Robert Lytton to GHL, Vienna, 29 April 1872
Title
Robert Lytton to GHL, Vienna, 29 April 1872
Title
Robert Lytton to GHL, Vienna, 29 April 1872
Sender
Robert Lytton
Recipient
M
Date(s)
- 1872-04-29
Place
Vienna
Letter Content
Robert Lytton to GHL, Vienna, 29 April 1872
MS: Yale.
Vienna 29 April 1872.
My dear Lewes
Procrastination is the Thief of Time, Time is the murderer of good intentions, and good intentions are the fraudulent bankers, the rascally psalmsinging Deane Pauls, 101 of honest innocent well disposed folks, like myself. I sat down to answer your last letter the day I received it, -- was called away to receive visitors, meant to write to you the next day, on the same evening was laid up with an inflammation in the stomach from which I am only now escaped. It vexes me however to have left you so long under a false impression of my own impressions of your admirable paper on Dickens and his critics. I DIDN'T think you had underrated D's genius or set Thackeray above him on the score of genius. Your incidental mention of the two in connection with each other led me to talk of them both in reference to my own predilections when writing to you currente calamo. You never fail to express with fine accuracy what you mean: and the essay in question is crystal clear. It is I who must have expressed myself imperfectly if you thought I either mistook your meaning or dissented from it. All I meant was that in regard to authors, after criticism has said its last word pro and con about them, we readers, transcribing the verdict on the tablets of our own impressions, add, unconsciously for the most part, a saving or a damning clause dictated by personal predilections or prejudices which are stronger than all criticisms because they are not formed on critical grounds, or accountable to critical cannons, but the inevitable resultant of an infinite number of accidents which happen to have favoured or disfavoured the rapport between our own minds and that of the author under judgement. It is like the feather in the Egyptian Scale of the Dead, which, though of no weight in itself, just turns the scale after strict justice has adjusted the balance: or the talisman in the pretty German story about Charlemagne which to the astonishment and scandal of all his wise counsellors made him attach himself to whoever happened to have that talisman for the time being. I have often thought that from the rapport between two friends there results a third individuality common to both, but not completely residing in either. A calls it B and B calls it A. It is really A + B, and probably as regards works of imagination, their effect is quite as dependent on the imagination that receives as on the imagination that produces. Voil'e0 tout ce que je voulais dire, in explanation of my own delight in D's genius -- a delight undiminished by any critical consciousness of his defects in art, though those defects are patent and numerous.
How I wish I could have a chat with you au coin du feu, or rather under some tree in your garden, concerning the subject and scope of your present labours! Would I not just "bid you discourse" knowing that "you would enchant mine ear!" 102 The tiny and mysterious glimpse you give me of the road you are following -- or making -- bewilders my curiosity. I don't understand your dark saying -- dark as seen from the depths of my ignorance, in which I welter whimsically amongst all sorts of fanciful conjectures, as for instance that I am now writing to a positivized Pythagoras, and how strange it would be if Physical Sciences should first reduce the explanation of all phenomena to a single force, and then Philosophy step in to reduce the logic of all explanations to a single formula. What a sword wherewith to open the world, our oyster! 103 Perhaps the next generation will be able to travel through the universe like Mr. Cook's Tourists with tickets of admission to the sun and moon, and a portable guidebook explaining everything by the way. Perhaps knowledge will end where it begins at the Multiplication Table and perhaps the Fairy tale of the Belle au bois dormant was a prophecy of this. The Sleeping Beauty will wake up and say to her enterprizing fianc'e9 Humanity, as she rubs her eye, "Well you have come at last, but what a time you have kept me waiting and how stupid of you not to have found out the secret sooner. You see now how simple it is!"
Your story of the Bagman is magnificent. I have been chuckling over it ever since I got your letter. And as the old women say of Mr. Spurgeon's 104 preaching "It is very comforting." For is not the Paladium of the British Constitution built on a granite foundation of Bagmans' heads? and how do those dear heads tingle with satisfaction when tenderly titilated by the toes of the temporal and spiritual Hierarchy that stands upon them! Baron Schwartz (not a descendant of the inventor of gunpowder, but the present director of the Great Vienna Exhibition, or Weltausstellung, for the year of our Lord 1873) has just officially proposed (by way of appropriately inaugurating that particular date of the Christian Era, and adding to the attractions of the great guinguette with which it is for ever after to be associated in the grateful memory of manking) -- to the Amergau Peasants to perform the Passion Play here on that occasion. Such is my sympathy with this sacred subject, that as you see, I have in speaking of it, fallen into the parenthetical style of St. Paul! Baron Schwartz is an Austrian-German, a Consul, and a Baron; I therefore presume that he is also a Jew -- a fact which refines the spicy flavour of this invitation. But though the Vienna Jews (of whom there are no less than 30,000) would probably be willing to give more than thirty silver groschen (and could certainly afford to give much more) for such a second edition of the Crucifixion, I fancy that amongst the Amergau disciples Mr. Schwartz will not find any Judas willing to strike a bargain with these scribes and pharasees. The idea however was a great one.
We are going into the Country (thank Heaven!) in about 10 days to a little house with a garden and water mill and a troutstream which I have taken, at 2 hours distance from Vienna for the summer. Edith cannot
[The rest of the letter is lacking.]
MS: Yale.
Vienna 29 April 1872.
My dear Lewes
Procrastination is the Thief of Time, Time is the murderer of good intentions, and good intentions are the fraudulent bankers, the rascally psalmsinging Deane Pauls, 101 of honest innocent well disposed folks, like myself. I sat down to answer your last letter the day I received it, -- was called away to receive visitors, meant to write to you the next day, on the same evening was laid up with an inflammation in the stomach from which I am only now escaped. It vexes me however to have left you so long under a false impression of my own impressions of your admirable paper on Dickens and his critics. I DIDN'T think you had underrated D's genius or set Thackeray above him on the score of genius. Your incidental mention of the two in connection with each other led me to talk of them both in reference to my own predilections when writing to you currente calamo. You never fail to express with fine accuracy what you mean: and the essay in question is crystal clear. It is I who must have expressed myself imperfectly if you thought I either mistook your meaning or dissented from it. All I meant was that in regard to authors, after criticism has said its last word pro and con about them, we readers, transcribing the verdict on the tablets of our own impressions, add, unconsciously for the most part, a saving or a damning clause dictated by personal predilections or prejudices which are stronger than all criticisms because they are not formed on critical grounds, or accountable to critical cannons, but the inevitable resultant of an infinite number of accidents which happen to have favoured or disfavoured the rapport between our own minds and that of the author under judgement. It is like the feather in the Egyptian Scale of the Dead, which, though of no weight in itself, just turns the scale after strict justice has adjusted the balance: or the talisman in the pretty German story about Charlemagne which to the astonishment and scandal of all his wise counsellors made him attach himself to whoever happened to have that talisman for the time being. I have often thought that from the rapport between two friends there results a third individuality common to both, but not completely residing in either. A calls it B and B calls it A. It is really A + B, and probably as regards works of imagination, their effect is quite as dependent on the imagination that receives as on the imagination that produces. Voil'e0 tout ce que je voulais dire, in explanation of my own delight in D's genius -- a delight undiminished by any critical consciousness of his defects in art, though those defects are patent and numerous.
How I wish I could have a chat with you au coin du feu, or rather under some tree in your garden, concerning the subject and scope of your present labours! Would I not just "bid you discourse" knowing that "you would enchant mine ear!" 102 The tiny and mysterious glimpse you give me of the road you are following -- or making -- bewilders my curiosity. I don't understand your dark saying -- dark as seen from the depths of my ignorance, in which I welter whimsically amongst all sorts of fanciful conjectures, as for instance that I am now writing to a positivized Pythagoras, and how strange it would be if Physical Sciences should first reduce the explanation of all phenomena to a single force, and then Philosophy step in to reduce the logic of all explanations to a single formula. What a sword wherewith to open the world, our oyster! 103 Perhaps the next generation will be able to travel through the universe like Mr. Cook's Tourists with tickets of admission to the sun and moon, and a portable guidebook explaining everything by the way. Perhaps knowledge will end where it begins at the Multiplication Table and perhaps the Fairy tale of the Belle au bois dormant was a prophecy of this. The Sleeping Beauty will wake up and say to her enterprizing fianc'e9 Humanity, as she rubs her eye, "Well you have come at last, but what a time you have kept me waiting and how stupid of you not to have found out the secret sooner. You see now how simple it is!"
Your story of the Bagman is magnificent. I have been chuckling over it ever since I got your letter. And as the old women say of Mr. Spurgeon's 104 preaching "It is very comforting." For is not the Paladium of the British Constitution built on a granite foundation of Bagmans' heads? and how do those dear heads tingle with satisfaction when tenderly titilated by the toes of the temporal and spiritual Hierarchy that stands upon them! Baron Schwartz (not a descendant of the inventor of gunpowder, but the present director of the Great Vienna Exhibition, or Weltausstellung, for the year of our Lord 1873) has just officially proposed (by way of appropriately inaugurating that particular date of the Christian Era, and adding to the attractions of the great guinguette with which it is for ever after to be associated in the grateful memory of manking) -- to the Amergau Peasants to perform the Passion Play here on that occasion. Such is my sympathy with this sacred subject, that as you see, I have in speaking of it, fallen into the parenthetical style of St. Paul! Baron Schwartz is an Austrian-German, a Consul, and a Baron; I therefore presume that he is also a Jew -- a fact which refines the spicy flavour of this invitation. But though the Vienna Jews (of whom there are no less than 30,000) would probably be willing to give more than thirty silver groschen (and could certainly afford to give much more) for such a second edition of the Crucifixion, I fancy that amongst the Amergau disciples Mr. Schwartz will not find any Judas willing to strike a bargain with these scribes and pharasees. The idea however was a great one.
We are going into the Country (thank Heaven!) in about 10 days to a little house with a garden and water mill and a troutstream which I have taken, at 2 hours distance from Vienna for the summer. Edith cannot
[The rest of the letter is lacking.]
Citation
Robert Lytton, Robert Lytton to GHL, Vienna, 29 April 1872, 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/95592