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

I shall be agreeably surprised if there is a respectable subscription for the four volumes. Already the numbers taken have been satisfactorily large, considering the indisposition of the public to buy books by comparison with other wares, and especially to buy novels at a high price. I fancy every private copy has done duty for a circle. Friends of mine in the country have implied that they lent their copies to all the readers in their neighborhood. A little fuss of advertisement, together with the reviews, will perhaps create a few more curious inquirers after the book, and impress its existence on the slower part of the reading world. But really the reading world is, after all, very narrow, as, according to the Spectator, the "comfortable" world also is – the world able to give away a sovereign without pinching itself. Those statistics just given about incomes are very interesting.

Letter to J. W. Cross, 11th Dec. 1872.

A thousand thanks for your kind interest in our project, and for the trouble you have taken in our behalf. I fear the land buying and building20 is likely to come to nothing, and our construction to remain entirely of the aerial sort. It is so much easier to imagine other people doing wise things than to do them one's self! Practically, I excel in nothing but paying twice as much as I ought for everything. On the whole, it would be better if my life could be done for me, and I could look on. However, it appears that the question of the land at Shere may remain open until we can discuss it with you at Weybridge; and there is no telling what we may not venture on with your eyes to see through.

But, oh dear, I don't like anything that is troublesome under the name of pleasure.

Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 12th Dec. 1872.

I have had the news that you are safely landed at Pooree, so now I can write with some courage. I have got some comfort – I trust it is not false comfort – out of the probability that there will be much good mingled with the evil of this winter's exile for you. You must be the richer for it mentally, and your health may be the better – and then, you will be back again in the late spring. In this way I make myself contented under the incompleteness of our life without you, and I am determined not to grumble at my share of the loss which falls so sadly on Dr. Congreve and the children. Dr. Congreve kindly let me know when you had got through the trials of the Red Sea, rather better than might have been expected; and Sophie tells me that you speak of the brilliant coloring in your new world as quite equal to any description you had read. Beyond that all is a blank to me except the fact of your arrival at Pooree, and all my feeling is taken up with the joy there must have been in the meeting with Mr. Geddes. You find it very difficult to write in the heat – so don't make the thought of me disagreeable by associating it with a claim on you for a letter. I will be grateful for scraps from your correspondence with home, and wait for my turn when you come back to us. For ourselves, we think our little granddaughter, Blanche, the perfection of a baby. She is, dispassionately speaking, very pretty, and has a cooing, chanting song of her own which it makes me happy to hear. Mr. Lewes goes on at his writing with as much interest as ever, and is bringing the first part of his work into its final shape. Since we came home I have been reading his manuscript, which has been piling itself up in preparation for my leisure, and I have been wearing my gravest philosophic cap. Altogether we are dangerously happy. You remember Mrs. Blank of Coventry? You know hers was another name for astonishing cleverness in that town. Now, of course, she is old, and her cleverness seems to have a mouldy flavor. Apropos of the seventh book of "Middlemarch" – which you may not have read, but never mind – Mrs. Blank, having lain awake all night from compassion for Bulstrode, said, "Poor, dear creature, after he had done so much for that wretch, sitting up at night and attending on him! and I don't believe it was the brandy that killed him– and what is to become of Bulstrode now, he has nobody left but Christ!" I think this is worth sending to India, you see; it is a little bit of old Coventry life that may make you and Emily laugh with all the more lively memory in the midst of your strange scenery. But there is a hovering terror while I write to you from far off, lest my trivialities should find you when you are ill or have some cause for being sad. In any case, however, you will take my letter for a simple proof that I dwell on you and Emily as images constantly present in my mind, and very often moving to the foreground in my contemplation. Mr. Lewes is one with me in many affectionate thoughts about you, and your names are often on our lips. We are going to pass the Christmas week with our friends at Weybridge; and I shall be glad to escape the London aspects of that season – aspects that are without any happy association for me. Mr. Lewes has just been in to speak to me, and begs me to say that he hopes baby is raised to the nth power. You see the lofty point of view from which he regards the world at present. But there is enough of the sap of affection in him to withstand all the dryness of the dryest mathematics, and he has very hearty regards for you all, including Mr. Geddes, not as a matter of course, but with special emphasis. Good-bye, dear, dear friend. May it give you some little satisfaction to think of me as yours always lovingly.

Letter to Mrs. Wm. Smith, 18th Dec. 1872.

Your letter was very welcome to me. I wanted to know how you were; and I think that I discern in your words some growth of courage to face the hard task – it is a hard task – of living a separate life. I reckon it a great good to me that any writing of mine has been taken into companionship by you, and seemed to speak with you of your own experience. Thank you for telling me of that.

This weather, which is so melancholy in the privation it must cause to those who are worst off in the world, adds a little weight to everybody's griefs. But I trust that you find it a comfort, not an oppression, to be among friends who make a little claim on your attention. When you go to How, please tell me all about the place, and whom you have near you, because I like to be able to imagine your circumstances.

I have been, and am still, reading Mr. Lewes's manuscript – and I often associate this with your dear husband, to whom I imagine mine would have liked to send his proofs when the matter had reached the printing stage.

We are both very well, and Mr. Lewes is enjoying his morning at his desk. He likes very much to be included in your love, and has always thought you one of the most charming women among our acquaintance. Please not to say that he has bad taste in women. We both cherish very tender thoughts of your sorrow, dear friend. Let me always be assured that you think of me as yours affectionately.

Letter to Mr. Simpson, 18th Dec. 1872.

We have to thank you for two things especially. First, for the good bargain you have made for "Middlemarch" with Australia; and secondly, for the trouble you have kindly taken with the MS., which has come to us safely in its fine Russian coat.

The four volumes, we imagine, must have been subscribed long ago; and we should be glad to know, if it were convenient – perhaps even if it were inconvenient – what are the figures representing the courage of "the trade" in the matter of a 42s. novel, which has already been well distributed.

We both hope that your health is well confirmed, and that you are prepared for Christmas pleasures, among which you would probably, like Caleb Garth, reckon the extra "business" which the jolly season carries in its hinder wallet.

SUMMARYJANUARY, 1869, TO DECEMBER, 1872

Poem on Agatha – Reading on Philology, "Iliad," "Faery Queen," Clough's Poems, Bright's Speeches, "Volpone," Lecture by Sir Wm. Thomson – Writing "How Lisa Loved the King" – Browning and Rector of Lincoln on Versification – Letter to Miss Hennell – Browning's "Elisha" – Fourth visit to Italy – Two months away – Letter to Mrs. Congreve from Paris – Dr. Congreve's Reply to Professor Huxley in Fortnightly– Meeting in Rome with Mrs. Bullock and Mr. and Mrs. Cross – Letter to Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe – Effect of books – Religion of the future – Arrival of Thornton Lewes from Natal – Letter to Mrs. Congreve – Marriage engagements of Mr. Beesley, Mr. Frederic Harrison, and Dr. Clifford Allbut – Finished five "Sonnets on Childhood" – Letter to Mrs. Stowe – "Old Town Folks" – Presentation of alien religious convictions – Spiritualism – Reading Drayton and Grote – Writing Introduction to "Middlemarch" – Reading Theocritus – Burne-Jones's Pictures – Reading Littré on Comte – Sainte Beuve – Thornton Lewes's continued illness – Visit to Mrs. Cross at Weybridge – Reading for "Middlemarch" – Asks Mrs. Congreve to get information about provincial hospitals – Letter to Miss Hennell – The Byron scandal – Byron a vulgar-minded genius – The Kovilevskys – "Legend of Jubal" begun – Mr. W. G. Clark – Reading Max Müller – Lecky and Herbert Spencer – Death of Thornton Lewes – Letter to Miss Hennell describing month's visit to Limpsfield – Letter to Mrs. Congreve – Mr. Doyle – Letter to F. Harrison on the Positivist Problem – Aversion to personal statements – Shrinking from deliverances – Letter to Miss Hennell on Charles Hennell's "Inquiry" – Letter to Mrs. Congreve from Berlin – Sees Mommsen, Bunsen, and Du Bois Reymond – Visit to Vienna – Return to London – Three days' visit to the Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, and Mrs. Pattison – Meets Sir Benjamin Brodie – Professor Rawlinson and Professor Phillips – Dr. Rolleston and the Miss Gaskells, and Miss Arnold – Mr. Jowett, Professor Henry Smith, and Mr. Fowler – Re-reading Grove "On the Correlation of the Physical Forces" – Letter to Miss Hennell – Dickens's Death, and his story of President Lincoln – Letter to Mme. Bodichon – Visit to Cromer – Growing dislike of migratory life – Letter to Mrs. Lytton on the death of Lord Clarendon – Danger of women living too exclusively in the affections – Reading Mendelssohn's letters – From Cromer to Harrogate and Whitby – Meets Mrs. Burne-Jones there – "Armgart" begun – Three weeks' visit to Limpsfield – Letter to Miss Hennell on the beginning of the war between Germany and France – Jowett's "Plato" – Letter to Mme. Bodichon – The French nation – "Armgart" finished at Limpsfield – Return to the Priory – Letter to Miss Hennell – A popular preacher – Growing influence of ideas – Goethe's contempt for revolution of 1830 – Letter to Mme. Bodichon on the faults of one's friends – Letter to Mrs. Congreve – Industrial schemes – Greater cheerfulness – Frederic Harrison on Bismarckism – Writing "Miss Brooke" – Reading Wolf's "Prolegomena to Homer" and "Wilhelm Meister" – Visit to Mme. Bodichon at Ryde – Letter to Miss Hennell – Ritualism at Ryde – Brutalizing effect of German war – Trollope's "Sir Harry Hotspur" – Limits of woman's constancy – Miss Bury's engagement to Mr. Geddes – Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor – Three and a half months' visit to Petersfield – Mode of life – Letter to Mme. Bodichon – Lowell's "My Study Windows" – "Diethelm von Buchenberg" in Deutschen Novellenschatz– Letter to Mrs. Congreve – Mrs. Geddes's marriage – Letter to John Blackwood – Relinquishment of Scott Commemoration – Captain Lockhart – Letter to John Blackwood on MS. of "Middlemarch" – Visit from Tennyson – Letter to Mrs. Lytton on death of her son – Letter to Miss Mary Cross on story in Macmillan's Magazine– Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor – Suffering from cold – Got's acting – Crystal Palace music – Letter to Mrs. Bray – Delight in intellectual activity – Letter to Mrs. Congreve – Enjoyment of Cherrimans – Letter to John Blackwood – Visit to Weybridge – Mr. Main, the collector of the "Sayings" – Reception of "Middlemarch" – Letters to Miss Hennell – Foster's "Life of Dickens" – Low health – Tichborne trial – Letters to John Blackwood: pleased with the "Sayings" – Visit to Weybridge – Length of "Middlemarch" – Letter to Mrs. Congreve – Reading Johnson's "Lives of the Poets" – Finished second volume of "Middlemarch" – Letter to Mrs. Stowe – Spiritualistic phenomena – Letter to John Blackwood – German and French interest in "Middlemarch" – Asher's edition – German readers – Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor on death of Mazzini – Letter to Miss Hennell – Low health – Letter to Mrs. Stowe – Spirit communications – Letter to Mrs. Congreve on Wallace's "Eastern Archipelago" – Tylor's "Primitive Culture" – Letter to John Blackwood – "Middlemarch" finished – Letter to Mrs. Cross on invitation to Six-Mile Bottom, Cambridge – Month's visit to Homburg – Letter to Mrs. Cross – Trèves – On gambling at Homburg – Letter to John Blackwood – Play of a young lady at Homburg – German reading – Letter to Mrs. Cross from Boulogne – Letter to Mrs. Wm. Smith of condolence on loss of her husband – Memorial article on Mr. Wm. Smith – Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor on Mr. Wm. Smith – Letters to Miss Hennell – Presentation copies of "Middlemarch" – Mr. Lewes studying mathematics – Letter to John Blackwood – "Maga's" review of "Middlemarch" – Tone of the Bar – Letter to J. W. Cross on building a house at Shere – Letter to Mrs. Congreve – Happiness – Story of Coventry lady and Bulstrode – Letter to Mr. Simpson – MS. of "Middlemarch."

CHAPTER XVII

Journal, 1873.

Jan. 1.– At the beginning of December the eighth and last book of "Middlemarch" was published, the three final numbers having been published monthly. No former book of mine has been received with more enthusiasm – not even "Adam Bede;" and I have received many deeply affecting assurances of its influence for good on individual minds. Hardly anything could have happened to me which I could regard as a greater blessing than the growth of my spiritual existence when my bodily existence is decaying. The merely egoistic satisfactions of fame are easily nullified by toothache, and that has made my chief consciousness for the last week. This morning, when I was in pain, and taking a melancholy breakfast in bed, some sweet-natured creature sent a beautiful bouquet to the door for me, bound round with the written wish that "Every year may be happier and happier, and that God's blessing may ever abide with the immortal author of 'Silas Marner.'" Happily my dear husband is well, and able to enjoy these things for me. That he rejoices in them is my most distinct personal pleasure in such tributes.

Letter to John Blackwood, 3d Jan. 1873.

It was very pleasant to have your greeting on the New Year, though I was keeping its advent in melancholy guise. I am relieved now from the neuralgic part of my ailment, and am able to write something of the hearty response I feel to your good wishes.

We both hope that the coming year may continue to you all the family joys which must make the core of your happiness, without underrating golf and good contributors to "Maga." Health has to be presupposed as the vehicle of all other good, and in this respect you may be possibly better off in '73 than in '72, for I think you have had several invalidings within the last twelve months.

Mr. Langford wrote yesterday that he knew of an article on "Middlemarch" being in preparation for the Times, which certainly was never before so slow in noticing a book of mine. Whether such an article will affect the sale favorably seems eminently uncertain, and can only complicate Mr. Simpson's problem.

We have been glad to welcome our good friend, Mr. Anthony Trollope, after his long absence. He is wonderfully full of life and energy, and will soon bring out his two thick volumes on Australian colonies.

My friendly Dutch publishers lately sent us a handsome row of volumes – George Eliot's "Romantische Werke," with an introduction, in which comparisons are safely shrouded for me in the haze of Dutch, so that if they are disadvantageous, I am not pained.

Please give my best wishes for the coming year to Mr. William Blackwood.

Letter to Mrs. Cross, 4th Jan. 1873.

At last I break my silence, and thank you for your kind care about me. I am able to enjoy my reading at the corner of my study fire, and am at that unpitiable stage of illness which is counterbalanced by extra petting. I have been fearing that you too may be undergoing some malaise of a kindred sort, and I should like to be assured that you have quite got through the troubles which threatened you.

How good you have all been to me, and what a disappointing investment of affection I have turned out! But those evening drives, which perhaps encouraged the faceache, have left me a treasure of picture and poetry in my memory quite worth paying for, and in these days all prices are high.

The new year began very prettily for me at half-past eight in the morning with a beautiful bouquet, left by an unknown at our door, and an inscription asking that "God's blessing might ever abide with the immortal author of 'Silas Marner.'"

Letter to John Blackwood, 25th Feb. 1873.

I am much pleased with the color and the lettering of the guinea edition, and the thinner paper makes it delightfully handy. Let us hope that some people still want to read it, since a friend of ours, in one short railway bit to and fro, saw two persons reading the paper-covered numbers. Now is the moment when a notice in the Times might possibly give a perceptible impulse.

Kohn, of Berlin, has written to ask us to allow him to reprint the "Spanish Gypsy" for £50, and we have consented. Some Dresdener, who has translated poems of Tennyson's, asked leave to translate the "Spanish Gypsy" in 1870, but I have not heard of his translation appearing.

The rain this morning is welcome, in exchange for the snow, which in London has none of its country charms left to it. Among my books, which comfort me in the absence of sunshine, is a copy of the "Handy Royal Atlas" which Mr. Lewes has got for me. The glorious index is all the more appreciable by me, because I am tormented with German historical atlases which have no index, and are covered with names swarming like ants on every map.

The catalogue coming in the other day renewed my longing for the cheap edition of Lockhart's novels, though I have some compunction in teasing your busy mind with my small begging. I should like to take them into the country, where our days are always longer for reading.

I have a love for Lockhart because of Scott's Life, which seems to me a perfect biography. How different from another we know of!

Letter to John Blackwood, 28th Feb. 1873.

After your kind words I will confess that I should very much like to have the "Manual of Geography" by Mackay, and Bayne's "Port Royal Logic."

À propos of the "Lifted Veil," I think it will not be judicious to reprint it at present. I care for the idea which it embodies and which justifies its painfulness. A motto which I wrote on it yesterday perhaps is a sufficient indication of that idea:

"Give me no light, great heaven, but such as turnsTo energy of human fellowship;No powers, save the growing heritageThat makes completer manhood."

But it will be well to put the story in harness with some other productions of mine, and not send it forth in its dismal loneliness. There are many things in it which I would willingly say over again, and I shall never put them in any other form. But we must wait a little. The question is not in the least one of money, but of care for the best effect of writing, which often depends on circumstances, much as pictures depend on light and juxtaposition.

I am looking forward with interest to "Kenelm Chillingly," and thinking what a blessed lot it is to die on just finishing a book, if it could be a good one. I mean, it is blessed only to quit activity when one quits life.

Letter to Mrs. Wm. Smith, 1st Mch. 1873.

If I had been quite sure of your address I should have written to you even before receiving your dear letter, over which I have been crying this morning. The prompting to write to you came from my having ten days ago read your Memoir – brief yet full – of the precious last months before the parting. Mrs. P. Taylor brought me her copy as a loan. But may I not beg to have a copy of my own? It is to me an invaluable bit of writing; the inspiration of a great sorrow, born of a great love, has made it perfect; and ever since I read it I have felt a strengthening companionship from it. You will perhaps think it strange when I tell you that I have been more cheerful since I read the record of his sweet, mild heroism, which threw emphasis on every blessing left in his waning life, and was silent over its pangs. I have even ventured to lend this copy, which is not my own, to a young married woman of whom I am very fond, because I think it is an unforgetable picture of that union which is the ideal of marriage, and which I desire young people to have in their minds as a goal.

It is a comfort in thinking of you that you have two lovable young creatures with you. I have found quite a new interest in young people since I have been conscious that I am getting older; and if all personal joy were to go from me as it has gone from you, I could perhaps find some energy from that interest, and try to teach the young. I wish, dear friend, it were possible to convey to you the sense I have of a great good in being permitted to know of your happiness, and of having some communion with the sorrow which is its shadow. Your words have a consecration for me, and my husband shares my feeling. He sends his love along with mine. He sobbed with something which is a sort of grief better worth having than any trivial gladness, as he read the printed record of your love. He, too, is capable of that supreme, self-merging love.

Letter to John Blackwood, 14th Mch. 1873.

This is good news about the guinea edition, but I emphatically agree with you that it will be well to be cautious in further printing. I wish you could see a letter I had from California the other day, apparently from a young fellow, and beginning, "Oh, you dear lady! I who have been a Fred Vincy ever so long … have played vagabond and ninny ever since I knew the meaning of such terms," etc., etc.

I am sorry to infer, from what you say about being recommended to go to a German bath, that you have been out of health lately. There really is a good deal of curative virtue in the air, waters, and exercise one gets at such places, and if the boredom were not strong enough to counteract the better influences, it would be worth while to endure.

That phrase of Miss Stuart's – "fall flat on the world" – is worth remembering. I should think it is not likely to prove prophetic, if she is at all like her cousin, whose fair, piquant face remains very vividly before me. The older one gets, the more one delights in these young things, rejoicing in their joys.

The ministerial crisis interests me, though it does not bring me any practical need for thinking of it, as it does to you. I wish there were some solid, philosophical Conservative to take the reins – one who knows the true functions of stability in human affairs, and, as the psalm says, "Would also practice what he knows."

Letter to Edward Burne-Jones, 20th Mch. 1873.

I suppose my hesitation about writing to you to tell you of a debt I feel towards you is all vanity. If you did not know me, you might think a great deal more of my judgment than it is worth, and I should feel bold in that possibility. But when judgment is understood to mean simply one's own impression of delight, one ought not to shrink from making one's small offering of burnt clay because others can give gold statues.

It would be narrowness to suppose that an artist can only care for the impressions of those who know the methods of his art as well as feel its effects. Art works for all whom it can touch. And I want in gratitude to tell you that your work makes life larger and more beautiful to me. I mean that historical life of all the world, in which our little personal share often seems a mere standing-room from which we can look all round, and chiefly backward. Perhaps the work has a strain of special sadness in it – perhaps a deeper sense of the tremendous outer forces which urge us, than of the inner impulse towards heroic struggle and achievement – but the sadness is so inwrought with pure, elevating sensibility to all that is sweet and beautiful in the story of man and in the face of the earth that it can no more be found fault with than the sadness of mid-day, when Pan is touchy, like the rest of us. Don't you agree with me that much superfluous stuff is written on all sides about purpose in art? A nasty mind makes nasty art, whether for art or any other sake; and a meagre mind will bring forth what is meagre. And some effect in determining other minds there must be, according to the degree of nobleness or meanness in the selection made by the artist's soul.