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

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 turns
To energy of human fellowship;
No powers, save the growing heritage
That 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.

Your work impresses me with the happy sense of noble selection and of power determined by refined sympathy. That is why I wanted to thank you in writing, since lip-homage has fallen into disrepute.

I cannot help liking to tell you a sign that my delight must have taken a little bit of the same curve as yours. Looking, à propos of your picture, into the "Iphigenia in Aulis," to read the chorus you know of, I found my blue pencil-marks made seven years ago (and gone into that forgetfulness which makes my mind seem very large and empty) – blue pencil-marks made against the dance – loving Kithara and the footsteps of the muses and the nereids dancing on the shining sands. I was pleased to see that my mind had been touched in a dumb way by what has touched yours to fine utterance.

Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 15th April, 1873

Welcome back to Europe! What a comfort to see your handwriting dated from San Remo – to think that Dr. Congreve's anxieties about your voyage are at an end, and that you are once more in the post which is more specially and permanently yours! Mr. Lewes finds fault with your letter for not telling enough; but the mere fact of your safety seems to fill it quite full for me, and I can think of no drawbacks – not even of the cold, which I hope is by this time passing away for you, as it is for us. You must be so rich in memories that we and our small ordinary news must appear very flat to you, but we will submit to be a little despised by you if only we can have you with us again. I have never lost the impression of Dr. Congreve's look when he paid us his farewell visit, and spoke of his anxiety about your voyage, fearing that you had started too late; and that impression gives me all the keener sympathy with the repose I trust he is feeling. About ourselves I have only good news to tell. We are happier than ever, and have no troubles. We are searching for a country-house to go to at the end of May or earlier. I long for the perfect peace and freedom of the country again. The hours seem to stretch themselves there, and to hold twice as much thought as one can get into them in town, where acquaintances and small claims inevitably multiply.

Imagine us nearly as we were when we last saw you – only a little older – with unchanged affection for you and undimmed interest in whatever befalls you. Do not tax yourself to write unless you feel a pleasure in that imperfect sort of communication. I will try not to fear evil if you are silent, but you know that I am glad to have something more than hope to feed on.

Letter to Mrs. Wm. Smith, 25th April, 1873.

It was a cordial to me this morning to learn that you have the project of going with your young friend to Cambridge at the end of the autumn. I could not have thought of anything better to wish for on your behalf than that you should have the consciousness of helping a younger life. I know, dear friend, that so far as you directly are concerned with this life the remainder of it can only be patience and resignation. But we are not shut up within our individual life, and it is one of the gains of advancing age that the good of young creatures becomes a more definite, intense joy to us. With that renunciation for ourselves which age inevitably brings, we get more freedom of soul to enter into the life of others; what we can never learn they will know, and the gladness which is a departed sunlight to us is rising with the strength of morning to them.

I am very much interested in the fact of young women studying at Cambridge, and I have lately seen a charming specimen of the pupils at Hitchin – a very modest, lovely girl, who distinguished herself in the last examination. One is anxious that, in the beginning of a higher education for women – the immediate value of which is chiefly the social recognition of its desirableness – the students should be favorable subjects for experiment, girls or young women whose natures are large and rich enough not to be used up in their efforts after knowledge.

Mr. Lewes is very well and goes on working joyously. Proofs come in slowly, but he is far from being ready with all the manuscript which will be needed for his preliminary volume – the material, which has long been gathered, requiring revision and suggesting additions.

Do think it a privilege to have that fine physique of yours instead of a headachy, dyspeptic frame such as many women drag through life. Even in irremediable sorrow it is a sort of blasphemy against one's suffering fellow-beings to think lightly of any good which they would be thankful for in exchange for something they have to bear.

Journal, 1873.

May 19.– We paid a visit to Cambridge at the invitation of Mr. Frederick Myers, and I enjoyed greatly talking with him and some others of the "Trinity Men." In the evenings we went to see the boat-race, and then returned to supper and talk – the first evening with Mr. Henry Sidgwick, Mr. Jebb, Mr. Edmund Gurney; the second, with young Balfour, young Lyttelton, Mr. Jackson, and Edmund Gurney again. Mrs. and Miss Huth were also our companions during the visit. On the Tuesday morning we breakfasted at Mr. Henry Sidgwick's with Mr. Jebb, Mr. W. G. Clark, Mr. Myers, and Mrs. and Miss Huth.

May 22.– We went to the French play at the Princess's and saw Plessy and Desclée in "Les Idées de Madame Aubray." I am just finishing again Aristotle's "Poetics," which I first read in 1856.

Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 25th May, 1873.

Our plans have been upset by the impossibility of finding a house in the country that is suitable to us, and weariness of being deluded into journeys of investigation by fanciful advertisements has inclined Mr. Lewes for the present to say that we will go abroad. Still, I have nothing to tell that is absolutely settled, and I must ask you, when you return, to send a note to this house. If I am in England it will be forwarded to me, and you will get a prompt answer. If I am silent you will conclude that I am gone abroad. I think it is at the end of June that you are to come home?

Here we have been wearing furs and velvet, and having fires all through the past week, chiefly occupied by Mr. Lewes and me in a visit to Cambridge. We were invited ostensibly to see the boat-race, but the real pleasure of the visit consisted in talking with a hopeful group of Trinity young men. On Monday we had a clear, cold day, more like the fine weather of mid-winter than any tradition of May time. I hope that you have had no such revisiting of winter at San Remo. How much we should enjoy having you with us to narrate everything that has happened to you in the last eventful half year! I shall feel the loss of this, as an immediate prospect, to be the greatest disadvantage in our going abroad next month – if we go.

Your last news of Emily and of "baby's teeth" is cheerful. "Baby's teeth" is a phrase that enters much into our life just now. Little Blanche had a sad struggle with her first little bit of ivory, but she has been blooming again since, and is altogether a ravishing child. To-day we have had a large collection of visitors, and I have the usual Sunday evening condition of brain. But letters are so constantly coming and claiming my time to answer them, that I get fidgety lest I should neglect to write to you; and I was determined not to let another day pass without letting you have a proof that I think of you. When I am silent please believe that the silence is due to feebleness of body, which narrows my available time. Mr. Lewes often talks of you, and will value any word from you about yourself as much as I shall.

Letter to Mrs. Bray, 2d June, 1873.

Thanks for sending me word of poor Miss Rebecca Franklin's death. It touches me deeply. She was always particularly good and affectionate to me, and I had much happiness in her as my teacher.

In September a house near Chislehurst will be open to us – a house which we think of ultimately making our sole home, turning our backs on London. But we shall be allowed to have it, furnished, for a year on trial.

Journal, 1873.

June.– In the beginning of June we paid a visit to Mr. Jowett at Oxford, meeting there Mr. and Mrs. Charles Roundell, then newly married. We stayed from Saturday to Monday, and I was introduced to many persons of interest. Professor T. Green, Max Müller, Thomson, the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, a Mr. Wordsworth, the grandson of the poet, who had spent some time in India, and a host of others.

June 23.– Started for the Continent. Fontainebleau, Plombières, etc.

Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 9th Aug. 1873.

I feel myself guilty that I have allowed the vicissitudes of travelling to hinder me from writing to you, for the chance that a letter from me might be welcome to you in what I have been imagining as the first weeks of your return to England and the house in Mecklenburgh Square. I am sure that I should not have been guilty in this way if I had been at any time able to say where you should send me an answer which I could call for at a Poste Restante. But we have been invariably uncertain as to the length of our stay in any one place and as to our subsequent route; and I confess that I shrink from writing a letter full of my own doings, without the prospect of getting some news in return. I am usually in a state of fear rather than of hope about my absent friends; and I dread lest a letter written in ignorance about them should be ill-timed. But at last all fears have become weaker than the uneasy sense that I have omitted to send you a sign of your loved presence in my thoughts, and that you may have lost a gleam of pleasure through my omission.

We left home on the 23d of June, with a sketch of a journey in our minds, which included Grenoble, the Grande Chartreuse, Aix-les-Bains, Chambéry, and Geneva. The last place I wished to get to, because my friend Mme. d'Albert is not likely to live much longer, and I thought that I should like to see her once more. But during a short stay at Fontainebleau I began to feel that lengthy railway journeys were too formidable for us old, weak creatures, and, moreover, that July and August were not the best months for those southern regions. We were both shattered, and needed quiet rather than the excitement of seeing friends and acquaintances – an excitement of which we had been having too much at home – so we turned aside by easy stages to the Vosges, and spent about three weeks at Plombières and Luxeuil. We shall carry home many pleasant memories of our journey – of Fontainebleau, for example, which I had never seen before. Then of the Vosges, where we count on going again. Erckmann-Chatrian's books had been an introduction to the lovely region; and several of them were our companions there. But what small experiences these are compared with yours; and how we long for the time when you will be seated with us at our country-house (Blackbrook, near Bromley, is the name of the house), and tell us as much as you can think of about this long year in which we have been deprived of you. If you receive this letter in time to write me a line, which would reach me by the 15th, I shall be most grateful if you will give me that undeserved indulgence.

Letter to John Blackwood, 24th Aug. 1873.

On our return yesterday from our nine-weeks' absence I found a letter from Mr. Main, in which he shows some anxiety that I should write you the "formal sanction" you justly require before admitting extracts from "Middlemarch" in the new edition of the "Sayings." I have no objection, if you see none, to such an enlargement of the volume, and I satisfy our good Mr. Main's promptitude by writing the needed consent at once.

We used our plan of travel as "a good thing to wander from," and went to no single place (except Fontainebleau) to which we had beforehand projected going.

Our most fortunate wandering was to the Vosges – to Plombières and Luxeuil – which have made us in love with the mode of life at the Eaux of France, as greatly preferable to the ways of the German Bad.

We happened to be at Nancy just as the Germans were beginning to quit it, and we saw good store of tricolores and paper lanterns ready in the shop windows for those who wished to buy the signs of national rejoicing. I can imagine that, as a Prussian lady told us, the Germans themselves were not at all rejoiced to leave that pretty town for "les bords de la Spree," where, in French dialogue, all Germans are supposed to live.

Journal, 1873.

Sept. 4.– Went to Blackbrook, near Bickley.

Letter to Mrs. Cross, 17th Sept. 1873.

Thanks, dear friend, for the difficult exertion you gave to the telling of what I so much wished to know – the details of the trouble²¹ which you have all had to go through either directly or sympathetically. But I will not dwell now on what it cost you, I fear, too much pain to recall so as to give me the vivid impressions I felt in reading your letter. The great practical result of such trouble is to make us all more tender to each other; this is a world in which we must pay heavy prices for love, as you know by experience much deeper than mine.

I will gossip a little about ourselves now. We gave up our intention of going far southward, fearing the fatigue of long railway journeys, and the heat (which hardly ever came) of July and August in the region we had thought of visiting. So, after staying a very enjoyable time at Fontainebleau, we went to the Vosges, and at Plombières and Luxeuil we should have felt ourselves in paradise if it had not been for a sad deafness of George's, which kept us uneasy and made us hurry to that undesirable place, Frankfort, in order to consult Spiess. At Frankfort the nearest bath was the also undesirable Homburg; so we spent or wasted a fortnight there, winning little but the joy of getting away again. The journey home, which we took very easily, was interesting – through Metz, Verdun, Rheims, and Amiens.

As to our house, spite of beautiful lawn, tall trees, fine kitchen-garden, and good, invigorating air, we have already made up our minds that it will not do for our home. Still, we have many things to enjoy, but we shall not probably remain here longer than to the end of October.

My motherly love to all such young ones as may be around you. I do not disturb George in order to ask for messages from him, being sure that his love goes with mine.

Letter to John Blackwood, 19th Sept. 1873.

I quite assent to your proposal that there should be a new edition of "Middlemarch" in one volume, at 7s. 6d.– to be prepared at once, but not published too precipitately.

I like your project of an illustration; and the financial arrangements you mention are quite acceptable to me.

For one reason especially I am delighted that the book is going to be reprinted – namely, that I can see the proof-sheets and make corrections. Pray give orders that the sheets be sent to me. I should like the binding to be of a rich, sober color, with very plain Roman lettering. It might be called a "revised edition."

Thanks for the extract from Mr. Collins's letter. I did not know that there was really a Lowick, in a Midland county too. Mr. Collins has my gratitude for feeling some regard towards Mr. Casaubon, in whose life I lived with much sympathy.

When I was at Oxford, in May, two ladies came up to me after dinner: one said, "How could you let Dorothea marry that Casaubon?" The other, "Oh, I understand her doing that, but why did you let her marry the other fellow, whom I cannot bear?" Thus two "ardent admirers" wished that the book had been quite different from what it is.

I wonder whether you have abandoned – as you seemed to agree that it would be wise to do – the project of bringing out my other books in a cheaper form than the present 3s. 6d., which, if it were not for the blemish of the figure illustrations, would be as pretty an edition as could be, and perhaps as cheap as my public requires. Somehow, the cheap books that crowd the stalls are always those which look as if they were issued from Pandemonium.

Letter to Mrs. Cross, 11th Oct. 1873.

I am rather ashamed of our grumblings. We are really enjoying the country, and have more than our share of everything. George has happy mornings at his desk now, and we have fine bracing air to walk in – air which I take in as a sort of nectar. We like the bits of scenery round us better and better as we get them by heart in our walks and drives. The house, with all its defects, is very pretty, and more delightfully secluded, without being remote from the conveniences of the world, than any place we have before thought of as a possible residence for us.

I am glad that you have been seeing the Cowper Temples. My knowledge of them has not gone beyond dining with them at Mrs. Tollemache's, and afterwards having a good conversational call from them, but they both struck me very agreeably.

Mr. Henry Sidgwick is a chief favorite of mine – one of whom his friends at Cambridge say that they always expect him to act according to a higher standard than they think of attributing to any other chief man, or of imposing on themselves. "Though we kept our own fellowships without believing more than he did," one of them said to me, "we should have felt that Henry Sidgwick had fallen short if he had not renounced his."

Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 12th Oct. 1873.

Our plan is not to give up our London house, but to have a country place as a retreat. We want a good house in a lovely country, away from rows of villas, but within easy reach of all conveniences. This seems an immodest requirement in a world where one good is hardly to be got without renunciation of another. You perceive that we are getting very old and fastidious.

I like to interpret your enjoyment of Brighton and its evening skies as a proof that you flourish there physically. All things are to be endured and counted even as a fuller life, with a body free from pain and depressing sensations of weakness; but illness is a partial death, and makes the world dim to us.

We have no great strength to boast of; but we are so unspeakably happy in all other respects that we cannot grumble at this tax on us as elderly mortals.

Our little Blanche grows in grace, and her parents have great delight in her – Charles being quite as fond a father as if he had beforehand been an idolizer of babies.

Letter to J. W. Cross, Sunday, 20th Oct. 1873.

The chances of conversation were against my being quite clear to you yesterday as to the cases in which it seems to me that conformity is the higher rule. What happened to be said or not said is of no consequence in any other light than that of my anxiety not to appear what I should hate to be– which is surely not an ignoble, egoistic anxiety, but belongs to the worship of the Best.