George Eliot's Life, as Related in Her Letters and Journals. Vol. 3 (of 3)

I saw handsome Dean Liddell at Oxford. He is really a grand figure. They accuse him of being obstructive to much-needed reforms. For my own part I am thankful to him for his share in "Liddell and Scott" and his capital little Roman History. À propos of books and St. Andrews, I have read aloud to Mr. Lewes Professor Flint's volume, and we have both been much pleased with its conscientious presentation and thorough effort at fairness.

We have enjoyed the country, as we always do; but we have been, for our constitutions, a little unfortunate in the choice of a spot which is the windiest of the windy. That heat which we have read and heard of has hardly been at all felt by us; and we have both suffered a little from chills. You will perceive from my letter I am just now possessed by an evil spirit in the form of headache; but on the whole I am much the stronger for the peace and the delicious air, which I take in as a conscious addition to the good of living.

We have been near buying a little country hermitage on Holmwood Common – a grand spot, with a view hard to match in our flat land. But we have been frightened away by its windiness. I rather envy Major Lockhart and the rest of the golfian enthusiasts; to have a seductive idleness which is really a healthy activity is invaluable to people who have desk-work.

Letter to Mrs H. B. Stowe, 11th Nov. 1874.

I feel rather disgraced by the fact that I received your last kind letter nearly two months ago. But a brief note of mine, written immediately on hearing of you from Mrs. Fields, must have crossed yours and the Professor's kind letters to me; and I hope it proved to you that I love you in my heart.

We were in the country then, but soon afterwards we set out on a six-weeks' journey, and we are but just settled in our winter home.

Those unspeakable troubles in which I necessarily felt more for you than for any one else concerned, are, I trust, well at an end, and you are enjoying a time of peace. It was like your own sympathetic energy to be able, even while the storm was yet hanging in your sky, to write to me about my husband's books. Will you not agree with me that there is one comprehensive Church whose fellowship consists in the desire to purify and ennoble human life, and where the best members of all narrower Churches may call themselves brother and sister in spite of differences? I am writing to your dear husband as well as to you, and in answer to his question about Goethe, I must say, for my part, that I think he had a strain of mysticism in his soul – of so much mysticism as I think inevitably belongs to a full, poetic nature – I mean the delighted bathing of the soul in emotions which overpass the outlines of definite thought. I should take the "Imitation" as a type (it is one which your husband also mentions), but perhaps I might differ from him in my attempt to interpret the unchangeable and universal meanings of that great book.

Mr. Lewes, however, who has a better right than I to a conclusion about Goethe, thinks that he entered into the experience of the mystic – as in the confessions of the Schöne Seele– simply by force of his sympathetic genius, and that his personal individual bent was towards the clear and plastic exclusively. Do not imagine that Mr. Lewes is guided in his exposition by theoretic antipathies. He is singularly tolerant of difference, and able to admire what is unlike himself.

He is busy now correcting the proofs of his second volume. I wonder whether you have headaches and are rickety as we are, or whether you have a glorious immunity from those ills of the flesh. Your husband's photograph looks worthy to represent one of those wondrous Greeks who wrote grand dramas at eighty or ninety.

I am decidedly among the correspondents who may exercise their friends in the virtue of giving and hoping for nothing again. Otherwise I am unprofitable. Yet believe me, dear friend, I am always with lively memories of you, yours affectionately.

Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 20th Nov. 1874.

We have spent this year in much happiness, and are sorry to part with it. From the beginning of June to the end of September we had a house in Surrey, and enjoyed delicious quiet with daily walks and drives in the lovely scenery round Reigate and Dorking. October we spent in a country visit to friends (Six-Mile Bottom) and in a journey to Paris, and through the Ardennes homeward, finishing off our travels by some excursions in our own country, which we are ready to say we will never quit again – it is so much better worth knowing than most places one travels abroad to see. We make ourselves amends for being in London by going to museums to see the wonderful works of men; and the other day I was taken over the Bank of England and to Woolwich Arsenal – getting object-lessons in my old age, you perceive. Mr. Lewes is half through the proof-correcting of his second volume; and it will be matter of rejoicing when the other half is done, for we both hate proof-correcting (do you?) – the writing always seems worse than it really is when one reads it in patches, looking out for mistakes.

Letter to the Hon. Mrs. Ponsonby (now Lady Ponsonby), 10th Dec. 1874.

My books have for their main bearing a conclusion the opposite of that in which your studies seem to have painfully imprisoned you – a conclusion without which I could not have cared to write any representation of human life – namely, that the fellowship between man and man which has been the principle of development, social and moral, is not dependent on conceptions of what is not man: and that the idea of God, so far as it has been a high spiritual influence, is the ideal of a goodness entirely human (i. e., an exaltation of the human).

Have you quite fairly represented yourself in saying that you have ceased to pity your suffering fellow-men, because you can no longer think of them as individualities of immortal duration, in some other state of existence than this of which you know the pains and the pleasures? – that you feel less for them now you regard them as more miserable? And, on a closer examination of your feelings, should you find that you had lost all sense of quality in actions, all possibility of admiration that yearns to imitate, all keen sense of what is cruel and injurious, all belief that your conduct (and therefore the conduct of others) can have any difference of effect on the well-being of those immediately about you (and therefore on those afar off), whether you carelessly follow your selfish moods, or encourage that vision of others' needs which is the source of justice, tenderness, sympathy in the fullest sense – I cannot believe that your strong intellect will continue to see, in the conditions of man's appearance on this planet, a destructive relation to your sympathy. This seems to me equivalent to saying that you care no longer for color, now you know the laws of the spectrum.

As to the necessary combinations through which life is manifested, and which seem to present themselves to you as a hideous fatalism, which ought logically to petrify your volition, have they, in fact, any such influence on your ordinary course of action in the primary affairs of your existence as a human, social, domestic creature? And if they don't hinder you from taking measures for a bath, without which you know that you cannot secure the delicate cleanliness which is your second nature, why should they hinder you from a line of resolve in a higher strain of duty to your ideal, both for yourself and others? But the consideration of molecular physics is not the direct ground of human love and moral action any more than it is the direct means of composing a noble picture or of enjoying great music. One might as well hope to dissect one's own body and be merry in doing it, as take molecular physics (in which you must banish from your field of view what is specifically human) to be your dominant guide, your determiner of motives, in what is solely human. That every study has its bearing on every other is true; but pain and relief, love and sorrow, have their peculiar history, which make an experience and knowledge over and above the swing of atoms.

The teaching you quote as George Sand's would, I think, deserve to be called nonsensical if it did not deserve to be called wicked. What sort of "culture of the intellect" is that which, instead of widening the mind to a fuller and fuller response to all the elements of our existence, isolates it in a moral stupidity? – which flatters egoism with the possibility that a complex and refined human society can continue, wherein relations have no sacredness beyond the inclination of changing moods? – or figures to itself an æsthetic human life that one may compare to that of the fabled grasshoppers who were once men, but having heard the song of the Muses could do nothing but sing, and starved themselves so till they died and had a fit resurrection as grasshoppers? "And this," says Socrates, "was the return the Muses made them."

With regard to the pains and limitations of one's personal lot, I suppose there is not a single man or woman who has not more or less need of that stoical resignation which is often a hidden heroism, or who, in considering his or her past history, is not aware that it has been cruelly affected by the ignorant or selfish action of some fellow-being in a more or less close relation of life. And to my mind there can be no stronger motive than this perception, to an energetic effort that the lives nearest to us shall not suffer in a like manner from us.

The progress of the world – which you say can only come at the right time – can certainly never come at all save by the modified action of the individual beings who compose the world; and that we can say to ourselves with effect, "There is an order of considerations which I will keep myself continually in mind of, so that they may continually be the prompters of certain feelings and actions," seems to me as undeniable as that we can resolve to study the Semitic languages and apply to an Oriental scholar to give us daily lessons. What would your keen wit say to a young man who alleged the physical basis of nervous action as a reason why he could not possibly take that course?

As to duration and the way in which it affects your view of the human history, what is really the difference to your imagination between infinitude and billions when you have to consider the value of human experience? Will you say that, since your life has a term of threescore years and ten, it was really a matter of indifference whether you were a cripple with a wretched skin disease, or an active creature with a mind at large for the enjoyment of knowledge, and with a nature which has attracted others to you?

Difficulties of thought – acceptance of what is, without full comprehension – belong to every system of thinking. The question is to find the least incomplete.

When I wrote the first page of this letter I thought I was going to say that I had not courage to enter on the momentous points you had touched on in the hasty, brief form of a letter. But I have been led on sentence after sentence – not, I fear, with any inspiration beyond that of my anxiety. You will at least pardon any ill-advised things I may have written on the prompting of the moment.

Journal, 1875.

Jan. 13.– Here is a great gap since I last made a record. But the time has been filled full of happiness. A second edition of "Jubal" was published in August; and the fourth edition of the "Spanish Gypsy" is all sold. This morning I received a copy of the fifth edition. The amount of copies sold of "Middlemarch" up to 31st December is between nineteen and twenty thousand.

Yesterday I also received the good news that the engagement between Emily Cross and Mr. Otter is settled.

The last year has been crowded with proofs of affection for me and of value for what work I have been able to do. This makes the best motive or encouragement to do more; but, as usual, I am suffering much from doubt as to the worth of what I am doing, and fear lest I may not be able to complete it so as to make it a contribution to literature and not a mere addition to the heap of books. I am now just beginning the part about "Deronda," at page 234.

Letter to Francis Otter, 13th (?) Jan. 1875.

Your letter was a deeply felt pleasure to me last night; and I have one from Emily this morning, which makes my joy in the prospect of your union as thorough as it could well be. I could not wish either her words or yours to be in the least different. Long ago, when I had no notion that the event was probable, my too hasty imagination had prefigured it and longed for it. To say this is to say something of the high regard with which all I have known of you has impressed me – for I hold our sweet Emily worthy of one who may be reckoned among the best. The possibility of a constantly growing blessedness in marriage is to me the very basis of good in our mortal life; and the believing hope that you and she will experience that blessedness seems to enrich me for the coming years. I shall count it among my strengthening thoughts that you both think of me with affection, and care for my sympathy. Mr. Lewes shares in all the feelings I express, and we are rejoicing together.

Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 15th Jan. 1875.

Please never wonder at my silence, or believe that I bear you in any the less lively remembrance because I do not write to you.

Writing notes is the crux of my life. It often interferes with my morning hours (before 1 o'clock), which is the only time I have for quiet work. For certain letters are unavoidable demands, and though my kind husband writes them for me whenever he can, they are not all to be done by proxy.

That glorious bit of work of yours about the Home for Girls²⁶ is delightful to hear of. Hardly anything is more wanted, I imagine, than homes for girls in various employments – or, rather, for unmarried women of all ages.

I heard also the other day that your name was among those of the ladies interested in the beginning of a union among the bookbinding women, which one would like to succeed and spread.

I hope, from your ability to work so well, that you are in perfect health yourself. Our friend Barbara, too, looks literally the pink of well-being, and cheers one's soul by her interest in all worthy things.

Letter to the Hon. Mrs. Ponsonby (now Lady Ponsonby), 30th Jan. 1875.

I should urge you to consider your early religious experience as a portion of valid knowledge, and to cherish its emotional results in relation to objects and ideas which are either substitutes or metamorphoses of the earlier. And I think we must not take every great physicist – or other "ist" – for an apostle, but be ready to suspect him of some crudity concerning relations that lie outside his special studies, if his exposition strands us on results that seem to stultify the most ardent, massive experience of mankind, and hem up the best part of our feelings in stagnation.

Letter to John Blackwood, 7th Feb. 1875.

Last night I finished reading aloud to Mr. Lewes the "Inkerman" volume, and we both thank you heartily for the valuable present. It is an admirable piece of writing; such pure, lucid English is what one rarely gets to read. The masterly marshalling of the material is certainly in contrast with the movements described. To my non-military mind the Inkerman affair seems nothing but a brave blundering into victory. Great traits of valor – Homeric movements – but also a powerful lack of brains in the form of generalship. I cannot see that the ordering up of the two 18-pounder guns was a vast mental effort, unless the weight of the guns is to be counted in the order as well as in the execution. But the grand fact of the thousands beaten by the hundreds remains under all interpretation. Why the Russians, in their multitudinous mass, should have chosen to retreat into Sebastopol, moving at their leisure, and carrying off all their artillery, seems a mystery in spite of General Dannenberg's memorable answer to Mentschikoff.

There are some splendid movements in the story – the tradition of the "Minden Yell," the "Men, remember Albuera," and the officer of the 77th advancing with, "Then I will go myself," with what followed, are favorite bits of mine. My mind is in the anomalous condition of hating war and loving its discipline, which has been an incalculable contribution to the sentiment of duty.

I have not troubled myself to read any reviews of the book. My eye caught one in which the author's style was accused of affectation. But I have long learned to apply to reviewers an aphorism which tickled me in my childhood – "There must be some such to be some of all sorts." Pray tell Mr. Simpson that I was much pleased with the new dress of the "Spanish Gypsy."

The first part of "Giannetto" raised my interest, but I was disappointed in the unravelling of the plot. It seems to me neither really nor ideally satisfactory. But it is a long while since I read a story newer than "Rasselas," which I re-read two years ago, with a desire to renew my childish delight in it, when it was one of my best-loved companions. So I am a bad judge of comparative merits among popular writers. I am obliged to fast from fiction, and fasting is known sometimes to weaken the stomach. I ought to except Miss Thackeray's stories – which I cannot resist when they come near me – and bits of Mr. Trollope, for affection's sake. You would not wonder at my fasting, if you knew how deplorably uncalled-for and "everything-that-it-should-not-be" my own fiction seems to me in times of inward and outward fog – like this morning, when the light is dim on my paper.

Letter to the Hon. Mrs. Ponsonby (now Lady Ponsonby), 11th Feb. 1875.

Do send me the papers you have written – I mean as a help and instruction to me. I need very much to know how ideas lie in other minds than my own, that I may not miss their difficulties while I am urging only what satisfies myself. I shall be deeply interested in knowing exactly what you wrote at that particular stage. Please remember that I don't consider myself a teacher, but a companion in the struggle of thought. What can consulting physicians do without pathological knowledge? and the more they have of it, the less absolute – the more tentative – are their procedures.

You will see by the Fortnightly, which you have not read, that Mr. Spencer is very anxious to vindicate himself from neglect of the logical necessity that the evolution of the abstraction "society" is dependent on the modified action of the units; indeed, he is very sensitive on the point of being supposed to teach an enervating fatalism.

Consider what the human mind en masse would have been if there had been no such combination of elements in it as has produced poets. All the philosophers and savants would not have sufficed to supply that deficiency. And how can the life of nations be understood without the inward light of poetry – that is, of emotion blending with thought?

But the beginning and object of my letter must be the end – please send me your papers.

Letter to Mrs. Wm. Smith, 10th May, 1875.

We cannot believe that there is reason to fear any painful observations on the publication of the memoir in one volume with "Gravenhurst" and the essays. The memoir is written with exquisite judgment and feeling; and without estimating too highly the taste and carefulness of journalists in their ordinary treatment of books, I think that we may count on their not being impressed otherwise than respectfully and sympathetically with the character of your dear husband's work, and with the sketch of his pure, elevated life. I would also urge you to rely on the fact that Mr. Blackwood thinks the publication desirable, as a guarantee that it will not prove injudicious in relation to the outer world – I mean, the world beyond the circle of your husband's especial friends and admirers. I am grieved to hear of your poor eyes having been condemned to an inaction which, I fear, may have sadly increased the vividness of that inward seeing, already painfully strong in you. There has been, I trust, always some sympathetic young companionship to help you – some sweet voice to read aloud to you, or to talk of those better things in human lots which enable us to look at the good of life a little apart from our own particular sorrow.

Letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones, 11th May, 1875.

The doctors have decided that there is nothing very grave the matter with me: and I am now so much better that we even think it possible I may go to see Salvini, in the Gladiator, to-morrow evening. This is to let you know that there is no reason against your coming, with or without Margaret, at the usual time on Friday.

Your words of affection in the note you sent me are very dear to my remembrance. I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same mind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear.

Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 14th May, 1875.

You are right – there is no time, but only the sense of not having time; especially when, instead of filling the days with useful exertion, as you do, one wastes them in being ill, as I have been doing of late. However, I am better now, and will not grumble. Thanks for all the dear words in your letter. Be sure I treasure the memory of your faithful friendship, which goes back – you know how far.

Letter to Frederic Harrison, 1st June, 1875.

If you could, some day this week or the beginning of next, allow me half an hour's quiet tête-à-tête, I should be very much obliged by such a kindness.

The trivial questions I want to put could hardly be shapen in a letter so as to govern an answer that would satisfy my need. And I trust that the interview will hardly be more troublesome to you than writing.

I hope, when you learn the pettiness of my difficulties, you will not be indignant, like a great doctor called in to the favorite cat.

Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 9th Aug. 1875, from Rickmansworth.

We admire our bit of Hertfordshire greatly; but I should be glad of more breezy common land and far-reaching outlooks. For fertility, wealth of grand trees, parks, mansions, and charming bits of stream and canal, our neighborhood can hardly be excelled. And our house is a good old red-brick Georgian place, with a nice bit of garden and meadow and river at the back. Perhaps we are too much in the valley, and have too large a share of mist, which often lies white on our meadows in the early evening. But who has not had too much moisture in this calamitously wet, cold summer?

Mr. Lewes is very busy, but not in zoologizing. We reserve that for October, when we mean to go to the coast for a few weeks. It is a long while since I walked on broad sands and watched the receding tide; and I look forward agreeably to a renewal of that old pleasure.

I am not particularly flourishing in this pretty region, probably owing to the low barometer. The air has been continually muggy, and has lain on one's head like a thick turban.

Letter to J. W. Cross, 14th Aug. 1875.

What a comfort that you are at home again and well!²⁷ The sense of your nearness had been so long missing to us that we had begun to take up with life as inevitably a little less cheerful than we remembered it to have been formerly, without thinking of restoration.

My box is quite dear to me, and shall be used for stamps, as you recommend, unless I find another use that will lead me to open it and think of you the oftener. It is very precious to me that you bore me in your mind, and took that trouble to give me pleasure – in which you have succeeded.

Our house here is rather a fine old brick Georgian place, with a lovely bit of landscape; but I think we have suffered the more from the rainy, close weather, because we are in a valley, and can see the mists lie in a thick, white stratum on our meadows. Mr. Lewes has been, on the whole, flourishing and enjoying – writing away with vigor, and making a discovery or theory at the rate of one per diem.

Of me you must expect no good. I have been in a piteous state of debility in body and depression in mind. My book seems to me so unlikely ever to be finished in a way that will make it worth giving to the world, that it is a kind of glass in which I behold my infirmities.

That expedition on the Thames would be a great delight, if it were possible to us. But our arrangements forbid it. Our loving thanks to Mr. Druce, as well as to you, for reviving the thought. We are to remain here till the 23d of September; then to fly through town, or at least only perch there for a night or so, and then go down to the coast, while the servants clean our house. We expect that Bournemouth will be our destination.

Let us have news of you all again soon. Let us comfort each other while it is day, for the night cometh.

I hope this change of weather, in which we are glorying both for the country's sake and our own, will not make Weybridge too warm for Mrs. Cross.

Letter to the Hon. Mrs. Ponsonby, 19th Aug. 1875.

I don't mind how many letters I receive from one who interests me as much as you do. The receptive part of correspondence I can carry on with much alacrity. It is writing answers that I groan over. Please take it as a proof of special feeling that I declined answering your kind inquiries by proxy.

This corner of Hertfordshire is as pretty as it can be of the kind. There are really rural bits at every turn. But for my particular taste I prefer such a region as that round Haslemere – with wide, furzy commons and a grander horizon. Also I prefer a country where I don't make bad blood by having to see one public house to every six dwellings – which is literally the case in many spots around us. My gall rises at the rich brewers in Parliament and out of it, who plant these poison shops for the sake of their million-making trade, while probably their families are figuring somewhere as refined philanthropists or devout Evangelicals and Ritualists.

You perceive from this that I am dyspeptic and disposed to melancholy views. In fact, I have not been flourishing, but I am getting a little better; grateful thanks that you will care to know it. On the whole the sins of brewers, with their drugged ale and devil's traps, depress me less than my own inefficiency. But every fresh morning is an opportunity that one can look forward to for exerting one's will. I shall not be satisfied with your philosophy till you have conciliated necessitarianism – I hate the ugly word – with the practice of willing strongly, willing to will strongly, and so on, that being what you certainly can do and have done about a great many things in life, whence it is clear that there is nothing in truth to hinder you from it – except, you will say, the absence of a motive. But that absence I don't believe in in your case – only in the case of empty, barren souls.

Are you not making a transient confusion of intuitions with innate ideas? The most thorough experientialists admit intuition —i. e., direct impressions of sensibility underlying all proof, as necessary starting-points for thought.

Journal, 1875.

Oct. 10.– On the 15th June, we went to a house we had taken at Rickmansworth. Here, in the end of July, we received the news that our dear Bertie had died on June 29th. Our stay at Rickmansworth, though otherwise peaceful, was not marked by any great improvement in health from the change to country instead of town – rather the contrary. We left on 23d September, and then set off on a journey into Wales, which was altogether unfortunate on account of the excessive rain.

Letter to John Blackwood, 10th Oct. 1875.

I behaved rather shabbily in not thanking you otherwise than by proxy for the kind letter you sent me to Rickmansworth, but I had a bad time down there, and did less of everything than I desired. Last night we returned from our trip – a very lively word for a journey made in the worst weather; and since I am, on the whole, the better for a succession of small discomforts in hotels, and struggling walks taken under an umbrella, I have no excuse for not writing a line to my neglected correspondents.

You will laugh at our nervous caution in depositing our MSS. at the Union Bank before we set out. We could have borne to hear that our house had been burned down, provided no lives were lost, and our unprinted matter, our œuvres inédites, were safe out of it.

About my unprinted matter, Mr. Lewes thinks it will not be well to publish the first part till February. The four first monthly parts are ready for travelling now. It will be well to begin the printing in good time, so that I may not be hurried with the proofs; and I must beg Mr. Simpson to judge for me in that matter with kind carefulness.

I can't say that I am at all satisfied with the book, or that I have a comfortable sense of doing in it what I want to do; but Mr. Lewes is satisfied with it, and insists that since he is as anxious as possible for it to be fine, I ought to accept his impressions as trustworthy. So I resign myself.

I read aloud the "Abode of Snow" at Rickmansworth, to our mutual delight; and we are both very much obliged to you for the handsome present. But what an amazing creature is this Andrew Wilson to have kept pluck for such travelling while his body was miserably ailing! One would have said that he had more than the average spirit of hardy men to have persevered even in good health after a little taste of the difficulties he describes.

Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 20th Oct. 1875.

The arrangements as to the publication of my next book are already determined on. Ever since "Adam Bede" appeared I have been continually having proposals from the proprietors or editors of periodicals, but I have always declined them, except in the case of "Romola," which appeared in the Cornhill, and was allowed to take up a varying and unusual number of pages. I have the strongest objection to cutting up my work into little bits; and there is no motive to it on my part, since I have a large enough public already. But, even apart from that objection, it would not now be worth the while of any magazine or journal to give me a sum such as my books yield in separate publication. I had £7000 for "Romola," but the mode in which "Middlemarch" was issued brings in a still larger sum. I ought to say, however, that the question is not entirely one of money with me: if I could gain more by splitting my writing into small parts, I would not do it, because the effect would be injurious as a matter of art. So much detail I trouble you with to save misapprehension.