Robert Lytton to GHL, Lisbon, 3 June 1866
Title
Robert Lytton to GHL, Lisbon, 3 June 1866
Title
Robert Lytton to GHL, Lisbon, 3 June 1866
Sender
Robert Lytton
Recipient
M
Date(s)
- 1866-06-03
Place
Lisbon
Letter Content
Robert Lytton to GHL, Lisbon, 3 June 1866
MS: Yale.
B[ritish] Legation, Lisbon 3 June 1866.
My dear Lewes
I wished, and was about, to write to you ages ago: but a pressure of official business on the departure of my chief, 709 obliged me to postpone doing so; and meanwhile, all those little things which frustrate the fulfilment of great ones, having been daily thrusting themselves between my heart and my pen, and postponing the pleasure of recording my great and warm thanks for your most kind letter.
All your valuable &unknown;corrections&unknown; suggestions for the improvement of the verses I have &unknown;availed myself&unknown; gratefully adopted, and I hope with good result. I wish that my new book of verse, contributions from which you invite for the Fortnightly, could furnish any thing suitable. But there are very few of its contents that are at all fitted for separate publication, and those few I had already sent to Dickens for All the Year Round before the receipt of your letter.
I have indeed a thousand motives for strongly wishing to see you, and wishing to see very much more of you, than I have any chance of doing: but I don't know that I have any special counsel to ask, or confidence to make: none, at least, which even your good will could, I think, encourage me to find the means of making, if I should have the pleasure of meeting you during the visit which I hope to be able to make to England this winter, but which, I already foresee must be hurried and desultory. My desire is rather that "of the moth for the star": 710 or to put it less poetically, of a young frog to get to the water in spring. An instinctive wishing that I could sometimes sun myself in your fullness of knowledge and freedom from prejudice, and test the temper of certain instincts in myself by the edge of your keen conclusive intellect. By the way do you really find aesthetic truth and beauty in the realism of those [London Idyls] of Mr. Buchanan, 711 which you have been publishing in the Fortnightly? They are very antagonistic to all my instincts about art.
I shall be at Cintra all the summer, and wish, indeed, there might be any chance of something bringing you this way: and the bulldog too: if he would not eat up one of my best friends here -- a very accomplisht Raven, who has a taste for books -- verse especially -- and literally devoured the whole Inferno of Dante the other day.
I rejoice to see that "George Eliot's" new book is already advertised. I think Romola among the masterpieces of fiction, and, with all due reverence for Adam Bede and the incomparable Mrs Poinsett [sic] that work appears to me to be the author's highest and broadest. Ever, my dear Lewes,
Very faithfully yours
R. Lytton.
MS: Yale.
B[ritish] Legation, Lisbon 3 June 1866.
My dear Lewes
I wished, and was about, to write to you ages ago: but a pressure of official business on the departure of my chief, 709 obliged me to postpone doing so; and meanwhile, all those little things which frustrate the fulfilment of great ones, having been daily thrusting themselves between my heart and my pen, and postponing the pleasure of recording my great and warm thanks for your most kind letter.
All your valuable &unknown;corrections&unknown; suggestions for the improvement of the verses I have &unknown;availed myself&unknown; gratefully adopted, and I hope with good result. I wish that my new book of verse, contributions from which you invite for the Fortnightly, could furnish any thing suitable. But there are very few of its contents that are at all fitted for separate publication, and those few I had already sent to Dickens for All the Year Round before the receipt of your letter.
I have indeed a thousand motives for strongly wishing to see you, and wishing to see very much more of you, than I have any chance of doing: but I don't know that I have any special counsel to ask, or confidence to make: none, at least, which even your good will could, I think, encourage me to find the means of making, if I should have the pleasure of meeting you during the visit which I hope to be able to make to England this winter, but which, I already foresee must be hurried and desultory. My desire is rather that "of the moth for the star": 710 or to put it less poetically, of a young frog to get to the water in spring. An instinctive wishing that I could sometimes sun myself in your fullness of knowledge and freedom from prejudice, and test the temper of certain instincts in myself by the edge of your keen conclusive intellect. By the way do you really find aesthetic truth and beauty in the realism of those [London Idyls] of Mr. Buchanan, 711 which you have been publishing in the Fortnightly? They are very antagonistic to all my instincts about art.
I shall be at Cintra all the summer, and wish, indeed, there might be any chance of something bringing you this way: and the bulldog too: if he would not eat up one of my best friends here -- a very accomplisht Raven, who has a taste for books -- verse especially -- and literally devoured the whole Inferno of Dante the other day.
I rejoice to see that "George Eliot's" new book is already advertised. I think Romola among the masterpieces of fiction, and, with all due reverence for Adam Bede and the incomparable Mrs Poinsett [sic] that work appears to me to be the author's highest and broadest. Ever, my dear Lewes,
Very faithfully yours
R. Lytton.
Signature
R. Lytton.
Citation
Robert Lytton, Robert Lytton to GHL, Lisbon, 3 June 1866, Complete George Eliot Letters(2026), George Eliot Archive, edited by Beverley Park Rilett. https://GeorgeEliotArchive.org, Accessed September 7, 2026. https://www.georgeeliotarchive.org/items/show/95589