George Eliot's Life

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George Eliot's Life

GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE

VOL. I.--UNKNOWN


"OUR FINEST HOPE IS FINEST MEMORY"


[Illustration: Portrait of George Eliot. Etched by M. Rajon.]




            GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE
  _as related in her Letters and Journals_

     ARRANGED AND EDITED BY HER HUSBAND
                J. W. CROSS

             WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

         IN THREE VOLUMES.--VOLUME I


                 NEW YORK
     HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE




GEORGE ELIOT'S WORKS.

_LIBRARY EDITION._

     ADAM BEDE. Illustrated. 12mo, Cloth, $1.25.

     DANIEL DERONDA. 2 vols., 12mo, Cloth, $2.50.

     ESSAYS and LEAVES FROM A NOTE-BOOK. 12mo, Cloth, $1.25.

     FELIX HOLT, THE RADICAL. Illustrated. 12mo, Cloth, $1.25.

     MIDDLEMARCH. 2 vols., 12mo, Cloth, $2.50.

     ROMOLA. Illustrated. 12mo, Cloth, $1.25.

     SCENES OF CLERICAL LIFE, and SILAS MARNER. Illustrated.
     12mo, Cloth, $1.25.

     THE IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 12mo, Cloth, $1.25.

     THE MILL ON THE FLOSS. Illustrated. 12mo, Cloth, $1.25.


PUBLISHED BY HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK.

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prepaid, to any part of the United States or Canada, on receipt of the
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& Brothers see advertisement at end of third volume_.




PREFACE.


With the materials in my hands I have endeavored to form an
_autobiography_ (if the term may be permitted) of George Eliot. The
life has been allowed to write itself in extracts from her letters and
journals. Free from the obtrusion of any mind but her own, this method
serves, I think, better than any other open to me, to show the
development of her intellect and character.

In dealing with the correspondence I have been influenced by the
desire to make known the woman, as well as the author, through the
presentation of her daily life.

On the intellectual side there remains little to be learned by those
who already know George Eliot's books. In the twenty volumes which she
wrote and published in her lifetime will be found her best and ripest
thoughts. The letters now published throw light on another side of her
nature--not less important, but hitherto unknown to the public--the
side of the affections.

The intimate life was the core of the root from which sprung the
fairest flowers of her inspiration. Fame came to her late in life,
and, when it presented itself, was so weighted with the sense of
responsibility that it was in truth a rose with many thorns, for
George Eliot had the temperament that shrinks from the position of a
public character. The belief in the wide, and I may add in the
beneficent, effect of her writing was no doubt the highest happiness,
the reward of the artist which she greatly cherished: but the joys of
the hearthside, the delight in the love of her friends, were the
supreme pleasures in her life.

By arranging all the letters and journals so as to form one connected
whole, keeping the order of their dates, and with the least possible
interruption of comment, I have endeavored to combine a narrative of
day-to-day life, with the play of light and shade which only letters,
written in various moods, can give, and without which no portrait can
be a good likeness. I do not know that the particular method in which
I have treated the letters has ever been adopted before. Each letter
has been pruned of everything that seemed to me irrelevant to my
purpose--of everything that I thought my wife would have wished to be
omitted. Every sentence that remains adds, in my judgment, something
(however small it may be) to the means of forming a conclusion about
her character. I ought perhaps to say a word of apology for what may
appear to be undue detail of travelling experiences; but I hope that
to many readers these will be interesting, as reflected through George
Eliot's mind. The remarks on works of art are only meant to be records
of impressions. She would have deprecated for herself the attitude of
an art critic.

Excepting a slight introductory sketch of the girlhood, up to the time
when letters became available, and a few words here and there to
elucidate the correspondence, I have confined myself to the work of
selection and arrangement.

I have refrained almost entirely from quoting remembered sayings by
George Eliot, because it is difficult to be certain of complete
accuracy, and everything depends upon accuracy. Recollections of
conversation are seldom to be implicitly trusted in the absence of
notes made at the time. The value of spoken words depends, too, so
much upon the _tone_, and on the circumstances which gave rise to
their utterance, that they often mislead as much as they enlighten,
when, in the process of repetition, they have taken color from another
mind. "All interpretations depend upon the interpreter," and I have
judged it best to let George Eliot be her own interpreter, as far as
possible.

I owe thanks to Mr. Isaac Evans, the brother of my wife, for much of
the information in regard to her child-life; and the whole book is a
long record of debts due to other friends for letters. It is not,
therefore, necessary for me to recapitulate the list of names in this
place. My thanks to all are heartfelt. But there is a very special
acknowledgment due to Miss Sara Hennell, to Mrs. Bray, and to the late
Mr. Charles Bray of Coventry, not only for the letters which they
placed at my disposal, but also for much information given to me in
the most friendly spirit. The very important part of the life from
1842 to 1854 could not possibly have been written without their
contribution.

To Mr. Charles Lewes, also, I am indebted for some valuable letters
and extracts from the journals of his father, besides the letters
addressed to himself. He also obtained for me an important letter
written by George Eliot to Mr. R. H. Hutton; and throughout the
preparation of the book I have had the advantage of his sympathetic
interest, and his concurrence in the publication of all the
materials.

Special thanks are likewise due to Messrs. Wm. Blackwood & Sons for
having placed at my disposal George Eliot's long correspondence with
the firm. The letters (especially those addressed to her friend the
late Mr. John Blackwood) throw a light, that could not otherwise have
been obtained, on the most interesting part of her literary career.

To the legal representatives of the late Charles Dickens, of the late
Lord Lytton, and of Mrs. Carlyle; to Mr. J. A. Froude, and to Mr.
Archer Gurney, I owe thanks for leave to print letters written by
them.

For all the defects that there may be in the plan of these volumes I
alone am responsible. The lines were determined and the work was
substantially put into shape before I submitted the manuscript to any
one. While passing the winter in the south of France I had the good
fortune at Cannes to find, in Lord Acton, not only an enthusiastic
admirer of George Eliot, but also a friend always most kindly ready to
assist me with valuable counsel and with cordial, generous sympathy.
He was the first reader of the manuscript, and whatever accuracy may
have been arrived at, particularly in the names of foreign books,
foreign persons, and foreign places, is in great part due to his
friendly, careful help. But of course he has no responsibility
whatever for any of my sins of omission or commission.

By the kind permission of Sir Frederic Burton, I have been enabled to
reproduce as a frontispiece M. Rajon's etching of the beautiful
drawing, executed in 1864, now in the National Portrait Gallery, South
Kensington.

The view of the old house at Rosehill is from a drawing by Mrs. Bray.
It is connected with some of George Eliot's happiest experiences, and
with the period of her most rapid intellectual development.

For permission to use the sketch of the drawing-room at the Priory I
am indebted to the Messrs. Harpers, of New York.

In conclusion, it is in no conventional spirit, but from my heart,
that I bespeak the indulgence of readers for my share of this work. Of
its shortcomings no one can be so convinced as I am myself.

                                                    J. W. C.

  CAMDEN HILL, _December, 1884_.




CONTENTS OF VOL. I.


     Introductory Sketch of Childhood.                     Page 1


     CHAPTER I.
     AUGUST, 1838, TO MARCH, 1841.

       Life at Griff                                           28


     CHAPTER II.
     MARCH, 1841, TO APRIL, 1846.

       Coventry--Translation of Strauss                        61


     CHAPTER III.
     MAY, 1846, TO MAY, 1849.

       Life in Coventry till Mr. Evans's Death                106


     CHAPTER IV.
     JUNE, 1849, TO MARCH, 1850.

       Geneva                                                 150


     CHAPTER V.
     MARCH, 1850, TO JULY, 1854.

       Work in London--Union with Mr. Lewes                   181


     CHAPTER VI.
     JULY, 1854, TO MARCH, 1855.

       Germany                                                239


     CHAPTER VII.
     MARCH, 1855, TO DECEMBER, 1857.

       Richmond--"Scenes of Clerical Life"                    273


     APPENDIX                                                 349




ILLUSTRATIONS TO VOL. I.


     PORTRAIT OF GEORGE ELIOT.
       Etched by M. Rajon                         _Frontispiece._

     GRIFF--FRONT VIEW                        _To face p_.      6

     GRIFF--WITH THE FARM OFFICES                  "           12

     HOUSE IN FOLESHILL ROAD, COVENTRY             "           62

     PORTRAIT OF MR. ROBERT EVANS                  "          148

     ROSEHILL                                      "          182




GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE.




_INTRODUCTORY SKETCH OF CHILDHOOD._


"_Nov. 22, 1819._--Mary Ann Evans was born at Arbury Farm,[1] at five
o'clock this morning."

This is an entry, in Mr. Robert Evans's handwriting, on the page of an
old diary that now lies before me, and records, with characteristic
precision, the birth of his youngest child, afterwards known to the
world as George Eliot. Let us pause for a moment to pay its due homage
to the precision, because it was in all probability to this most
noteworthy quality of her father's nature that the future author was
indebted for one of the principal elements of her own after-success--the
enormous faculty for taking pains. The baby was born on St. Cecilia's
day, and Mr. Evans, being a good churchman, takes her, on the 29th
November, to be baptized in the church at Chilvers Coton--the parish in
which Arbury Farm lies--a church destined to impress itself strongly on
the child's imagination, and to be known by many people in many lands
afterwards as Shepperton Church. The father was a remarkable man, and
many of the leading traits in his character are to be found in Adam Bede
and in Caleb Garth--although, of course, neither of these is a portrait.
He was born in 1773, at Ellaston, in Staffordshire, son of a George
Evans, who carried on the business of builder and carpenter there: the
Evans family having come originally from Northop, in Flintshire. Robert
was brought up to the business; but about 1799, or a little before, he
held a farm of Mr. Francis Newdigate at Kirk Hallam, in Derbyshire, and
became his agent. On Sir Roger Newdigate's death the Arbury estate came
to Mr. Francis Newdigate for his life, and Mr. Evans accompanied him
into Warwickshire, in 1806, in the capacity of agent. In 1801 he had
married Harriott Poynton, by whom he had two children--Robert, born
1802, at Ellaston, and Frances Lucy, born 1805, at Kirk Hallam. His
first wife died in 1809; and on 8th February, 1813, he married
Christiana Pearson, by whom he had three children--Christiana, born
1814; Isaac, born 1816, and Mary Ann, born 1819. Shortly after the last
child's birth, Robert, the son, became the agent, under his father, for
the Kirk Hallam property, and lived there with his sister Frances, who
afterwards married a Mr. Houghton. In March, 1820, when the baby girl
was only four months old, the Evans family removed to Griff, a charming
red-brick, ivy-covered house on the Arbury estate--"the warm little nest
where her affections were fledged"--and there George Eliot spent the
first twenty-one years of her life.

Let us remember what the England was upon which this observant child
opened her eyes.

The date of her birth was removed from the beginning of the French
Revolution by just the same period of time as separates a child, born
this year, 1884, from the beginning of the Crimean War. To a man of
forty-six to-day, the latter event seems but of yesterday. It took
place at a very impressionable period of his life, and the remembrance
of every detail is perfectly vivid. Mr. Evans was forty-six when his
youngest child was born. He was a youth of sixteen when the Revolution
began, and that mighty event, with all its consequences, had left an
indelible impression on him, and the convictions and conclusions it
had fostered in his mind permeated through to his children, and
entered as an indestructible element into the susceptible soul of his
youngest daughter. There are bits in the paper "Looking Backward," in
"Theophrastus Such," which are true autobiography.

"In my earliest remembrance of my father his hair was already gray,
for I was his youngest child, and it seemed to me that advanced age
was appropriate to a father, as, indeed, in all respects I considered
him a parent so much to my honor that the mention of my relationship
to him was likely to secure me regard among those to whom I was
otherwise a stranger--his stories from his life including so many
names of distant persons that my imagination placed no limit to his
acquaintanceship.... Nor can I be sorry, though myself given to
meditative if not active innovation, that my father was a Tory who had
not exactly a dislike to innovators and dissenters, but a slight
opinion of them as persons of ill-founded self-confidence.... And I
often smile at my consciousness that certain Conservative
prepossessions have mingled themselves for me with the influences of
our Midland scenery, from the tops of the elms down to the buttercups
and the little wayside vetches. Naturally enough. That part of my
father's prime to which he oftenest referred had fallen on the days
when the great wave of political enthusiasm and belief in a speedy
regeneration of all things had ebbed, and the supposed millennial
initiative of France was turning into a Napoleonic empire.... To my
father's mind the noisy teachers of revolutionary doctrine were, to
speak mildly, a variable mixture of the fool and the scoundrel; the
welfare of the nation lay in a strong government which could maintain
order; and I was accustomed to hear him utter the word 'government' in
a tone that charged it with awe, and made it part of my effective
religion, in contrast with the word 'rebel,' which seemed to carry the
stamp of evil in its syllables, and, lit by the fact that Satan was
the first rebel, made an argument dispensing with more detailed
inquiry."

This early association of ideas must always be borne in mind, as it is
the key to a great deal in the mental attitude of the future thinker
and writer. It is the foundation of the latent Conservative bias.

The year 1819 is memorable as a culminating period of bad times and
political discontent in England. The nation was suffering acutely from
the reaction after the excitement of the last Napoleonic war. George
IV. did not come to the throne till January, 1820, so that George
Eliot was born in the reign of George III. The trial of Queen Caroline
was the topic of absorbing public interest. Waterloo was not yet an
affair of five years old. Byron had four years, and Goethe had
thirteen years, still to live. The last of Miss Austen's novels had
been published only eighteen months, and the first of the Waverley
series only six years before. Thackeray and Dickens were boys at
school, and George Sand, as a girl of fifteen, was leaving her loved
freedom on the banks of the Indre for the Convent des Anglaises at
Paris. That "Greater Britain" (Canada and Australia), which to-day
forms so large a reading public, was then scarcely more than a
geographical expression, with less than half a million of inhabitants,
all told, where at present there are eight millions; and in the United
States, where more copies of George Eliot's books are now sold than in
any other quarter of the world, the population then numbered less than
ten millions where to-day it is fifty-five millions. Including Great
Britain, these English-speaking races have increased from thirty
millions in 1820 to one hundred millions in 1884; and with the
corresponding increase in education we can form some conception how a
popular English writer's fame has widened its circle.

There was a remoteness about a detached country-house, in the England
of those days, difficult for us to conceive now, with our railways,
penny-post, and telegraphs; nor is the Warwickshire country about
Griff an exhilarating surrounding. There are neither hills nor vales,
no rivers, lakes, or sea--nothing but a monotonous succession of green
fields and hedgerows, with some fine trees. The only water to be seen
is the "brown canal." The effect of such a landscape on an ordinary
observer is not inspiring, but "effective magic is transcendent
nature;" and with her transcendent nature George Eliot has
transfigured these scenes, dear to Midland souls, into many an idyllic
picture, known to those who know her books. In her childhood the great
event of the day was the passing of the coach before the gate of Griff
House, which lies at a bend of the high-road between Coventry and
Nuneaton, and within a couple of miles of the mining village of
Bedworth, "where the land began to be blackened with coal-pits, the
rattle of hand-looms to be heard in hamlets and villages. Here were
powerful men walking queerly, with knees bent outward from squatting
in the mine, going home to throw themselves down in their blackened
flannel and sleep through the daylight, then rise and spend much of
their high wages at the alehouse with their fellows of the Benefit
Club; here the pale, eager faces of hand-loom weavers, men and women,
haggard from sitting up late at night to finish the week's work,
hardly begun till the Wednesday. Everywhere the cottages and the small
children were dirty, for the languid mothers gave their strength to
the loom; pious Dissenting women, perhaps, who took life patiently,
and thought that salvation depended chiefly on predestination, and not
at all on cleanliness. The gables of Dissenting chapels now made a
visible sign of religion, and of a meeting-place to counterbalance the
alehouse, even in the hamlets.... Here was a population not convinced
that old England was as good as possible; here were multitudinous men
and women aware that their religion was not exactly the religion of
their rulers, who might therefore be better than they were, and who,
if better, might alter many things which now made the world perhaps
more painful than it need be, and certainly more sinful. Yet there
were the gray steeples too, and the churchyards, with their grassy
mounds and venerable headstones, sleeping in the sunlight; there were
broad fields and homesteads, and fine old woods covering a rising
ground, or stretching far by the roadside, allowing only peeps at the
park and mansion which they shut in from the working-day world. In
these midland districts the traveller passed rapidly from one phase of
English life to another; after looking down on a village dingy with
coal-dust, noisy with the shaking of looms, he might skirt a parish
all of fields, high hedges, and deep-rutted lanes; after the coach had
rattled over the pavement of a manufacturing town, the scene of riots
and trades-union meetings, it would take him in another ten minutes
into a rural region, where the neighborhood of the town was only felt
in the advantages of a near market for corn, cheese, and hay, and
where men with a considerable banking account were accustomed to say
that 'they never meddled with politics themselves.'"[2]

[Illustration: Griff House--Front view.]

We can imagine the excitement of a little four-year-old girl and her
seven-year-old brother waiting, on bright frosty mornings, to hear the
far-off ringing beat of the horses' feet upon the hard ground, and
then to see the gallant appearance of the four grays, with coachman
and guard in scarlet, outside passengers muffled up in furs, and
baskets of game and other packages hanging behind the boot, as his
majesty's mail swung cheerily round on its way from Birmingham to
Stamford. Two coaches passed the door daily--one from Birmingham at 10
o'clock in the morning, the other from Stamford at 3 o'clock in the
afternoon. These were the chief connecting links between the household
at Griff and the outside world. Otherwise life went on with that
monotonous regularity which distinguishes the country from the town.
And it is to these circumstances of her early life that a great part
of the quality of George Eliot's writing is due, and that she holds
the place she has attained in English literature. Her roots were down
in the pre-railroad, pre-telegraphic period--the days of fine old
leisure--but the fruit was formed during an era of extraordinary
activity in scientific and mechanical discovery. Her genius was the
outcome of these conditions. It would not have existed in the same
form deprived of either influence. Her father was busy both with his
own farm-work and increasing agency business. He was already remarked
in Warwickshire for his knowledge and judgment in all matters relating
to land, and for his general trustworthiness and high character, so
that he was constantly selected as arbitrator and valuer. He had a
wonderful eye, especially for valuing woods, and could calculate with
almost absolute precision the quantity of available timber in a
standing tree. In addition to his merits as a man of business, he had
the good fortune to possess the warm friendship and consistent support
of Colonel Newdigate of Astley Castle, son of Mr. Francis Newdigate of
Arbury, and it was mainly through the colonel's introduction and
influence that Mr. Evans became agent also to Lord Aylesford, Lord
Lifford, Mr. Bromley Davenport, and several others.

His position cannot be better summed up than in the words of his
daughter, writing to Mr. Bray on 30th September, 1859, in regard to
some one who had written of her, after the appearance of "Adam Bede,"
as a "self-educated farmer's daughter."

"My father did not raise himself from being an artisan to be a farmer;
he raised himself from being an artisan to be a man whose extensive
knowledge in very varied practical departments made his services
valued through several counties. He had large knowledge of building,
of mines, of plantations, of various branches of valuation and
measurement--of all that is essential to the management of large
estates. He was held by those competent to judge as _unique_ among
land-agents for his manifold knowledge and experience, which enabled
him to save the special fees usually paid by landowners for special
opinions on the different questions incident to the proprietorship of
land. So far as I am personally concerned I should not write a stroke
to prevent any one, in the zeal of antithetic eloquence, from calling
me a tinker's daughter; but if my father is to be mentioned at all--if
he is to be identified with an imaginary character--my piety towards
his memory calls on me to point out to those who are supposed to speak
with information what he really achieved in life."

Mr. Evans was also, like Adam Bede, noteworthy for his extraordinary
physical strength and determination of character. There is a story
told of him, that one day when he was travelling on the top of a
coach, down in Kent, a decent woman sitting next him complained that a
great hulking sailor on her other side was making himself offensive.
Mr. Evans changed places with the woman, and, taking the sailor by the
collar, forced him down under the seat, and held him there with an
iron hand for the remainder of the stage: and at Griff it is still
remembered that the master, happening to pass one day while a couple
of laborers were waiting for a third to help to move the high, heavy
ladder used for thatching ricks, braced himself up to a great effort,
and carried the ladder alone and unaided from one rick to the other,
to the wide-eyed wonder and admiration of his men. With all this
strength, however, both of body and of character, he seems to have
combined a certain self-distrust, owing, perhaps, to his early
imperfect education, which resulted in a general submissiveness in his
domestic relations, more or less portrayed in the character of Mr.
Garth.

His second wife was a woman with an unusual amount of natural force; a
shrewd, practical person, with a considerable dash of the Mrs. Poyser
vein in her. Hers was an affectionate, warm-hearted nature, and her
children, on whom she cast "the benediction of her gaze," were
thoroughly attached to her. She came of a race of yeomen, and her
social position was, therefore, rather better than her husband's at
the time of their marriage. Her family are, no doubt, prototypes of
the Dodsons in the "Mill on the Floss." There were three other sisters
married, and all living in the neighborhood of Griff--Mrs. Everard,
Mrs. Johnson, and Mrs. Garner--and probably Mr. Evans heard a good
deal about "the traditions in the Pearson family." Mrs. Evans was a
very active, hard-working woman, but shortly after her last child's
birth she became ailing in health, and consequently her eldest girl,
Christiana, was sent to school, at a very early age, to Miss Lathom's,
at Attleboro, a village a mile or two from Griff, while the two
younger children spent some part of their time every day at the
cottage of a Mrs. Moore, who kept a dame's school close to Griff
gates. The little girl very early became possessed with the idea that
she was going to be a personage in the world; and Mr. Charles Lewes
has told me an anecdote which George Eliot related of herself as
characteristic of this period of her childhood. When she was only four
years old she recollected playing on the piano, of which she did not
know one note, in order to impress the servant with a proper notion of
her acquirements and generally distinguished position. This was the
time when the love for her brother grew into the child's affections.
She used always to be at his heels, insisting on doing everything he
did. She was not, in these baby-days, in the least precocious in
learning. In fact, her half-sister, Mrs. Houghton, who was some
fourteen years her senior, told me that the child learned to read
with some difficulty; but Mr. Isaac Evans says that this was not from
any slowness in apprehension, but because she liked playing so much
better. Mere sharpness, however, was not a characteristic of her mind.
Hers was a large, slow-growing nature; and I think it is, at any rate,
certain that there was nothing of the infant phenomenon about her. In
her moral development she showed, from the earliest years, the trait
that was most marked in her all through life, namely, the absolute
need of some one person who should be all in all to her, and to whom
she should be all in all. Very jealous in her affections, and easily
moved to smiles or tears, she was of a nature capable of the keenest
enjoyment and the keenest suffering, knowing "all the wealth and all
the woe" of a pre-eminently exclusive disposition. She was
affectionate, proud, and sensitive in the highest degree.

The sort of happiness that belongs to this budding-time of life, from
the age of three to five, is apt to impress itself very strongly on
the memory; and it is this period which is referred to in the Brother
and Sister Sonnet, "But were another childhood's world my share, I
would be born a little sister there." When her brother was eight years
old he was sent to school at Coventry, and, her mother continuing in
very delicate health, the little Mary Ann, now five years of age, went
to join her sister at Miss Lathom's school, at Attleboro, where they
continued as boarders for three or four years, coming, occasionally,
home to Griff on Saturdays. During one of our walks at Witley, in
1880, my wife mentioned to me that what chiefly remained in her
recollection about this very early school-life was the difficulty of
getting near enough the fire in winter to become thoroughly warmed,
owing to the circle of girls forming round too narrow a fireplace.
This suffering from cold was the beginning of a low general state of
health; also at this time she began to be subject to fears at
night--"the susceptibility to terror"--which she has described as
haunting Gwendolen Harleth in her childhood. The other girls in the
school, who were all, naturally, very much older, made a great pet of
the child, and used to call her "little mamma," and she was not
unhappy except at nights; but she told me that this liability to have
"all her soul become a quivering fear," which remained with her
afterwards, had been one of the supremely important influences
dominating at times her future life. Mr. Isaac Evans's chief
recollection of this period is the delight of the little sister at his
home-coming for holidays, and her anxiety to know all that he had been
doing and learning. The eldest child, who went by the name of
Chrissey, was the chief favorite of the aunts, as she was always neat
and tidy, and used to spend a great deal of her time with them, while
the other two were inseparable playfellows at home. The boy was his
mother's pet and the girl her father's. They had everything to make
children happy at Griff--a delightful old-fashioned garden, a pond and
the canal to fish in, and the farm-offices close to the house, "the
long cow-shed, where generations of the milky mothers have stood
patiently, the broad-shouldered barns, where the old-fashioned flail
once made resonant music," and where butter-making and cheese-making
were carried on with great vigor by Mrs. Evans.

[Illustration: Griff--with the Farm Offices.]

Any one, about this time, who happened to look through the window on
the left-hand side of the door of Griff House would have seen a pretty
picture in the dining-room on Saturday evenings after tea. The
powerful, middle-aged man with the strongly marked features sits in
his deep, leather-covered arm-chair, at the right-hand corner of the
ruddy fireplace, with the head of "the little wench" between his
knees. The child turns over the book with pictures that she wishes her
father to explain to her--or that perhaps she prefers explaining to
him. Her rebellious hair is all over her eyes, much vexing the pale,
energetic mother who sits on the opposite side of the fire, cumbered
with much service, letting no instant of time escape the inevitable
click of the knitting-needles, accompanied by epigrammatic speech. The
elder girl, prim and tidy, with her work before her, is by her
mother's side; and the brother, between the two groups, keeps assuring
himself by perpetual search that none of his favorite means of
amusement are escaping from his pockets. The father is already very
proud of the astonishing and growing intelligence of his little girl.
From a very early age he has been in the habit of taking her with him
in his drives about the neighborhood, "standing between her father's
knees as he drove leisurely," so that she has drunk in knowledge of
the country and of country folk at all her pores. An old-fashioned
child, already living in a world of her own imagination, impressible
to her finger-tips, and willing to give her views on any subject.

The first book that George Eliot read, so far as I have been able to
ascertain, was a little volume published in 1822, entitled "The
Linnet's Life," which she gave to me in the last year of her life, at
Witley. It bears the following inscription, written some time before
she gave it to me:

"This little book is the first present I ever remember having received
from my father. Let any one who thinks of me with some tenderness
after I am dead take care of this book for my sake. It made me very
happy when I held it in my little hands, and read it over and over
again; and thought the pictures beautiful, especially the one where
the linnet is feeding her young."

It must, I think, have been very shortly after she received this
present that an old friend of the family, who was in the habit of
coming as a visitor to Griff from time to time, used occasionally to
bring a book in his hand for the little girl. I very well remember her
expressing to me deep gratitude for this early ministration to her
childish delights; and Mr. Burne Jones has been kind enough to tell me
of a conversation with George Eliot about children's books, when she
also referred to this old gentleman's kindness. They were agreeing in
disparagement of some of the books that the rising generation take
their pleasure in, and she recalled the dearth of child-literature in
her own home, and her passionate delight and total absorption in
Æsop's Fables (given to her by the aforesaid old gentleman), the
possession of which had opened new worlds to her imagination. Mr.
Burne Jones particularly remembers how she laughed till the tears ran
down her face in recalling her infantine enjoyment of the humor in the
fable of Mercury and the Statue-seller. Having so few books at this
time, she read them again and again, until she knew them by heart. One
of them was a Joe Miller jest-book, with the stories from which she
used greatly to astonish the family circle. But the beginning of her
serious reading-days did not come till later. Meantime her talent for
observation gained a glorious new field for employment in her first
journey from home, which took place in 1826. Her father and mother
took her with them on a little trip into Derbyshire and Staffordshire,
where she saw Mr. Evans's relations, and they came back through
Lichfield, sleeping at the Swan.[3] They were away only a week, from
the 18th to the 24th of May; but "what time is little" to an
imaginative, observant child of seven on her first journey? About this
time a deeply felt crisis occurred in her life, as her brother had a
pony given to him, to which he became passionately attached. He
developed an absorbing interest in riding, and cared less and less to
play with his sister. The next important event happened in her eighth
or ninth year, when she was sent to Miss Wallington's school at
Nuneaton with her sister. This was a much larger school than Miss
Lathom's, there being some thirty girls, boarders. The principal
governess was Miss Lewis, who became then, and remained for many years
after, Mary Ann Evans's most intimate friend and principal
correspondent, and I am indebted to the letters addressed to her from
1836 to 1842 for most of the information concerning that period. Books
now became a passion with the child; she read everything she could lay
hands on, greatly troubling the soul of her mother by the consumption
of candles as well as of eyesight in her bedroom. From a subsequent
letter it will be seen that she was "early supplied with works of
fiction by those who kindly sought to gratify her appetite for
reading."

It must have been about this time that the episode occurred in
relation to "Waverley" which is mentioned by Miss Simcox in her
article in the June, 1881, number of the _Nineteenth Century Review_.
It was quite new to me, and, as it is very interesting, I give it in
Miss Simcox's own words: "Somewhere about 1827 a friendly neighbor
lent 'Waverley' to an elder sister of little Mary Ann Evans. It was
returned before the child had read to the end, and, in her distress at
the loss of the fascinating volume, she began to write out the story
as far as she had read it for herself, beginning naturally where the
story begins with Waverley's adventures at Tully Veolan, and
continuing until the surprised elders were moved to get her the book
again." Miss Simcox has pointed out the reference to this in the motto
of the 57th chapter of "Middlemarch:"

       "They numbered scarce eight summers when a name
         Rose on their souls and stirred such motions there
       As thrill the buds and shape their hidden frame
         At penetration of the quickening air:
     His name who told of loyal Evan Dhu,
       Of quaint Bradwardine, and Vich Ian Vor,
     Making the little world their childhood knew
       Large with a land of mountain, lake, and scaur,
     And larger yet with wonder, love, belief
       Towards Walter Scott, who, living far away,
     Sent them this wealth of joy and noble grief.
       The book and they must part, but, day by day,
           In lines that thwart like portly spiders ran,
           They wrote the tale, from Tully Veolan."

Miss Simcox also mentions that "Elia divided her childish allegiance
with Scott, and she remembered feasting with singular pleasure upon an
extract in some stray almanac from the essay in commemoration of
'Captain Jackson and his slender ration of Single Gloucester.' This is
an extreme example of the general rule that a wise child's taste in
literature is sounder than adults generally venture to believe."

We know, too, from the "Mill on the Floss" that the "History of the
Devil," by Daniel Defoe, was a favorite. The book is still religiously
preserved at Griff, with its pictures just as Maggie looked at them.
"The Pilgrim's Progress," also, and "Rasselas" had a large share of
her affections.

At Miss Wallington's the growing girl soon distinguished herself by an
easy mastery of the usual school-learning of her years, and there,
too, the religious side of her nature was developed to a remarkable
degree. Miss Lewis was an ardent Evangelical Churchwoman, and exerted
a strong influence on her young pupil, whom she found very
sympathetically inclined. But Mary Ann Evans did not associate freely
with her schoolfellows, and her friendship with Miss Lewis was the
only intimacy she indulged in.

On coming home for their holidays the sister and brother began, about
this time, the habit of acting charades together before the Griff
household and the aunts, who were greatly impressed with the
cleverness of the performance; and the girl was now recognized in the
family circle as no ordinary child.

Another epoch presently succeeded, on her removal to Miss Franklin's
school at Coventry, in her thirteenth year. She was probably then very
much what she has described her own Maggie at the age of thirteen:

"A creature full of eager, passionate longings for all that was
beautiful and glad; thirsty for all knowledge; with an ear straining
after dreamy music that died away and would not come near to her; with
a blind, unconscious yearning for something that would link together
the wonderful impressions of this mysterious life, and give her soul a
sense of home in it. No wonder, when there is this contrast between
the outward and the inward, that painful collisions come of it."

In _Our Times_ of June, 1881, there is a paper by a lady whose mother
was at school with Mary Ann Evans, which gives some interesting
particulars of the Miss Franklins.

"They were daughters of a Baptist minister who had preached for many
years in Coventry, and who inhabited, during his pastorate, a house in
the chapel-yard almost exactly resembling that of Rufus Lyon in 'Felix
Holt.' For this venerable gentleman Miss Evans, as a schoolgirl, had a
great admiration, and I, who can remember him well, can trace in Rufus
Lyon himself many slight resemblances, such as the 'little legs,' and
the habit of walking up and down when composing. Miss Rebecca Franklin
was a lady of considerable intellectual power, and remarkable for her
elegance in writing and conversation, as well as for her beautiful
calligraphy. In her classes for English Composition Mary Ann Evans
was, from her first entering the school, far in advance of the rest;
and while the themes of the other children were read, criticised, and
corrected in class, hers were reserved for the private perusal and
enjoyment of the teacher, who rarely found anything to correct. Her
enthusiasm for music was already very strongly marked, and her
music-master, a much-tried man, suffering from the irritability
incident to his profession, reckoned on his hour with her as a
refreshment to his wearied nerves, and soon had to confess that he had
no more to teach her. In connection with this proficiency in music, my
mother recalls her sensitiveness at that time as being painfully
extreme. When there were visitors, Miss Evans, as the best performer
in the school, was sometimes summoned to the parlor to play for their
amusement, and though suffering agonies from shyness and reluctance,
she obeyed with all readiness, but, on being released, my mother has
often known her to rush to her room and throw herself on the floor in
an agony of tears. Her schoolfellows loved her as much as they could
venture to love one whom they felt to be so immeasurably superior to
themselves, and she had playful nicknames for most of them. My mother,
who was delicate, and to whom she was very kind, was dubbed by her
'Miss Equanimity.' A source of great interest to the girls, and of
envy to those who lived farther from home, was the weekly cart which
brought Miss Evans new-laid eggs and other delightful produce of her
father's farm."

In talking about these early days, my wife impressed on my mind the
debt she felt that she owed to the Miss Franklins for their excellent
instruction, and she had also the very highest respect for their moral
qualities. With her chameleon-like nature she soon adopted their
religious views with intense eagerness and conviction, although she
never formally joined the Baptists or any other communion than the
Church of England. She at once, however, took a foremost place in the
school, and became a leader of prayer-meetings among the girls. In
addition to a sound English education the Miss Franklins managed to
procure for their pupils excellent masters for French, German, and
music; so that, looking to the lights of those times, the means of
obtaining knowledge were very much above the average for girls. Her
teachers, on their side, were very proud of their exceptionally gifted
scholar; and years afterwards, when Miss Evans came with her father to
live in Coventry, they introduced her to one of their friends, not
only as a marvel of mental power, but also as a person "sure to get
something up very soon in the way of clothing-club or other charitable
undertaking."

This year, 1832, was not only memorable for the change to a new and
superior school, but it was also much more memorable to George Eliot
for the riot which she saw at Nuneaton, on the occasion of the
election for North Warwickshire, after the passing of the great Reform
Bill, and which subsequently furnished her with the incidents for the
riot in "Felix Holt." It was an event to lay hold on the imagination
of an impressionable girl of thirteen, and it is thus described in the
local newspaper of 29th December, 1832:

"On Friday, the 21st December, at Nuneaton, from the commencement of
the poll till nearly half-past two, the Hemingites[4] occupied the
poll; the numerous plumpers for Sir Eardley Wilmot and the adherents
of Mr. Dugdale being constantly interrupted in their endeavors to go
to the hustings to give an honest and conscientious vote. The
magistrates were consequently applied to, and from the representations
they received from all parties, they were at length induced to call in
aid a military force. A detachment of the Scots Greys accordingly
arrived; but it appearing that that gallant body was not sufficiently
strong to put down the turbulent spirit of the mob, a reinforcement
was considered by the constituted authorities as absolutely necessary.
The tumult increasing, as the detachment of the Scots Greys were
called in, the Riot Act was read from the windows of the Newdigate
Arms; and we regret to add that both W. P. Inge, Esq., and Colonel
Newdigate, in the discharge of their magisterial duties, received
personal injuries.

"On Saturday the mob presented an appalling appearance, and but for
the forbearance of the soldiery numerous lives would have fallen a
sacrifice. Several of the officers of the Scots Greys were materially
hurt in their attempt to quell the riotous proceedings of the mob.
During the day the sub-sheriffs at the different booths received
several letters from the friends of Mr. Dugdale, stating that they
were outside of the town, and anxious to vote for that gentleman, but
were deterred from entering it from fear of personal violence. Two or
three unlucky individuals, drawn from the files of the military on
their approach to the poll, were cruelly beaten, and stripped
literally naked. We regret to add that one life has been sacrificed
during the contest, and that several misguided individuals have been
seriously injured."

The term ending Christmas, 1835, was the last spent at Miss
Franklin's. In the first letter of George Eliot's that I have been
able to discover, dated 6th January, 1836, and addressed to Miss
Lewis, who was at that time governess in the family of the Rev. L.
Harper, Burton Latimer, Northamptonshire, she speaks of her mother
having suffered a great increase of pain, and adds--

"We dare not hope that there will be a permanent improvement. Our
anxieties on my mother's account, though so great, have been since
Thursday almost lost sight of in the more sudden, and consequently
more severe, trial which we have been called on to endure in the
alarming illness of my dear father. For four days we had no cessation
of our anxiety; but I am thankful to say that he is now considered out
of danger, though very much reduced by frequent bleeding and very
powerful medicines."

In the summer of this year--1836--the mother died, after a long,
painful illness, in which she was nursed with great devotion by her
daughters. It was their first acquaintance with death; and to a highly
wrought, sensitive girl of sixteen such a loss seems an unendurable
calamity. "To the old, sorrow is sorrow; to the young, it is despair."
Many references will be found in the subsequent correspondence to what
she suffered at this time, all summed up in the old popular phrase,
"We can have but one mother." In the following spring Christiana was
married to Mr. Edward Clarke, a surgeon practising at Meriden, in
Warwickshire. One of Mr. Isaac Evans's most vivid recollections is
that on the day of the marriage, after the bride's departure, he and
his younger sister had "a good cry" together over the break-up of the
old home-life, which of course could never be the same with the mother
and the elder sister wanting.

Twenty-three years later we shall find George Eliot writing, on the
death of this sister, that she "had a very special feeling for
her--stronger than any third person would think likely." The relation
between the sisters was somewhat like that described as existing
between Dorothea and Celia in "Middlemarch"--no intellectual affinity,
but a strong family affection. In fact, my wife told me, that although
Celia was not in any sense a portrait of her sister, she "had Chrissey
continually in mind" in delineating Celia's character. But we must be
careful not to found too much on such _suggestions_ of character in
George Eliot's books; and this must particularly be borne in mind in
the "Mill on the Floss." No doubt the early part of Maggie's
portraiture is the best autobiographical representation we can have of
George Eliot's own feelings in her childhood, and many of the
incidents in the book are based on real experiences of family life,
but so mixed with fictitious elements and situations that it would be
absolutely misleading to trust to it as a true history. For instance,
all that happened in real life between the brother and sister was, I
believe, that as they grew up their characters, pursuits, and tastes
diverged more and more widely. He took to his father's business, at
which he worked steadily, and which absorbed most of his time and
attention. He was also devoted to hunting, liked the ordinary
pleasures of a young man in his circumstances, and was quite satisfied
with the circle of acquaintance in which he moved. After leaving
school at Coventry he went to a private tutor's at Birmingham, where
he imbibed strong High-Church views. His sister had come back from the
Miss Franklins' with ultra-Evangelical tendencies, and their
differences of opinion used to lead to a good deal of animated
argument. Miss Evans, as she now was, could not rest satisfied with a
mere profession of faith without trying to shape her own life--and, it
may be added, the lives around her--in accordance with her
convictions. The pursuit of pleasure was a snare; dress was vanity;
society was a danger.

"From what you know of her, you will not be surprised that she threw
some exaggeration and wilfulness, some pride and impetuosity, even
into her self-renunciation: her own life was still a drama for her, in
which she demanded of herself that her part should be played with
intensity. And so it came to pass that she often lost the spirit of
humility by being excessive in the outward act; she often strove after
too high a flight, and came down with her poor little half-fledged
wings dabbled in the mud.... That is the path we all like when we set
out on our abandonment of egoism--the path of martyrdom and endurance,
where the palm-branches grow, rather than the steep highway of
tolerance, just allowance, and self-blame, where there are no leafy
honors to be gathered and worn."[5]

After Christiana's marriage the entire charge of the Griff
establishment devolved on Mary Ann, who became a most exemplary
housewife, learned thoroughly everything that had to be done, and,
with her innate desire for perfection, was never satisfied unless her
department was administered in the very best manner that circumstances
permitted. She spent a great deal of time in visiting the poor,
organizing clothing-clubs, and other works of active charity. But over
and above this, as will be seen from the following letters, she was
always prosecuting an active intellectual life of her own. Mr. Brezzi,
a well-known master of modern languages at Coventry, used to come over
to Griff regularly to give her lessons in Italian and German. Mr.
M'Ewen, also from Coventry, continued her lessons in music, and she
got through a large amount of miscellaneous reading by herself. In the
evening she was always in the habit of playing to her father, who was
very fond of music. But it requires no great effort of imagination to
conceive that this life, though full of interests of its own, and the
source from whence the future novelist drew the most powerful and the
most touching of her creations, was, as a matter of fact, very
monotonous, very difficult, very discouraging. It could scarcely be
otherwise to a young girl with a full, passionate nature and hungry
intellect, shut up in a farmhouse in the remote country. For there was
no sympathetic human soul near with whom to exchange ideas on the
intellectual and spiritual problems that were beginning to agitate her
mind. "You may try, but you can never imagine what it is to have a
man's force of genius in you, and yet to suffer the slavery of being a
girl."[6] This is a point of view that must be distinctly recognized
by any one attempting to follow the development of George Eliot's
character, and it will always be corrected by the other point of view
which she has made so prominent in all her own writing--the soothing,
strengthening, sacred influences of the home life, the home loves, the
home duties. Circumstances in later life separated her from her
kindred, but among her last letters it will be seen that she wrote to
her brother in May, 1880, that "our long silence has never broken the
affection for you that began when we were little ones"[7]--and she
expresses her satisfaction in the growing prosperity of himself and
all his family. It was a real gratification to her to hear from some
Coventry friends that her nephew, the Rev. Frederic Evans, the present
rector of Bedworth, was well spoken of as a preacher in the old
familiar places, and in our last summer at Witley we often spoke of a
visit to Warwickshire, that she might renew the sweet memories of her
child-days. No doubt, the very monotony of her life at Griff, and the
narrow field it presented for observation of society, added
immeasurably to the intensity of a naturally keen mental vision,
concentrating into a focus what might perhaps have become dissipated
in more liberal surroundings. And though the field of observation was
narrow in one sense, it included very various grades of society. Such
fine places as Arbury, and Packington, the seat of Lord Aylesford,
where she was being constantly driven by her father, affected the
imagination and accentuated the social differences--differences which
had a profound significance for such a sensitive and such an
intellectually commanding character, and which left their mark on it.

"No one who has not a strong natural prompting and susceptibility
towards such things [the signs and luxuries of ladyhood] and has, at
the same time, suffered from the presence of opposite conditions, can
understand how powerfully those minor accidents of rank which please
the fastidious sense can preoccupy the imagination."[8]

The tone of her mind will be seen from the letters written during the
following years, and I remember once, after we were married, when I
was urging her to write her autobiography, she said, half sighing,
half smiling, "The only thing I should care much to dwell on would be
the absolute despair I suffered from of ever being able to achieve
anything. No one could ever have felt greater despair, and a knowledge
of this might be a help to some other struggler"--adding, with a
smile, "but, on the other hand, it might only lead to an increase of
bad writing."


_SUMMARY._

NOVEMBER 22, 1819, TO END OF 1837.

     Birth at Arbury Farm--Baptism--Character of father--His first
     marriage and children--Second marriage and children--Removal
     to Griff--Events at time of birth--Character of country
     about Griff--Coach communication--Father's
     position--Anecdotes of father--Character of mother--Mother's
     family and delicacy--Dame's school--Companionship with
     brother--Miss Lathom's school at Attleboro--Suffers from
     fear--Father's pet--Drives with him--First books read--First
     journey to Staffordshire--Miss Wallington's school at
     Nuneaton--Miss Lewis, governess--Books read--Religious
     impressions--Charade acting--Miss Franklin's school at
     Coventry--Riot at Nuneaton--First letter to Miss
     Lewis--Mother's illness--Mother's death--Sister Christiana
     married to Mr. Clarke--Relations with brother--Housekeeper at
     Griff--Life and studies there.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The farm is also known as the South Farm, Arbury.

[2] "Felix Holt"--Introduction.

[3] See vol. ii. p. 96.

[4] A Mr. Heming was the Radical candidate.

[5] "Mill on the Floss," chap. iii. book iv.

[6] "Daniel Deronda."

[7] See vol. iii.

[8] "Felix Holt," chap. xxxviii. p. 399.




CHAPTER I.


In the foregoing introductory sketch I have endeavored to present the
influences to which George Eliot was subjected in her youth, and the
environment in which she grew up; I am now able to begin the
fulfilment of the promise on the titlepage, that the life will be
related in her own letters; or, rather, in extracts from her own
letters, for no single letter is printed entire from the beginning to
the end. I have not succeeded in obtaining any between 6th January,
1836, and 18th August, 1838; but from the latter date the
correspondence becomes regular, and I have arranged it as a continuous
narrative, with the names of the persons to whom the letters are
addressed in the margin. The slight thread of narrative or explanation
which I have written to elucidate the letters, where necessary, will
hereafter occupy an inside margin, so that the reader will see at a
glance what is narrative and what is correspondence, and will be
troubled as little as possible with marks of quotation or changes of
type.

     The following opening letter of the series to Miss Lewis
     describes a first visit to London with her brother:

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 18th Aug. 1838.]

Let me tell you, though, that I was not at all delighted with the stir
of the great Babel, and the less so, probably, owing to the
circumstances attending my visit thither. Isaac and I went alone (that
seems rather Irish), and stayed only a week, every day of which we
worked hard at seeing sights. I think Greenwich Hospital interested me
more than anything else.

     Mr. Isaac Evans himself tells me that what he remembers
     chiefly impressed her was the first hearing the great bell of
     St. Paul's. It affected her deeply. At that time she was so
     much under the influence of religious and ascetic ideas that
     she would not go to any of the theatres with her brother, but
     spent all her evenings alone, reading. A characteristic
     reminiscence is that the chief thing she wanted to buy was
     Josephus's "History of the Jews;" and at the same bookshop
     her brother got her this he bought for himself a pair of
     hunting sketches. In the same letter, alluding to the
     marriage of one of her friends, she says:

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 18th Aug. 1838.]

For my part, when I hear of the marrying and giving in marriage that
is constantly being transacted, I can only sigh for those who are
multiplying earthly ties which, though powerful enough to detach their
hearts and thoughts from heaven, are so brittle as to be liable to be
snapped asunder at every breeze. You will think that I need nothing
but a tub for my habitation to make me a perfect female Diogenes; and
I plead guilty to occasional misanthropical thoughts, but not to the
indulgence of them. Still, I must believe that those are happiest who
are not fermenting themselves by engaging in projects for earthly
bliss, who are considering this life merely a pilgrimage, a scene
calling for diligence and watchfulness, not for repose and amusement.
I do not deny that there may be many who can partake with a high
degree of zest of all the lawful enjoyments the world can offer, and
yet live in near communion with their God--who can warmly love the
creature, and yet be careful that the Creator maintains his supremacy
in their hearts; but I confess that, in my short experience and narrow
sphere of action, I have never been able to attain to this. I find, as
Dr. Johnson said respecting his wine, total abstinence much easier
than moderation. I do not wonder you are pleased with Pascal;[9] his
thoughts may be returned to the palate again and again with increasing
rather than diminished relish. I have highly enjoyed Hannah More's
letters; the contemplation of so blessed a character as hers is very
salutary. "That ye be not slothful, but followers of them who, through
faith and patience, inherit the promises," is a valuable admonition. I
was once told that there was nothing out of myself to prevent my
becoming as eminently holy as St. Paul; and though I think that is too
sweeping an assertion, yet it is very certain we are generally too low
in our aims, more anxious for safety than sanctity, for place than
purity, forgetting that each involves the other, and that, as
Doddridge tells us, to rest satisfied with any attainments in religion
is a fearful proof that we are ignorant of the very first principles
of it. O that we could live only for eternity! that we could realize
its nearness! I know you do not love quotations, so I will not give
you one; but if you do not distinctly remember it, do turn to the
passage in Young's "Infidel Reclaimed," beginning, "O vain, vain, vain
all else eternity," and do love the lines for my sake.

I really feel for you, sacrificing, as you are, your own tastes and
comforts for the pleasure of others, and that in a manner the most
trying to rebellious flesh and blood; for I verily believe that in
most cases it requires more of a martyr's spirit to endure, with
patience and cheerfulness, daily crossings and interruptions of our
petty desires and pursuits, and to rejoice in them if they can be made
to conduce to God's glory and our own sanctification, than even to lay
down our lives for the truth.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 6th Nov. 1838.]

I can hardly repress a sort of indignation towards second causes. That
your time and energies should be expended in ministering to the petty
interests of those far beneath you in all that is really elevating is
about as _bienséant_ as that I should set fire to a goodly volume to
light a match by! I have had a very unsettled life lately--Michaelmas,
with its onerous duties and anxieties, much company (for us) and
little reading, so that I am ill prepared for corresponding with
profit or pleasure. I am generally in the same predicament with books
as a glutton with his feast, hurrying through one course that I may be
in time for the next, and so not relishing or digesting either; not a
very elegant illustration, but the best my organs of ideality and
comparison will furnish just now.

I have just begun the "Life of Wilberforce," and I am expecting a rich
treat from it. There is a similarity, if I may compare myself with
such a man, between his temptations, or rather _besetments_, and my
own, that makes his experience very interesting to me. O that I might
be made as useful in my lowly and obscure station as he was in the
exalted one assigned to him! I feel myself to be a mere cumberer of
the ground. May the Lord give me such an insight into what is truly
good that I may not rest contented with making Christianity a mere
addendum to my pursuits, or with tacking it as a fringe to my
garments! May I seek to be sanctified wholly! My nineteenth birthday
will soon be here (the 22d)--an awakening signal. My mind has been
much clogged lately by languor of body, to which I am prone to give
way, and for the removal of which I shall feel thankful.

We have had an oratorio at Coventry lately, Braham, Phillips, Mrs.
Knyvett, and Mrs. Shaw--the last, I think, I shall attend. I am not
fitted to decide on the question of the propriety or lawfulness of
such exhibitions of talent and so forth, because I have no soul for
music. "Happy is he that condemneth not himself in that thing which he
alloweth." I am a tasteless person, but it would not cost me any
regrets if the only music heard in our land were that of strict
worship, nor can I think a pleasure that involves the devotion of all
the time and powers of an immortal being to the acquirement of an
expertness in so useless (at least in ninety-nine cases out of a
hundred) an accomplishment, can be quite pure or elevating in its
tendency.

     The above remarks on oratorio are the more surprising
     because, two years later, when Miss Evans went to the
     Birmingham festival, in September, 1840, previous to her
     brother's marriage, she was affected to an extraordinary
     degree, so much so that Mrs. Isaac Evans--then Miss
     Rawlins--told me that the attention of people sitting near
     was attracted by her hysterical sobbing. And in all her later
     life music was one of the chiefest delights to her, and
     especially oratorio.

"Not that her enjoyment of music was of the kind that indicates a
great specific talent; it was rather that her sensibility to the
supreme excitement of music was only one form of that passionate
sensibility which belonged to her whole nature, and made her faults
and virtues all merge in each other--made her affections sometimes an
impatient demand, but also prevented her vanity from taking the form
of mere feminine coquetry and device, and gave it the poetry of
ambition."[10]

     The next two letters, dated from Griff--February 6th and
     March 5th, 1839--are addressed to Mrs. Samuel Evans, a
     Methodist preacher, the wife of a younger brother of Mr.
     Robert Evans. They are the more interesting from the fact,
     which will appear later, that an anecdote related by this
     aunt during her visit to Griff in 1839 was the germ of "Adam
     Bede." To what extent this Elizabeth Evans resembled the
     ideal character of Dinah Morris will also be seen in its
     place in the history of "Adam Bede."

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Samuel Evans, 6th Feb. 1839.]

I am so unwilling to believe that you can forget a promise, or to
entertain fears respecting your health, that I persuade myself I must
have mistaken the terms of the agreement between us, and that I ought
to have sent you a letter before I considered myself entitled to one
from Wirksworth. However this may be, I feel so anxious to hear of
your well-being in every way, that I can no longer rest satisfied
without using my only means of obtaining tidings of you. My dear
father is not at home to-night, or I should probably have a message of
remembrance to give you from him, in addition to the good news that he
is as well as he has been for the last two years, and even, I think,
better, except that he feels more fatigue after exertion of mind or
body than formerly. If you are able to fill a sheet, I am sure both
uncle and you would in doing so be complying with the precept, "Lift
up the hands that hang down, and strengthen the feeble knees." I need
not tell you that this is a dry and thirsty land, and I shall be as
grateful to you for a draught from your fresh spring as the traveller
in the Eastern desert is to the unknown hand that digs a well for him.
"Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel," seems to be my character,
instead of that regular progress from strength to strength that marks,
even in this world of mistakes, the people that shall, in the heavenly
Zion, stand before God. I shall not only suffer, but be delighted to
receive, the word of exhortation, and I beg you not to withhold it. If
I did not know how little you need human help, I should regret that my
ignorance and want of deep feeling in spiritual things prevent me from
suggesting profitable or refreshing thoughts; but I dare say I took
care to tell you that my desire for correspondence with you was quite
one of self-interest.

I am thankful to tell you that my dear friends here are all well. I
have a faint hope that the pleasure and profit I have felt in your
society may be repeated in the summer: there is no place I would
rather visit than Wirksworth, or the inhabitants of which have a
stronger hold on my affections.

     In the next letter the touch about Mrs. Fletcher's life is
     characteristic.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Samuel Evans, 5th Mch. 1839.]

My dear father is just now so plunged in business, and that of a
fatiguing kind, that I should put your confidence in my love and
gratitude to an unreasonably severe trial if I waited until he had
leisure to unite with me in filling a sheet. You were very kind to
remember my wish to see "Mrs. Fletcher's Life:" I only desire such a
spiritual digestion as has enabled _you_ to derive so much benefit
from its perusal. I am truly glad to hear that you are less
embarrassed with respect to your congregation, etc., than you were
when we saw you. I must protest against your making apologies for
speaking of yourself, for nothing that relates to you can be
uninteresting to me.

The unprofitableness you lament in yourself, during your visit to us,
had its true cause, not in your lukewarmness, but in the little
improvement I sought to derive from your society, and in my lack of
humility and Christian simplicity, that makes me willing to obtain
credit for greater knowledge and deeper feeling than I really possess.
Instead of putting my light under a bushel, I am in danger of
ostentatiously displaying a false one. You have much too high an
opinion, my dear aunt, of my spiritual condition, and of my personal
and circumstantial advantages. My soul seems for weeks together
completely benumbed, and when I am aroused from this torpid state, the
intervals of activity are comparatively short. I am ever finding
excuses for this in the deprivation of outward excitement and the
small scope I have for the application of my principles, instead of
feeling self-abasement under the consciousness that I abuse precious
hours of retirement, which would be eagerly employed in spiritual
exercises by many a devoted servant of God who is struggling with
worldly cares and occupations. I feel that my besetting sin is the one
of all others most destroying, as it is the fruitful parent of them
all--ambition, a desire insatiable for the esteem of my
fellow-creatures. This seems the centre whence all my actions proceed.
But you will perhaps remember, my dear aunt, that I do not attach
much value to a disclosure of religious feelings, owing probably to
the dominant corruption I have just been speaking of, which "turns the
milk of my good purpose all to curd."

     On 16th March, 1839, in a letter to Miss Lewis, there is a
     reference to good spirits, which is of the rarest occurrence
     all through the correspondence:

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 16th Mch. 1839.]

I am this morning hardly myself, owing to the insuppressible rising of
my animal spirits on a deliverance from sick headache;

     and then the letter continues as to the expediency of reading
     works of fiction, in answer to a question Miss Lewis had
     asked:

I put out of the question all persons of perceptions so quick, memories
so eclectic and retentive, and minds so comprehensive that nothing less
than omnivorous reading, as Southey calls it, can satisfy their
intellectual man; for (if I may parody the words of Scripture without
profaneness) they will gather to themselves all facts, and heap unto
themselves all ideas. For such persons we cannot legislate. Again, I
would put out of the question standard works, whose contents are matter
of constant reference, and the names of whose heroes and heroines
briefly, and therefore conveniently, describe characters and ideas--such
are "Don Quixote," Butler's "Hudibras," "Robinson Crusoe," "Gil Blas,"
Byron's Poetical Romances, Southey's ditto, etc. Such, too, are Walter
Scott's novels and poems. Such allusions as "He is a perfect Dominie
Sampson," "He is as industrious in finding out antiquities, and about as
successful, as Jonathan Oldbuck," are likely to become so common in
books and conversation that, _always providing_ our leisure is not
circumscribed by duty within narrow bounds, we should, I think, qualify
ourselves to understand them. Shakespeare has a higher claim than this
on our attention; but we have need of as nice a power of distillation as
the bee, to suck nothing but honey from his pages. However, as in life
we must be exposed to malign influences from intercourse with others, if
we would reap the advantages designed for us by making us social beings,
so in books. Having cleared our way of what would otherwise have
encumbered us, I would ask why is one engaged in the instruction of
youth to read, as a purely conscientious and self-denying performance of
duty, works whose value to others is allowed to be doubtful? I can only
imagine two shadows of reasons. Either that she may be able
experimentally to decide on their desirableness for her pupils, or else
that there is a certain power exerted by them on the mind that would
render her a more efficient "tutress" by their perusal. I would not
depreciate the disinterestedness of those who will make trial of the
effect on themselves of a cup suspected poisonous, that they may deter
another from risking life; but it appears to me a work of
supererogation, since there are enough witnesses to its baneful effect
on themselves already to put an end to all strife in the matter. The
Scriptural declaration, "As face answereth to face in a glass, so the
heart of man to man," will exonerate me from the charge of
uncharitableness, or too high an estimation of myself, if I venture to
believe that the same causes which exist in my own breast to render
novels and romances pernicious have their counterpart in that of every
fellow-creature. I am, I confess, not an impartial member of a jury in
this case; for I owe the culprits a grudge for injuries inflicted on
myself. When I was quite a little child I could not be satisfied with
the things around me; I was constantly living in a world of my own
creation, and was quite contented to have no companions, that I might be
left to my own musings, and imagine scenes in which I was chief actress.
Conceive what a character novels would give to these Utopias. I was
early supplied with them by those who kindly sought to gratify my
appetite for reading, and of course I made use of the materials they
supplied for building my castles in the air. But it may be said--"No one
ever dreamed of recommending children to read them: all this does not
apply to persons come to years of discretion, whose judgments are in
some degree matured." I answer that men and women are but children of a
larger growth: they are still imitative beings. We cannot (at least
those who ever read to any purpose at all)--we cannot, I say, help being
modified by the ideas that pass through our minds. We hardly wish to lay
claim to such elasticity as retains no impress. We are active beings
too. We are each one of the _dramatis personæ_ in some play on the stage
of life; hence our actions have their share in the effects of our
reading. As to the discipline our minds receive from the perusal of
fictions, I can conceive none that is beneficial but may be attained by
that of history. It is the merit of fictions to come within the orbit of
probability: if unnatural they would no longer please. If it be said the
mind must have relaxation, "Truth is strange--stranger than fiction."
When a person has exhausted the wonders of truth there is no other
resort than fiction: till then, I cannot imagine how the adventures of
some phantom conjured up by fancy can be more entertaining than the
transactions of real specimens of human nature, from which we may
safely draw inferences. I dare say Mr. James's "Huguenot" would be
recommended as giving an idea of the times of which he writes; but as
well may one be recommended to look at landscapes for an idea of English
scenery. The real secret of the relaxation talked of is one that would
not generally be avowed; but an appetite that wants seasoning of a
certain kind cannot be indicative of health. Religious novels are more
hateful to me than merely worldly ones: they are a sort of centaur or
mermaid, and, like other monsters that we do not know how to class,
should be destroyed for the public good as soon as born. The weapons of
the Christian warfare were never sharpened at the forge of romance.
Domestic fictions, as they come more within the range of imitation, seem
more dangerous. For my part, I am ready to sit down and weep at the
impossibility of my understanding or barely knowing a fraction of the
sum of objects that present themselves for our contemplation in books
and in life. Have I, then, any time to spend on things that never
existed?

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 20th May, 1839.]

You allude to the religious, or rather irreligious, contentions that
form so prominent a feature in the aspect of public affairs--a
subject, you will perhaps be surprised to hear me say, full of
interest to me, and on which I am unable to shape an opinion for the
satisfaction of my mind. I think no one feels more difficulty in
coming to a decision on controverted matters than myself. I do not
mean that I have not preferences; but, however congruous a theory may
be with my notions, I cannot find that comfortable repose that others
appear to possess after having made their election of a class of
sentiments. The other day Montaigne's motto came to my mind (it is
mentioned by Pascal) as an appropriate one for me--"Que
sais-je?"--beneath a pair of balances, though, by-the-bye, it is an
ambiguous one, and may be taken in a sense that I desire to reprobate,
as well as in a Scriptural one, to which I do not refer. I use it in a
limited sense as a representation of my oscillating judgment. On no
subject do I veer to all points of the compass more frequently than on
the nature of the visible Church. I am powerfully attracted in a
certain direction, but, when I am about to settle there,
counter-assertions shake me from my position. I cannot enter into
details, but when we are together I will tell you all my
difficulties--that is, if you will be kind enough to listen. I have
been reading the new prize essay on "Schism," by Professor Hoppus, and
Milner's "Church History," since I last wrote to you: the former ably
expresses the tenets of those who deny that any form of Church
government is so clearly dictated in Scripture as to possess a divine
right, and, consequently, to be binding on Christians; the latter, you
know, exhibits the views of a moderate Evangelical Episcopalian on the
inferences to be drawn from ecclesiastical remains. He equally
repudiates the loud assertion of a _jus divinum_, to the exclusion of
all separatists from the visible Church, though he calmly maintains
the superiority of the evidence in favor of Episcopacy, of a moderate
kind both in power and extent of diocese, as well as the benefit of a
national establishment. I have been skimming the "Portrait of an
English Churchman," by the Rev. W. Gresley: this contains an outline
of the system of those who exclaim of the Anglican Church as the Jews
did of their sacred building (that they do it in as reprehensible a
spirit I will not be the judge), "the temple of the Lord, the temple
of the Lord, the temple of the Lord" is exclusively theirs; while the
authors of the Oxford Tracts go a step further, and evince by their
compliments to Rome, as a dear though erring sister, and their
attempts to give a Romish color to our ordinance, with a very confused
and unscriptural statement of the great doctrine of justification, a
disposition rather to fraternize with the members of a Church carrying
on her brow the prophetical epithets applied by St. John to the
scarlet beast, the mystery of iniquity, than with pious
Nonconformists. It is true they disclaim all this, and that their
opinions are seconded by the extensive learning, the laborious zeal,
and the deep devotion of those who propagate them; but a reference to
facts will convince us that such has generally been the character of
heretical teachers. Satan is too crafty to commit his cause into the
hands of those who have nothing to recommend them to approbation.
According to their dogmas, the Scotch Church and the foreign
Protestant Churches, as well as the non-Episcopalians of our own land,
are wanting in the essentials of existence as part of the Church.

     In the next letter there is the first allusion to authorship,
     but, from the wording of the sentence, the poem referred to
     has evidently not been a first attempt.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 17th July, 1839.]

I send you some doggerel lines, the crude fruit of a lonely walk last
evening when the words of one of our martyrs occurred to me. You must
be acquainted with the idiosyncrasy of my authorship, which is, that
my effusions, once committed to paper, are like the laws of the Medes
and Persians, that alter not.

"_Knowing that shortly I must put off this my tabernacle._"

                                            --2 PETER i. 14.

     "As o'er the fields by evening's light I stray
     I hear a still, small whisper--Come away;
     Thou must to this bright, lovely world soon say
                                               Farewell!

     "The mandate I'd obey, my lamp prepare,
     Gird up my garments, give my soul to pray'r,
     And say to earth, and all that breathe earth's air,
                                               Farewell!

     "Thou sun, to whose parental beam I owe
     All that has gladden'd me while here below,
     Moon, stars, and covenant-confirming bow,
                                               Farewell!

     "Ye verdant meads, fair blossoms, stately trees,
     Sweet song of birds and soothing hum of bees,
     Refreshing odors wafted on the breeze,
                                               Farewell!

     "Ye patient servants of creation's Lord,
     Whose mighty strength is govern'd by his word,
     Who raiment, food, and help in toil afford,
                                               Farewell!

     "Books that have been to me as chests of gold,
     Which, miserlike, I secretly have told,
     And for them love, health, friendship, peace have sold,
                                               Farewell!

     "Blest volume! whose clear truth-writ page once known,
     Fades not before heaven's sunshine or hell's moan,
     To thee I say not, of earth's gifts alone,
                                               Farewell!

     "There shall my new-born senses find new joy,
     New sounds, new sights, my eyes and ears employ,
     Nor fear that word that here brings sad alloy,
                                               Farewell!"

     I had a dim recollection that my wife had told me that this
     poem had been printed somewhere. After a long search I found
     it in the _Christian Observer_ for January, 1840. The version
     there published has the two following additional verses, and
     is signed M. A. E.:

          "Ye feebler, freer tribes that people air,
          Ye gaudy insects, making buds your lair,
          Ye that in water shine and frolic there,
                                                    Farewell!

          "Dear kindred, whom the Lord to me has given,
          Must the strong tie that binds us now be riven?
          No! say I--only till we meet in heaven,
                                                    Farewell!"

     The editor of the _Christian Observer_ has added this note:
     "We do not often add a note to a poem: but if St. John found
     no temple in the New Jerusalem, neither will there be any
     need of a Bible; for we shall not then see through a glass
     darkly--through the veil of sacraments or the written
     Word--but face to face. The Bible is God's gift, but not for
     heaven's use. Still, on the very verge of heaven we may cling
     to it, after we have bid farewell to everything earthly: and
     this, perhaps, is what M. A. E. means."

     In the following letter we already see the tendency to draw
     illustrations from science:

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 4th Sept. 1839.]

I have lately led so unsettled a life, and have been so desultory in
my employments, that my mind, never of the most highly organized
genus, is more than usually chaotic, or, rather, it is like a stratum
of conglomerated fragments, that shows here a jaw and rib of some
ponderous quadruped, there a delicate alto-relievo of some fern-like
plant, tiny shells and mysterious nondescripts incrusted and united
with some unvaried and uninteresting but useful stone. My mind
presents just such an assemblage of disjointed specimens of history,
ancient and modern; scraps of poetry picked up from Shakespeare,
Cowper, Wordsworth, and Milton; newspaper topics; morsels of Addison
and Bacon, Latin verbs, geometry, entomology, and chemistry; reviews
and metaphysics--all arrested and petrified and smothered by the
fast-thickening every-day accession of actual events, relative
anxieties, and household cares and vexations. How deplorably and
unaccountably evanescent are our frames of mind, as various as the
forms and hues of the summer clouds! A single word is sometimes enough
to give an entirely new mould to our thoughts--at least, I find myself
so constituted; and therefore to me it is pre-eminently important to
be anchored within the veil, so that outward things may be unable to
send me adrift. Write to me as soon as you can. Remember Michaelmas is
coming, and I shall be engaged in matters so nauseating to me that it
will be a charity to console me; to reprove and advise me no less.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 22d Nov. 1839.]

I have emerged from the slough of domestic troubles, or, rather, to
speak quite clearly, "malheurs de cuisine," and am beginning to take a
deep breath in my own element, though with a mortifying consciousness
that my faculties have become superlatively obtuse during my
banishment from it. I have been so self-indulgent as to possess myself
of Wordsworth at full length, and I thoroughly like much of the
contents of the first three volumes, which I fancy are only the low
vestibule of the three remaining ones. I never before met with so many
of my own feelings expressed just as I could like them. The distress
of the lower classes in our neighborhood is daily increasing, from the
scarcity of employment for weavers, and I seem sadly to have
handcuffed myself by unnecessary expenditure. To-day is my 20th
birthday.

     This allusion to Wordsworth is interesting, as it entirely
     expresses the feeling she had to him up to the day of her
     death. One of the very last books we read together at Cheyne
     Walk was Mr. Frederick Myers's "Wordsworth" in the "English
     Men of Letters," which she heartily enjoyed.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 23d Mch. 1840.]

I have just received my second lesson in German.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 2d May, 1840, Friday evening.]

I know you will be glad to think of me as thoroughly employed, as,
indeed, I am to an extent that makes me fear I shall not be able to
accomplish everything well. I have engaged, if possible, to complete
the chart,[11] the plan of which I sketched out last year, by November
next, and I am encouraged to believe that it will answer my purpose to
print it. The profits arising from its sale, if any, will go partly to
Attleboro Church, and partly to a favorite object of my own. Mrs.
Newdigate is very anxious that I should do this, and she permits me to
visit her library when I please, in search of any books that may
assist me. Will you ask Mr. Craig what he considers the best authority
for the date of the apostolical writings? I should like to carry the
chart down to the Reformation, if my time and resources will enable me
to do so. We are going to have a clothing-club, the arrangement and
starting of which are left to me. I am ashamed to run the risk of
troubling you, but I should be very grateful if you could send me an
abstract of the rules by which yours is regulated.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 21st May, 1840.]

Our house is now, and will be for the next two months, miserably noisy
and disorderly with the musical operations of masons, carpenters, and
painters. You know how abhorrent all this is to my tastes and
feelings, taking all the spice out of my favorite little epithet,
"this working-day world:" I can no longer use it figuratively. How
impressive must the gradual rise of Solomon's Temple have been! each
prepared mass of virgin marble laid in reverential silence. I fancy
Heber has compared it to the growth of a palm. Your nice miniature
chart, which I shall carefully treasure up, has quite satisfied me
that Dr. Pearson, at least, has not realized my conceptions, though it
has left me still dubious as to my own power of doing so. I will just
(if you can bear to hear more of the matter) give you an idea of the
plan, which may have partly faded from your memory. The series of
perpendicular columns will successively contain the Roman emperors,
with their dates, the political and religious state of the Jews, the
bishops, remarkable men, and events in the several churches, a column
being devoted to each of the chief ones, the aspect of heathenism and
Judaism towards Christianity, the chronology of the apostolical and
patristical writings, schisms, and heresies, General Councils, eras of
corruption (under which head the remarks would be general), and I
thought possibly an application of the apocalyptic prophecies, which
would merely require a few figures and not take up room. I think there
must be a break in the chart after the establishment of Christianity
as the religion of the empire, and I have come to a determination not
to carry it beyond the first acknowledgment of the supremacy of the
Pope by Phocas, in 606, when Mohammedanism became a besom of
destruction in the hand of the Lord, and completely altered the aspect
of ecclesiastical history. So much for this, at present, airy
project, about which I hope never to tease you more. Mr. Harper[12]
lent me a little time ago a work by the Rev. W. Gresley, begging me to
read it, as he thought it was calculated to make me a proselyte to the
opinions it advocates. I had skimmed the book before ("Portrait of an
English Churchman"), but I read it attentively a second time, and was
pleased with the spirit of piety that breathes throughout. His last
work is one in a similar style ("The English Citizen"), which I have
cursorily read; and, as they are both likely to be seen by you, I want
to know your opinion of them. Mine is this: that they are sure to have
a powerful influence on the minds of small readers and shallow
thinkers, as, from the simplicity and clearness with which the author,
by his _beau-idéal_ characters, enunciates his sentiments, they
furnish a magazine of easily wielded weapons for _morning-calling_ and
_evening-party_ controversialists, as well as that really honest minds
will be inclined to think they have found a resting-place amid the
footballing of religious parties. But it appears to me that there is
unfairness in arbitrarily selecting a train of circumstances and a set
of characters as a development of a class of opinions. In this way we
might make atheism appear wonderfully calculated to promote social
happiness. I remember, as I dare say you do, a very amiable atheist
depicted by Bulwer in "Devereux;" and for some time after the perusal
of that book, which I read seven or eight years ago,[13] I was
considerably shaken by the impression that religion was not a
requisite to moral excellence.

Have you not alternating seasons of mental stagnation and activity?
just such as the political economists say there must be in a nation's
pecuniary condition--all one's precious specie, Time, going out to
procure a stock of commodities, while one's own manufactures are too
paltry to be worth vending. I am just in that condition--partly, I
think, owing to my not having met with any steel to sharpen my edge
against for the last three weeks. I am going to read a volume of the
Oxford Tracts and the "Lyra Apostolica;" the former I almost shrink
from the labor of conning, but the other I confess I am attracted
towards by some highly poetical extracts that I have picked up in
various quarters. I have just bought Mr. Keble's "Christian Year," a
volume of sweet poetry that perhaps you know. The fields of poesy look
more lovely than ever, now I have hedged myself in the geometrical
regions of fact, where I can do nothing but draw parallels and measure
differences in a double sense.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 26th May, 1840.]

[14]I will only hint that there seems a probability of my being an
unoccupied damsel, of my being severed from all the ties that have
hitherto given my existence the semblance of a usefulness beyond that
of making up the requisite quantum of animal matter in the universe. A
second important intimation respecting my worthy self is one that, I
confess, I impart without one sigh, though perhaps you will think my
callousness discreditable. It is that Seeley & Burnside have just
published a Chart of Ecclesiastical History, doubtless giving to my
airy vision a local habitation and a name. I console all my little
regrets by thinking that what is thus evidenced to be a desideratum
has been executed much better than if left to my slow fingers and
slower head. I fear I am laboriously doing nothing, for I am beguiled
by the fascination that the study of languages has for my capricious
mind. I could e'en give myself up to making discoveries in the world
of words.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, in London, Whit-Wednesday, June,
1840.]

May I trouble you to procure for me an Italian book recommended by Mr.
Brezzi--Silvio Pellico's "Le mie Prigioni;" if not, "Storia d'Italia"?
If they are cheap, I should like both.

I shall have, I hope, a little trip with my father next week into
Derbyshire, and this "lark" will probably be beneficial to me; so do
not imagine I am inviting you to come and hear moaning, when you need
all attainable relaxation.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 23d June, 1840.]

Your letter greeted me last night on my arrival from Staffordshire.
The prospectus of Mr. Henslow's work is as marvellous to my ignorant
conceptions as the prophecies of the wonders of the steam-engine would
have been to some British worthy in the days of Caractacus. I can only
gape as he would probably have done. I hope Mr. H. has not imitated
certain show-keepers, who give so exaggerated a representation of
their giantess, on the outside, that the spectators have
disappointment for their cash within.

If I do not see you, how shall I send your "Don Quixote," which I hope
soon to finish? I have been sadly interrupted by other books that have
taken its scanty allowance of time, or I should have made better haste
with it. Will you try to get me Spenser's "Faery Queen"? the cheapest
edition, with a glossary, which is quite indispensable, together with
a clear and correct type. I have had some treats on my little
excursion, not the least of which was the gazing on some--albeit the
smallest--of the "everlasting hills," and on those noblest children
of the earth, fine, healthy trees, as independent in their beauty as
virtue; set them where you will, they adorn, and need not adornment.
Father indulged me with a sight of Ashborne Church, the finest mere
parish church in the kingdom--in the _interior_; of Alton Gardens,
where I saw actually what I have often seen mentally--the bread-fruit
tree, the fan-palm, and the papyrus; and last, of Lichfield Cathedral,
where, besides the exquisite architectural beauties, both external and
internal, I saw Chantrey's famous monument of the Sleeping Children.
There is a tasteless monument to the learned and brilliant female
pedant of Lichfield, Miss Seward, with a poor epitaph by Sir Walter
Scott. In the town we saw a large monument erected to Johnson's
memory, showing his Titanic body, in a sitting posture, on the summit
of a pedestal which is ornamented with bas-reliefs of three passages
in his life: his penance in Uttoxeter Market, his chairing on the
shoulders of his schoolmates, and his listening to the preaching of
Sacheverel. The statue is opposite to the house in which Johnson was
born--altogether inferior to that in St. Paul's, which shook me almost
as much as a real glance from the literary monarch. I am ashamed to
send you so many ill-clothed nothings. My excuse shall be a state of
head that calls for four leeches before I can attack Mrs. Somerville's
"Connection of the Physical Sciences."

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, July, Monday morning, 1840.]

I write with a very tremulous hand, as you will perceive; both this,
and many other defects in my letter, are attributable to a very mighty
cause--no other than the boiling of currant jelly! I have had much of
this kind of occupation lately, and I grieve to say I have not gone
through it so cheerfully as the character of a Christian who
professes to do _all_, even the most trifling, duty, as the Lord
demands. My mind is consequently run all wild, and bears nothing but
_dog-roses_. I am truly obliged to you for getting me Spenser. How
shall I send to you "Don Quixote," which I have quite finished?

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 8th July, 1840.]

I believe it is decided that father and I should leave Griff and take
up our residence somewhere in the neighborhood of Coventry, if we can
obtain a suitable house, and this is at present a matter of anxiety.
So you see I am likely still to have a home where I can independently
welcome you. I am really so plunged in an abyss of books, preserves,
and sundry _important trivialities_, that I must send you this bare
proof that I have not cast the remembrance of you to a dusty corner of
my heart. Ever believe that "my heart is as thy heart," that you may
rely on me as a second self, and that I shall, with my usual
selfishness, lose no opportunity of gratifying my duplicate.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 12th Aug. 1840.]

The Epistle to the Colossians is pre-eminently rich in the coloring
with which it portrays the divine fulness contained in the Saviour,
contrasted with the beggarly elements that a spirit of self-righteousness
would, in some way, mingle with the light of life, the filthy rags it
would tack round the "fine raiment" of his righteousness. I have been
reading it in connection with a train of thought suggested by the reading
of "Ancient Christianity and the Oxford Tracts," by Isaac Taylor, one
of the most eloquent, acute, and pious of writers. Five numbers only
have yet appeared. Have you seen them? If not, I should like to send you
an abstract of his argument. I have gulped it (pardon my coarseness) in a
most reptile-like fashion. I must _chew_ it thoroughly to facilitate its
assimilation with my mental frame. When your pupils can relish Church
history, I venture to recommend the chart lately published by Seeley &
Burnside--far superior in conception to mine--as being more compendious,
yet answering the purpose of presenting epochs as nuclei round which less
important events instinctively cluster.

     Mrs. John Cash of Coventry, who was then Miss Mary Sibree,
     daughter of a Nonconformist minister there, and whose
     acquaintance Miss Evans made a year or two later in Coventry,
     writes in regard to this book of Isaac Taylor's: "In her
     first conversations with my father and mother, they were much
     interested in learning in what high estimation she held the
     writings of Isaac Taylor. My father _thought_ she was a
     little disappointed on hearing that he was a Dissenter. She
     particularly enjoyed his 'Saturday Evening,' and spoke in
     years after to me of his 'Physical Theory of Another Life,'
     as exciting thought and leading speculation further than he
     would have desired. When his 'Ancient Christianity' was
     published in numbers, Miss Evans took it in, and kindly
     forwarded the numbers to us. From the impression made on my
     own mind by unfavorable facts about 'The Fathers,' and from
     her own subsequent references to this work, I am inclined to
     think it had its influence in unsettling her views of
     Christianity."

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 17th Sept. 1840.]

I have thought of you as _the_ one who has ever shown herself so
capable of consideration for my weakness and sympathy in my warm and
easily fastened affections. My imagination is an enemy that must be
cast down ere I can enjoy peace or exhibit uniformity of character.
I know not which of its caprices I have most to dread--that which
incites it to spread sackcloth "above, below, around," or that
which makes it "cheat my eye with blear illusion, and beget strange
dreams" of excellence and beauty in beings and things of only
working-day price. The beautiful heavens that we have lately enjoyed
awaken in me an indescribable sensation of exultation in existence,
and aspiration after all that is suited to engage an immaterial
nature. I have not read very many of Mr. B.'s poems, nor any with much
attention. I simply declare my determination not to feed on the broth
of literature when I can get strong soup--such, for instance, as
Shelley's "Cloud," the five or six stanzas of which contain more
poetic metal than is beat out in all Mr. B.'s pages. You must know I
have had bestowed on me the very pretty cognomen of Clematis, which,
in the floral language, means "mental beauty." I cannot find in my
heart to refuse it, though, like many other appellations, it has
rather the appearance of a satire than a compliment. _Addio!_ I will
send your floral name in my next, when I have received my dictionary.
My hand and mind are wearied with writing four pages of German and a
letter of business.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 1st Oct. 1840.]

My dear Veronica--which, being interpreted, is "fidelity in
friendship"--Last week I was absent from home from Wednesday to
Saturday, in quest of the "coy maiden," Pleasure--at least, nominally
so, the real motive being rather to gratify another's feeling.[15] I
heard the "Messiah" on Thursday morning at Birmingham, and some
beautiful selections from other oratories of Handel and Haydn on
Friday. With a stupid, drowsy sensation, produced by standing sentinel
over damson cheese and a warm stove, I cannot do better than ask you
to read, if accessible, Wordsworth's short poem on the "Power of
Sound," with which I have just been delighted. I have made an
alteration in my plans with Mr. Brezzi, and shall henceforward take
Italian and German alternately, so that I shall not be liable to the
consciousness of having imperative employment for every interstice of
time. There seems a greater affinity between German and my mind than
Italian, though less new to me, possesses.

I am reading Schiller's "Maria Stuart," and Tasso.

I was pleased with a little poem I learned a week or two ago in
German; and, as I want you to like it, I have just put the idea it
contains into English doggerel, which quite fails to represent the
beautiful simplicity and nature of the original, but yet, I hope, will
give you sufficiently its sense to screen the odiousness of the
translation. _Eccola_:

QUESTION AND ANSWER.

     "'Where blooms, O my father, a thornless rose?'
       'That can I not tell thee, my child;
     Not one on the bosom of earth e'er grows
       But wounds whom its charms have beguiled.'

     "'Would I'd a rose on my bosom to lie,
       But I shrink from the piercing thorn:
     I long, but I dare not its point defy;
       I long, and I gaze forlorn.'

     "'Not so, O my child--round the stem again
       Thy resolute fingers entwine;
     Forego not the joy for its sister, pain--
       Let the rose, the sweet rose, be thine.'"

Would not a parcel reach you by railway?

     This is the first allusion to the new means of locomotion,
     which would, no doubt, be attracting much interest in the
     Griff household, as valuation was a large part of Mr. Evans's
     business. Long years after, George Eliot wrote:

"Our midland plains have never lost their familiar expression and
conservative spirit for me; yet at every other mile, since I first
looked on them, some sign of world-wide change, some new direction of
human labor, has wrought itself into what one may call the speech of
the landscape.... There comes a crowd of burly navvies with pickaxes
and barrows, and while hardly a wrinkle is made in the fading mother's
face, or a new curve of health in the blooming girl's, the hills are
cut through, or the breaches between them spanned, we choose our
level, and the white steam-pennon flies along it."

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 27th Oct. 1840.]

My only reason for writing is to obtain a timely promise that you will
spend your holidays chiefly with me, that we may once more meet among
scenes which, now I am called on to leave them, I find to have _grown
in_ to my affections. Carlyle says that to the artisans of Glasgow the
world is not one of blue skies and a green carpet, but a world of
copperas-fumes, low cellars, hard wages, "striking," and whiskey; and
if the recollection of this picture did not remind me that gratitude
should be my reservoir of feeling, that into which all that comes from
above or around should be received as a source of fertilization for my
soul, I should give a lachrymose parody of the said description, and
tell you all-seriously what I now tell you playfully, that mine is too
often a world such as Wilkie can so well paint, a walled-in world
furnished with all the details which he remembers so accurately, and
the least interesting part whereof is often what I suppose must be
designated the intelligent; but I deny that it has even a comparative
claim to the appellation, for give me a three-legged stool, and it
will call up associations--moral, poetical, mathematical--if I do but
ask it, while some human beings have the odious power of contaminating
the very images that are enshrined as our soul's arcana. Their baleful
touch has the same effect as would a uniformity in the rays of
light--it turns all objects to pale lead-color. O how luxuriously
joyous to have the wind of heaven blow on one after being _stived_ in
a human atmosphere--to feel one's heart leap up after the pressure
that Shakespeare so admirably describes: "When a man's wit is not
seconded by the forward chick understanding, it strikes a man as dead
as a large reckoning in a small room." But it is time I check this
Byronic invective, and, in doing so, I am reminded of Corinne's, or
rather Oswald's, reproof--"La vie est un _combat_ pas un _hymne_." We
should aim to be like a plant in the chamber of sickness--dispensing
purifying air even in a region that turns all pale its verdure, and
cramps its instinctive propensity to expand. Society is a wide nursery
of plants, where the hundreds decompose to nourish the future ten,
after giving collateral benefits to their contemporaries destined for
a fairer garden. An awful thought! one so heavy that if our souls
could once sustain its whole weight, or, rather, if its whole weight
were once to drop on them, they would break and burst their tenements.
How long will this continue? The cry of the martyrs heard by St. John
finds an echo in every heart that, like Solomon's, groans under "the
outrage and oppression with which earth is filled." Events are now so
momentous, and the elements of society in so chemically critical a
state, that a drop seems enough to change its whole form.

I am reading Harris's "Great Teacher," and am _innig bewegt_, as a
German would say, by its stirring eloquence, which leaves you no time
or strength for a cold estimate of the writer's strict merits. I wish
I could read some extracts to you. Isaac Taylor's work is not yet
complete. When it is so, I hope to reperuse it. Since I wrote to you I
have had Aimé Martin's work, "L'Education des Mères," lent to me, and
I have found it to be the real Greece whence "Woman's Mission" has
only imported to us a few marbles--but! Martin is a _soi-disant_
rational Christian, if I mistake him not. I send you an epitaph which
he mentions on a tomb in Paris--that of a mother: "Dors en paix, O ma
mère, ton fils t'obeira toujours." I am reading eclectically Mrs.
Hemans's poems, and venture to recommend to your perusal, if unknown
to you, one of the longest ones--"The Forest Sanctuary." I can give it
my pet adjective--exquisite.

I have adopted as my motto, "_Certum pete finem_"--seek a sure
end.[16]

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 5th Dec. 1840.]

Come when you would best like to do so: if my heart beat at all at the
time, it will be with a more rapid motion than the general, from the
joy of seeing you. I cannot promise you more than calmness when that
flush is past, for I am aweary, aweary--longing for rest, which seems
to fly from my very anticipations. But this wrought-up sensitiveness
which makes me shrink from all contact is, I know, not for
communication or sympathy, and is, from that very character, a kind of
trial best suited for me. Whatever tends to render us ill-contented
with ourselves, and more earnest aspirants after perfect truth and
goodness, is gold, though it come to us all molten and burning, and we
know not our treasure until we have had long smarting.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 21st Dec. 1840.]

It is impossible, to me at least, to be poetical in cold weather. I
understand the Icelanders have much national poetry, but I guess it
was written in the neighborhood of the boiling springs. I will promise
to be as cheerful and as Christmas-like as my rickety body and
chameleon-like spirits will allow. I am about to commence the making
of mince-pies, with all the interesting sensations characterizing
young enterprise or effort.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 27th Jan. 1841.]

Happily, the moody, melancholy temperament has some counterbalancing
advantages to those of the sanguine: it _does_ sometimes meet with
results more favorable than it expected, and by its knack of imagining
the pessimus, cheats the world of its power to disappoint. The very
worm-like originator of this coil of sentiment is the fact that you
write more cheerfully of yourself than I had been thinking of you, and
that, _ergo_, I am pleased.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 11th Feb. 1841.]

On Monday and Tuesday my father and I were occupied with the sale of
furniture at our new house: it is probable that we shall migrate
thither in a month. I shall be incessantly hurried until after our
departure, but at present I have to be grateful for a smooth passage
through contemplated difficulties. Sewing is my staple article of
commerce with the hard trader, Time. Now the wind has veered to the
south I hope to do much more, and that with greater zest than I have
done for many months--I mean, of all kinds.

I have been reading the three volumes of the "Life and Times of Louis
the Fourteenth," and am as eagerly waiting for the fourth and last as
any voracious novel-reader for Bulwer's last. I am afraid I am
getting quite martial in my spirit, and, in the warmth of my sympathy
for Turenne and Condé, losing my hatred of war. Such a conflict
between _individual_ and _moral_ influence is no novelty. But
certainly war, though the heaviest scourge with which the divine wrath
against sin is manifested in Time, has been a necessary vent for
impurities and a channel for tempestuous passions that must have
otherwise made the whole earth, like the land of the devoted
Canaanites, to vomit forth the inhabitants thereof. Awful as such a
sentiment appears, it seems to me that in the present condition of man
(and I do not mean this in the sense that Cowper does), such a
purgation of the body politic is probably essential to its health. A
foreign war would soon put an end to our national humors, that are
growing to so alarming a head.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 8th Mch. 1841.]

What do you think of the progress of architecture as a subject for
poetry?

I am just about to set out on a purchasing expedition to Coventry: you
may therefore conceive that I am full of little plans and anxieties,
and will understand why I should be brief. I hope by the close of next
week that we and our effects shall be deposited at Foleshill, and
until then and afterwards I shall be fully occupied, so that I am sure
you will not expect to hear from me for the next six weeks. One little
bit of unreasonableness you must grant me--the request for a letter
from yourself within that time.


_SUMMARY._

AUGUST 18, 1838, TO MARCH 8, 1841.

     Letters to Miss Lewis--First visit to London--Religious
     asceticism--Pascal--Hannah More's letters--Young's "Infidel
     Reclaimed"--Michaelmas visitors--"Life of
     Wilberforce"--Nineteenth birthday--Oratorio at
     Coventry--Religious objections to music--Letters to Mrs.
     Samuel Evans--Religious reflections--Besetting sin
     ambition--Letters to Miss Lewis--Objections to
     fiction-reading--Religious contentions on the nature of the
     visible Church--First poem--Account of books read and studies
     pursued--Wordsworth--Twentieth birthday--German begun--Plan
     of Chart of Ecclesiastical History--Religious
     controversies--Oxford Tracts--"Lyra Apostolica"--"Christian
     Year"--Chart of Ecclesiastical History forestalled--Italian
     begun--Trip to Derbyshire and Staffordshire--"Don
     Quixote"--Spenser's "Faery Queen"--Mrs. Somerville's
     "Connection of the Physical Sciences"--Dislike of
     housekeeping work--Removal to Coventry decided--"Ancient
     Christianity and the Oxford Tracts," by Isaac Taylor, and
     Mrs. John Cash's impression of its effect--Determination not
     to feed on the broth of literature--Visit to Birmingham to
     hear the "Messiah"--Reading Schiller's "Maria Stuart," and
     Tasso--Translation of German poem--Depression of surroundings
     at Griff--Reading Harris's "Great Teacher," Aimé Martin's
     "L'Education des Mères," and Mrs. Hemans's Poems--Selling
     furniture at new house--Sewing--Reading "Life and Times of
     Louis XIV."--Removal to Foleshill road, Coventry.

FOOTNOTES:

[9] Given to her as a school prize when she was fourteen.

[10] "Mill on the Floss," chap. v. book vi.

[11] Of ecclesiastical history.

[12] The Squire of Coton.

[13] When she would be thirteen years old.

[14] Written probably in view of her brother's marriage.

[15] Visit to Miss Rawlins, her brother's _fiancée_.

[16] By a curious coincidence, when she became Mrs. Cross, this
actually was her motto.




CHAPTER II.


     New circumstances now created a change almost amounting to a
     revolution in Miss Evans's life. Mr. Isaac Evans, who had
     been associated for some time with his father in the
     land-agency business, married, and it was arranged that he
     should take over the establishment at Griff. This led to the
     removal in March, 1841, of Mr. Robert Evans and his daughter
     to a house on the Foleshill road, in the immediate
     neighborhood of Coventry. The house is still standing,
     although considerably altered--a semi-detached house with a
     good bit of garden round it, and from its upper windows a
     wide view over the surrounding country, the immediate
     foreground being unfortunately, however, disfigured by the
     presence of mills and chimneys. It is town life now instead
     of country life, and we feel the effects at once in the tone
     of the subsequent letters. The friendships now formed with
     Mr. and Mrs. Bray and Miss Sara Hennell particularly, and the
     being brought within reach of a small circle of cultivated
     people generally, render this change of residence an
     exceedingly important factor in George Eliot's development.
     It chanced that the new house was next door to Mrs. Pears', a
     sister of Mr. Bray, and as there had been some acquaintance
     in days gone by between him and the family at Griff, this
     close neighborhood led to an exchange of visits. The
     following extracts from letters to Miss Lewis show how the
     acquaintance ripened, and will give some indications of the
     first impressions of Coventry life:

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, Saturday evening, April, 1841.]

Last evening I mentioned you to my neighbor (Mrs. Pears), who is
growing into the more precious character of a friend. I have seriously
to be thankful for far better health than I have possessed, I think,
for years, and I am imperatively called on to trade diligently with
this same talent. I am likely to be more and more busy, if I succeed
in a project that is just now occupying my thoughts and feelings. I
seem to be tried in a contrary mode to that in which most of my
dearest friends are being tutored--tried in the most dangerous way--by
prosperity. Solomon says, "In the day of prosperity be joyful, but in
the day of adversity consider." It seems to me that a transposition,
_vice versâ_, of the admonitions would be equally salutary and just.
Truly, as the prophet of Selwyn has told us, "Heaven is formidable in
its favors." Not that a wise and grateful reception of blessings
obliges us to stretch our faces to the length of one of Cromwell's
Barebones; nor to shun that joyous, bird-like enjoyment of things
(which, though perishable as to their actual existence, will be
embalmed to eternity in the precious spices of gratitude) that is
distinct from levity and voluptuousness. I am really crowded with
engagements just now, and I have added one to the number of my
correspondents.

[Illustration: House in Foleshill Road, Coventry.]

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, April, 1841]

The whole of last week was devoted to a bride's-maid's[17] duties, and
each day of this has been partially occupied in paying or receiving
visits. I have a calm in sea and sky that I doubt not will ere long be
interrupted. This is not our rest, if we are among those for whom
there remaineth one, and to pass through life without tribulation (or,
as Jeremy Taylor beautifully says, with only such a measure of it as
may be compared to an artificial discord in music, which nurses the
ear for the returning harmony) would leave us destitute of one of the
marks that invariably accompany salvation, and of that fellowship in
the sufferings of the Redeemer which can alone work in us a
resemblance to one of the most prominent parts of his divinely perfect
character, and enable us to obey the injunction, "In patience possess
your souls." I have often observed how, in secular things, active
occupation in procuring the necessaries of life renders the character
indifferent to trials not affecting that one object. There is an
analogous influence produced in the Christian by a vigorous pursuit of
duty, a determination to work while it is day.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 28th April, 1841.]

One of the penalties women must pay for modern deference to their
intellect is, I suppose, that they must give reasons for their
conduct, after the fashion of men. The days are past for pleading a
woman's reason. The truth is, that the hinderances to my writing have
been like the little waves of the brooks that look so lovely just
now--they have arisen one after another close to my side, but when I
have looked back I have found the ripples too insignificant to be
marked in the distance. My father's longer _séjours_ at home than
formerly, and multiplied acquaintances and engagements, are really
valid excuses for me hitherto, but I do not intend to need them in
future; I hope to be a "snapper-up of unconsidered" moments. I have
just been interrupted by a visit from a lass of fourteen, who has
despoiled me of half an hour, and I am going out to dinner, so that I
cannot follow the famous advice, "Hasten slowly." I suppose that you
framed your note on the principle that a sharp and sudden sound is the
most rousing, but there are _addenda_ about yourself that I want to
know, though I dare not ask for them. I do not feel settled enough to
write more at present. How is it that Erasmus could write volumes on
volumes and multifarious letters besides, while I, whose labors hold
about the same relation to his as an ant-hill to a pyramid or a drop
of dew to the ocean, seem too busy to write a few? A most posing
query!

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, Thursday morning, June, 1841.]

I have of late felt a depression that has disordered the vision of my
mind's eye and made me _alive_ to what is certainly a fact (though my
imagination when I am in health is an adept at concealing it), that I
am _alone_ in the world. I do not mean to be so sinful as to say that
I have not friends _most_ undeservedly kind and tender, and disposed
to form a far too favorable estimate of me, but I mean that I have no
one who enters into my pleasures or my griefs, no one with whom I can
pour out my soul, no one with the same yearnings, the same
temptations, the same delights as myself. I merely mention this as the
impression that obtrudes itself when my body tramples on its
keeper--(a metaphor borrowed from a menagerie of wild beasts, if it
should happen to puzzle you!)--mysterious "connection exquisite of
distant worlds" that we present! A few drops of steel will perhaps
make me laugh at the simple objects that, in gloom and mist, I conjure
into stalking apparitions.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, at Margate, 31st July, 1841.]

I am beginning to be interlaced with multiplying ties of duty and
affection, that, while they render my new home happier, forbid me to
leave it on a pleasure-seeking expedition. I think, indeed, that both
my heart and limbs would leap to behold the great and wide sea--that
old ocean on which man can leave no trace.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 3d Sept. 1841.]

I have been revelling in Nichol's "Architecture of the Heavens and
Phenomena of the Solar System," and have been in imagination winging
my flight from system to system, from universe to universe, trying to
conceive myself in such a position and with such a visual faculty as
would enable me to enjoy what Young enumerates among the novelties of
the "Stranger" man when he bursts the shell to

     "Behold an infinite of floating worlds
     Divide the crystal waves of ether pure
     In endless voyage without port."

"Hospitable infinity!" Nichol beautifully says. How should I love to
have a thorough-going student with me, that we might read together! We
might each alternately employ the voice and the fingers, and thus
achieve just twice as much as a poor solitary. I am more impressed
than ever with a truth beautifully expressed in "Woman's
Mission"--"Learning is only so far valuable as it serves to enlarge
and enlighten the bounds of conscience." This I believe it eminently
does when pursued humbly and piously, and from a belief that it is a
solemn duty to cultivate every faculty of our nature so far as primary
obligations allow. There is an exhortation of St. Paul's that I should
love to take as my motto: "Finally, my brethren, whatsoever things are
honest" (you know the continuation)--"if there be _any_ virtue, and if
there be any praise, think on these things." I have had to lament
lately that mine is not a _hard-working_ mind--it requires frequent
rest. I am violently in love with the Italian fashion of repeating an
adjective or adverb, and even noun, to give force to expression:
there is so much more fire in it than in our circumlocutory phrases,
our dull "verys" and "exceedinglys" and "extremelys." I strongly
recommend Hallam to you. I shall read it again if I live. When a sort
of haziness comes over the mind, making one feel weary of articulated
or written signs of ideas, does not the notion of a less laborious
mode of communication, of a perception approaching more nearly to
intuition, seem attractive? Nathless, I love words: they are the
quoits, the bows, the staves that furnish the gymnasium of the mind.
Without them, in our present condition, our intellectual strength
would have no implements. I have been rather humbled in thinking that
if I were thrown on an uncivilized island, and had to form a
literature for its inhabitants from my own mental stock, how very
fragmentary would be the information with which I could furnish them!
It would be a good mode of testing one's knowledge to set one's self
the task of writing sketches of all subjects that have entered into
one's studies entirely from the chronicles of memory. The prevalence
of misery and want in this boasted nation of prosperity and glory is
appalling, and really seems to call us away from mental luxury. O to
be doing some little towards the regeneration of this groaning,
travailing creation! I am supine and stupid--overfed with
favors--while the haggard looks and piercing glance of want and
conscious hopelessness are to be seen in the streets.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 1st Oct. 1841.]

Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I
love--that makes life and nature harmonize. The birds are consulting
about their migrations, the trees are putting on the hectic or the
pallid hues of decay, and begin to strew the ground, that one's very
footsteps may not disturb the repose of earth and air, while they give
us a scent that is a perfect anodyne to the restless spirit. Delicious
autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly
about the earth seeking the successive autumns.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 2d Nov. 1841.]

I am going, I hope, to-day to effect a breach in the thick wall of
indifference behind which the denizens of Coventry seem inclined to
intrench themselves; but I fear I shall fail.

     This probably refers to the first visit paid by Miss Evans to
     Mr. and Mrs. Bray at their house. They had met in the
     previous May at Mrs. Pears'; but although they were at once
     mutually attracted, the acquaintance does not seem to have
     been immediately prosecuted further. Now, however, any time
     lost in the beginning was quickly made up, and it is
     astonishing how rapidly the most intimate relations were
     formed. Mr. Bray was a ribbon-manufacturer, well-to-do at
     that time, and had a charming house, Rosehill, with a
     beautiful lawn and garden, in the outskirts of Coventry. Only
     a part of his time was occupied with his business, and he had
     much leisure and opportunity, of which he availed himself,
     for liberal self-education and culture. His was a robust,
     self-reliant mind. Already, in 1839, he had published a work
     on the "Education of the Feelings," viewed from the
     phrenological standpoint; and in this year, 1841, appeared
     his most important book, "The Philosophy of Necessity." He
     always remained a sincere and complete believer in the
     science of phrenology. He had married Miss Caroline Hennell,
     sister of the Mr. Charles Hennell who published, in 1838, "An
     Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity"--a remarkable
     book, which was translated into German, Strauss contributing
     a preface to the translation. It will be seen from subsequent
     letters how greatly Miss Evans was interested in this
     book--how much she admired it; and the reading of it,
     combined with the association with her new friends--with the
     philosophical speculations of Mr. Bray, and with Mrs. Bray's
     sympathy in her brother's critical and sceptical
     standpoint--no doubt hastened the change in her attitude
     towards the dogmas of the old religion. In the Analytical
     Catalogue of Mr. Chapman's publications, issued in 1852,
     there is an analysis of Hennell's "Inquiry," done by Miss
     Evans, which may be inserted here, as giving her idea of the
     book eleven years later.

"The first edition of this work appeared in 1838, when the present
strong current of public opinion in favor of free religious discussion
had not yet set in; and it probably helped to generate the tone of
thought exhibited in more recent works of the same class, to which
circumstances have given a wider fame--works which, like the above, in
considering questions of Biblical criticism and the philosophy of
Christianity, combine high refinement, purity of aim, and candor, with
the utmost freedom of investigation, and with a popularity of style
which wins them the attention not only of the learned but of the
practical.

"The author opens his inquiry with an historical sketch, extending
from the Babylonish Captivity to the end of the first century, the
design of which is to show how, abstracting the idea of the
miraculous, or any speciality of divine influence, the gradual
development of certain elements in Jewish character, and the train of
events in Jewish history, contributed to form a suitable _nidus_ for
the production of a character and career like that of Jesus, and how
the devoted enthusiasm generated by such a career in his immediate
disciples, rendering it easier for them to modify their ideas of the
Messiah than to renounce their belief in their Master's
Messiahship--the accession of Gentile converts and the destruction of
the last remnant of theocracy, necessitating a wider interpretation of
Messianic hopes--the junction of Christian ideas with Alexandrian
Platonism, and the decrepitude of polytheism, combined to associate
the name of Jesus, his Messiahship, his death and his resurrection,
with a great moral and religious revolution. This historical sketch,
which is under the disadvantage of presenting, synthetically, ideas
based on a subsequent analysis, is intended to meet the difficulty so
often urged, and which might be held to nullify the value of a
critical investigation, that Christianity is a fact for which, if the
supposition of a miraculous origin be rejected, no adequate and
probable causes can be assigned, and that thus, however defective may
be the evidence of the New-Testament history, its acceptance is the
least difficult alternative.

"In the writer's view, the characteristics of the Essene sect, as
traced by Josephus and Philo, justify the supposition that Jesus was
educated in their school of philosophy; but with the elevated belief
and purity of life which belonged to this sect he united the ardent
patriotic ideas which had previously animated Judas of Galilee, who
resisted the Roman authority on the ground that God was the only ruler
and lord of the Jews. The profound consciousness of genius, a
religious fervor which made the idea of the divine ever present to
him, patriotic zeal, and a spirit of moral reform, together with a
participation in the enthusiastic belief of his countrymen that the
long-predicted exaltation of Israel was at hand, combined to produce
in the mind of Jesus the gradual conviction that he was himself the
Messiah, with whose reign that exaltation would commence. He began, as
John the Baptist had already done, to announce 'the kingdom of
heaven,' a phrase which, to the Jewish mind, represented the national
glorification of Israel; and by his preaching, and the influence of
his powerful personality, he won multitudes in Galilee to a
participation in his belief that he was the expected Son of David. His
public entrance into Jerusalem in the guise which tradition associated
with the Messiah, when he sanctioned the homage of the multitude, was
probably the climax of his confidence that a great demonstration of
divine power, in concurrence with popular enthusiasm, would seat him
triumphantly on the throne of David. No such result appearing, his
views of the divine dispensation with respect to himself began to
change, and he felt the presentiment that he must enter on his
Messianic reign through the gates of suffering and death. Viewing
Jesus as a pretender not only to spiritual but to political power, as
one who really expected the subversion of the existing government to
make way for his own kingship (though he probably relied on divine
rather than on human means), he must necessarily have appeared in a
dangerous light to those of his countrymen who were in authority, and
who were anxious at any price to preserve public tranquillity in the
presence of the Roman power, ready to visit with heavy vengeance any
breach of order, and to deprive them of the last remnants of their
independence; and hence the motives for his arrest and execution. To
account for the belief of the disciples in the resurrection of their
Master--a belief which appears to have been sincere--the author thinks
it necessary to suppose a certain nucleus of fact, and this he finds
in the disappearance of the body of Jesus, a point attested by all the
four evangelists. The secret of this disappearance probably lay with
Joseph of Arimathæa and Nicodemus, who were anxious to avoid
implicating themselves with that fermentation of regretful enthusiasm
to which a resort of the disciples to the grave might give rise.
Animated by a belief in the resurrection, which, being more harmless
in the eyes of the authorities than that in a living Messiah, they
were permitted to preach with little molestation; the zeal of the
disciples won many converts; a new impulse was given to their cause by
the accession of Paul, who became the chief missionary of the new
faith, as construed by himself, to the Gentiles; and the concurrence
of the causes indicated above, modifying the early creed of the
apostles, and blending it with trains of thought already prevalent,
bore along Christianity in its conquest over the minds of men until it
became the dominant religion of the Roman world.

"Having sought to show, in this preliminary sketch, that a belief in
miracles is not entailed on us by the fact of the early growth of
Christianity, the author enters on the inquiry whether the claims of
the evangelical writers on our credence are such as to sustain the
miraculous part of their narratives. The answer is in the negative. He
discusses, first, the date and credibility of each Gospel, and
concludes that while Matthew has many marvellous stories, incongruous
in themselves, and not only unsupported but contradicted by the other
evangelists, he nevertheless presents the most comprehensible account
of the career of Jesus; that in Mark, evidently more remote in time
and circumstances, both from his events and from Jewish modes of
thought, the idea conveyed of Jesus is much vaguer and less
explicable; that in Luke there is a still further modification of his
character, which has acquired a tinge of asceticism; while in John the
style of his teaching is wholly changed, and instead of the graphic
parable and the pithy apothegm, he utters long, mystical discourses in
the style of the first epistle bearing the name of the same
evangelist. Mr. Hennell, however, adheres to the conclusion that the
substance of this Gospel came from the apostle John at an advanced
age, when both the events of his early manhood and the scenes of his
native land lay in the far distance. The writer then enters on a
special examination of the Resurrection and Ascension, and the other
miracles in the Gospels and the Acts, and inquires how far they are
sustained by the apostolic Epistles. He examines the prophecies of the
Old Testament supposed to have been fulfilled in Jesus, and also the
predictions of Jesus himself concerning his death and resurrection;
and, finally, he considers the character, views, and doctrine of
Christ. According to him, an impartial study of the conduct and
sayings of Jesus, as exhibited in the Gospels, produces the conviction
that he was an enthusiast and a revolutionist, no less than a reformer
and a moral and religious teacher. Passages are adduced from the Old
Testament, and from the apocryphal and rabbinical writings, to show
that there is scarcely anything absolutely original in the teaching of
Jesus; but, in the opinion of the author, he manifests a freedom and
individuality in the use of his materials, and a general superiority
of tone and selection, which, united with the devotion of his life to
what he held the highest purpose, mark him to be of an order of minds
occurring but at rare intervals in the history of our race.

"Shortly after the appearance of this work it was translated into
German through the instrumentality of Dr. Strauss, who, in the preface
he prefixed to it, says: 'Not sufficiently acquainted with German to
read continuously a learned work in that language, the labors of our
theologians were only accessible to him' (the author of the 'Inquiry')
'so far as they were written in Latin, or translated into English, or
treated of in English writings or periodicals: especially he is
unacquainted with what the Germans have effected in the criticism of
the gospels since Schleiermacher's work on Luke, and even the earlier
commentators he knows but imperfectly. Only so much the more
remarkable is it, however, that both in the principles and in the main
results of his investigation, he is on the very track which has been
entered on among us in recent years.... That at certain periods,
certain modes of thought lie as it were in the atmosphere, ... and
come to light in the most remote places without perceptible media of
communication, is shown, not only by the contents, but by the spirit,
of Mr. Hennell's work. No further traces of the ridicule and scorn
which characterize his countrymen of the deistical school; the subject
is treated in the earnest and dignified tone of the truth-seeker, not
with the rancor of a passionate polemic; we nowhere find him deriving
religion from priestcraft, but from the tendencies and wants of human
nature.... These elevated views, which the learned German of our day
appropriates as the fruit of the religious and scientific advancement
of his nation, this Englishman, to whom most of the means at our
command were wanting, has been able to educe entirely from himself....
An Englishman, a merchant, a man of the world, he possesses, both by
nature and by training, the practical insight, the sure tact, which
lays hold on realities. The solution of problems over which the German
flutters with many circuits of learned formulæ, our English author
often succeeds in seizing at one spring.... To the learned he often
presents things under a surprisingly new aspect; to the unlearned,
invariably under that which is the most comprehensible and
attractive.'"

     The reading of Mr. Hennell's book no doubt marks an epoch in
     George Eliot's development; but probably there had been a
     good deal of half-unconscious preparation beforehand (as
     indicated by Mrs. Cash's remarks on Isaac Taylor's work, in
     the last chapter), which was greatly stimulated now by the
     contact with new minds. The following extract from a letter
     to Miss Lewis, dated 13th November, 1841, accurately fixes
     the date of the first acknowledgment by herself that her
     opinions were undergoing so momentous a change.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 13th Nov. 1841.]

My whole soul has been engrossed in the most interesting of all
inquiries for the last few days, and to what result my thoughts may
lead, I know not--possibly to one that will startle you; but my only
desire is to know the truth, my only fear to cling to error. I venture
to say our love will not decompose under the influence of separation,
unless you excommunicate me for differing from you in opinion.
Think--is there any _conceivable_ alteration in me that would prevent
your coming to me at Christmas? I long to have a friend such as you
are, I think I may say, alone to me, to unburden every thought and
difficulty--for I am still a solitary, though near a city. But we have
the universe to talk with, infinity in which to stretch the gaze of
hope, and an all-bountiful, all-wise Creator in whom to confide--he
who has given us the untold delights of which our reason, our emotion,
our sensations, are the ever-springing sources.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 8th Dec. 1841.]

What a pity that while mathematics are indubitable, immutable, and no
one doubts the properties of a triangle or a circle, doctrines
infinitely important to man are buried in a charnel-heap of bones over
which nothing is heard but the barks and growls of contention! "Unto
their assembly, mine honor, be not thou united."

     It was impossible for such a nature as Miss Evans's, in the
     enthusiasm of this first great change, to rest satisfied in
     compliance with the old forms, and she was so uneasy in an
     equivocal position that she determined to give up going to
     church. This was an unforgivable offence in the eyes of her
     father, who was a Churchman of the old school, and nearly led
     to a family rupture. He went so far as to put into an agent's
     hands the lease of the house in the Foleshill road, with the
     intention of going to live with his married daughter. Upon
     this, Miss Evans made up her mind to go into lodgings at
     Leamington, and to try to support herself by teaching. The
     first letter to Mrs. Bray refers to this incident:

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, Jan. 1842.]

My guardian angel, Mrs. Pears, has just sent for me to hear your kind
note, which has done my aching limbs a little good. I shall be most
thankful for the opportunity of going to Leamington, and Mrs. Pears is
willing to go too. There is but _one_ woe, that of leaving my dear
father--all else, doleful lodgings, scanty meals, and _gazing-stockism_,
are quite indifferent to me. Therefore do not fear for me when I am
once settled in my home--wherever it may be--and freed from wretched
suspense.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Pears, Friday evening, Feb. 1842.]

Far from being weary of your dear little Henry, his matin visits are
as cheering to me as those of any little bird

         "that comes in spite of sorrow,
     And at my window bids good-morrow."

We have not, perhaps, been so systematic as a regular tutor and pupil
would have been, but we crave indulgence for some laxity. I was really
touched that you should think of _me_ while among friends more closely
linked with you in every way. I was beginning to get used to the
conviction that, ivy-like as I am by nature, I must (as we see ivy do
sometimes) shoot out into an isolated tree. Never again imagine that
you need ask forgiveness for speaking or writing to me on subjects to
me more interesting than aught else; on the contrary, believe that I
really enjoy conversation of this nature: blank silence and cold
reserve are the only bitters I care for in my intercourse with you. I
can rejoice in all the joys of humanity; in all that serves to elevate
and purify feeling and action; nor will I quarrel with the million
who, I am persuaded, are with me in intention, though our dialects
differ. Of course, I must desire the ultimate downfall of error, for
no error is innocuous; but this assuredly will occur without my
proselytizing aid, and the best proof of a real love of the
truth--that freshest stamp of divinity--is a calm confidence in its
intrinsic power to secure its own high destiny, that of universal
empire. Do not fear that I will become a stagnant pool by a
self-sufficient determination only to listen to my own echo; to read
the yea, yea, on my own side, and be most comfortably deaf to the nay,
nay. Would that all rejected _practically_ this maxim! To _fear_ the
examination of any proposition appears to me an intellectual and a
moral palsy that will ever hinder the firm grasping of any substance
whatever. For my part, I wish to be among the ranks of that glorious
crusade that is seeking to set Truth's Holy Sepulchre free from a
usurped domination. We shall then see her resurrection! Meanwhile,
although I cannot rank among my principles of action a fear of
vengeance eternal, gratitude for predestined salvation, or a
revelation of future glories as a reward, I fully participate in the
belief that the only heaven here, or hereafter, is to be found in
conformity with the will of the Supreme; a continual aiming at the
attainment of the perfect ideal, the true _logos_ that dwells in the
bosom of the one Father. I hardly know whether I am ranting after the
fashion of one of the Primitive Methodist prophetesses, with a cart
for her rostrum, I am writing so fast. Good-bye, and blessings on you,
as they will infallibly be on the children of peace and virtue.

     Again about the same date in 1842 she writes to Mrs. Bray:

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, Feb. 1842.]

A heart full of love and gratitude to you for all your kindness in
thought and act to me, undeserving. I dare say my manner belies my
feelings: but friendship must live by faith and not by sight, and I
shall be a great gainer by leaving you to interpret my mystic
character without any other key than your own goodness.

     The last letter of the series to Miss Lewis also refers to
     the difficulties of the situation:

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Lewis, 19th Feb. 1842.]

I dare say you have added, subtracted, and divided suppositions until
you think you have a sure product--viz., a good quantum, or, rather,
a bad one, of indifference and forgetfulness, as the representation of
my conduct towards you. If so, revise your arithmetic, for be it known
to you that, having had my propensities, sentiments, and intellect
gauged a second time, I am pronounced to possess a large organ of
"adhesiveness," a still larger one of "firmness," and as large of
"conscientiousness"--hence, if I should turn out a very weathercock
and a most pitiful truckler, you will have data for the exercise of
faith maugre common-sense, common justice, and the testimony of your
eyes and ears.

How do you go on for society, for communion of spirit, the drop of
nectar in the cup of mortals? But why do I say the drop? The mind that
feels its value will get large draughts from some source, if denied it
in the most commonly chosen way.

     "'Mid the rich store of nature's gifts to man
     Each has his loves, close wedded to his soul
     By fine association's golden links.
     As the Great Spirit bids creation teem
     With conscious being and intelligence,
     So man, his miniature resemblance, gives
     To matter's every form a speaking soul,
     An emanation from his spirit's fount,
     The impress true of its peculiar seal.
     Here finds he thy best image, sympathy."

Beautiful egoism, to quote one's own. But where is not this same ego?
The martyr at the stake seeks its gratification as much as the court
sycophant, the difference lying in the comparative dignity and beauty
of the two egos. People absurdly talk of self-denial. Why, there is
none in virtue, to a being of moral excellence: the greatest torture
to such a soul would be to run counter to the dictates of conscience;
to wallow in the slough of meanness, deception, revenge, or
sensuality. This was Paul's idea in the first chapter of 2d Epistle to
Timothy (I think that is the passage).

I have had a weary week. At the beginning more than the usual amount
of _cooled_ glances, and exhortations to the suppression of
self-conceit. The former are so many hailstones that make me wrap more
closely around me the mantle of determinate purpose: the latter are
needful, and have a tendency to exercise forbearance, that well repays
the temporary smart. The heart knoweth its own, whether bitterness or
joy: let us, dearest, beware how we, _even with good intentions_,
press a finger's weight on the already bruised.

     And about the same date she writes to Mrs. Bray:

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, end of Feb. 1842.]

I must relieve my conscience before I go to bed by entering a protest
against every word or accent of discontent that I uttered this
morning. If I have ever complained of any person or circumstance, I do
penance by eating my own words. When my real self has regained its
place, I can shake off my troubles "like dewdrops from the lion's
mane," and then I feel the baseness of imputing my sorrows to others
rather than to my own pitiful weakness. But I do not write for your
forgiveness; that I know I have. I only want to satisfy my indignation
against myself.

     The conclusion of the matter was that Mr. Evans withdrew his
     house from the agent's hands, and his daughter went to stay
     at Griff, with Mr. and Mrs. Isaac Evans, whence she writes
     the following letter to Mrs. Pears:

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Pears, Thursday, Mch. 1842.]

I have just been climbing up some favorite old hills, or rather
hillocks, and if I could see you I should find myself in high
preparation for one of my thorough chats. Oh, if I could transport
myself to your dining-room, where I guess you and Mr. Pears are
sitting in anticipation of tea--carrying on no "holy war," but at
peace with the world and its opinions, or, if ever you do battle, in
the happy ranks of the majority--I could kiss you into sublime
liberality! How are you and your dear husband and children? It seems a
week of years instead of days since you said to me your kind good-bye,
and as I have tried your magnanimity quite long enough to be assured
that you will not let me hear of you without a beseeching letter from
me, I snatch half an hour from a too short day for the generous
purpose of doubly qualifying myself, first, by pouring out the
contents of my gossip-wallet, and then quietly awaiting the news I
want to hear of you. I have here, in every way, abundant and
unlooked-for blessings--delicacy and consideration from all whom I
have seen; and I really begin to recant my old belief about the
indifference of all the world towards me, for my acquaintances of this
neighborhood seem to seek an opportunity of smiling on me in spite of
my heresy. All these things, however, are but the fringe and ribbons
of happiness. They are _ad_herent, not _in_herent; and, without any
affectation, I feel myself to be acquiring what I must hold to be a
precious possession, an independence of what is baptized by the world
external good. There are externals (at least, they are such in common
thought) that I could ill part with--the deep, blue, glorious heavens,
bending as they do over all, presenting the same arch, emblem of a
truer omnipresence, wherever we may be chased, and all the sweet,
peace-breathing sights and sounds of this lovely earth. These, and the
thoughts of the good and great, are an inexhaustible world of delight;
and the felt desire to be one in will and design with the great mind
that has laid open to us these treasures is the sun that warms and
fructifies it. I am more and more impressed with the duty of _finding_
happiness. On a retrospection of the past month, I regret nothing so
much as my own impetuosity both of feeling and judging. I am not
inclined to be sanguine as to my dear father's future determination,
and I sometimes have an intensely vivid consciousness, which I only
allow to be a fleeting one, of all that is painful and that has been
so. I can only learn that my father has commenced his alterations at
Packington, but he only appears to be temporarily acquiescing in my
brother's advice "not to be in a hurry." I do not intend to remain
here longer than three weeks, or, at the very farthest, a month; and,
if I am not then recalled, I shall write for definite directions. I
must have a _home_, not a visiting-place. I wish you would learn
something from my father, and send me word how he seems disposed. I
hope you get long walks on these beautiful days. You would love to
hear the choristers we have here; they are hymning away incessantly.
Can you not drive over and see me? Do come by hook or by crook. Why,
Mr. Pears could almost walk hither. I am becoming very hurried, for
most welcome tea is in the vicinity, and I must be busy after I have
imbibed its inspiration. You will write to me to-morrow, will you not?
and pray insist on Mr. Pears writing an appendix. I had a note from
Mrs. Bray this morning, and I liked it better than my breakfast. So do
give me a little treat on Saturday. Blessings on you and yours, as all
forlorn beggars have said from time immemorial to their benefactors;
but real feeling, you know, will sometimes slip into a hackneyed
guise.

     Miss Evans remained for about three weeks at Griff, at the
     end of which time, through the intervention of her brother,
     the Brays, and Miss Rebecca Franklin, the father was very
     glad to receive her again, and she resumed going to church as
     before.

     It will be seen from a subsequent noteworthy letter to Miss
     Sara Hennell, dated 19th October, 1843, that Miss Evans's
     views of the best course to be pursued under similar
     circumstances had already undergone considerable
     modifications, and in the last year of her life she told me
     that, although she did not think she had been to blame, few
     things had occasioned her more regret than this temporary
     collision with her father, which might, she thought, have
     been avoided with a little management.

     In July of this year (1842) Miss Sara Hennell--the gifted
     sister of Mrs. Bray--came to Rosehill, and completed the trio
     destined to exert the most important influence over the life
     of George Eliot. The individual characters of these three
     friends, and the relations each bore to their correspondent,
     will unfold themselves in the letters. It is only necessary
     here to say that the two ladies--Cara and Sara, as they are
     always addressed--now became like sisters to Miss Evans, and
     Mr. Bray her most intimate male friend, and the letters to
     them form an almost unbroken chain during all the remainder
     of George Eliot's life.

     To us Miss Sara Hennell is the most important correspondent,
     for it is to her that Miss Evans mainly turns now for
     intellectual sympathy; to Mrs. Bray when she is in pain or
     trouble, and wants affectionate companionship; with Mr. Bray
     she quarrels, and the humorous side of her nature is brought
     out. Every good story goes to him, with a certainty that it
     will be appreciated. With all three it is a beautiful and
     consistent friendship, running like a thread through the woof
     of the coming thirty-eight years. For the next twelve years,
     as will be seen, it is quite the most important thread; and
     although later it naturally became very much less important,
     it was never dropped except for a moment, in 1854, owing to a
     brief misunderstanding of letters, which will appear in its
     due place.

     The following letters to Miss Sara Hennell show what was
     passing from 30th August, 1842, to April, 1843:

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 30th Aug. 1842.]

How I have delighted in the thought that there are beings who are
better than their promises, beyond the regions of waking and sleeping
dreams.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Friday, Sept. 1842.]

I have not yet accounted for my tardiness in writing, which, I assure
you, is no representation of my usual habit, and has been occasioned
only by a week's indisposition, the foster-parent to the ill-favored
offspring of my character and circumstances, gloom and stolidity, and
I could not write to you with such companions to my thought. I am
anxious that you should not imagine me unhappy even in my most
melancholy moods, for I hold all indulgence of sadness that has the
slightest tincture of discontent to be a grave delinquency. I think
there can be few who more truly feel than I that this is a world of
bliss and beauty--that is, that bliss and beauty are the end, the
tendency of creation; and evils are the shadows that are the only
conditions of light in the picture, and I live in much, much
enjoyment.

I am beginning to enjoy the "Eneid," though, I suppose, much in the
same way as the uninitiated enjoy wine, compared with the
connoisseurs.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 3d Nov. 1842.]

I have been in high displeasure with myself, have thought my soul only
fit for limbo, to keep company with other abortions, and my life the
shallowest, muddiest, most unblessing stream. Having got my head above
this slough of despond, I feel quite inclined to tell you how much
pleasure your letter gave me. You observe in your note that some
persons say the unsatisfied longing we feel in ourselves for something
better than the greatest perfection to be found on earth is a proof
that the true object of our desires lies beyond it. Assuredly, this
earth is not the home of the spirit--it will rest only in the bosom of
the Infinite. But the non-satisfaction of the affections and intellect
being inseparable from the unspeakable advantage of such a mind as
that of man in connection with his corporal condition and _terrene_
destiny, forms not at present an argument with me for the realization
of particular desires.

     The next letter refers to Miss Mary Hennell's[18] last
     illness:

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 7th Jan. 1843.]

I cannot help wishing to tell you, now that you are in trouble and
anxiety, how dear you are to me, and how the recollection of you is
ever freshening in my mind. You have need of all your cheeriness and
energy; and if they do not fail, I think it almost enviable, as far as
one's self is concerned (not, of course, when the sufferer is
remembered), to have the care of a sick-room, with its twilight and
tiptoe stillness and helpful activity. I have always had a peculiarly
peaceful feeling in such a scene.

     Again, after the death of Miss Mary Hennell, there is a
     letter to her sister Sara:

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, April, 1843.]

We always find that our stock of appreciated good can never be really
diminished. When the chief desire of the eyes is taken, we can afford
a gaze to hitherto unnoticed possessions; and even when the topmost
boughs are lopped, a thousand shoots spring from below with the energy
of new life. So it will be with you; but you cannot yet look beyond
the present, nor is it desirable that you should. It would not be well
for us to overleap one grade of joy or suffering: our life would lose
its completeness and beauty.

     Rosehill not only afforded a pleasant variety in the Coventry
     life, as most visitors to the town, of any note, found their
     way there, but the Brays were also frequently in the habit of
     making little holiday excursions, in many of which Miss Evans
     now joined. Thus we find them in May, 1843, all going to
     Stratford and Malvern, together with Mr. Charles Hennell and
     Miss Sara Hennell, for a week; and again, in July of that
     year the same party, accompanied by Miss Brabant, daughter of
     Dr. Brabant of Devizes, went on a fortnight's tour, visiting
     Tenby, among other places. This trip is chiefly memorable
     from the fact that it was indirectly responsible for Miss
     Evans undertaking the translation of Strauss's "Leben Jesu."
     For Miss Brabant (to whom the translation had been confided
     by Mr. Joseph Parkes of Birmingham and a group of friends)
     became engaged to be married to Mr. Charles Hennell; and
     shortly after her marriage she handed the work over to Miss
     Evans.

     In the next two letters to Miss Sara Hennell there are
     allusions to the approaching marriage, which took place in
     London on 1st November, 1843, the Brays and Miss Evans being
     present.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 16th Sept. 1843.]

Many thanks for procuring me the hymns and anthems. I was right glad
to play "Ancient of Ages" again, and I shall like still better to sing
it with you when we meet. That that is to be so soon, and under
circumstances so joyful, are among the _mirabilia_ of this changing
world. To see and re-see such a cluster of not indifferent persons as
the programme for the wedding gives, will be almost too large a
_bonne-bouche_.

I saw Robert Owen yesterday, Mr. and Mrs. Bray having kindly asked me
to dine with him, and I think if his system prosper it will be in
spite of its founder, and not because of his advocacy.

     The next letter to Mrs. Bray gives a pleasant glimpse of
     their studies together, and of the little musical society
     that was in the habit of meeting at Rosehill to play
     concerted pieces.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, no date, 1843.]

I only wish you would change houses with the mayor, that I might get
to you when I would. I send you the first part of "Wallenstein," with
the proposition that we should study that in conjunction with the
"Thirty Years' War," as I happen to have a loose copy. We had better
omit the "Lager," and begin "Die Piccolomini." You shall have "Joan of
Arc," my grand favorite, as a _bonne-bouche_ when you have got through
"Wallenstein," which will amply repay you for any trouble in
translating it, and is not more difficult than your reading ought to
be now. I have skimmed Manzoni, who has suffered sadly in being poured
out of silver into pewter. The chapter on Philosophy and Theology is
worth reading. Miss Brabant sent me my "Hyperion" with a note, the
other day. She had put no direction besides Coventry, and the parcel
had consequently been sent to some other Miss Evans, and my choice
little sentimental treasures, alas! exposed to vulgar gaze. Thank you
for the manual, which I have had so long. I trust I did not bestow
those scratches on the cover. I have been trying to find a French book
that you were not likely to have read, but I do not think I have one,
unless it be "Gil Blas," which you are perhaps too virtuous to have
read, though how any one can opine it to have a vicious tendency I am
at a loss to conjecture. They might as well say that to condemn a
person to eat a whole plum-pudding would deprive him of all future
relish for plain food. I have had a visitor ever since Saturday, and
she will stay till Saturday again. I cannot desire that you should
_un_ask Violin and Flute, unless a postponement would be in every way
as agreeable to you and them. If you have them, you will give them
much more pleasure as Piano than I, so do not think of me in the
matter for a moment. Good-bye; and remember to treat your cold as if
it were an orphan's cold, or a widow's cold, or any one's cold but
your own.

     The following is the letter before referred to as containing
     an important and noteworthy declaration of opinion on the
     very interesting question of conformity:

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 9th Oct. 1843.]

The first thing I have to say to you is to entreat that you and Mrs.
Hennell will not perplex yourselves for a moment about my
accommodation during the night. I am so well now that a hearthrug
would be as luxurious a couch as I should need, and I defy anything
short of a kettledrum or my conscience to keep me awake after a long
day.

The subject of your conversation with Miss D---- is a very important
one, and worth an essay. I will not now inflict one of mine on you,
but I will tell you, as briefly as possible, my present opinion, which
you know is contrary to the one I held in the first instance. I am
inclined to think that such a change of sentiment is likely to happen
to most persons whose views on religious matters undergo a change
early in life. The first impulse of a young and ingenuous mind is to
withhold the slightest sanction from all that contains even a mixture
of supposed error. When the soul is just liberated from the wretched
giant's bed of dogmas on which it has been racked and stretched ever
since it began to think, there is a feeling of exultation and strong
hope. We think we shall run well when we have the full use of our
limbs and the bracing air of independence, and we believe that we
shall soon obtain something positive, which will not only more than
compensate us for what we have renounced, but will be so well worth
offering to others that we may venture to proselytize as fast as our
zeal for truth may prompt us. But a year or two of reflection, and the
experience of our own miserable weakness, which will ill afford to
part even with the crutch of superstition, must, I think, effect a
change. Speculative truth begins to appear but a shadow of individual
minds. Agreement between intellects seems unattainable, and we turn to
the _truth of feeling_ as the only universal bond of union. We find
that the intellectual errors which we once fancied were a mere
incrustation have grown into the living body, and that we cannot, in
the majority of cases, wrench them away without destroying vitality.
We begin to find that with individuals, as with nations, the only safe
revolution is one arising out of the wants which their own progress
has generated. It is the quackery of infidelity to suppose that it has
a nostrum for all mankind, and to say to all and singular, "Swallow my
opinions and you shall be whole." If, then, we are debarred by such
considerations from trying to reorganize opinions, are we to remain
aloof from our fellow-creatures on occasions when we may fully
sympathize with the feelings exercised, although our own have been
melted into another mould? Ought we not on every opportunity to seek
to have our feelings in harmony, though not in union, with those who
are often richer in the fruits of faith, though not in reason, than
ourselves? The results of nonconformity in a family are just an
epitome of what happens on a larger scale in the world. An influential
member chooses to omit an observance which, in the minds of all the
rest, is associated with what is highest and most venerable. He cannot
make his reasons intelligible, and so his conduct is regarded as a
relaxation of the hold that moral ties had on him previously. The rest
are infected with the disease they imagine in him. All the screws by
which order was maintained are loosened, and in more than one case a
person's happiness may be ruined by the confusion of ideas which took
the form of principles. But, it may be said, how then are we to do
anything towards the advancement of mankind? Are we to go on
cherishing superstitions out of a fear that seems inconsistent with
any faith in a Supreme Being? I think the best and the only way of
fulfilling our mission is to sow good seed in good (_i.e._, prepared)
ground, and not to root up tares where we must inevitably gather all
the wheat with them. We cannot fight and struggle enough for freedom
of inquiry, and we need not be idle in imparting all that is pure and
lovely to children whose minds are unbespoken. Those who can write,
let them do it as boldly as they like; and let no one hesitate at
proper seasons to make a full _con_fession (far better than
_pro_fession). St. Paul's reasoning about the conduct of the strong
towards the weak, in the fourteenth and fifteenth chapters of Romans,
is just in point. But I have not said half what I meant to say. There
are so many aspects in which the subject might be presented that it is
useless to attempt to exhaust it. I fear I have written very
unintelligibly, for it is rather late, and I am so cold that my
thoughts are almost frozen.

     After Miss Brabant's marriage to Mr. Charles Hennell, Miss
     Evans went to stay for a week or two with Dr. Brabant at
     Devizes, and some time about the beginning of January, 1844,
     the proposition was made for the transfer of the translation
     of Strauss from Mrs. Charles Hennell. At the end of April,
     1844, Mrs. Bray writes to Miss Sara Hennell that Miss Evans
     is "working away at Strauss six pages a day," and the next
     letter from Miss Evans refers to the beginning of the
     undertaking.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Sunday, May, 1844.]

To begin with business, I send you on the other side the translations
you wished (Strauss), but they are perhaps no improvements on what you
had done. I shall be very glad to learn from you the particulars as to
the mode of publication--who are the parties that will find the funds,
and whether the manuscripts are to be put into the hands of any one
when complete, or whether they are to go directly from me to the
publishers? I was very foolish not to imagine about these things in
the first instance, but ways and means are always afterthoughts with
me.

You will soon be settled and enjoying the blessed spring and summer
time. I hope you are looking forward to it with as much delight as I.
One has to spend so many years in learning how to be happy. I am just
beginning to make some progress in the science, and I hope to disprove
Young's theory that "as soon as we have found the key of life it opes
the gates of death." Every year strips us of at least one vain
expectation, and teaches us to reckon some solid good in its stead. I
never will believe that our youngest days are our happiest. What a
miserable augury for the progress of the race and the destination of
the individual if the more matured and enlightened state is the less
happy one! Childhood is only the beautiful and happy time in
contemplation and retrospect: to the child it is full of deep sorrows,
the meaning of which is unknown. Witness colic and whooping-cough and
dread of ghosts, to say nothing of hell and Satan, and an offended
Deity in the sky, who was angry when I wanted too much plumcake. Then
the sorrows of older persons, which children see but cannot
understand, are worse than all. All this to prove that we are happier
than when we were seven years old, and that we shall be happier when
we are forty than we are now, which I call a comfortable doctrine, and
one worth trying to believe! I am sitting with father, who every now
and then jerks off my attention to the history of Queen Elizabeth,
which he is reading.

     On the 1st July, 1844, there was another little trip with the
     Brays to the Cumberland lakes, this time returning by
     Manchester and Liverpool; and on reaching home, about the
     beginning of August, there is the following letter:

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Friday, Aug. 1844.]

Can I have the remaining volumes of Strauss, excepting any part that
you may choose to keep for your own use? If you could also send me
such parts of the introduction and first section as you wish me to
look over, I should like to despatch that business at intervals, when
I am not inspired for more thorough labor. Thank you for the
encouragement you sent me. I only need it when my head is weak and I
am unable to do much. Then I sicken at the idea of having Strauss in
my head and on my hands for a lustrum, instead of saying good-bye to
him in a year. When I can work fast I am never weary, nor do I regret
either that the work has been begun or that I have undertaken it. I am
only inclined to vow that I will never translate again, if I live to
correct the sheets for Strauss. My first page is 257.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 31st Oct. 1844.]

Pray tell Mrs. C. Hennell that no apology was needed for the very good
translation she has sent me. I shall be glad to avail myself of it to
the last word, for I am thoroughly tired of my own garb for Strauss's
thoughts. I hope the introduction, etc., will be ready by the end of
November, when I hope to have put the last words to the first volume.
I am awfully afraid of my own translation, and I want you to come and
comfort me. I am relapsing into heathen darkness about everything but
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. "Heaven has sent leanness into my
soul"--for reviling them, I suppose. This lovely autumn! Have you
enjoyed its long shadows and fresh breezes?

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, end of 1844.]

I do not think it was kind to Strauss (I knew he was handsome) to tell
him that a young lady was translating his book. I am sure he must have
some twinges of alarm to think he was dependent on that most
contemptible specimen of the human being for his English reputation.
By the way, I never said that the Canons of the Council of Nice, or
the Confession of Augsburg, or even the Thirty-nine Articles, are
suggestive of poetry. I imagine no _dogmas_ can be. But surely
Christianity, with its Hebrew retrospect and millennial hopes, the
heroism and divine sorrow of its founder, and all its glorious army of
martyrs, might supply, and has supplied, a strong impulse not only to
poetry, but to all the Fine Arts. Mr. Pears is coming home from
Malvern to-night, and the children are coming to tea with me, so that
I have to make haste with my afternoon matters. Beautiful little Susan
has been blowing bubbles, and looking like an angel at sport. I am
quite happy, only sometimes feeling "the weight of all this
unintelligible world."

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, Sunday, beginning of 1845.]

Your books are come for the school, and I have covered them--at least
those that I think you will like for the children; two or three are
quite for grown-up people. What an exquisite little thing that is of
Harriet Martineau's--"The Crofton Boys"! I have had some delightful
crying over it. There are two or three lines in it that would feed
one's soul for a month. Hugh's mother says to him, speaking of people
who have permanent sorrow, "They soon had a new and delicious
pleasure, which none but the bitterly disappointed can feel--the
pleasure of rousing their souls to bear pain, and of _agreeing with
God silently_, when nobody knows what is in their hearts." I received
"Sybil" yesterday quite safely. I am not utterly disgusted with
D'Israeli. The man hath good veins, as Bacon would say, but there is
not enough blood in them.

     The 17th April this year was an interesting day, as Miss
     Evans went with the Brays to Atherstone Hall, and met Harriet
     Martineau for the first time. It will be seen that in later
     years there was considerable intimacy between them.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 29th April, 1845.]

If you think any of my future manuscript too untidy for the printer,
only mark it to that effect, and I will rewrite it, for I do not mind
that mechanical work; and my conscience is rather uneasy lest the
illegibility of my hand should increase materially the expense of the
publication. Do not be alarmed because I am not well just now: I shall
be better very soon, and I am not really disgusted with Strauss. I
only fancy so sometimes, as I do with all earthly things.

     In June Mrs. Bray writes to Miss Hennell that Miss Evans
     "looks all the better of her London trip. I never saw her so
     blooming and buoyant;" but the two next letters show a
     relapse.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, end of June, (?) 1845.]

Glad am I that some one can enjoy Strauss! The million certainly will
not, and I have ceased to sit down to him with any relish. I should
work much better if I had some proof-sheets coming in to assure me
that my soul-stupefying labor is not in vain. I am more grateful to
you than I can tell you for taking the trouble you do. If it had not
been for your interest and encouragement I should have been almost in
despair by this time.

     And again, a little later:

I begin utterly to despair that Strauss will ever be published, unless
I can imitate the Rev. Mr. Davis, and print it myself. At the very
best, if we go on according to the rate of procedure hitherto, the
book will not be published within the next two years. This seems
dolorous enough to me, whose only real satisfaction just now is some
hope that I am not sowing the wind. It is very laughable that I should
be irritated about a thing in itself so trifling as a translation, but
it is the very triviality of the thing that makes delays provoking.
The difficulties that attend a really grand undertaking are to be
borne, but things should run smoothly and fast when they are not
important enough to demand the sacrifice of one's whole soul. The
second volume is quite ready. The last few sections were written under
anything but favorable circumstances. They are not Strauss's best
thoughts, nor are they put into his translator's best language; but I
have not courage to imitate Gibbon--put my work in the fire and begin
again.

     In July, 1845, there seems to have arisen some difficulty in
     getting in the cash subscriptions for the publication. Mr.
     Charles Hennell and Mr. Joseph Parkes, however, exerted
     themselves in the matter, and £300 was collected, and the
     following letter shows the relief it was to Miss Evans:

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles Hennell, Friday evening, July, 1845.]

Thank you for sending me the good news so soon, and for sympathizing
in my need of encouragement. I have all I want now, and shall go
forward on buoyant wing. I am glad for the work's sake, glad for your
sake, and glad for "the honorable gentleman's" sake, that matters have
turned out so well. Pray think no more of my pens, ink, and paper. I
would gladly give much more towards the work than these and my
English, if I could do so consistently with duty.

     The book now got into the hands of the printers, as will be
     seen from the next letter:

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Aug. 1845.]

I have just been looking over some of the _revise_, and reading again
your sweet letter to me from Hastings, and an impulse of gratitude
and love will not let me rest without writing you a little note,
though my hand has almost done its possible for the day under this
intense heat. You do not guess how much pleasure it gives me to look
over your pencillings, they prove so clearly that you have really
entered into the meaning of every sentence, and it always gives one
satisfaction to see the evidence of brain-work. I am quite indebted to
you for your care, and I feel greatly the advantage of having a friend
to undertake the office of critic. There is one word I must
mention--Azazel is the word put in the original of the Old Testament
for the scapegoat: now I imagine there is some dubiousness about the
meaning, and that Strauss would not think it right to translate
_scapegoat_, because, from the tenor of his sentence, he appears to
include Azazel with the evil demons. I wonder if it be supposed by any
one that Azazel is in any way a distinct being from the goat. I know
no Hebrew scholar, and have access to no Hebrew lexicon. Have you
asked Mr. Hennell about it?

Your letter describes what I _have_ felt rather than what I feel. It
seems as if my affections were quietly sinking down to temperate, and
I every day seem more and more to value thought rather than feeling. I
do not think this is man's best estate, but it is better than what I
have sometimes known.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Friday evening, autumn of
1845.]

I am not ashamed to confess that I should like to be idle with you for
a little while, more than anything else I can think of just now. But,
alas! leathery brain must work at leathery Strauss for a short time
before my butterfly days come. O, how I shall spread my wings then!
Anent the Greek, it would produce very dreadful cold perspirations
indeed in me, if there were anything amounting to a serious error,
but this, I trust, there will not be. You must really expect me, if
not to sleep and snore _aliquando_, at least to nod in the course of
some thousand pages. I should like you to be deliberate over the
_Schluss Abhandlung_. It is the only part on which I have bestowed
much pains, for the difficulty was _piquing_, not piquant.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, no date, 1845.]

I am never pained when I think Strauss right; but in many cases I
think him wrong, as every man must be in working out into detail an
idea which has general truth, but is only one element in a perfect
theory--not a perfect theory in itself.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 25th Sept. 1845.]

I am delighted with the proof. The type and everything else are just
what I wished. To see the first sheet is the next best thing to seeing
the last, which I hope we shall all have done this time next year.
There is a very misty vision of a trip to the Highlands haunting us in
this quarter. The vision would be much pleasanter if Sara were one of
the images in it. You would surely go if we went, and then the thing
would be perfect. I long to see you, for you are becoming a sort of
transfigured existence, a mere ideal to me, and I have nothing to tell
me of your real flesh-and-blood self but sundry very useful little
pencil-marks, and a scrap of Mrs. Bray's notes now and then. So, if
you would have me bear in my memory your own self, and not some aerial
creation that I call by your name, you must make your appearance.

     In October "the misty vision" took palpable shape, and the
     Brays, Miss Hennell, and Miss Evans had a delightful
     fortnight in Scotland, visiting Loch Lomond and Loch Katrine,
     The Trossachs, Stirling, Edinburgh, Melrose, and Abbotsford.
     They were away from the 14th to the 28th, and on returning to
     Coventry Strauss was taken up again. Miss Hennell was reading
     the translation, and aiding with suggestions and corrections.
     The next letter to her seems to be dated in November.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Nov. 1845.]

Please to tell Mr. Hennell that "habits of thought" is not a
translation of the word _particularismus_. This does not mean national
idiosyncrasy, but is a word which characterizes that idiosyncrasy. If
he decidedly objects to particularism, ask him to be so good as
substitute _exclusiveness_, though there is a shade of meaning in
_particularismus_ which even that does not express. It was because the
word could only be translated by a circumlocution that I ventured to
Anglicize it.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Tuesday morning, Dec. (?)
1845.]

I have been idle, and have not done a stroke to the prefaces, but they
shall be sent as soon as possible. Thanks for the copy of the Latin
preface and letter. They are in preconceived harmony with my ideas of
the appropriate.

I will leave the titlepage to you and Mr. Hennell. Thanks for the news
in your last _extra Blatt_. I am glad to find that the theological
organs are beginning to deal with philosophy, but I can hardly imagine
your writer to be a friend with a false cognizance on his shield.
These dear orthodox people talk so simply sometimes that one cannot
help fancying them satirists of their own doctrines and fears, though
they mean manfully to fight against the enemy. I should like if
possible to throw the emphasis on _critically_ in the titlepage.
Strauss means it to be so: and yet I do not know how we can put
anything better than what you say.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Dec. 1845.]

I send you to-day the conclusion of the chapter you are reading, and,
unless you find anything of importance to be rectified, you need not
return this to me, but may forward the whole to the printer as soon as
you have read it. I am not altogether satisfied with the use of the
word sacrament as applied specifically to the _Abendmahl_. It seems
like a vulgarism to say _the_ sacrament for one thing, and for another
it does not seem _ab_original enough in the life of Jesus; but I know
of no other word that can be substituted. I have altered passover to
paschal meal, but [Greek: tho pascha] is used in the New Testament of
the eating of the lamb _par excellence_. You remember, in the title of
the first section in the _Schluss_--which I had been so careless as to
omit--the expression is "Nothwendiger Uebergang der Kritik in das
Dogma." Now, dogmatism will not do, as that would represent
_Dogmatismus_. "Dogmatik" is the idea, I believe--_i.e._, positive
theology. Is it allowable to say _dogmatics_, think you? I do not
understand how the want of manuscript can be so pressing, as I have
only had one proof for the last fortnight. It seems quite dispiriting
to me now not to see the proofs regularly. I have had a miserable week
of headache, but am better now, and ready for work, to which I must
go.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 1st Jan. 1846.]

I do pity you, with the drunken Christmas workmen keeping you in this
uncomfortable interregnum. But do not go distraught; the spring will
really come and the birds--many having had to fly across the Atlantic,
which is farther than you have to go to establish yourself. I could
easily give the meaning of the Hebrew word in question, as I know
where to borrow a lexicon. But observe, there are two Hebrew words
untranslated in this proof. I do not think it will do to give the
English in one place and not in another, where there is no reason for
such a distinction, and there is not here, for the note in this proof
sounds just as fee-fo-fum-ish as the other without any translation. I
could not alter the "troublesome," because it is the nearest usable
adjective for _schwierig_, which stands in the German. I am tired of
inevitable _importants_, and cannot bear to put them when they do not
represent the German.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 26th Jan. 1846.]

I have been sadly occupied for the last ten days. My father has been
ill, and has required much attention, and my own head was very
middling for some days, so that I send you but a poor cargo of new
manuscript. Indeed, on looking through the last quire of paper this
morning for the purpose of putting in the Greek, it seemed all very
poor to me, but the subject is by no means inspiring, and no muse
would condescend to visit such an uncertain votary as I have been for
the last week or so. How is it that I have only had one proof this
week? You know we are five hundred pages in advance of the printer, so
you need not be dreadfully alarmed. I have been so pleased to hear
some of your letters read to me, but, alas! I can reflect no pleasure
at this moment, for I have a woful pain and am in a desperate hurry.

     On 14th February, 1846, Mrs. Bray writes to Miss Sara Hennell
     that Miss Evans "says she is Strauss-sick--it makes her ill
     dissecting the beautiful story of the Crucifixion, and only
     the sight of the Christ-image[19] and picture make her endure
     it. Moreover, as her work advances nearer its public
     appearance, she grows dreadfully nervous. Poor thing, I do
     pity her sometimes, with her pale, sickly face and dreadful
     headaches, and anxiety, too, about her father. This illness
     of his has tried her so much, for all the time she had for
     rest and fresh air she had to read to him. Nevertheless, she
     looks very happy and satisfied sometimes in her work."

     And about the end of February there is the following letter
     from Miss Evans:

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, end of Feb. 1846.]

Health and greeting, my Achates, in this veritable spring month. I
shall send you a parcel on Monday with sixty-four new pages of German
for your intellectual man. The next parcel, which will be the LAST, I
shall send on the Monday following, and when you have read to the end,
you may, if you think it desirable, send the whole to me. Your dull
ass does not mend his pace for beating; but he _does_ mend it when he
finds out that he is near his journey's end, and makes you wonder how
he could pretend to find all the previous drawing so hard for him. I
plead guilty to having set off in a regular scamper: but be lenient
and do not scold me if you find all sorts of carelessnesses in these
last hundred pages.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, end of Feb. 1846.]

I have been guilty of the most unpardonable piece of carelessness, for
which I am stretched on a rack of anxiety and mortification. In the
proof that came on Thursday I unwittingly drew out a quarter sheet
with the blotting-paper, and did not discover the mistake until
Saturday morning, when about to correct the last proof. Surely the
printer would discover the absence of the four pages and wait for
them--otherwise I would rather have lost one of my fingers, or all the
hair from my head, than have committed such a _faux pas_. For there
were three very awkward blunders to be corrected. All this vexation
makes a cold and headache doubly intolerable, and I am in a most
purgatorial state on this "good Sunday." I shall send the proofs, with
the unfortunate quarter sheet and an explanation, to-night to Mr.
Chapman, and prithee do thou inquire and see that the right thing is
done. The tears are streaming from my smarting eyes--so farewell.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Mch. 1846.]

I wish we could get the book out in May--why not? I suppose the
binding could not be all got through--the printing and writing I
should think might be managed in time. Shouldn't I like to fleet the
time away with thee as they did in the Golden Age--after all our toils
to lie reclined on the hills (spiritually), like gods together,
careless of mankind. Sooth to speak, idleness, and idleness with thee,
is just the most tempting mirage you could raise before my mind's
eye--I say mirage, because I am determined from henceforth to believe
in no substantiality for future time, but to live in and love the
present--of which I have done too little. Still, the thought of being
with you in your own home will attract me to that future; for without
all controversy I love thee and miss thee.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Mch. 1846.]

My soul kisses thee, dear Sara, in gratitude for those dewy thoughts
of thine in this morning's note. My poor adust soul wants such
refreshment. Continue to do me good--hoping for nothing again. I have
had my sister with me all day--an interruption, alas! I cannot write
more, but I should not be happy to let the day pass without saying one
word to thee.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Mch. 1846.]

The last hundred pages have certainly been totally uninteresting to
me, considered as matter for translation. Strauss has inevitably
anticipated in the earlier part of his work all the principles and
many of the details of his criticism, and he seems fagged himself.
_Mais courage!_ the neck of the difficulty is broken, and there is
really very little to be done now. If one's head would but keep in
anything like thinking and writing order! Mine has robbed me of half
the last fortnight; but I am a little better now, and am saying to
myself _Frisch zu!_ The Crucifixion and the Resurrection are, at all
events, better than the bursting asunder of Judas. I am afraid I have
not made this dull part of Strauss even as tolerable as it might be,
for both body and mind have recoiled from it. Thank you, dearest, for
all your love and patience for me and with me. I have nothing on earth
to complain of but subjective maladies. Father is pretty well, and I
have not a single excuse for discontent through the livelong day.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, end of Mch. 1846.]

As I believe that even your kindness cannot overcome your sincerity, I
will cast aside my fear that your wish to see me in your own home is
rather a plan for my enjoyment than for yours. I believe it would be
an unmixed pleasure to me to be your visitor, and one that I would
choose among a whole bouquet of agreeable possibilities; so I will
indulge myself, and accept the good that the heavens and you offer me.
I am miserably in want of you to stir up my soul and make it shake its
wings, and begin some kind of flight after something good and noble,
for I am in a grovelling, slothful condition, and you are the _only_
friend I possess who has an animating influence over me. I have
written to Mr. Hennell anent the titlepage, and have voted for
_critically examined_, from an entire conviction of its
preferableness.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, beginning of April, 1846.]

See what it is to have a person _en rapport_ with you, that knows all
your thoughts without the trouble of communication! I am especially
grateful to you for restoring the "therefore" to its right place. I
was about to write to you to get you to remonstrate about this and the
"dispassionate calmness," which I did not at all like; but I thought
you had corrected the prefaces, as the marks against the Latin looked
like yours, so I determined to indulge my _laissez-faire_
inclinations, for I hate stickling and debating unless it be for
something really important. I do really like reading our Strauss--he
is so _klar und ideenvoll_; but I do not know _one_ person who is
likely to read the book through--do you? Next week we will be merry
and sad, wise and nonsensical, devout and wicked, together.

     On 19th April, 1846, Mrs. Bray writes to Miss Hennell that
     Miss Evans is "as happy as you may imagine at her work being
     done. She means to come and read Shakespeare through to us as
     her first enjoyment." And again, on 27th April, that she "is
     delighted beyond measure with Strauss's elegant preface. It
     is just what she likes. And what a nice letter too! The Latin
     is quite beyond me, but the letter shows how neatly he can
     express himself."


_SUMMARY._

MARCH, 1841, TO APRIL, 1846.

     Foleshill--New friends--Mrs. Pears--Coventry life and
     engagements--Letters to Miss Lewis--Brother's
     marriage--Mental depression--Reading Nichol's "Architecture
     of the Heavens and Phenomena of the Solar System"--Makes
     acquaintance with Mr. and Mrs. Bray--Reads Charles Hennell's
     book, "An Inquiry Concerning the Origin of
     Christianity"--Effect of this book--Gives up going to
     church--Family difficulties--Letters to Mrs. Pears--Visit to
     Griff--Returns to Foleshill and resumes going to
     church--Acquaintance with Miss Sara Hennell, and development
     of friendship with her and Mr. and Mrs. Bray--Letters to Miss
     Sara Hennell describing mental characteristics--Attitude
     towards immortality--Death of Miss Mary Hennell--Excursion
     with the Brays, Mr. Charles Hennell, and Miss Hennell to
     Stratford and Malvern, and to Tenby with same party and Miss
     Brabant--Meets Robert Owen--Studies German and music with
     Mrs. Bray--Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, with important
     declaration of opinion in regard to conformity--Mr. Charles
     Hennell's marriage--Stay with Dr. Brabant at
     Devizes--Arrangement for translation of Strauss's "Leben
     Jesu"--Excursion with Brays to the Cumberland lakes,
     returning by Manchester and Liverpool--Weary of
     Strauss--Letter to Mrs. Bray--Poetry of
     Christianity--Admiration of Harriet Martineau's "The Crofton
     Boys"--Trip to London--Despair about publication of
     Strauss--Subscription of £300 for the work--In better
     heart--Minutiæ of Strauss translation--Pains taken with the
     _Schluss Abhandlung_--Opinion of Strauss's work--The book in
     print--Trip to the Highlands--Strauss difficulties--Miss
     Hennell reads the translation and makes
     suggestions--Suffering from headaches and "Strauss-sick"--The
     last MS. of the translation sent to Miss Hennell--Joy at
     finishing--Delighted with Strauss's Preface.

FOOTNOTES:

[17] Brother's marriage.

[18] Miss Mary Hennell was the author of "An Outline of the Various
Social Systems founded on the Principle of Co-operation," published in
1841.

[19] This was an ivory image she had of the Crucified Christ over the
desk in her study at Foleshill, where she did all her work at that
time--a little room on the first floor, with a charming view over the
country.




CHAPTER III.


     The completion of the translation of Strauss is another
     milestone passed in the life journey of George Eliot, and the
     comparatively buoyant tone of the letters immediately
     following makes us feel that the galled neck is out of the
     yoke for a time. In May, Mrs. Bray had gone away from home
     for a visit, and the next letter is addressed to her.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, Sunday (probably about 6th May),
1846.]

Do not stay any longer than is necessary to do you good, lest I should
lose the pleasure of loving you, for my affections are always the
warmest when my friends are within an attainable distance. I think I
can manage to keep respectably warm towards you for three weeks
without seeing you, but I cannot promise more. Tell Mr. Bray I am
getting too amiable for this world, and Mr. Donovan's wizard hand
would detect a slight corrugation of the skin on my organs 5 and
6;[20] they are so totally without exercise. I had a lecture from Mr.
Pears on Friday, as well as a sermon this morning, so you need be in
no alarm for my moral health. Do you never think of those Caribs who,
by dint of flattening their foreheads, can manage to see
perpendicularly above them without so much as lifting their heads?
There are some good people who remind me of them. They see everything
so clearly and with so little trouble, but at the price of sad
self-mutilation.

     On the 26th May Miss Evans went to pay a visit to Mrs. and
     Miss Hennell at Hackney, and she writes from there to Mrs.
     Bray, who was expected to join them in London.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, end of May, 1846.]

I cannot deny that I am very happy without you, but perhaps I shall be
happier with you, so do not fail to try the experiment. We have been
to town only once, and are saving all our strength to "rake" with you;
but we are as ignorant as Primitive Methodists about any of the
amusements that are going. Please to come in a very mischievous,
unconscientious, theatre-loving humor. Everybody I see is very kind to
me, and therefore I think them all very charming; and, having
everything I want, I feel very humble and self-denying. It is only
rather too great a bore to have to write to my friends when I am half
asleep, and I have not yet reached that pitch of amiability that makes
such magnanimity easy. Don't bring us any bad news or any pains, but
only nods and becks and wreathèd smiles.

     They stayed in London till the 5th June, and on the 15th of
     that month the translation of Strauss was published. On the
     2d July Mrs. Bray writes to Miss Hennell that Miss Evans "is
     going to Dover with her father, for a fortnight." In passing
     through Dover on our way to the Continent, in 1880, after our
     marriage, we visited the house they stayed at in 1846, and my
     wife then told me that she had suffered a great deal there,
     as her father's health began to show signs of breaking up. On
     returning to Coventry there is the following letter referring
     to Wicksteed's review of the translation of Strauss, which
     was advertised for the forthcoming number of the _Prospective
     Review_.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Thursday, Aug. (?) 1846.]

Do you think it worth my while to buy the _Prospective_ for the sake
of Wicksteed's review--is there anything new in it? Do you know if Mr.
Chapman has any unusual facilities for obtaining cheap classics? Such
things are to be got handsome and second-hand in London--if one knew
but the way. I want to complete Xenophon's works. I have the
"Anabasis," and I might, perhaps, get a nice edition of the
"Memorabilia" and "Cyropædia" in a cheaper way than by ordering them
directly from our own bookseller. I have been reading the "Fawn of
Sertorius."[21] I think you would like it, though the many would not.
It is pure, chaste, and classic, beyond any attempt at fiction I ever
read. If it be Bulwer's, he has been undergoing a gradual
transfiguration, and is now ready to be exalted into the assembly of
the saints. The professor's (Strauss's) letter, transmitted through
you, gave me infinite consolation, more especially the apt and
pregnant quotation from Berosus. Precious those little hidden lakelets
of knowledge in the high mountains, far removed from the vulgar eye,
only visited by the soaring birds of love.

     On 25th September, 1846, Mrs. Bray writes to Miss Hennell
     that Miss Evans "looks very brilliant just now. We fancy she
     must be writing her novel;" and then come the following
     letters, written in October and November:

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Oct. 1846.]

All the world is bathed in glory and beauty to me now, and thou
sharest in the radiance. Tell me whether I live for you as you do for
me, and tell me how gods and men are treating you. You must send me a
scrap every month--only a scrap with a dozen words in it, just to
prevent me from starving on faith alone--of which you know I have the
minimum of endowment. I am sinning against my daddy by yielding to the
strong impulse I felt to write to you, for he looks at me as if he
wanted me to read to him.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 29th Oct. 1846.]

I do not know whether I can get up any steam again on the subject of
Quinet; but I will try--when Cara comes back, however, for she has run
away with "Christianity" into Devonshire, and I must have the book as
a springing-board. When does the _Prospective_ come out?

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 1st Nov. 1846.]

The review of Strauss contains some very just remarks, though, on the
whole, I think it shallow, and in many cases unfair. The praise it
gives to the translation is just what I should have wished; indeed, I
cannot imagine anything more gratifying in the way of laudation. Is it
not droll that Wicksteed should have chosen one of my interpolations,
or rather paraphrases, to dilate on. The expression "granite," applied
to the sayings of Jesus, is nowhere used by Strauss, but is an
impudent addition of mine to eke out his metaphor. Did you notice the
review of Foster's Life?[22] I am reading the Life, and thinking all
the time how you would like it. It is deeply interesting to study the
life of a genius under circumstances amid which genius is so seldom to
be found. Some of the thoughts in his journal are perfect gems.

     The words of the reviewer of the Strauss translation in the
     _Prospective_ are worth preserving: "A faithful, elegant, and
     scholarlike translation. Whoever reads these volumes without
     any reference to the German must be pleased with the easy,
     perspicuous, idiomatic, and harmonious force of the English
     style. But he will be still more satisfied when, on turning
     to the original, he finds that the rendering is word for
     word, thought for thought, and sentence for sentence. In
     preparing so beautiful a rendering as the present, the
     difficulties can have been neither few nor small in the way
     of preserving, in various parts of the work, the exactness of
     the translation, combined with that uniform harmony and
     clearness of style which imparts to the volumes before us the
     air and spirit of an original. Though the translator never
     obtrudes himself upon the reader with any notes or comments
     of his own, yet he is evidently a man who has a familiar
     knowledge of the whole subject; and if the work be the joint
     production of several hands, moving in concert, the passages
     of a specially scholastic character, at least, have received
     their version from a discerning and well-informed theologian.
     Indeed, Strauss may well say, as he does in the notice which
     he writes for the English edition, that, as far as he has
     examined it, the translation is 'et accurata et perspicua.'"

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, end of Nov. 1846.]

Many things, both outward and inward, have concurred to make this
November far happier than the last. One's thoughts

     "Are widened with the process of the suns;"

and if one is rather doubtful whether one is really wiser or better,
it is some comfort to know that the desire to be so is more pure and
dominant. I have been thinking of that most beautiful passage in
Luke's Gospel--the appearance of Jesus to the disciples at Emmaus. How
universal in its significance! The soul that has hopelessly followed
its Jesus--its impersonation of the highest and best--all in
despondency; its thoughts all refuted, its dreams all dissipated. Then
comes another Jesus--another, but the same--the same highest and best,
only chastened--crucified instead of triumphant--and the soul learns
that this is the true way to conquest and glory. And then there is the
burning of the heart, which assures that "this was the Lord!"--that
this is the inspiration from above, the true comforter that leads unto
truth. But I am not become a Methodist, dear Sara; on the contrary, if
I am pious one day, you may be sure I was very wicked the day before,
and shall be so again the next.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 20th Dec. 1846.]

I have been at Griff for the last week, or I should have written
before. I thank you most heartily for sending me "Heliados"--first,
because I admire it greatly in itself; and, secondly, because it is a
pretty proof that I am not dissociated from your most hallowed
thoughts. As yet I have read it only once, but I promise myself to
read it again and again. I shall not show it to any one, for I hate
"friendly criticism," as much for you as for myself; but you have a
better spirit than I, and when you come I will render "Heliados" up to
you, that others may have the pleasure of reading it.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 18th Feb. 1847.]

Lying in bed this morning, grievously tormented, your "Heliados"
visited me and revealed itself to me more completely than it had ever
done before. How true that "it is only when all portions of an
individual nature, or all members of society, move forward
harmoniously together that religious progress is calm and beneficial!"
I imagine the sorrowful amaze of a child who had been dwelling with
delight on the idea that the stars were the pavement of heaven's
court, and that there above them sat the kind but holy God, looking
like a venerable Father who would smile on his good little ones--when
it was cruelly told, before its mind had substance enough to bear such
tension, that the sky was not real, that the stars were worlds, and
that even the sun could not be God's dwelling, because there were
many, many suns. These ideas would introduce atheism into the child's
mind, instead of assisting it to form a nobler conception of God (of
course I am supposing the bare information given, and left to the
child to work upon); whereas the idea it previously had of God was
perfectly adapted to its intellectual condition, and formed to the
child as perfect an embodiment of the all-good, all-wise, and
all-powerful as the most enlightened philosopher ever formed to
himself.

     On 21st April Miss Evans went to London with the Brays, and,
     among other things, heard "Elijah" at Exeter Hall. On
     returning to Coventry she writes:

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 30th April, 1847.]

I did so long to see you after hearing "Elijah," just to exchange an
exclamation of delight. Last night I had a perfect treat, too, in "I
Puritani." Castellar was admirable as Elvira, and Gardoni as a seraph.
N.B.--I liked the Babel less--another sign of age.

     Mention has already been made of Miss Mary Sibree (now Mrs.
     John Cash of Coventry), and as the following genial letter is
     addressed to her, it gives an opportunity for mentioning here
     that Miss Evans had a high regard for all the members of the
     Sibree family. At the end of this year (1847) and the
     beginning of 1848 there will be found an interesting
     correspondence with Miss Sibree's brother, Mr. John Sibree,
     who, in 1849, published a translation of Hegel's "Lectures
     on the Philosophy of History," and in 1880 a volume of poems
     entitled "Fancy, and other Rhymes." The subjoined extract
     from a communication from Mrs. Cash will show upon what terms
     Miss Evans was with the family:

     "It was in the early part of the year 1841 that Miss Franklin
     came to see my mother at our house on the Foleshill
     road--about a mile and a half from Coventry--to tell her, as
     a piece of most interesting news, that an old pupil, of whom
     she herself and her sister Rebecca had always been very
     proud, was coming at the Lady-Day quarter to live at a house
     on the same road--within five minutes' walk of ours. This was
     Miss Evans, then twenty-one years of age. Miss Franklin dwelt
     with much pride on Miss Evans's mental power, on her skill in
     music, etc.; but the great recommendation to my mother's
     interest was the zeal for others which had marked her earnest
     piety at school, where she had induced the girls to come
     together for prayer, and which had led her to visit the poor
     most diligently in the cottages round her own home. Many
     years after, an old nurse of mine told me that these poor
     people had said, after her removal, 'We shall never have
     another Mary Ann Evans.'

     "My mother was asked to second and help her in work of this
     kind. 'She will be sure to get something up very soon,' was
     the last remark I can recall; and on her first visit to us I
     well remember she told us of a club for clothing, set going
     by herself and her neighbor Mrs. Pears, in a district to
     which she said 'the euphonious name of the Pudding-Pits had
     been given.' It was not until the winter of 1841, or early
     in 1842, that my mother first received (not from Miss Evans's
     own lips, but through a mutual friend) the information that a
     total change had taken place in this gifted woman's mind with
     respect to the evangelical religion, which she had evidently
     believed in up to the time of her coming to Coventry, and for
     which, she once told me, she had at one time sacrificed the
     cultivation of her intellect, and a proper regard to personal
     appearance. 'I used,' she said, 'to go about like an owl, to
     the great disgust of my brother; and I would have denied him
     what I now see to have been quite lawful amusements.' My
     mother's grief, on hearing of this change in one whom she had
     begun to love, was very great; but she thought argument and
     expostulation might do much, and I well remember a long
     evening devoted to it, but no more of the subject-matter than
     her indignant refusal to blame the Jews for not seeing in a
     merely spiritual Deliverer a fulfilment of promises of a
     temporal one; and a still more emphatic protest against my
     father's assertion that we had no claim on God. To Miss
     Evans's affectionate and pathetic speech to my mother, 'Now,
     Mrs. Sibree, you won't care to have anything more to do with
     me,' my mother rejoined, 'On the contrary, I shall feel more
     interested in you than ever.' But it was very evident at this
     time that she stood in no _need_ of sympathizing friends;
     that the desire for congenial society, as well as for books
     and larger opportunities for culture, which had led her most
     eagerly to seek a removal from Griff to a home near Coventry,
     had been met beyond her highest expectations. In Mr. and Mrs.
     Bray, and in the Hennell family, she had found friends who
     called forth her interest and stimulated her powers in no
     common degree. This was traceable even in externals--in the
     changed tone of voice and manner--from formality to a
     geniality which opened my heart to her, and made the next
     five years the most important epoch in my life. She gave me
     (as yet in my teens) weekly lessons in German, speaking
     freely on all subjects, but with no attempt to directly
     unsettle my evangelical beliefs, confining herself in these
     matters to a steady protest against the claim of the
     Evangelicals to an exclusive possession of higher motives to
     morality--or even to religion. Speaking to my mother of her
     dearest friend, Mrs. Bray, she said, 'She is the most
     religious person I know.' Of Mr. Charles Hennell, in whose
     writings she had great interest, she said, 'He is a perfect
     model of manly excellence.'

     "On one occasion, at Mr. Bray's house at Rosehill, roused by
     a remark of his on the beneficial influence exercised by
     evangelical beliefs on the moral feelings, she said
     energetically, 'I say it now, and I say it once for all, that
     I am influenced in my own conduct at the present time by far
     higher considerations, and by a nobler idea of duty, than I
     ever was while I held the evangelical beliefs.' When, at
     length, after my brother's year's residence at the Hallé
     University (in 1842-43), my own mind having been much
     exercised in the matter of religion, I felt the moral
     difficulties press heavily on my conscience, and my whole
     heart was necessarily poured out to my 'guide, philosopher,
     and friend,' the steady turning of my attention from
     theoretical questions to a confession of my own want of
     thoroughness in arithmetic, which I pretended to teach; and
     the request that I would specially give attention to this
     study and get my conscience clear about it, and that I would
     not come to her again until my views of religion were also
     clear, is too characteristic of Miss Evans, as I knew her
     during those years, and too much in harmony with the moral
     teaching of George Eliot, to be omitted in reminiscences by
     one to whom that wholesome advice proved a turning-point in
     life. Two things more I cannot omit to mention: one, the
     heightened sense given to me by her of the duty of making
     conversation profitable, and, in general, of using time for
     serious purposes--of the positive immorality of frittering it
     away in ill-natured or in poor, profitless talk; another, the
     debt (so frequently acknowledged by Miss Evans to me) which
     she owed, during the years of her life with her father, to
     the intercourse she enjoyed with her friends at Rosehill. Mr.
     and Mrs. Bray and Miss Hennell, with their friends, were
     _her_ world; and on my saying to her once, as we closed the
     garden-door together, that we seemed to be entering a
     paradise, she said, 'I do indeed feel that I shut the world
     out when I shut that door.' It is consoling to me now to feel
     that in her terrible suffering through her father's illness
     and death, which were most trying to witness, she had such
     alleviations."

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Mary Sibree, 10th May, 1847.]

It is worth while to forget a friend for a week or ten days, just for
the sake of the agreeable kind of startle it gives one to be reminded
that one has such a treasure in reserve--the same sort of pleasure, I
suppose, that a poor body feels who happens to lay his hand on an
undreamed-of sixpence which had sunk to a corner of his pocket. When
Mr. Sibree brought me your parcel, I had been to London for a week;
and having been full of Mendelssohn oratorios and Italian operas, I
had just this kind of delightful surprise when I saw your note and the
beautiful purse. Not that I mean to compare you to a sixpence; you are
a bright, golden sovereign to me, with edges all unrubbed, fit to
remind a poor, tarnished, bruised piece, like me, that there are ever
fresh and more perfect coinages of human nature forthcoming. I am very
proud of my purse--first, because I have long had to be ashamed of
drawing my old one out of my pocket; and, secondly, because it is a
sort of symbol of your love for me--and who is not proud to be loved?
For there is a beautiful kind of pride at which no one need frown--I
may call it a sort of impersonal pride--a thrill of exultation at all
that is good and lovely and joyous as a possession of our human
nature.

I am glad to think of all your pleasure among friends new and old.
Mrs. D----'s mother is, I dare say, a valuable person; but do not, I
beseech thee, go to old people as oracles on matters which date any
later than their thirty-fifth year. Only trust them, if they are good,
in those practical rules which are the common property of long
experience. If they are governed by one special idea which
circumstances or their own mental bias have caused them to grasp with
peculiar firmness, and to work up into original forms, make yourself
master of their thoughts and convictions, the residuum of all that
long travail which poor mortals have to encounter in their threescore
years and ten, but do not trust their application of their gathered
wisdom; for however just old people may be their _principles_ of
judgment, they are often wrong in their application of them, from an
imperfect or unjust conception of the matter to be judged. Love and
cherish and venerate the old; but never imagine that a worn-out,
dried-up organization can be so rich in inspiration as one which is
full fraught with life and energy. I am not talking like one who is
superlatively jealous for the rights of the old; yet such I am, I
assure thee. I heard Mendelssohn's new oratorio, "Elijah," when I was
in London. It has been performed four times in Exeter Hall to as large
an audience as the building would hold--Mendelssohn himself the
conductor. It is a glorious production, and altogether I look upon it
as a kind of sacramental purification of Exeter Hall, and a
proclamation of indulgence for all that is to be perpetrated there
during this month of May. This is a piece of impiety which you may
expect from a lady who has been guanoing her mind with French novels.
This is the impertinent expression of D'Israeli, who, writing himself
much more detestable stuff than ever came from a French pen, can do
nothing better to bamboozle the unfortunates who are seduced into
reading his "Tancred" than speak superciliously of all other men and
things--an expedient much more successful in some quarters than one
would expect. But _au fond_, dear Mary, I have no impiety in my mind
at this moment, and my soul heartily responds to your rejoicing that
society is attaining a more perfect idea and exhibition of Paul's
exhortation--"Let the same mind be in you which was also in Christ
Jesus." I believe the Amen to this will be uttered more and more
fervently, "Among all posterities for evermore."

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 15th June, 1847.]

Ask me not why I have never written all this weary time. I can only
answer, "All things are full of labor--man cannot utter it"--_et seq._
See the first chapter of Ecclesiastes for my experience.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 16th Sept. 1847.]

I have read the "Inquiry" again with more than interest--with delight
and high admiration. My present impression from it far surpasses the
one I had retained from my two readings about five years ago. With the
exception of a few expressions which seem too little discriminating in
the introductory sketch, there is nothing in its whole tone, from
beginning to end, that jars on my moral sense; and apart from any
opinion of the book as an explanation of the existence of Christianity
and the Christian documents, I am sure that no one, fit to read it at
all, could read it without being intellectually and morally
stronger--the reasoning is so close, the induction so clever, the
style so clear, vigorous, and pointed, and the animus so candid and
even generous. Mr. Hennell ought to be one of the happiest of men that
he has done such a life's work. I am sure if I had written such a book
I should be invulnerable to all the arrows of all spiteful gods and
goddesses. I should say, "None of these things move me, neither count
I my life dear unto myself," seeing that I have delivered such a
message of God to men. The book is full of _wit_, to me. It gives me
that exquisite kind of laughter which comes from the gratification of
the reasoning faculties. For instance: "If some of those who were
actually at the mountain doubted whether they saw Jesus or not, we may
reasonably doubt whether he was to be seen at all there: especially as
the words attributed to him do not seem at all likely to have been
said, from the disciples paying no attention to them." "The disciples
considered her (Mary Magdalene's) words idle tales, and believed them
not." We have thus their example for considering her testimony alone
as insufficient, and for seeking further evidence. To say "Jewish
philosopher" seems almost like saying a round square; yet those two
words appear to me the truest description of Jesus. I think the
"Inquiry" furnishes the utmost that can be done towards obtaining a
_real_ view of the life and character of Jesus, by rejecting as little
as possible from the Gospels. I confess that I should call many things
"shining ether," to which Mr. Hennell allows the solid angularity of
facts; but I think he has thoroughly worked out the problem--subtract
from the New Testament the miraculous and highly improbable, and what
will be the remainder?

     At the end of September Miss Evans and her father went for a
     little trip to the Isle of Wight, and on their return there
     is the following letter:

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 13th Oct. 1847.]

I heartily wish you had been with me to see all the beauties which
have gladdened my soul and made me feel that this earth is as good a
heaven as I ought to dream of. I have a much greater respect for the
Isle of Wight, now I have seen it, than when I knew it only by
report--a compliment which one can seldom very sincerely pay to things
and people that one has heard puffed and bepraised. I do long for you
to see Alum Bay. Fancy a very high precipice, the strata upheaved
perpendicularly in rainbow-like streaks of the brightest maize,
violet, pink, blue, red, brown, and brilliant white, worn by the
weather into fantastic fretwork, the deep blue sky above, and the
glorious sea below. It seems an enchanted land, where the earth is of
more delicate, refined materials than this dingy planet of ours is
wrought out of. You might fancy the strata formed of the compressed
pollen of flowers, or powder from bright insects. You can think of
nothing but Calypsos, or Prosperos and Ariels, and such-like beings.

I find one very great spiritual good attendant on a quiet, meditative
journey among fresh scenes. I seem to have removed to a distance from
myself when I am away from the petty circumstances that make up my
ordinary environment. I can take myself up by the ears and inspect
myself, like any other queer monster on a small scale. I have had many
thoughts, especially on a subject that I should like to work out--"The
superiority of the consolations of philosophy to those of (so-called)
religion." Do you stare?

Thank you for putting me on reading Sir Charles Grandison. I have read
five volumes, and am only vexed that I have not the two last on my
table at this moment, that I might have them for my _convives_. I had
no idea that Richardson was worth so much. I have had more pleasure
from him than from all the Swedish novels together. The morality is
perfect--there is nothing for the new lights to correct.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 27th Nov. 1847.]

How do you like "Lelia," of which you have never spoken one word? I am
provoked with you for being in the least pleased with "Tancred;" but
if you have found out any lofty meaning in it, or any true picturing
of life, tell it me, and I will recant. I have found two new readers
of Strauss. One, a lady at Leamington, who is also reading the
"Inquiry," but likes Strauss better! The other is a gentleman here in
Coventry; he says "it is most clever and ingenious, and that no one
whose faith rests only on the _common_ foundation can withstand it." I
think he may safely say that his faith rests on an _un_common
foundation. The book will certainly give him a lift in the right
direction, from its critical, logical character--just the opposite of
his own. I was interested the other day in talking to a young lady who
lives in a nest of clergymen, her brothers, but not of the evangelical
school. She had been reading Blanco White's life, and seems to have
had her spirit stirred within her, as every one's must be who reads
the book with any power of appreciation. She is unable to account to
herself for the results at which Blanco White arrived with his
earnestness and love of truth; and she asked me if I had come to the
same conclusions.

I think "Live and teach" should be a proverb as well as "Live and
learn." We must teach either for good or evil; and if we use our
inward light as the Quaker tells us, always taking care to feed and
trim it well, our teaching must, in the end, be for good. We are
growing old together--are we not? I am growing happier too. I am
amusing myself with thinking of the prophecy of Daniel as a sort of
allegory. All those monstrous, "rombustical" beasts with their
horns--the horn with eyes and a mouth speaking proud things, and the
little horn that waxed rebellious and stamped on the stars, seem like
my passions and vain fancies, which are to be knocked down one after
the other, until all is subdued into a universal kingdom over which
the Ancient of Days presides--the spirit of love--the Catholicism of
the Universe--if you can attach any meaning to such a phrase. It _has_
a meaning for my sage noddle.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Jan. 1848.]

I am reading George Sand's "Lettres d'un Voyageur" with great delight,
and hoping that they will some time do you as much good as they do me.
In the meantime, I think the short letter about "Lelia" will interest
you. It has a very deep meaning to my apprehension. You can send back
the pages when you have duly digested them. I once said of you that
yours was a sort of alkali nature which would detect the slightest acid
of falsehood. You began to phiz-z-z directly it approached you. I want
you as a test. I now begin to see the necessity of the arrangement (a
bad word) that love should determine people's fate while they are
young. It is so impossible to admire--"_s'enthousiasmer_" of--an
_individual_ as one gets older.

     Here follows the interesting correspondence, referred to
     before, with Mr. John Sibree:

[Sidenote: Letter to J. Sibree, beginning of 1848.]

Begin your letter by abusing me, according to my example. There is
nothing like a little gunpowder for a damp chimney; and an explosion
of that sort will set the fire of your ideas burning to admiration. I
hate bashfulness and modesties, as Sir Hugh Evans would say; and I
warn you that I shall make no apologies, though, from my habit of
writing only to people who, rather than have nothing from me, will
tolerate nothings, I shall be very apt to forget that you are not one
of those amiably silly individuals. I must write to you _more meo_,
without taking pains or laboring to be _spirituelle_ when Heaven never
meant me to be so; and it is your own fault if you bear with my
letters a moment after they become an infliction. I am glad you detest
Mrs. Hannah More's letters. I like neither her letters, nor her books,
nor her character. She was that most disagreeable of all monsters, a
blue-stocking--a monster that can only exist in a miserably false
state of society, in which a woman with but a smattering of learning
or philosophy is classed along with singing mice and card-playing
pigs. It is some time since I read "Tancred," so that I have no very
vivid recollection of its details; but I thought it very "thin," and
inferior in the working up to "Coningsby" and "Sybil." Young
Englandism is almost as remote from my sympathies as Jacobitism, as
far as its force is concerned, though I love and respect it as an
effort on behalf of the people. D'Israeli is unquestionably an able
man, and I always enjoy his tirades against liberal principles as
opposed to popular principles--the name by which he distinguishes his
own. As to his theory of races, it has not a leg to stand on, and can
only be buoyed up by such windy eloquence as--You chubby-faced,
squabby-nosed Europeans owe your commerce, your arts, your religion,
to the Hebrews--nay, the Hebrews lead your armies: in proof of which
he can tell us that Massena, a second-rate general of Napoleon's, was
a Jew, whose real name was Manasseh. Extermination up to a certain
point seems to be the law for the inferior races--for the rest fusion,
both for physical and moral ends. It appears to me that the law by
which privileged classes degenerate, from continual intermarriage,
must act on a larger scale in deteriorating whole races. The nations
have been always kept apart until they have sufficiently developed
their idiosyncrasies, and then some great revolutionary force has been
called into action, by which the genius of a particular nation becomes
a portion of the common mind of humanity. Looking at the matter
æsthetically, our idea of beauty is never formed on the
characteristics of a single race. I confess the types of the pure
races, however handsome, always impress me disagreeably; there is an
undefined feeling that I am looking not at _man_, but at a specimen of
an order under Cuvier's class Bimana. The negroes certainly puzzle me.
All the other races seem plainly destined to extermination, not
excepting even the Hebrew Caucasian. But the negroes are too
important, physiologically and geographically, for one to think of
their extermination; while the repulsion between them and the other
races seems too strong for fusion to take place to any great extent.
On one point I heartily agree with D'Israeli as to the superiority of
the Oriental races--their clothes are beautiful and their manners are
agreeable. Did you not think the picture of the Barroni family
interesting? I should like to know who are the originals. The
fellowship of race, to which D'Israeli so exultingly refers the
munificence of Sidonia, is so evidently an inferior impulse, which
must ultimately be superseded, that I wonder even he, Jew as he is,
dares to boast of it. My Gentile nature kicks most resolutely against
any assumption of superiority in the Jews, and is almost ready to echo
Voltaire's vituperation. I bow to the supremacy of Hebrew poetry, but
much of their early mythology, and almost all their history, is
utterly revolting. Their stock has produced a Moses and a Jesus; but
Moses was impregnated with Egyptian philosophy, and Jesus is venerated
and adored by us only for that wherein he transcended or resisted
Judaism. The very exaltation of their idea of a national deity into a
spiritual monotheism seems to have been borrowed from the other
Oriental tribes. Everything specifically Jewish is of a low grade.

And do you really think that sculpture and painting are to die out of
the world? If that be so, let another deluge come as quickly as
possible, that a new race of Glums and Gowries may take possession of
this melancholy earth. I agree with you as to the inherent superiority
of music--as that questionable woman, the Countess Hahn-Hahn, says
painting and sculpture are but an idealizing of our actual existence.
Music arches over this existence with another and a diviner. Amen,
too, to that _ideenvoll_ observation of Hegel's. "We hardly know what
it is to feel for human misery until we have heard a shriek; and a
more perfect hell might be made out of sound than out of any
preparation of fire and brimstone." When the tones of our voice have
betrayed peevishness or harshness, we seem to be doubly haunted by the
ghost of our sin; we are doubly conscious that we have been untrue to
our part in the great Handel chorus. But I cannot assent to the notion
that music is to supersede the other arts, or that the highest minds
must necessarily aspire to a sort of Milton blindness, in which the
_tiefste der Sinne_ is to be a substitute for all the rest. I cannot
recognize the truth of all that is said about the necessity of
religious fervor to high art. I am sceptical as to the real existence
of such fervor in any of the greatest artists. Artistic power seems to
me to resemble dramatic power--to be an intimate perception of the
varied states of which the human mind is susceptible, with ability to
give them out anew in intensified expression. It is true that the
older the world gets originality becomes less possible. Great subjects
are used up, and civilization tends evermore to repress individual
predominance, highly wrought agony, or ecstatic joy. But all the
gentler emotions will be ever new, ever wrought up into more and more
lovely combinations, and genius will probably take their direction.

Have you ever seen a head of Christ taken from a statue, by
Thorwaldsen, of Christ scourged? If not, I think it would almost
satisfy you. There is another work of his, said to be very sublime,
of the Archangel waiting for the command to sound the last trumpet.
Yet Thorwaldsen came at the fag end of time.

I am afraid you despise landscape painting; but to me even the works
of our own Stanfield, and Roberts, and Creswick bring a whole world of
thought and bliss--"a sense of something far more deeply interfused."
The ocean and the sky and the everlasting hills are spirit to me, and
they will never be robbed of their sublimity.

[Sidenote: Letter to J. Sibree, beginning of 1848.]

I have tired myself with trying to write cleverly, _invitâ Minervâ_,
and having in vain endeavored to refresh myself by turning over
Lavater's queer sketches of physiognomies, and still queerer judgments
on them, it is a happy thought of mine that I have a virtuous reason
for spending my _ennui_ on you.

I send you a stanza I picked up the other day in George Sand's
"Lettres d'un Voyageur," which is almost the ultimatum of human wisdom
on the question of human sorrow.

     "Le bonheur et le malheur,
     Nous viennent du même auteur,
     Voilà la _ressemblance_.
     Le bonheur nous rend heureux,
     Et le malheur malheureux,
     Voilà la différence."

Ah, here comes a cup of coffee to console me! When I have taken it I
will tell you what George Sand says: "Sais tu bien que tout est dit
devant Dieu et devant les hommes quand l'homme infortuné demande
compte de ses maux et qu'il obtient cette réponse? Qu'y a-t-il de
plus? Rien." But I am not a mocking pen, and if I were talking to you
instead of writing, you would detect some falsity in the ring of my
voice. Alas! the atrabiliar patient you describe is first cousin to
me in my very worst moods, but I have a profound faith that the
serpent's head will be bruised. This conscious kind of false life that
is ever and anon endeavoring to form itself within us and eat away our
true life, will be overcome by continued accession of vitality, by our
perpetual increase in "quantity of existence," as Foster calls it.
Creation is the superadded life of the intellect; sympathy,
all-embracing love, the superadded moral life. These given more and
more abundantly, I feel that all the demons, which are but my own
egotism mopping and mowing and gibbering, would vanish away, and there
would be no place for them,

     "For every gift of noble origin
     Is breathed upon by hope's perpetual breath."

Evils, even sorrows, are they not all negations? Thus matter is in a
perpetual state of decomposition; superadd the principle of life, and
the tendency to decomposition is overcome. Add to this consciousness,
and there is a power of self-amelioration. The passions and senses
decompose, so to speak. The intellect, by its analytic power,
restrains the fury with which they rush to their own destruction; the
moral nature purifies, beautifies, and at length transmutes them. But
to whom am I talking? You know far more _sur ce chapitre_ than I.

Every one talks of himself or herself to me, and I beg you will follow
every one's example in this one thing only. Individuals are precious
to me in proportion as they unfold to me their intimate selves. I have
just had lent me the journal of a person who died some years ago. When
I was less venerable I should have felt the reading of such a thing
insupportable; now it interests me, though it is the simplest record
of events and feelings.

Mary says she has told you about Mr. Dawson and his lecture--miserably
crude and mystifying in some parts, but with a few fine passages. He
is a very delightful man, but not (at least so say my impressions) a
great man. How difficult it is to be great in this world, where there
is a tariff for spiritualities as well as for beeves and cheese and
tallow. It is scarcely possible for a man simply to give out his true
inspiration--the real, profound conviction which he has won by hard
wrestling, or the few-and-far-between pearls of imagination; he must
go on talking or writing by rote, or he must starve. Would it not be
better to take to tent-making with Paul, or to spectacle-making with
Spinoza?

[Sidenote: Letter to J. Sibree, Feb. 1848.]

Write and tell you that I join you in your happiness about the French
Revolution? Very fine, my good friend. If I made you wait for a letter
as long as you do me, our little _échantillon_ of a millennium would
be over, Satan would be let loose again, and I should have to share
your humiliation instead of your triumph.

Nevertheless I absolve you, for the sole merit of thinking rightly
(that is, of course, just as I do) about _la grande nation_ and its
doings. You and Carlyle (have you seen his article in last week's
_Examiner_?) are the only two people who feel just as I would have
them--who can glory in what is actually great and beautiful without
putting forth any cold reservations and incredulities to save their
credit for wisdom. I am all the more delighted with your enthusiasm
because I didn't expect it. I feared that you lacked revolutionary
ardor. But no--you are just as _sans-culottish_ and rash as I would
have you. You are not one of those sages whose reason keeps so tight
a rein on their emotions that they are too constantly occupied in
calculating consequences to rejoice in any great manifestation of the
forces that underlie our every-day existence. I should have written a
soprano to your jubilate the very next day, but that, lest I should be
exalted above measure, a messenger of Satan was sent in the form of a
headache, and directly on the back of that a face-ache, so that I have
been a mere victim of sensations, memories, and visions for the last
week. I am even now, as you may imagine, in a very shattered,
limbo-like mental condition.

I thought we had fallen on such evil days that we were to see no
really great movement; that ours was what St. Simon calls a purely
critical epoch, not at all an organic one; but I begin to be glad of
my date. I would consent, however, to have a year clipped off my life
for the sake of witnessing such a scene as that of the men of the
barricades bowing to the image of Christ, "who first taught fraternity
to men." One trembles to look into every fresh newspaper lest there
should be something to mar the picture; but hitherto even the scoffing
newspaper critics have been compelled into a tone of genuine respect
for the French people and the Provisional Government. Lamartine can
act a poem if he cannot write one of the very first order. I hope that
beautiful face given to him in the pictorial newspaper is really his;
it is worthy of an aureole. I am chiefly anxious about Albert, the
operative, but his picture is not to be seen. I have little patience
with people who can find time to pity Louis Philippe and his
moustachioed sons. Certainly our decayed monarchs should be pensioned
off; we should have a hospital for them, or a sort of zoological
garden, where these worn-out humbugs may be preserved. It is but
justice that we should keep them, since we have spoiled them for any
honest trade. Let them sit on soft cushions, and have their dinner
regularly, but, for Heaven's sake, preserve me from sentimentalizing
over a pampered old man when the earth has its millions of unfed souls
and bodies. Surely he is not so Ahab-like as to wish that the
revolution had been deferred till his son's days: and I think that the
shades of the Stuarts would have some reason to complain if the
Bourbons, who are so little better than they, had been allowed to
reign much longer.

I should have no hope of good from any imitative movement at home. Our
working classes are eminently inferior to the mass of the French
people. In France the _mind_ of the people is highly electrified; they
are full of ideas on social subjects; they really desire social
_reform_--not merely an acting out of Sancho Panza's favorite proverb,
"Yesterday for you, to-day for me." The revolutionary animus extended
over the whole nation, and embraced the rural population--not merely,
as with us, the artisans of the towns. Here there is so much larger a
proportion of selfish radicalism and unsatisfied brute sensuality (in
the agricultural and mining districts especially) than of perception
or desire of justice that a revolutionary movement would be simply
destructive, not constructive. Besides, it would be put down. Our
military have no notion of "fraternizing." They have the same sort of
inveteracy as dogs have for the ill-dressed _canaille_. They are as
mere a brute force as a battering-ram; and the aristocracy have got
firm hold of them. And there is nothing in our constitution to
obstruct the slow progress of _political_ reform. This is all we are
fit for at present. The social reform which may prepare us for great
changes is more and more the object of effort both in Parliament and
out of it. But we English are slow crawlers. The sympathy in Ireland
seems at present only of the water-toast kind. The Glasgow riots are
more serious; but one cannot believe in a Scotch Reign of Terror in
these days. I should not be sorry to hear that the Italians had risen
_en masse_, and chased the odious Austrians out of beautiful Lombardy.
But this they could hardly do without help, and that involves another
European war.

Concerning the "tent-making," there is much more to be said, but am I
to adopt your rule and never speak of what I suppose we agree about?
It is necessary to me, not simply to _be_ but to _utter_, and I
require utterance of my friends. What is it to me that I think the
same thoughts? I think them in a somewhat different fashion. No mind
that has any _real_ life is a mere echo of another. If the perfect
unison comes occasionally, as in music, it enhances the harmonies. It
is like a diffusion or expansion of one's own life to be assured that
its vibrations are repeated in another, and words are the media of
those vibrations. Is not the universe itself a perpetual utterance of
the one Being? So I say again, utter, utter, utter, and it will be a
deed of mercy twice blessed, for I shall be a safety-valve for your
communicativeness and prevent it from splitting honest people's brains
who don't understand you; and, moreover, it will be fraught with
ghostly comfort to me.

[Sidenote: Letter to J. Sibree, Sunday evening, later in 1848.]

I might make a very plausible excuse for not acknowledging your kind
note earlier by telling you that I have been both a nurse and invalid;
but, to be thoroughly ingenuous, I must confess that all this would
not have been enough to prevent my writing but for my chronic disease
of utter idleness. I have heard and thought of you with great
interest, however. You have my hearty and not inexperienced sympathy;
for, to speak in the style of Jonathan Oldbuck, I am _haud ignara
mali_. I have gone through a trial of the same genus as yours, though
rather differing in species. I sincerely rejoice in the step you have
taken; it is an absolutely necessary condition for any true
development of your nature. It was impossible to think of your career
with hope, while you tacitly subscribed to the miserable _etiquette_
(it deserves no better or more spiritual name) of sectarianism. Only
persevere; be true, firm, and loving; not too anxious about immediate
usefulness to others--that can only be a result of justice to
yourself. Study mental hygiene. Take long doses of _dolce far niente_,
and be in no great hurry about anything in this 'varsal world! Do we
not commit ourselves to sleep, and so resign all care for ourselves
every night; lay ourselves gently on the bosom of Nature or God? A
beautiful reproach to the spirit of some religionists and ultra good
people.

I like the notion of your going to Germany, as good in every way, for
yourself, body and mind, and for all others. Oh, the bliss of having a
very high attic in a romantic Continental town, such as Geneva, far
away from morning callers, dinners, and decencies, and then to pause
for a year and think _de omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis_, and then
to return to life, and work for poor stricken humanity, and never
think of self again![23]

I am writing nearly in the dark, with the post-boy waiting. I fear I
shall not be at home when you come home, but surely I shall see you
before you leave England. However that may be, I shall utter a genuine
_Lebewohl_.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 1st Feb. 1848.]

In my view there are but two kinds of _regular_ correspondence
possible--one of simple affection, which gives a picture of all the
details, painful and pleasurable, that a loving heart pines after, and
this we carry on through the medium of Cara; or one purely moral and
intellectual, carried on for the sake of ghostly edification, in which
each party has to put salt on the tails of all sorts of ideas on all
sorts of subjects, in order to send a weekly or fortnightly packet, as
so much duty and self-castigation. I have always been given to
understand that such Lady-Jane-Grey-like works were your abhorrence.
However, let me know what you _would_ like--what would make you
continue to hold me in loving remembrance or convince you that you are
a bright evergreen in my garden of pleasant plants. Behold me ready to
tear off my right hand or pluck out my right eye (metaphorically, of
course--I speak to an experienced exegetist, _comme dirait notre_
Strauss), or write reams of letters full of interesting falsehoods or
very dull truths. We have always concluded that our correspondence
should be of the _third_ possible kind--one of impulse, which is
necessarily irregular as the Northern Lights.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 14th April, 1848.]

I am a miserable wretch, with aching limbs and sinking spirits, but
still alive enough to feel the kindness of your last note. I
thoroughly enjoyed your delight in Emerson. I should have liked to see
you sitting by him "with awful eye," for once in your life feeling all
the bliss of veneration. I am quite uncertain about our movements.
Dear father gets on very slowly, if at all. You will understand the
impossibility of my forming any plans for my own pleasure. Rest is
the only thing I can think of with pleasure now.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 20th April, 1848.]

Dear father is so decidedly progressing towards recovery that I am
full of quiet joy--a gentle dawning light after the moonlight of
sorrow. I have found already some of the "sweet uses" that belong only
to what is called trouble, which is, after all, only a deepened gaze
into life, like the sight of the darker blue and the thickening host
of stars when the hazy effect of twilight is gone--as our dear Blanco
White said of death. I shall have less time than I have had at my own
disposal, probably; but I feel prepared to accept life, nay, lovingly
to embrace it, in any form in which it shall present itself.

     Some time in May Mr. Evans and his daughter went to St.
     Leonard's, and remained there till near the end of June. His
     mortal illness had now taken hold of him, and this was a
     depressing time, both for him and for her, as will be seen
     from the following letters:

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, May, 1848.]

Your words of affection seem to make this earthly atmosphere sit less
heavily on my shoulders, and in gratitude I must send you my thanks
before I begin to read of Henry Gow and Fair Catharine for father's
delectation. In truth, I have found it somewhat difficult to live for
the last week--conscious all the time that the only additions to my
lot worth having must be more strength to love in my own nature; but
perhaps this very consciousness has an irritating rather than a
soothing effect. I have a fit of sensitiveness upon me, which, after
all, is but egotism and mental idleness. The enthusiasm without which
one cannot even pour out breakfast well (at least _I_ cannot) has
forsaken me. You may laugh, and wonder when my enthusiasm has
displayed itself, but that will only prove that you are no seer. I can
never live long without it in some form or other. I possess my soul in
patience for a time, believing that this dark, damp vault in which I
am groping will soon come to an end, and the fresh, green earth and
the bright sky be all the more precious to me. But for the present my
address is Grief Castle, on the River of Gloom, in the Valley of
Dolor. I was amused to find that Castle Campbell in Scotland was
called so. Truly for many seasons in my life I should have been an
appropriate denizen of such a place; but I have faith that unless I am
destined to insanity, I shall never again abide long in that same
castle. I heartily say Amen to your dictum about the cheerfulness of
"large moral regions." Where _thought_ and _love_ are active--thought
the formative power, love the vitalizing--there can be no sadness.
They are in themselves a more intense and extended participation of a
divine existence. As they grow, the highest species of faith grows
too, and all things are possible. I don't know why I should prose in
this way to you. But I wanted to thank you for your note, and all this
selfish grumbling was at my pen's end. And now I have no time to
redeem myself. We shall not stay long away from home, I feel sure.

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, 31st May, 1848.]

Father has done wonders in the way of walking and eating--for him--but
he makes not the slightest attempt to amuse himself, so that I
scarcely feel easy in following my own bent even for an hour. I have
told you everything now, except that I look amiable in spite of a
strong tendency to look black, and speak gently, though with a strong
propensity to be snappish. Pity me, ye happier spirits that look
amiable and speak gently because ye _are_ amiable and gentle.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 4th June, 1848.]

Alas for the fate of poor mortals, which condemns them to wake up some
fine morning and find all the poetry in which their world was bathed
only the evening before utterly gone!--the hard, angular world of
chairs and tables and looking-glasses staring at them in all its naked
prose! It is so in all the stages of life; the poetry of girlhood
goes, the poetry of love and marriage, the poetry of maternity, and at
last the very poetry of duty forsakes us for a season, and we see
ourselves, and all about us, as nothing more than miserable
agglomerations of atoms--poor tentative efforts of the _Natur Princip_
to mould a personality. This is the state of prostration, the
self-abnegation, through which the soul must go, and to which perhaps
it must again and again return, that its poetry or religion, which is
the same thing, may be a real, ever-flowing river, fresh from the
windows of heaven and the fountains of the great deep--not an
artificial basin, with grotto-work and gold-fish. I feel a sort of
madness growing upon me, just the opposite of the delirium which makes
people fancy that their bodies are filling the room. It seems to me as
if I were shrinking into that mathematical abstraction, a point. But I
am wasting this "good Sunday morning" in grumblings.

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, 8th June, 1848.]

Poor Louis Blanc! The newspapers make me melancholy; but shame upon me
that I say "poor." The day will come when there will be a temple of
white marble, where sweet incense and anthems shall rise to the memory
of every man and woman who has had a deep _Ahnung_--a presentiment, a
yearning, or a clear vision--of the time when this miserable reign of
Mammon shall end; when men shall be no longer "like the fishes of the
sea," society no more like a face one half of which--the side of
profession, of lip-faith--is fair and God-like; the other half--the
side of deeds and institutions--with a hard, old, wrinkled skin
puckered into the sneer of a Mephistopheles. I worship the man who has
written as the climax of his appeal against society, "L'inegalité des
talents _doit aboutir_ non à l'inegalité des retributions mais à
l'inegalité des devoirs." You will wonder what has wrought me up into
this fury. It is the loathsome fawning, the transparent hypocrisy, the
systematic giving as little as possible for as much as possible that
one meets with here at every turn. I feel that society is training men
and women for hell.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 23d June, 1848.]

All creatures about to moult, or to cast off an old skin, or enter on
any new metamorphosis, have sickly feelings. It was so with me. But
now I am set free from the irritating, worn-out integument. I am
entering on a new period of my life, which makes me look back on the
past as something incredibly poor and contemptible. I am enjoying
repose, strength, and ardor in a greater degree than I have ever
known, and yet I never felt my own insignificance and imperfection so
completely. My heart bleeds for dear father's pains, but it is blessed
to be at hand to give the soothing word and act needed. I should not
have written this description of myself but that I felt your
affectionate letter demanded some I-ism, which, after all, is often
humility rather than pride. Paris, poor Paris--alas! alas!

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, June, 1848.]

I have read "Jane Eyre," and shall be glad to know what you admire in
it. All self-sacrifice is good, but one would like it to be in a
somewhat nobler cause than that of a diabolical law which chains a man
soul and body to a putrefying carcass. However, the book _is_
interesting; only I wish the characters would talk a little less like
the heroes and heroines of police reports.

     About the beginning of July Miss Evans and her father
     returned to Coventry; and the 13th July was a memorable day,
     as Emerson came to visit the Brays, and she went with them to
     Stratford. All she says herself about it is in this note.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Friday, July, 1848.]

I have seen Emerson--the first _man_ I have ever seen. But you have
seen still more of him, so I need not tell you what he is. I shall
leave Cara to tell how the day--the Emerson day--was spent, for I have
a swimming head from hanging over the desk to write business letters
for father. Have you seen the review of Strauss's pamphlet in the
_Edinburgh_? The title is "Der Romantiker auf dem Throne der Cäsaren,
oder Julian der Abtrünnige"--a sort of erudite satire on the King of
Prussia; but the reviewer pronounces it to have a permanent value
quite apart from this fugitive interest. The "Romantiker," or
Romanticist, is one who, in literature, in the arts, in religion or
politics, endeavors to revive the dead past. Julian was a romanticist
in wishing to restore the Greek religion and its spirit, when mankind
had entered on the new development. But you have very likely seen the
review. I must copy one passage, translated from the conclusion of
Strauss's pamphlet, lest you should not have met with it. "Christian
writers have disfigured the death-scene of Julian. They have
represented him as furious, blaspheming, despairing, and in his
despair exclaiming, _Thou_ hast conquered, O Galilean!--'[Greek:
nenikekas Galilaie].' This phrase, though false as history, has a
truth in it. It contains a prophecy--to us a consoling prophecy--and
it is this: Every Julian--_i.e._, every great and powerful man--who
would attempt to resuscitate a state of society which has died, will
infallibly be vanquished by the Galilean--for the Galilean is nothing
less than the genius of the future!"

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Dec. 1848.]

Father's tongue has just given utterance to a thought which has been
very visibly radiating from his eager eyes for some minutes. "I
thought you were going on with the book." I can only bless you for
those two notes, which have emanated from you like so much ambrosial
scent from roses and lavender. Not less am I grateful for the Carlyle
eulogium.[24] I have shed some quite delicious tears over it. This is
a world worth abiding in while one man can thus venerate and love
another. More anon--this from my doleful prison of stupidity and
barrenness, with a yawning trapdoor ready to let me down into utter
fatuity. But I can even yet feel the omnipotence of a glorious chord.
Poor pebble as I am, left entangled among slimy weeds, I can yet hear
from afar the rushing of the blessed torrent, and rejoice that it is
there to bathe and brighten other pebbles less unworthy of the
polishing.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, end of 1848.]

Thank you for a sight of our blessed St. Francis's[25] letter. There
is no imaginable moment in which the thought of such a being could be
an intrusion. His soul is a blessed _yea_. There is a sort of
blasphemy in that proverbial phrase, "Too good to be true." The
highest inspiration of the purest, noblest human soul, is the nearest
expression of the truth. Those extinct volcanoes of one's spiritual
life--those eruptions of the intellect and the passions which have
scattered the lava of doubt and negation over our early faith--are
only a glorious Himalayan chain, beneath which new valleys of
undreamed richness and beauty will spread themselves. Shall we poor
earthworms have sublimer thoughts than the universe, of which we are
poor chips--mere effluvia of mind--shall we have sublimer thoughts
than that universe can furnish out into reality? I am living
unspeakable moments, and can write no more.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Jan. 1849.]

I think of you perpetually, but my thoughts are all aqueous; they will
not crystallize--they are as fleeting as ripples on the sea. I am
suffering perhaps as acutely as ever I did in my life. Breathe a wish
that I may gather strength--the fragrance of your wish will reach me
somehow.

     The next letter is to Mrs. Houghton, who, it will be
     remembered, was the only daughter by Mr. Evans's first
     marriage. Miss Evans had more intellectual sympathy with this
     half-sister Fanny than with any of the other members of her
     family, and it is a pity that more of the letters to her have
     not been preserved.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Houghton, Sunday evening, 1849.]

I have been holding a court of conscience, and I cannot enjoy my
Sunday's music without restoring harmony, without entering a protest
against that superficial soul of mine which is perpetually
contradicting and belying the true inner soul. I am in that mood
which, in another age of the world, would have led me to put on
sackcloth and pour ashes on my head, when I call to mind the sins of
my tongue--my animadversions on the faults of others, as if I thought
myself to be something when I am nothing. When shall I attain to the
true spirit of love which Paul has taught for all the ages? I want no
one to excuse me, dear Fanny; I only want to remove the shadow of my
miserable words and deeds from before the divine image of truth and
goodness, which I would have all beings worship. I need the Jesuits'
discipline of silence, and though my "evil speaking" issues from the
intellectual point of view rather than the moral--though there may be
gall in the thought while there is honey in the feeling, yet the evil
speaking is wrong. We may satirize character and qualities in the
abstract without injury to our moral nature, but persons hardly ever.
Poor hints and sketches of souls as we are--with some slight,
transient vision of the perfect and the true--we had need help each
other to gaze at the blessed heavens instead of peering into each
other's eyes to find out the motes there.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Sunday morning, 4th Feb. 1849.]

I have not touched the piano for nearly two months until this morning,
when, father being better, I was determined to play a mass before the
piano is utterly out of tune again. _Write, asking for nothing again_,
like a true disciple of Jesus. I am still feeling rather shattered in
brain and limbs; but do not suppose that I lack inward peace and
strength. My body is the defaulter--_consciously_ so. I triumph over
all things in the spirit, but the flesh is weak, and disgraces itself
by headaches and backaches. I am delighted to find that you mention
Macaulay, because that is an indication that Mr. Hennell has been
reading him. I thought of Mr. H. all through the book, as the only
person I could be quite sure would enjoy it as much as I did myself. I
did not know if it would interest you: tell me more explicitly that it
does. Think of Babylon being unearthed in spite of the prophecies?
Truly we are looking before and after, "au jour d'aujourd'hui," as
Monsieur Bricolin says. Send me the criticism of Jacques the morn's
morning--only beware there are not too many blasphemies against my
divinity.

Paint soap-bubbles--and never fear but I will find _a_ meaning, though
very likely not your meaning. Paint the Crucifixion in a bubble--after
Turner--and then the Resurrection: I see them now.

There has been a vulgar man sitting by while I have been writing, and
I have been saying parenthetical bits of civility to him to help out
poor father in his conversation, so I have not been quite sure what I
have been saying to you. I have woful aches which take up half my
nervous strength.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 9th Feb. 1849.]

My life is a perpetual nightmare, and always haunted by something to
be done, which I have never the time, or, rather, the energy, to do.
Opportunity is kind, but only to the industrious, and I, alas! am not
one of them. I have sat down in desperation this evening, though dear
father is very uneasy, and his moans distract me, just to tell you
that you have full absolution for your criticism, which I do not
reckon of the impertinent order. I wish you thoroughly to understand
that the writers who have most profoundly influenced me--who have
rolled away the waters from their bed, raised new mountains and spread
delicious valleys for me--are not in the least oracles to me. It is
just possible that I may not embrace one of their opinions; that I may
wish my life to be shaped quite differently from theirs. For instance,
it would signify nothing to me if a very wise person were to stun me
with proofs that Rousseau's views of life, religion, and government
are miserably erroneous--that he was guilty of some of the worst
_bassesses_ that have degraded civilized man. I might admit all this:
and it would be not the less true that Rousseau's genius has sent that
electric thrill through my intellectual and moral frame which has
awakened me to new perceptions; which has made man and nature a fresh
world of thought and feeling to me; and this not by teaching me any
new belief. It is simply that the rushing mighty wind of his
inspiration has so quickened my faculties that I have been able to
shape more definitely for myself ideas which had previously dwelt as
dim _Ahnungen_ in my soul; the fire of his genius has so fused
together old thoughts and prejudices that I have been ready to make
new combinations.

It is thus with George Sand. I should never dream of going to her
writings as a moral code or text-book. I don't care whether I agree
with her about marriage or not--whether I think the design of her plot
correct, or that she had no precise design at all, but began to write
as the spirit moved her, and trusted to Providence for the
catastrophe, which I think the more probable case. It is sufficient
for me, as a reason for bowing before her in eternal gratitude to that
"great power of God manifested in her," that I cannot read six pages
of hers without feeling that it is given to her to delineate human
passion and its results, and (I must say, in spite of your judgment)
some of the moral instincts and their tendencies, with such
truthfulness, such nicety of discrimination, such tragic power, and,
withal, such loving, gentle humor, that one might live a century with
nothing but one's own dull faculties, and not know so much as those
six pages will suggest. The psychological anatomy of Jacques and
Fernande in the early days of their marriage seems quite
preternaturally true--I mean that her power of describing it is
preternatural. Fernande and Jacques are merely the feminine and the
masculine nature, and their early married life an every-day tragedy;
but I will not dilate on the book or on your criticism, for I am so
sleepy that I should write nothing but _bêtises_. I have at last the
most delightful "De imitatione Christi," with quaint woodcuts. One
breathes a cool air as of cloisters in the book--it makes one long to
be a saint for a few months. Verily its piety has its foundations in
the depth of the divine-human soul.

     In March Miss Evans wrote a short notice of the "Nemesis of
     Faith" for the _Coventry Herald_, in which she says:

"We are sure that its author is a bright, particular star, though he
sometimes leaves us in doubt whether he be not a fallen 'son of the
morning.'"

     The paper was sent to Mr. Froude, and on 23d March Mrs. Bray
     writes to Miss Hennell: "Last night at dusk M. A. came
     running in in high glee with a most charming note from
     Froude, naïvely and prettily requesting her to reveal
     herself. He says he recognized her hand in the review in the
     _Coventry Herald_, and if she thinks him a fallen star she
     might help him to rise, but he 'believes he has only been
     dipped in the Styx, and is not much the worse for the bath.'
     Poor girl, I am so pleased she should have this little
     episode in her dull life."

     The next letter again refers to Mr. Froude's books.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Wednesday, April, 1849.]

Tell me not that I am a mere prater--that feeling never talks. I will
talk, and caress, and look lovingly, until death makes me as stony as
the Gorgon-like heads of all the judicious people I know. What is
anything worth until it is uttered? Is not the universe one great
utterance? Utterance there must be in word or deed to make life of any
worth. Every true pentecost is a gift of utterance. Life is too short
and opportunities too meagre for many deeds--besides, the best
friendships are precisely those where there is no possibility of
material helpfulness--and I would take no deeds as an adequate
compensation for the frigid, glassy eye and hard, indifferent tones
of one's very solid and sensible and conscientious friend. You will
wonder of what this is _à propos_--only of a little bitterness in my
own soul just at this moment, and not of anything between you and me.
I have nothing to tell you, for all the "haps" of my life are so
indifferent. I spin my existence so entirely out of myself that there
is a sad want of proper names in my conversation, and I am becoming a
greater bore than ever. It is a consciousness of this that has kept me
from writing to you. My letters would be a sort of hermit's diary. I
have so liked the thought of your enjoying the "Nemesis of Faith." I
quote Keats's sonnet, _à propos_ of that book. It has made me feel--

           "Like some watcher of the skies
     When a new planet swims into his ken;
     Or like stout Cortez--when with eagle eyes
     He stared at the Pacific, and all his men
     Look'd at each other with a wild surmise--
     Silent, upon a peak in Darien."

You must read "The Shadows of the Clouds." It produces a sort of
palpitation that one hardly knows whether to call wretched or
delightful. I cannot take up the book again, though wanting very much
to read it more closely. Poor and shallow as one's own soul is, it is
blessed to think that a sort of transubstantiation is possible by
which the greater ones can live in us. Egotism apart, another's
greatness, beauty, or bliss is one's own. And let us sing a
_Magnificat_ when we are conscious that this power of expansion and
sympathy is growing, just in proportion as the individual
satisfactions are lessening. Miserable dust of the earth we are, but
it is worth while to be so, for the sake of the living soul--the
breath of God within us. You see I can do nothing but scribble my own
prosy stuff--such chopped straw as my soul is foddered on. I am
translating the "Tractatus Theologico-Politicus" of Spinoza, and seem
to want the only friend that knows how to praise or blame. How
exquisite is the satisfaction of feeling that another mind than your
own sees precisely where and what is the difficulty--and can exactly
appreciate the success with which it is overcome. One knows--_sed
longo intervallo_--the full meaning of the "fit audience though few."
How an artist must hate the noodles that stare at his picture, with a
vague notion that it _is_ a clever thing to be able to paint.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Pears, 10th May, 1849.]

I know it will gladden your heart to hear that father spoke of you the
other day with affection and gratitude. He remembers you as one who
helped to strengthen that beautiful spirit of resignation which has
never left him through his long trial. His mind is as clear and
rational as ever, notwithstanding his feebleness, and he gives me a
thousand little proofs that he understands my affection and responds
to it. These are very precious moments to me; my chair by father's
bedside is a very blessed seat to me. My delight in the idea that you
are being benefited after all, prevents me from regretting you, though
you are just the friend that would complete my comfort. Every addition
to your power of enjoying life is an expansion of mine. I partake of
your ebb and flow. I am going to my post now. I have just snatched an
interval to let you know that, though you have taken away a part of
yourself from me, neither you nor any one else can take the whole.

     It will have been seen from these late letters, that the last
     few months of her father's illness had been a terrible strain
     on his daughter's health and spirits. She did all the nursing
     herself, and Mrs. Congreve (who was then Miss Bury, daughter
     of the doctor who was attending Mr. Evans--and who, it will
     be seen, subsequently became perhaps the most intimate and
     the closest of George Eliot's friends) tells me that her
     father told her at the time that he never saw a patient more
     admirably and thoroughly cared for. The translating was a
     great relief when she could get to it. Under date of 19th
     April, 1849, Mrs. Bray writes to Miss Hennell, "M. A. is
     happy now with this Spinoza to do: she says it is such a rest
     for her mind."

     The next letter to Rosehill pathetically describes how the
     end came at last to Mr. Evans's sufferings:

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, half-past nine, Wednesday morning, 31st
May, 1849.]

Dear friends, Mr. Bury told us last night that he thought father would
not last till morning. I sat by him with my hand in his till four
o'clock, and he then became quieter and has had some comfortable
sleep. He is obviously weaker this morning, and has been for the last
two or three days so painfully reduced that I dread to think what his
dear frame may become before life gives way. My brother slept here
last night, and will be here again to-night. What shall I be without
my father? It will seem as if a part of my moral nature were gone. I
write when I can, but I do not know whether my letter will do to send
this evening.

_P.S._--Father is very, very much weaker this evening.

     Mr. Evans died during that night, 31st May, 1849.

[Illustration: Portrait of Mr. Robert Evans.]


_SUMMARY._

MAY, 1846, TO MAY, 1849.

     Visit to Mrs. Hennell at Hackney--Letters to Mrs.
     Bray--Strauss translation published--Visit to Dover with
     father--Classical books wanted--Pleasure in Strauss's
     letter--Brays suspect novel-writing--Letters to Miss Sara
     Hennell--Good spirits--Wicksteed's review of the Strauss
     translation--Reading Foster's life--Visit to Griff--Child's
     view of God (_à propos_ of Miss Hennell's "Heliados")--Visit
     to London--"Elijah"--Likes London less--The Sibree family and
     Mrs. John Cash's reminiscences--Letter to Miss Mary
     Sibree--Letters to Miss Sara Hennell--Mental
     depression--Opinion of Charles Hennell's "Inquiry"--Visit to
     the Isle of Wight with father--Admiration of
     Richardson--Blanco White--Delight in George Sand's "Lettres
     d'un Voyageur"--Letters to Mr. John Sibree--Opinion of Mrs.
     Hannah More's letters--"Tancred," "Coningsby," and
     "Sybil"--D'Israeli's theory of races--Gentile nature kicks
     against superiority of Jews--Bows only to the supremacy of
     Hebrew poetry--Superiority of music among the arts--Relation
     of religion to art--Thorwaldsen's Christ--Admiration of
     Roberts and Creswick--The intellect and moral nature restrain
     the passions and senses--Mr. Dawson the
     lecturer--Satisfaction in French Revolution of '48--The men
     of the barricade bowing to the image of Christ--Difference
     between French and English working-classes--The need of
     utterance--Sympathy with Mr. Sibree in religious
     difficulties--Longing for a high attic in Geneva--Letters to
     Miss Sara Hennell--Views on correspondence--Mental
     depression--Father's illness--Father better--Goes with him to
     St. Leonard's--Letter to Charles Bray--Depression to be
     overcome by thought and love--Admiration of Louis
     Blanc--Recovery from depression--"Jane Eyre"--Return to
     Coventry--Meets Emerson--Strauss's pamphlet on Julian the
     Apostate--Carlyle's eulogium on Emerson--Francis
     Newman--Suffering from depression--Letter to Mrs.
     Houghton--Self-condemnation for evil speaking--Letters to
     Miss Hennell--Macaulay's History--On the influence of George
     Sand's and Rousseau's writing--Writes review of the "Nemesis
     of Faith" for the _Coventry Herald_--Opinion of the "Nemesis"
     and the "Shadows of the Clouds"--Translating Spinoza's
     "Tractatus Theologico-Politicus"--Letter to Mrs. Pears--The
     consolations of nursing--Strain of father's illness--Father's
     death.

FOOTNOTES:

[20] Organs of Combativeness.

[21] Afterwards acknowledged by the author, Robert Landor (brother of
Walter Savage Landor), who also wrote the "Fountain of Arethusa," etc.

[22] John Foster, Baptist minister, born 1770, died 1843.

[23] An _Ahnung_--a presentiment--of her own future.

[24] On Emerson.

[25] Francis Newman.




CHAPTER IV.


     It fortunately happened that the Brays had planned a trip to
     the Continent for this month of June, 1849, and Miss Evans,
     being left desolate by the death of her father, accepted
     their invitation to join them. On the 11th June they started,
     going by way of Paris, Lyons, Avignon, Marseilles, Nice,
     Genoa, Milan, Como, Lago Maggiore, Martigny, and Chamounix,
     arriving at Geneva in the third week of July. Here Miss Evans
     determined to remain for some months, the Brays returning
     home. Before they went, however, they helped her to settle
     herself comfortably _en pension_, and, as will be seen from
     the following letters, the next eight months were quietly and
     peacefully happy. The _pension_ selected in the first
     instance was the Campagne Plongeon, which stands on a slight
     eminence a few hundred yards back from the road on the route
     d'Hermance, some ten minutes' walk from the Hôtel Métropole.
     From the Hôtel National on the Quai de Mont Blanc one catches
     a pleasant glimpse of it nestling among its trees. A
     good-sized, gleaming white house, with a centre, and gables
     at each side, a flight of steps leading from the middle
     window to the ground. A meadow in front, nicely planted,
     slopes charmingly down to the blue lake, and behind the
     house, on the left-hand side, there is an avenue of
     remarkably fine chestnut-trees, whence there is a magnificent
     view of the Jura mountains on the opposite side of the lake.
     The road to Geneva is very beautiful, by the lake-side,
     bordered with plane-trees. It was a delightful, soothing
     change after the long illness and the painful death of her
     father--after the monotonous dulness, too, of an English
     provincial town like Coventry, where there is little beauty
     of any sort to gladden the soul. In the first months
     following a great loss it is good to be alone for a
     time--alone, especially amidst beautiful scenes--and alone in
     the sense of being removed from habitual associations, but
     yet constantly in the society of new acquaintances, who are
     sufficiently interesting, but not too intimate. The Swiss
     correspondence which follows is chiefly addressed to the
     Brays collectively, and describes the life minutely.

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 27th July, 1840.]

About my comfort here, I find no disagreeables, and have every
physical comfort that I care about. The family seems well-ordered and
happy. I have made another friend, too--an elderly English lady, a
Mrs. Locke, who used to live at Ryde--a pretty old lady with plenty of
shrewdness and knowledge of the world. She began to say very kind
things to me in rather a waspish tone yesterday morning at breakfast.
I liked her better at dinner and tea, and to-day we are quite
confidential. I only hope she will stay; she is just the sort of
person I shall like to have to speak to--not at all "congenial," but
with a character of her own. The going down to tea bores me, and I
shall get out of it as soon as I can, unless I can manage to have the
newspapers to read. The American lady embroiders slippers--the mamma
looks on and does nothing. The marquis and his friends play at whist;
the old ladies sew; and madame says things so true that they are
insufferable. She is obliged to talk to all, and cap their
_niaiseries_ with some suitable observation. She has been very kind
and motherly to me. I like her better every time I see her. I have
quiet and comfort--what more can I want to make me a healthy,
reasonable being once more? I will never go near a friend again until
I can bring joy and peace in my heart and in my face--but remember
that friendship will be easy then.

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 5th Aug. 1849.]

I hope my imagination paints truly when it shows me all of you seated
with beaming faces round the tea-table at Rosehill. I shall be
yearning to know that things as well as people are smiling on you; but
I am sure you will not let me wait for news of you longer than is
necessary. My life here would be delightful if we could always keep
the same set of people; but, alas! I fear one generation will go and
another come so fast that I shall not care to become acquainted with
any of them. My good Mrs. Locke is not going, that is one comfort. She
is quite a mother to me--helps me to buy my candles and do all my
shopping--takes care of me at dinner, and quite rejoices when she sees
me enjoy conversation or anything else. The St. Germains are
delightful people--the marquise really seems to me the most charming
person I ever saw, with kindness enough to make the ultra-politeness
of her manners quite genuine. She is very good to me, and says of me,
"Je m'interesse vivement à mademoiselle." The marquis is the most
well-bred, harmless of men. He talks very little--every sentence seems
a terrible gestation, and comes forth _fortissimo_; but he generally
bestows one on me, and seems especially to enjoy my poor tunes (mind
you, all these trivialities are to satisfy your vanity, not
mine--because you are beginning to be ashamed of having loved me).
The gray-headed gentleman got quite fond of talking philosophy with me
before he went; but, alas! he and a very agreeable young man who was
with him are gone to Aix les Bains. The young German is the Baron de
H----. I should think he is not more than two or three and twenty,
very good-natured, but a most determined enemy to all gallantry. I
fancy he is a Communist; but he seems to have been joked about his
opinions by madame and the rest until he has determined to keep a
proud silence on such matters. He has begun to talk to me, and I think
we should become good friends; but he, too, is gone on an expedition
to Monte Rosa. He is expecting his brother to join him here on his
return, but I fear they will not stay long. The _gouvernante_ is a
German, with a moral region that would rejoice Mr. Bray's eyes. Poor
soul, she is in a land of strangers, and often seems to feel her
loneliness. Her situation is a very difficult one; and "_die Angst_,"
she says, often brings on a pain at her heart. Madame is a woman of
some reading and considerable talent--very fond of politics, a
devourer of the journals, with an opinion ready for you on any subject
whatever. It will be a serious loss to her to part with the St.
Germain family. I fear that they will not stay longer than this month.
I should be quite indifferent to the world that comes or goes if once
I had my boxes with all my books. Last Sunday I went with madame to a
small church near Plongeon, and I could easily have fancied myself in
an Independent chapel at home. The spirit of the sermon was not a whit
more elevated than that of our friend Dr. Harris; the text, "What
shall I do to be saved?" the answer of Jesus being blinked as usual.

To-day I have been to hear one of the most celebrated preachers, M.
Meunier. His sermon was really eloquent--all written down, but
delivered with so much energy and feeling that you never thought of
the book. It is curious to notice how patriotism--_dévouement à la
patrie_--is put in the sermons as the first of virtues, even before
devotion to the Church. We never hear of it in England after we leave
school. The good marquis goes with his family and servants, all nicely
dressed, to the Catholic Church. They are a most orderly set of
people: there is nothing but their language and their geniality and
politeness to distinguish them from one of the best of our English
aristocratic families. I am perfectly comfortable; every one is kind
to me and seems to like me. Your kind hearts will rejoice at this, I
know. Only remember that I am just as much interested in all that
happens to you at Rosehill as you are in what happens to me at
Plongeon. Pray that the motto of Geneva may become mine--"_Post
tenebras lux_."

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 20th Aug. 1849.]

I have no head for writing to-day, for I have been keeping my bed for
the last three days; but I must remember that writing to you is like
ringing a bell hung in the planet Jupiter--it is so weary a while
before one's letters reach. I have been positively sickening for want
of my boxes, and anxiety to hear of my relations. Your kind letter of
this morning has quieted the latter a little; but my boxes, alas! have
not appeared. Do not be alarmed about my health. I have only had a
terrible headache--prolonged, in fact, by the assiduities of the good
people here; for the first day I lay in my bed I had the whole female
world of Plongeon in my bedroom, and talked so incessantly that I was
unable to sleep after it; the consequence, as you may imagine, was
that the next day I was very much worse; but I am getting better, and
indeed it was worth while to be ill to have so many kind attentions.
There is a fresh German family from Frankfurt here just now--Madame
Cornelius and her children. She is the daughter of the richest banker
in Frankfurt, and, what is better, full of heart and mind, with a face
that tells you so before she opens her lips. She has more reading than
the marquise, being German and Protestant; and it is a real
refreshment to talk with her for half an hour. The dear marquise is a
truly devout Catholic. It is beautiful to hear her speak of the
comfort she has in the confessional--for our _têtes-à-tête_ have
lately turned on religious matters. She says I am in a "mauvaise voie
sous le rapport de la religion. Peut être vous vous marierez, et le
mariage, chère amie, sans la foi religieuse!..." She says I have
isolated myself by my studies--that I am too cold and have too little
confidence in the feelings of others towards me--that I do not believe
how deep an interest she has conceived in my lot. She says Signor
Goldrini (the young Italian who was here for a week) told her, when he
had been talking to me one evening, "Vous aimerez cette demoiselle,
j'en suis sûr"--and she has found his prediction true. They are
leaving for their own country on Wednesday. She hopes I shall go to
Italy and see her; and when I tell her that I have no faith that she
will remember me long enough for me to venture on paying her a visit
if ever I should go to Italy again, she shakes her head at my
incredulity. She was born at Genoa. Her father was three years
Sardinian Minister at Constantinople before she was married, and she
speaks with enthusiasm of her life there--"C'est là le pays de la
vraie poésie ou l'on sent ce que c'est que de vivre par le coeur." M.
de H---- is returned from Monte Rosa. He would be a nice person if he
had another soul added to the one he has by nature--the soul that
comes by sorrow and love. I stole his book while he was gone--the
first volume of Louis Blanc's "History of Ten Years." It contains a
very interesting account of the three days of July, 1830. His brother
is coming to join him, so I hope he will not go at present. Tell Miss
Sibree my address, and beg her to write to me all about herself, and
to write on thin paper. I hardly know yet whether I shall like this
place well enough to stay here through the winter. I have been under
the disadvantage of wanting all on which I chiefly depend, my books,
etc. When I have been here another month I shall be better able to
judge. I hope you managed to get in the black velvet dress. The people
dress, and think about dressing, here more even than in England. You
would not know me if you saw me. The marquise took on her the office
of _femme de chambre_ and dressed my hair one day. She has abolished
all my curls, and made two things stick out on each side of my head
like those on the head of the Sphinx. All the world says I look
infinitely better; so I comply, though to myself I seem uglier than
ever--if possible. I am fidgeted to death about my boxes, and that
tiresome man not to acknowledge the receipt of them. I make no apology
for writing all my peevishness and follies, because I want you to do
the same--to let me know everything about you, to the aching of your
fingers--and you tell me very little. My boxes, my boxes! I dream of
them night and day. Dear Mr. Hennell! Give him my heartiest
affectionate remembrances. Tell him I find no one here so spirited as
he: there are no better jokes going than I can make myself. Mrs.
Hennell and Mrs. C. Hennell, too, all are remembered--if even I have
only seen them in England.

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 28th Aug. 1849.]

Mme. de Ludwigsdorff, the wife of an Austrian baron, has been here for
two days, and is coming again. She is handsome, spirited, and
clever--pure English by birth, but quite foreign in manners and
appearance. She, and all the world besides, are going to winter in
Italy. Nothing annoys me now; I feel perfectly at home, and shall
really be comfortable when I have all my little matters about me. This
place looks more lovely to me every day--the lake, the town, the
_campagnes_, with their stately trees and pretty houses, the glorious
mountains in the distance; one can hardly believe one's self on earth;
one might live here, and forget that there is such a thing as want or
labor or sorrow. The perpetual presence of all this beauty has
somewhat the effect of mesmerism or chloroform. I feel sometimes as if
I were sinking into an agreeable state of numbness, on the verge of
unconsciousness, and seem to want well pinching to rouse me. The other
day (Sunday) there was a _fête_ held on the lake--the _fête_ of
Navigation. I went out, with some other ladies, in M. de H----'s boat,
at sunset, and had the richest draught of beauty. All the boats of
Geneva turned out in their best attire. When the moon and stars came
out there were beautiful fireworks sent up from the boats. The
mingling of the silver and the golden rays on the rippled lake, the
bright colors of the boats, the music, the splendid fireworks, and the
pale moon looking at it all with a sort of grave surprise, made up a
scene of perfect enchantment; and our dear old Mont Blanc was there,
in his white ermine robe. I rowed all the time, and hence comes my
palsy. I can perfectly fancy dear Mrs. Pears in her Leamington house.
How beautiful all that Foleshill life looks now, like the distant Jura
in the morning! She was such a sweet, dear, good friend to me. My
walks with her, my little visits to them in the evening--all is
remembered. I am glad you have seen Fanny again; any attention you
show her is a real kindness to me, and I assure you she is worth it.
You know, or, you do not know, that my nature is so chameleon-like I
shall lose all my identity unless you keep nourishing the old self
with letters; so, pray, write as much and as often as you can. It
jumps admirably with my humor to live in two worlds at once in this
way. I possess my dearest friends and my old environment in my
thoughts, and another world of novelty and beauty in which I am
actually moving, and my contrariety of disposition always makes the
world that lives in my thoughts the dearer of the two, the one in
which I more truly dwell. So, after all, I enjoy my friends most when
I am away from them. I shall not say so, though, if I should live to
rejoin you six or seven months hence. Keep me for seven[26] years
longer, and you will find out the use of me, like all other pieces of
trumpery.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Houghton, 6th Sept. 1849.]

Have I confided too much in your generosity in supposing that you
would write to me first? or is there some other reason for your
silence? I suffer greatly from it--not entirely from selfish reasons,
but in great part because I am really anxious to know all about you,
your state of health and spirits, the aspect of things within and
without you. Did Mr. Bray convey to you my earnest request that you
would write to me? You know of my whereabouts and circumstances from
my good friends at Rosehill, so that I have little to tell you; at
least, I have not spirit to write of myself until I have heard from
you, and have an assurance from yourself that you yet care about me.
Sara (Mrs. Isaac Evans) has sent me word of the sad, sad loss that has
befallen poor Chrissey and Edward--a loss in which I feel that I have
a share; for that angelic little being had great interest for me; she
promised to pay so well for any care spent on her. I can imagine poor
Edward's almost frantic grief, and I dread the effect on Chrissey's
weak frame of her more silent suffering. Anything you can tell me
about them will be read very eagerly. I begin to feel the full value
of a letter; so much so that, if ever I am convinced that any one has
the least anxiety to hear from me, I shall always reckon it among the
first duties to sit down without delay, giving no ear to the
suggestions of my idleness and aversion to letter-writing. Indeed, I
am beginning to find it really pleasant to write to my friends, now
that I am so far away from them; and I could soon fill a sheet to you,
if your silence did not weigh too heavily on my heart. My health is by
no means good yet; seldom good enough not to be a sort of drag on my
mind; so you must make full allowance for too much egotism and
susceptibility in me. It seems to be three years instead of three
months since I was in England and amongst you, and I imagine that all
sorts of revolutions must have taken place in the interim; whereas to
you, I dare say, remaining in your old home and among your every-day
duties, the time has slipped away so rapidly that you are unable to
understand my anxiety to hear from you. I think the climate here is
not particularly healthy; I suppose, from the vicinity of the lake,
which, however, becomes so dear to me that one cannot bear to hear it
accused. Good-bye, dear Fanny; a thousand blessings to you, whether
you write to me or not, and much gratitude if you do.

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 13th Sept. 1849.]

My boxes arrived last Friday. The expense was fr. 150--perfectly
horrible! Clearly, I must give myself for food to the fowls of the air
or the fishes of the lake. It is a consolation to a mind imbued with a
lofty philosophy that, when one can get nothing to eat, one can still
be eaten--the evil is only apparent. It is quite settled that I cannot
stay at Plongeon; I must move into town. But, alas! I must pay fr. 200
per month. If I were there I should see more conversable people than
here. Do you think any one would buy my "Encyclopædia Britannica" at
half-price, and my globes? If so, I should not be afraid of exceeding
my means, and I should have a little money to pay for my piano, and
for some lessons of different kinds that I want to take. The
"Encyclopædia" is the last edition, and cost £42, and the globes
£8 10_s._ I shall never have anywhere to put them, so it is folly to
keep them, if any one will buy them. No one else has written to me,
though I have written to almost all. I would rather have it so than
feel that the debt was on my side. When will you come to me for help,
that I may be able to hate you a little less? I shall leave here as
soon as I am able to come to a decision, as I am anxious to feel
settled, and the weather is becoming cold. This house is like a
bird-cage set down in a garden. Do not count this among my letters. I
am good for nothing to-day, and can write nothing well but bitterness,
so that I will not trust myself to say another word. The Baronne de
Ludwigsdorff seems to have begun to like me very much, and is really
kind; so you see Heaven sends kind souls, though they are by no means
kindred ones. Poor Mrs. Locke is to write to me--has given me a little
ring; says, "Take care of yourself, my child--have some tea of your
own--you'll be quite another person if you get some introductions to
clever people; you'll get on well among a certain set--that's true;"
it is her way to say "that's true" after all her affirmations. She
says, "You won't find any kindred spirits at Plongeon, my dear."

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 20th Sept. 1849.]

I am feeling particularly happy because I have had very kind letters
from my brother and sisters. I am ashamed to fill sheets about myself,
but I imagined that this was precisely what you wished. Pray correct
my mistake, if it be one, and then I will look over the Calvin
manuscripts, and give you some information of really general interest,
suited to our mutual capacities. Mme. Ludwigsdorff is so good to me--a
charming creature--so anxious to see me comfortably settled--petting
me in all sorts of ways. She sends me tea when I wake in the
morning--orange-flower water when I go to bed--grapes--and her maid to
wait on me. She says if I like she will spend the winter after this at
Paris with me, and introduce me to her friends there; but she does not
mean to attach herself to me, because I shall never like her long. I
shall be tired of her when I have sifted her, etc. She says I have
more intellect than _morale_, and other things more true than
agreeable; however, she is "greatly interested" in me; has told me her
troubles and her feelings, she says, in spite of herself; for she has
never been able before in her life to say so much even to her old
friends. It is a mystery she cannot unravel. She is a person of high
culture, according to the ordinary notions of what feminine culture
should be. She speaks French and German perfectly, plays well, and has
the most perfect polish of manner--the most thorough refinement, both
socially and morally. She is tall and handsome, a striking-looking
person, but with a sweet feminine expression when she is with those
she likes; dresses exquisitely; in fine, is all that I am not. I shall
tire you with all this, but I want you to know what good creatures
there are here as elsewhere. Miss F. tells me that the first day she
sat by my side at dinner she looked at me and thought to herself,
"That is a grave lady; I do not think I shall like her much;" but as
soon as I spoke to her, and she looked into my eyes, she felt she
could love me. Then she lent me a book written by her cousin--a
religious novel--in which there is a fearful infidel who will not
believe, and hates all who do, etc. Then she invited me to walk with
her, and came to talk in my room; then invited me to go to the
Oratoire with them, till I began to be uncomfortable under the idea
that they fancied I was evangelical, and that I was gaining their
affection under false pretences; so I told Miss F. that I was going to
sacrifice her good opinion, and confess my heresies. I quite expected,
from their manner and character, that they would forsake me in
horror--but they are as kind as ever. They never go into the _salon_
in the evening, and I have almost forsaken it, spending the evening
frequently in Mme. de Ludwigsdorff's room, where we have some
delightful tea. The tea of the house here is execrable; or, rather, as
Mrs. A. says, "How glad we ought to be that it has no taste at all; it
might have a very bad one!" I like the A.'s; they are very
good-natured. Mrs. A., a very ugly but lady-like little woman, who is
under an infatuation "as it regards" her caps--always wearing the
brightest rose-color or intensest blue--with a complexion not unlike a
dirty primrose glove. The rest of the people are nothing to me,
except, indeed, dear old Mlle. de Phaisan, who comes into my room when
I am ill, with "Qu'est ce que vous avez, ma bonne?" in the tone of the
kindest old aunt, and thinks that I am the most amiable douce
creature, which will give you a better opinion of her charity than her
penetration.

Dear creatures! no one is so good as you yet. I have not yet found any
one who can bear comparison with you; not in kindness to me--_ça va
sans dire_--but in solidity of mind and in expansion of feeling. This
is a very coarse thing to say, but it came to the end of my pen, and
_litera scripta manet_--at least, when it comes at the end of the
second page. I shall certainly stay at Geneva this winter, and shall
return to England as early as the spring weather will permit, always
supposing that nothing occurs to alter my plans. I am still thin; so
how much will be left of me next April I am afraid to imagine. I shall
be length without breadth. Cara's assurance that you are well and
comfortable is worth a luncheon to me, which is just the thing I am
generally most in want of, for we dine at six now. I love to imagine
you in your home; and everything seems easy to me when I am not
disturbed about the health or well-being of my loved ones. It is
really so; I do not say it out of any sort of affectation, benevolent
or otherwise. I am without carefulness, alas! in more senses than one.
Thank Sara very heartily for her letter. I do not write a special
sheet for her to-day, because I have to write to two or three other
people, but she must not the less believe how I valued a little
private morsel from her; and also that I would always rather she wrote
"from herself" than "to me"--that is my theory of letter-writing. Your
letters are as welcome as Elijah's ravens--I thought of saying the
dinner-bell, only that would be too gross! I get impatient at the end
of the ten days which it takes for our letters to go to and fro; and I
have not the least faith in the necessity for keeping the sheet three
or four days before Mr. Bray can find time to write his meagre bit. If
you see the Miss Franklins, give my love to them; my remembrances to
Mr. and Mrs. Whittem; love to Miss Sibree always. Hearty love to
Clapton[27] and Woodford;[28] and a very diffusive benevolence to the
world in general, without any particular attachment to A or B. I am
trying to please Mr. Bray. Good-bye, dear souls. _Dominus vobiscum._

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, Thursday, 4th Oct. 1849.]

I am anxious for you to know my new address, as I shall leave here on
Tuesday. I think I have at last found the very thing. I shall be the
only lodger. The _appartement_ is _assez joli_, with an alcove, so
that it looks like a sitting-room in the daytime--the people, an
artist of great respectability, and his wife, a most kind-looking,
lady-like person, with two boys, who have the air of being well
educated. They seem very anxious to have me, and are ready to do
anything to accommodate me. I shall live with them--that is, dine with
them; breakfast in my own room. The terms are fr. 150 per month, light
included. M. and Mme. d'Albert are middle-aged, musical, and, I am
told, have _beaucoup d'esprit_. I hope this will not exceed my means
for four or five months. There is a nice, large _salon_ and a good
_salle à manger_. I am told that their society is very good. Mme. de
Ludwigsdorff was about going there a year ago, and it was she who
recommended it to me.

I hope Sara's fears are supererogatory--a proof of a too nervous
solicitude about me, for which I am grateful, though it does me no
good to hear of it. I want encouraging rather than warning and
checking. I believe I am so constituted that I shall never be cured of
my faults except by God's discipline. If human beings would but
believe it, they do me the most good by saying to me the kindest
things truth will permit; and really I cannot hope those will be
superlatively kind. The reason I wished to raise a little extra money
is that I wanted to have some lessons and other means of culture--not
for my daily bread, for which I hope I shall have enough; but, since
you think my scheme impracticable, we will dismiss it. _Au reste_, be
in no anxiety about me. Nothing is going wrong that I know of. I am
not an absolute fool and weakling. When I am fairly settled in my new
home I will write again. My address will be--M. d'Albert Durade, Rue
des Chanoines, No. 107.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Houghton, 4th Oct. 1849.]

The blessed compensation there is in all things made your letter
doubly precious for having been waited for, and it would have inspired
me to write to you again much sooner, but that I have been in
uncertainty about settling myself for the winter, and I wished to send
you my future address. I am to move to my new home on Tuesday the 9th.
I shall not at all regret leaving here; the season is beginning to be
rather sombre, though the glorious chestnuts here are still worth
looking at half the day. You have heard of some of the people whom I
have described in my letters to Rosehill. The dear little old maid,
Mlle. de Phaisan, is quite a good friend to me--extremely prosy, and
full of tiny details; but really people of that calibre are a comfort
to one occasionally, when one has not strength enough for more
stimulating things. She is a sample of those happy souls who ask for
nothing but the work of the hour, however trivial; who are contented
to live without knowing whether they effect anything, but who do
really effect much good, simply by their calm and even _maintien_. I
laugh to hear her say in a tone of remonstrance--"Mme. de Ludwigsdorff
dit qu'elle s'ennuie quand les soirées sont longues: moi, je ne
conçois pas comment on peut s'ennuyer quand on a de l'ouvrage ou des
jeux ou de la conversation." When people who are dressing elegantly
and driving about to make calls every day of their life have been
telling me of their troubles--their utter hopelessness of ever finding
a vein worth working in their future life--my thoughts have turned
towards many whose sufferings are of a more tangible character, and I
have really felt all the old commonplaces about the equality of human
destinies, always excepting those spiritual differences which are
apart not only from poverty and riches, but from individual
affections. Dear Chrissey has found time and strength to write to me,
and very precious her letter was, though I wept over it. "Deep,
abiding grief must be mine," she says, and I know well it must be. The
mystery of trial! It falls with such avalanche weight on the head of
the meek and patient. I wish I could do something of more avail for my
friends than love them and long for their happiness.

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 11th Oct. 1849.]

M. and Mme. d'Albert are really clever people--people worth sitting up
an hour longer to talk to. This does not hinder madame from being an
excellent manager--dressing scrupulously, and keeping her servants in
order. She has hung my room with pictures, one of which is the most
beautiful group of flowers conceivable thrown on an open Bible,
painted by herself. I have a piano which I hire. There is also one in
the _salon_. M. d'Albert plays and sings, and in the winter he tells
me they have parties to sing masses and do other delightful things. In
fact, I think I am just in the right place. I breakfast in my own room
at half-past eight, lunch at half-past twelve, and dine at four or a
little after, and take tea at eight. From the tea-table I have gone
into the _salon_ and chatted until bedtime. It would really have been
a pity to have stayed at Plongeon, out of reach of everything, and
with people so little worth talking to. I have not found out the
_desagrémens_ here yet. It is raining horribly, but this just saves me
from the regret I should have felt at having quitted the chestnuts of
Plongeon. That _campagne_ looked splendid in its autumn dress.

     George Eliot retained so warm an admiration and love for M.
     d'Albert Durade to the end of her life that it seems fitting
     here to mention that he still lives, carrying well the weight
     of eighty winters. He is _conservateur_ of the Athénée--a
     permanent exhibition of works of art in Geneva; and he
     published only last year (1883) a French translation of the
     "Scenes of Clerical Life," having already previously
     published translations of "Adam Bede," "Felix Holt," "Silas
     Marner," and "Romola." The description of his personal
     appearance, in the following letter, still holds good, save
     that the gray hair has become quite white. He lost his wife
     in 1873; and it will be seen from subsequent letters that
     George Eliot kept up a faithful attachment to her to the
     end. They were both friends after her own heart. The old
     apartment is now No. 18, instead of No. 107, Rue des
     Chanoines, and is occupied as the printing-office of the
     _Journal de Genève_. But half of the rooms remain just as
     they were five-and-thirty years ago. The _salon_, wainscoted
     in imitation light-oak panels, with a white China stove, and
     her bedroom opening off it--as she had often described it to
     me; and M. d'Albert has still in his possession the painting
     of the bunch of beautiful flowers thrown on an open Bible
     mentioned in the last letter. He told me that when Miss Evans
     first came to look at the house she was so horrified with the
     forbidding aspect of the stairs that she declared she would
     not go up above the first floor; but when she got inside the
     door she was reconciled to her new quarters. Calvin's house
     is close to the Rue des Chanoines, and she was much
     interested in it. It will be seen that she did some work in
     physics under Professor de la Rive; but she principally
     rested and enjoyed herself during the stay at Geneva. It was
     exactly the kind of life she was in need of at the time, and
     the letters show how much she appreciated it.

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 26th Oct. 1849.]

I languished for your letter before it came, and read it three times
running--judge whether I care less for you than of old. It is the best
of blessings to know that you are well and cheerful; and when I think
of all that might happen in a fortnight to make you otherwise,
especially in these days of cholera and crises, I cannot help being
anxious until I get a fresh assurance that at least five days ago all
was well. Before I say anything about myself, I must contradict your
suspicion that I paint things too agreeably for the sake of giving
you pleasure. I assure you my letters are subjectively true; the
falsehood, if there be any, is in my manner of seeing things. But I
will give you some _vérités positives_, in which, alas! poor
imagination has hitherto been able to do little for the world. Mme.
d'Albert anticipates all my wants, and makes a spoiled child of me. I
like these dear people better and better--everything is so in harmony
with one's moral feeling that I really can almost say I never enjoyed
a more complete _bien être_ in my life than during the last fortnight.
For M. d'Albert, I love him already as if he were father and brother
both. His face is rather haggard-looking, but all the lines and the
wavy gray hair indicate the temperament of the artist. I have not
heard a word or seen a gesture of his yet that was not perfectly in
harmony with an exquisite moral refinement--indeed, one feels a better
person always when he is present. He sings well, and plays on the
piano a little. It is delightful to hear him talk of his friends--he
admires them so genuinely--one sees so clearly that there is no reflex
egotism. His conversation is charming. I learn something every
dinner-time. Mme. d'Albert has less of genius and more of
cleverness--a really lady-like person, who says everything well. She
brings up her children admirably--two nice, intelligent boys;[29]--the
youngest, particularly, has a sort of Lamartine expression, with a
fine head. It is so delightful to get among people who exhibit no
meannesses, no worldlinesses, that one may well be enthusiastic. To me
it is so blessed to find any departure from the rule of giving as
little as possible for as much as possible. Their whole behavior to me
is as if I were a guest whom they delighted to honor. Last night we
had a little knot of their most intimate musical friends, and M. and
Mme. d'Albert introduced me to them as if they wished me to know
them--as if they wished me to like their friends and their friends to
like me. The people and the evening would have been just after your
own hearts. In fact, I have not the slightest pretext for being
discontented--not the shadow of a discomfort. Even the little
housemaid Jeanne is charming; says to me every morning, in the
prettiest voice: "Madame a-t-elle bien dormi cette nuit?"--puts fire
in my _chauffe-pied_ without being told--cleans my rooms most
conscientiously. There--I promise to weary you less for the future
with my descriptions. I could not resist the temptation to speak
gratefully of M. and Mme. d'Albert.

Give my love to Mrs. Pears--my constant, ever-fresh remembrance. My
love to Miss Rebecca Franklin--tell her I have only spun my web to
Geneva; it will infallibly carry me back again across the gulf, were
it twice as great. If Mr. Froude preach the new word at Manchester, I
hope he will preach it so as to do without an after-explanation, and
not bewilder his hearers in the manner of Mephistopheles when he dons
the doctor's gown of Faust. I congratulate you on the new edition,[30]
and promise to read it with a disposition to admire when I am at
Rosehill once more. I am beginning to lose respect for the petty
acumen that sees difficulties. I love the souls that rush along to
their goal with a full stream of sentiment--that have too much of the
positive to be harassed by the perpetual negatives--which, after all,
are but the disease of the soul, to be expelled by fortifying the
principle of vitality.

Good-bye, dear loves; sha'n't I kiss you when I am in England
again--in England! I already begin to think of the journey as an
impossibility. Geneva is so beautiful now, the trees have their
richest coloring. Coventry is a fool to it--but, then, you are at
Coventry, and you are better than lake, trees, and mountains.

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 28th Oct. 1849.]

We have had some delicious autumn days here. If the fine weather last,
I am going up the Salève on Sunday with M. d'Albert. On one side I
shall have a magnificent view of the lake, the town, and the Jura; on
the other, the range of Mont Blanc. The walks about Geneva are
perfectly enchanting. "Ah!" says poor Mlle. de Phaisan, "nous avons un
beau pays si nous n'avions pas ces Radicaux!" The election of the
Conseil d'État is to take place in November, and an _émeute_ is
expected. The actual government is Radical, and thoroughly detested by
all the "respectable" classes. The vice-president of the Conseil and
the virtual head of the government is an unprincipled, clever fellow,
horribly in debt himself, and on the way to reduce the government to
the same position.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 28th Oct. 1849.]

I like my town life vastly. I shall like it still better in the
winter. There is an indescribable charm to me in this form of human
nest-making. You enter a by no means attractive-looking house, you
climb up two or three flights of cold, dark-looking stone steps, you
ring at a very modest door, and you enter a set of rooms, snug, or
comfortable, or elegant. One is so out of reach of intruders, so
undiverted from one's occupations by externals, so free from cold,
rushing winds through hall doors--one feels in a downy nest high up
in a good old tree. I have always had a hankering after this sort of
life, and I find it was a true instinct of what would suit me. Just
opposite my windows is the street in which the Sisters of Charity
live, and, if I look out, I generally see either one of them or a
sober-looking ecclesiastic. Then a walk of five minutes takes me out
of all streets, within sight of beauties that I am sure you too would
love, if you did not share my enthusiasm for the town. I have not
another minute, having promised to go out before dinner--so, dearest,
take my letter as a hasty kiss, just to let you know how constantly I
love you--how, the longer I live and the more I have felt, the better
I know how to value you.

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, 4th Dec. 1849.]

I write at once to answer your questions about business. Spinoza and I
have been divorced for several months. My want of health has obliged
me to renounce all application. I take walks, play on the piano, read
Voltaire, talk to my friends, and just take a dose of mathematics
every day to prevent my brain from becoming quite soft. If you are
anxious to publish the translation in question I could, after a few
months, finish the "Tractatus Theologico-Politicus" to keep it
company; but I confess to you that I think you would do better to
abstain from printing a translation. What is wanted in English is not
a translation of Spinoza's works, but a true estimate of his life and
system. After one has rendered his Latin faithfully into English, one
feels that there is another yet more difficult process of translation
for the reader to effect, and that the only mode of making Spinoza
accessible to a larger number is to study his books, then shut them,
and give an analysis. For those who read the very words Spinoza wrote
there is the same sort of interest in his style as in the conversation
of a person of great capacity who has led a solitary life, and who
says from his own soul what all the world is saying by rote; but this
interest hardly belongs to a translation.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 4th Dec. 1849.]

Your letter is very sweet to me, giving me a picture of your quiet
life. How shall I enable you to imagine mine, since you know nothing
of the localities? My good friends here only change for the better.
Mme. d'Albert is all affection; M. d'Albert all delicacy and
intelligence; the friends to whom they have introduced me very kind in
their attentions. In fact, I want nothing but a little more money, to
feel more at ease about my fires, etc. I am in an atmosphere of love
and refinement; even the little servant Jeanne seems to love me, and
does me good every time she comes into the room. I can say anything to
M. and Mme. d'Albert. M. d'A. understands everything, and if madame
does not understand, she believes--that is, she seems always sure that
I mean something edifying. She kisses me like a mother, and I am baby
enough to find that a great addition to my happiness. _Au reste_, I am
careful for nothing; I am a sort of supernumerary spoon, and there
will be no damage to the set if I am lost. My heart-ties are not
loosened by distance--it is not in the nature of ties to be so; and
when I think of my loved ones as those to whom I can be a comforter, a
help, I long to be with them again. Otherwise, I can only think with a
shudder of returning to England. It looks to me like a land of gloom,
of _ennui_, of platitude; but in the midst of all this it is the land
of duty and affection, and the only ardent hope I have for my future
life is to have given to me some woman's duty--some possibility of
devoting myself where I may see a daily result of pure, calm
blessedness in the life of another.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 4th Dec. 1849.]

How do you look? I hope that _bandeau_ of silvery locks is not
widening too fast on the head I love so well--that the eyes are as
bright as ever. Your letter tells me they will beam as kindly as ever
when I see them once more. Never make apologies about your letters, or
your words, or anything else. It is your soul to which I am wedded;
and do I not know too well how the soul is doubly belied--first, by
the impossibility of being in word and act as great, as loving, as
good as it wills to be; and again, by the miserable weaknesses of the
friends who see the words and acts through all sorts of mists raised
by their own passions and preoccupations? In all these matters I am
the chief of sinners, and I am tempted to rejoice in the offences of
my friends, because they make me feel less humiliation. I am quite
satisfied to be at Geneva instead of Paris; in fact, I am becoming
passionately attached to the mountains, the lake, the streets, my own
room, and, above all, the dear people with whom I live.

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 23d Dec. 1849.]

A thousand Christmas pleasures and blessings to you--good resolutions
and bright hopes for the New Year! Amen. People who can't be witty
exert themselves to be pious or affectionate. Henceforth I tell you
nothing whatever about myself; for if I speak of agreeables, and say I
am contented, Mr. Bray writes me word that you are all trying to
forget me. If I were to tell you of disagreeables and privations and
sadness, Sara would write: "If you are unhappy now, you will be so _à
fortiori_ ten years hence." Now, since I have a decided objection to
doses sent by post which upset one's digestion for a fortnight, I am
determined to give you no pretext for sending them. You shall not know
whether I am well or ill, contented or discontented, warm or cold,
fat or thin. But remember that I am so far from being of the same mind
as Mr. Bray, that good news of you is necessary to my comfort. I walk
more briskly, and jump out of bed more promptly, after a letter that
tells me you are well and comfortable, that business is promising,
that men begin to speak well of you, etc. "I am comforted in your
comfort," as saith St. Paul to the troublesome Corinthians. When one
is cabined, cribbed, confined in one's self, it is good to be enlarged
in one's friends. Good Mr. Marshall! We wish to keep even unamiable
people when death calls for them, much more good souls like him. I am
glad he had had one more pleasant visit to Cara for her to think of.
Dear Sara's letter is very charming--not at all physicky--rather an
agreeable draught of _vin sucré_. Dear Mr. Hennell, we shall never
look upon his like.

I am attending a course of lectures on Experimental Physics by M. le
Professeur de la Rive, the inventor, among other things, of
electroplating. The lectures occur every Wednesday and Saturday. It is
time for me to go. I am distressed to send you this shabby last
fragment of paper, and to write in such a hurry, but the days are
really only two hours long, and I have so many things to do that I go
to bed every night miserable because I have left out something I meant
to do. Good-bye, dear souls. Forget me if you like, you cannot oblige
me to forget you; and the active is worth twice of the passive all the
world over! The earth is covered with snow, and the government is
levelling the fortifications.

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 28th Jan. 1850.]

You leave me a long time without news of you, though I told you they
were necessary as a counteractive to the horrors of this terrible
winter. Are you really so occupied as to have absolutely no time to
think of me? I console myself, at least to-day, now we have a blue sky
once more after two months of mist, with thinking that I am excluded
by pleasanter ideas--that at least you are well and comfortable, and I
ought to content myself with that. The fact is, I am much of
Touchstone's mind--in respect my life is at Geneva, I like it very
well, but in respect it is not with you, it is a very vile life. I
have no yearnings to exchange lake and mountains for Bishop Street and
the Radford Fields, but I have a great yearning to kiss you all and
talk to you for three days running. I do not think it will be possible
for me to undertake the journey before the end of March. I look
forward to it with great dread. I see myself looking utterly
miserable, ready to leave all my luggage behind me at Paris for the
sake of escaping the trouble of it. We have had Alboni here--a very
fat siren. There has been some capital acting of comedies by friends
of M. d'Albert--one of them is superior to any professional actor of
comedy I have ever seen. He reads _vaudevilles_ so marvellously that
one seems to have a whole troupe of actors before one in his single
person. He is a handsome man of fifty, full of wit and talent, and he
married about a year ago.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Houghton, 9th Feb. 1850.]

It is one of the provoking contrarieties of destiny that I should have
written my croaking letter when your own kind, consolatory one was on
its way to me. I have been happier ever since it came. After mourning
two or three months over Chrissey's account of your troubles, I can
only dwell on that part of your letter which tells that there is a
little more blue in your sky--that you have faith in the coming
spring. Shall you be as glad to see me as to hear the cuckoo? I mean
to return to England as soon as the Jura is passable without
sledges--probably the end of March or beginning of April. I have a
little _Heimweh_ "as it regards" my friends. I yearn to see those I
have loved the longest, but I shall feel real grief at parting from
the excellent people with whom I am living. I feel they are my
_friends_; without entering into or even knowing the greater part of
my views, they understand my character and have a real interest in me.
I have infinite tenderness from Mme. d'Albert. I call her always
"maman;" and she is just the creature one loves to lean on and be
petted by. In fact, I am too much indulged, and shall go back to
England as undisciplined as ever. This terribly severe winter has been
a drawback on my recovering my strength. I have lost whole weeks from
headache, etc., but I am certainly better now than when I came to Mme.
d'Albert. You tell me to give you these details, so I obey. Decidedly
England is the most comfortable country to be in in winter--at least,
for all except those who are rich enough to buy English comforts
everywhere. I hate myself for caring about carpets, easy-chairs, and
coal fires--one's soul is under a curse, and can preach no truth while
one is in bondage to the flesh in this way; but, alas! habit is the
purgatory in which we suffer for our past sins. I hear much music. We
have a reunion of musical friends every Monday. For the rest, I have
refused _soirées_, which are as stupid and unprofitable at Geneva as
in England. I save all more interesting details, that I may have them
to tell you when I am with you. I am going now to a _séance_ on
Experimental Physics by the celebrated Professor de la Rive. This
letter will at least convince you that I am not eaten up by wolves, as
they have been fearing at Rosehill. The English papers tell of wolves
descending from the Jura and devouring the inhabitants of the
villages, but we have been in happy ignorance of these editors'
horrors.

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 15th Feb. 1850.]

If you saw the Jura to-day! The snow reveals its forests, ravines, and
precipices, and it stands in relief against a pure blue sky. The snow
is on the mountains only, now, and one is tempted to walk all day,
particularly when one lies in bed till ten, as your exemplary friend
sometimes does. I have had no discipline, and shall return to you more
of a spoiled child than ever. Indeed, I think I am destined to be so
to the end--one of the odious swarm of voracious caterpillars soon to
be swept away from the earth by a tempest. I am getting better bodily.
I have much less headache, but the least excitement fatigues me.
Certainly, if one cannot have a malady to carry one off rapidly, the
only sensible thing is to get well and fat; and I believe I shall be
driven to that alternative. You know that George Sand writes for the
theatre? Her "François le Champi--une Comédie," is simplicity and
purity itself. The seven devils are cast out. We are going to have
more acting here on Wednesday. M. Chamel's talent makes maman's
_soirées_ quite brilliant. You will be amused to hear that I am
sitting for my portrait--at M. d'Albert's request, not mine. If it
turns out well, I shall long to steal it to give to you; but M.
d'Albert talks of painting a second, and in that case I shall
certainly beg one. The idea of making a study of my visage is droll
enough. I have the kindest possible letters from my brother and
sisters, promising me the warmest welcome. This helps to give me
courage for the journey; but the strongest magnet of all is a certain
little group of three persons whom I hope to find together at
Rosehill. Something has been said of M. d'Albert accompanying me to
Paris. I am saddened when I think of all the horrible anxieties of
trade. If I had children, I would make them carpenters and shoemakers;
that is the way to make them Messiahs and Jacob Boehms. As for us, who
are dependent on carpets and easy-chairs, we are reprobates, and shall
never enter into the kingdom of heaven. I go to the Genevese churches
every Sunday, and nourish my heterodoxy with orthodox sermons.
However, there are some clever men here in the Church, and I am
fortunate in being here at a time when the very cleverest is giving a
series of conferences. I think I have never told you that we have a
long German lad of seventeen in the house--the most taciturn and
awkward of lads. He said very naïvely, when I reproached him for not
talking to a German young lady at a _soirée_, when he was seated next
her at table--"Je ne savais que faire de mes jambes." They had placed
the poor _garçon_ against one of those card-tables--all legs, like
himself.

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 1st March, 1850.]

The weather is so glorious that I think I may set out on my journey
soon after the 15th. I am not quite certain yet that M. d'Albert will
not be able to accompany me to Paris; in any case, a package of so
little value will get along safely enough. I am so excited at the idea
of the time being so near when I am to leave Geneva--a real grief--and
see my friends in England--a perfectly overwhelming joy--that I can do
nothing. I am frightened to think what an idle wretch I am become. And
you all do not write me one word to tell me you long for me. I have a
great mind to elope to Constantinople, and never see any one any
more!

     It is with a feeling of regret that we take leave of the
     pleasant town of Geneva, its lake and mountains, and its
     agreeable little circle of acquaintance. It was a peacefully
     happy episode in George Eliot's life, and one she was always
     fond of recurring to, in our talk, up to the end of her life.


_SUMMARY._

JUNE, 1849, TO MARCH, 1850.

     Goes abroad with Mr. and Mrs. Bray--Geneva--Life at Campagne
     Plongeon--Letters to Brays describing surroundings--Mrs.
     Locke--The St. Germain family--Anxiety about her boxes with
     books, etc.--Hears M. Meunier preach--Patriotism the first of
     virtues--Mme. Cornelius--Mme. de Ludwigsdorff--"_Fête_ of
     Navigation" on the lake--Demand for letters--Prophetic
     anticipation of position seven years later--Wishes to sell
     some of her books and globes to get music lessons--Letter to
     Mrs. Houghton--Loss of Mrs. Clarke's child--Love of Lake of
     Geneva--Letters to Brays--Mme. Ludwigsdorff wishes her to
     spend winter in Paris--Mlle. de Phaisan--Finds apartment in
     Geneva, No. 107 Rue des Chanoines, with M. and Mme.
     d'Albert--Enjoyment of their society--Remarks on translations
     of Spinoza--Hope of a woman's duty--Attachment to
     Geneva--Yearning for friends at home--Alboni--Private
     theatricals--Portrait by M. d'Albert--Remarks on education of
     children--Leaves Geneva by Jura.

FOOTNOTES:

[26] It may be noted as a curious verification of this presentiment
that "Scenes of Clerical Life" were published in 1856--just seven
years later.

[27] Mrs. Hennell.

[28] Mr. and Mrs. C. Hennell.

[29] Mr. Charles Lewes tells me that when he went to stay with the
d'Alberts at Geneva, many years afterwards, they mentioned how much
they had been struck by her extraordinary discernment of the character
of these two boys.

[30] "Philosophy of Necessity," by Charles Bray.




CHAPTER V.


     M. d'Albert and his charge left Geneva towards the end of
     March, and as the railway was not yet opened all the way to
     France, they had to cross the Jura in sledges, and suffered
     terribly from the cold. They joined the railway at Tonnerre,
     and came through Paris, arriving in England on the 23d of
     March. After a day in London, Miss Evans went straight to her
     friends at Rosehill, where she stayed for a few days before
     going on to Griff. It will have been seen that she had set
     her hopes high on the delights of home-coming, and with her
     too sensitive, impressionable nature, it is not difficult to
     understand, without attributing blame to any one, that she
     was pretty sure to be laying up disappointment for herself.
     All who have had the experience of returning from a bright,
     sunny climate to England in March will recognize in the next
     letters the actual presence of the east wind, the leaden sky,
     the gritty dust, and _le spleen_.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, end of Mch. 1850, from
Rosehill.]

No; I am not in England--I am only nearer the beings I love best. I
try to forget all geography, and that I have placed myself
irretrievably out of reach of nature's brightest glories and beauties
to shiver in a wintry flat. I am unspeakably grateful to find these
dear creatures looking well and happy, in spite of worldly cares, but
your clear face and voice are wanting to me. But I must wait with
patience, and perhaps by the time I have finished my visits to my
relations you will be ready to come to Rosehill again. I want you to
scold me, and make me good. I am idle and naughty--_on ne peut
plus_--sinking into heathenish ignorance and woman's frivolity.
Remember, you are one of my guardian angels.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, beginning of April, 1850, from
Griff.]

Will you send the enclosed note to Mrs. C. Hennell? I am not quite
sure about her direction, but I am anxious to thank her for her
kindness in inviting me. Will you also send me an account of Mr.
Chapman's prices for lodgers, and if you know anything of other
boarding-houses, etc., in London? Will you tell me what you can? I am
not asking you merely for the sake of giving you trouble. I am really
anxious to know. Oh, the dismal weather and the dismal country and the
dismal people. It was some envious demon that drove me across the
Jura. However, I am determined to sell everything I possess, except a
portmanteau and carpet-bag and the necessary contents, and be a
stranger and a foreigner on the earth for evermore. But I must see you
first; that is a yearning I still have in spite of disappointments.

     From Griff she went to stay with her sister, Mrs. Clarke, at
     Meriden, whence she writes:

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 24th April, 1850.]

Have you any engagement for the week after next? If not, may I join
you on Saturday the 4th, and invite M. d'Albert to come down on the
following Monday? It appears he cannot stay in England longer than
until about the second week in May. I am uncomfortable at the idea of
burdening even your friendship with the entertainment of a person
purely for my sake. It is indeed the greatest of all the great
kindnesses you have shown me. Write me two or three kind words, dear
Cara. I have been so ill at ease ever since I have been in England
that I am quite discouraged. Dear Chrissey is generous and
sympathizing, and really cares for my happiness.

[Illustration: Rosehill.]

     On the 4th of May Miss Evans went to Rosehill, and on the 7th
     M. d'Albert joined the party for a three days' visit. The
     strong affection existing between Mr. and Mrs. Bray and their
     guest, and the more congenial intellectual atmosphere
     surrounding them, led Miss Evans to make her home practically
     at Rosehill for the next sixteen months. She stayed there
     continuously till the 18th November, and, among other things,
     wrote a review of Mackay's "Progress of the Intellect." In
     October Mr. Mackay and Mr. Chapman, the editor of the
     _Westminster Review_, came to stay at Rosehill, and there was
     probably some talk then about her assisting in the editorial
     work of the _Review_, but it was not until the following
     spring that any definite understanding on this subject was
     arrived at. Meantime the article on Mackay's "Progress of the
     Intellect" came out in the January, 1851, number of the
     _Westminster_. It contains the following remarkable passages:

"Our civilization, and yet more, our religion, are an anomalous
blending of lifeless barbarisms, which have descended to us like so
many petrifactions from distant ages, with living ideas, the offspring
of a true process of development. We are in bondage to terms and
conceptions, which, having had their roots in conditions of thought no
longer existing, have ceased to possess any vitality, and are for us
as spells which have lost their virtue. The endeavor to spread
enlightened ideas is perpetually counteracted by these _idola
theatri_, which have allied themselves, on the one hand, with men's
better sentiments, and, on the other, with institutions in whose
defence are arrayed the passions and the interests of dominant
classes. Now, although the teaching of positive truth is the grand
means of expelling error, the process will be very much quickened if
the negative argument serve as its pioneer; if, by a survey of the
past, it can be shown how each age and each race has had a faith and a
symbolism suited to its need and its stage of development, and that
for succeeding ages to dream of retaining the spirit, along with the
forms, of the past, is as futile as the embalming of the dead body in
the hope that it may one day be resumed by the living soul.... It is
Mr. Mackay's faith that divine revelation is not contained exclusively
or pre-eminently in the facts and inspirations of any one age or
nation, but is coextensive with the history of human development, and
is perpetually unfolding itself to our widened experience and
investigation, as firmament upon firmament becomes visible to us in
proportion to the power and range of our exploring-instruments. The
master-key to this revelation is the recognition of the presence of
undeviating law in the material and moral world--of that invariability
of sequence which is acknowledged to be the basis of physical science,
but which is still perversely ignored in our social organization, our
ethics, and our religion. It is this invariability of sequence which
can alone give value to experience, and render education, in the true
sense, possible. The divine yea and nay, the seal of prohibition and
of sanction, are effectually impressed on human deeds and aspirations,
not by means of Greek and Hebrew, but by that inexorable law of
consequences whose evidence is confirmed instead of weakened as the
ages advance; and human duty is comprised in the earnest study of this
law and patient obedience to its teaching. While this belief sheds a
bright beam of promise on the future career of our race, it lights up
what once seemed the dreariest region of history with new interest;
every past phase of human development is part of that education of the
race in which we are sharing; every mistake, every absurdity, into
which poor human nature has fallen, may be looked on as an experiment
of which we may reap the benefit. A correct generalization gives
significance to the smallest detail, just as the great inductions of
geology demonstrate in every pebble the working of laws by which the
earth has become adapted for the habitation of man. In this view
religion and philosophy are not merely conciliated, they are
identical; or, rather, religion is the crown and consummation of
philosophy--the delicate corolla which can only spread out its petals
in all their symmetry and brilliance to the sun when root and branch
exhibit the conditions of a healthy and vigorous life."

     Miss Evans seems to have been in London from the beginning of
     January till the end of March, 1851; and Mr. Chapman made
     another fortnight's visit to Rosehill at the end of May and
     beginning of June. It was during this period that, with Miss
     Evans's assistance, the prospectus of the new series of the
     _Westminster Review_ was determined on and put in shape. At
     the end of July she went with Mrs. Bray to visit Mr. and Mrs.
     Robert Noel, at Bishop Steignton, in Devonshire. Mrs. Bray
     had some slight illness there, and Miss Evans writes:

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 5th Aug. 1851.]

I am grieved indeed if anything might have been written, which has not
been written, to allay your anxiety about Cara. Her letter yesterday
explained what has been the matter. I knew her own handwriting would
be pleasanter to you than any other. I have been talking to her this
morning about the going to London or to Rosehill. She seems to prefer
London. A glance or two at the Exposition, she thinks, would do her no
harm. To-day we are all going to Teignmouth. She seems to like the
idea of sitting by the waves. The sun is shining gloriously, and all
things are tolerably promising. I am going to walk on before the rest
and have a bath.

     They went to London on the 13th of August, saw the Crystal
     Palace, and returned to Rosehill on the 16th. At the end of
     that month, Mr. George Combe (the distinguished phrenologist)
     arrived on a visit, and he and Mrs. Combe became good friends
     to Miss Evans, as will be seen from the subsequent
     correspondence. They came on a second visit to Rosehill the
     following month--Mr. Chapman being also in the house at the
     same time--and at the end of September Miss Evans went to
     stay with the Chapmans at No. 142 Strand, as a boarder, and
     as assistant editor of the _Westminster Review_. A new period
     now opens in George Eliot's life, and emphatically the most
     important period, for now she is to be thrown in contact with
     Mr. Lewes, who is to exercise so paramount an influence on
     all her future, with Mr. Herbert Spencer, and with a number
     of writers then representing the most fearless and advanced
     thought of the day. Miss Frederica Bremer, the authoress, was
     also boarding with the Chapmans at this time, as will be seen
     from the following letters:

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, end of Sept. 1851.]

Mr. Mackay has been very kind in coming and walking out with me, and
that is the only variety I have had. Last night, however, we had an
agreeable enough gathering. Foxton[31] came, who, you know, is
trying, with Carlyle and others, to get a chapel for Wilson at the
West End--in which he is to figure as a seceding clergyman. I enclose
you two notes from Empson (he is the editor of the _Edinburgh Review_)
as a guarantee that I have been trying to work. Again, I proposed to
write a review of Greg for the _Westminster_, not for money, but for
love of the subject as connected with the "Inquiry." Mr. Hickson
referred the matter to Slack again, and he writes that he shall not
have room for it, and that the subject will not suit on this occasion,
so you see I am obliged to be idle, and I like it best. I hope Mr.
Bray is coming soon to tell me everything about you. I think I shall
cry for joy to see him. But do send me a little note on Monday
morning. Mrs. Follen called the other day, in extreme horror at Miss
Martineau's book.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mr. Bray, end of Sept. 1851.]

Dr. Brabant returned to Bath yesterday. He very politely took me to
the Crystal Palace, the theatre, and the Overland Route. On Friday we
had Foxton, Wilson, and some other nice people, among others a Mr.
Herbert Spencer, who has just brought out a large work on "Social
Statics," which Lewes pronounces the best book he has seen on the
subject. You must see the book, if possible. Mr. Chapman is going to
send you Miss Martineau's work, or rather Mr. Atkinson's,[32] which
you must review in the _Herald_. Whatever else one may think of the
book, it is certainly the boldest I have seen in the English language.
I get nothing done here, there are so many _distractions_--moreover, I
have hardly been well a day since I came. I wish I were rich enough
to go to the coast, and have some plunges in the sea to brace me.
Nevertheless do not suppose that I don't enjoy being here. I like
seeing the new people, etc., and I am afraid I shall think the country
rather dull after it. I am in a hurry to-day. I must have two hours'
work before dinner, so imagine everything I have not said, or, rather,
reflect that this scrap is quite as much as you deserve after being so
slow to write to me.

     The reference, in the above letter, to Mr. Lewes must not be
     taken as indicating personal acquaintance yet. It is only a
     quotation of some opinion heard or read. Mr. Lewes had
     already secured for himself a wide reputation in the literary
     world by his "Biographical History of Philosophy," his two
     novels, "Ranthorpe," and "Rose, Blanche, and Violet"--all of
     which had been published five or six years before--and his
     voluminous contributions to the periodical literature of the
     day. He was also, at this time, the literary editor of the
     _Leader_ newspaper, so that any criticism of his would carry
     weight, and be talked about. Much has already been written
     about his extraordinary versatility, the variety of his
     literary productions, his social charms, his talent as a
     _raconteur_, and his dramatic faculty; and it will now be
     interesting, for those who did not know him personally, to
     learn the deeper side of his character, which will be seen,
     in its development, in the following pages.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mr. Bray, end of Sept. 1851.]

I don't know how long Miss Bremer will stay, but you need not wish to
see her. She is to me equally unprepossessing to eye and ear. I never
saw a person of her years who appealed less to my purely instinctive
veneration. I have to reflect every time I look at her that she is
really Frederica Bremer.

Fox is to write the article on the Suffrage, and we are going to try
Carlyle for the Peerage, Ward refusing, on the ground that he thinks
the improvement of the physical condition of the people so
all-important that he must give all his energies to that. He says,
"Life is a bad business, but we must make the best of it;" to which
philosophy I say Amen. Dr. Hodgson is gone, and all the fun with him.

I was introduced to Lewes the other day in Jeff's shop--a sort of
miniature Mirabeau in appearance.[33]

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 2d Oct. (?) 1851.]

Professor Forbes is to write us a capital scientific article, whereat
I rejoice greatly. The Peerage apparently will not "get itself done,"
as Carlyle says. It is not an urgent question, nor does one see that,
if the undue influence of the Peers on the elections for the Commons
were done away with, there would be much mischief from the House of
Lords remaining for some time longer _in statu quo_. I have been
reading Carlyle's "Life of Sterling" with great pleasure--not for its
presentation of Sterling, but of Carlyle. There are racy bits of
description in his best manner, and exquisite touches of feeling.
Little rapid characterizations of living men too--of Francis Newman,
for example--"a man of fine university and other attainments, of the
sharpest cutting and most restlessly advancing intellect, and of the
mildest pious enthusiasm." There is an inimitable description of
Coleridge and his eternal monologue--"To sit as a passive bucket and
be pumped into, whether one like it or not, can in the end be
exhilarating to no creature."

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 15th Oct. 1851.]

All the world is doing its _devoir_ to the great little authoress
(Miss Bremer). I went to the exhibition on Saturday to hear the final
"God save the Queen" and the three times three--"C'êtait un beau
moment." Mr. Greg thought the review "well done, and in a kindly
spirit," but thought there was not much in it--dreadfully true, since
there was only all his book. I think he did not like the apology for
his want of theological learning, which, however, was just the thing
most needed, for the _Eclectic_ trips him up on that score. Carlyle
was very amusing the other morning to Mr. Chapman about the
Exhibition. He has no patience with the prince and "that Cole"
assembling Sawneys from all parts of the land, till you can't get
along Piccadilly. He has been worn to death with bores all summer, who
present themselves by twos and threes in his study, saying, "Here we
are," etc., etc.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 19th Oct. 1851.]

I wish you could see Miss Bremer's albums, full of portraits, flowers,
and landscapes, all done by herself. A portrait of Emerson,
marvellously like; one of Jenny Lind, etc. Last night we had quite a
charming _soirée_--Sir David Brewster and his daughter; Mackay, author
of a work on popular education you may remember to have seen reviewed
in the _Leader_; the Ellises, the Hodgsons, and half a dozen other
nice people. Miss Bremer was more genial than I have seen her--played
on the piano, and smiled benevolently. Altogether, I am beginning to
repent of my repugnance. Mackay approves our prospectus _in toto_. He
is a handsome, fine-headed man, and a "good opinion." We are getting
out a circular to accompany the prospectus. I have been kept
down-stairs by Mr. Mackay for the last two hours, and am hurried, but
it was a necessity to write _ein paar Worte_ to you. Mr. Mackay has
written an account of his book for the catalogue. I have been using my
powers of eloquence and flattery this morning to make him begin an
article on the "Development of Protestantism." Mr. Ellis was
agreeable--really witty. He and Mrs. Ellis particularly cordial to me,
inviting me to visit them without ceremony. I love you all better
every day, and better the more I see of other people. I am going to
one of the Birkbeck schools.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 3rd Nov. 1851.]

I must tell you a story Miss Bremer got from Emerson. Carlyle was very
angry with him for not believing in a devil, and to convert him took
him amongst all the horrors of London--the gin-shops, etc.--and
finally to the House of Commons, plying him at every turn with the
question, "Do you believe in a devil noo?" There is a severe attack on
Carlyle's "Life of Sterling" in yesterday's _Times_--unfair as an
account of the book, but with some truth in its general remarks about
Carlyle. There is an article, evidently by James Martineau, in the
_Prospective_, which you must read, "On the Unity of the Logical and
Intuitive in the Ultimate Grounds of Religious Belief." I am reading
with great amusement (!) J. H. Newman's "Lectures on the Position of
Catholics." They are full of clever satire and description. My table
is groaning with books, and I have done very little with them yet, but
I trust in my star, which has hitherto helped me, to do all I have
engaged to do. Pray remember to send the MS. translation of
Schleiermacher's little book, and also the book itself.

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 15th Nov. 1851.]

When Mr. Noel had finished his farewell visit to-day, Mr. Flower was
announced, so my morning has run away in chat. Time wears, and I don't
get on so fast as I ought, but I must scribble a word or two, else
you will make my silence an excuse for writing me no word of
yourselves. I am afraid Mr. Noel and Mr. Bray have given you a poor
report of me. The last two days I have been a little better, but I
hardly think existing arrangements can last beyond this quarter. Mr.
Noel says Miss L. is to visit you at Christmas. I hope that is a
mistake, as it would deprive me of my hoped-for rest amongst you.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Monday, 23d Nov. 1851.]

On Saturday afternoon came Mr. Spencer to ask Mr. Chapman and me to go
to the theatre; so I ended the day in a godless manner, seeing the
"Merry Wives of Windsor." You must read Carlyle's denunciation of the
opera, published in the _Keepsake_! The _Examiner_ quotes it at
length. I send you the enclosed from Harriet Martineau. Please to
return it. The one from Carlyle you may keep till I come. He is a
naughty fellow to write in the _Keepsake_, and not for us, after I
wrote him the most insinuating letter, offering him three glorious
subjects. Yesterday we went to Mr. Mackay's, Dr. Brabant being there.

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, 27th Nov. 1851.]

Carlyle called the other day, strongly recommending Browning, the
poet, as a writer for the _Review_, and saying, "We shall see," about
himself. In other respects we have been stagnating since Monday, and
now I must work, work, work, which I have scarcely done two days
consecutively since I have been here. Lewes says his article on "Julia
von Krüdener"[34] will be glorious. He sat in the same box with us at
the "Merry Wives of Windsor," and helped to carry off the dolorousness
of the play.

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, Tuesday, 22d Dec. 1851.]

Alas! the work is so heavy just for the next three days, all the
revises being yet to come in, and the proof of my own article;[35] and
Mr. Chapman is so overwhelmed with matters of detail, that he has
earnestly requested me to stay till Saturday, and I cannot refuse, but
it is a deep disappointment to me. My heart will yearn after you all.
It is the first Christmas Day I shall have passed without any
Christmas feeling. On Saturday, if you will have me, nothing shall
keep me here any longer. I am writing at a high table, on a low seat,
in a great hurry. Don't you think my style is editorial?

     Accordingly, on Saturday, the 29th December, 1851, she did go
     down to Rosehill, and stayed there till 12th January, when
     she returned to London, and writes:

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 12th Jan. 1852.]

I had a comfortable journey all alone, except from Weedon to
Blisworth. When I saw a coated animal getting into my carriage, I
thought of all horrible stories of madmen in railways; but his white
neckcloth and thin, mincing voice soon convinced me that he was one of
those exceedingly tame animals, the clergy.

A kind welcome and a good dinner--that is the whole of my history at
present. I am in anything but company trim, or spirits. I can do
nothing in return for all your kindness, dear Cara, but love you, as I
do most heartily. You and all yours, for their own sake first, but if
it were not so, for yours.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 21st Jan. 1852.]

Harriet Martineau called on Monday morning with Mr. Atkinson. Very
kind and cordial. I honor her for her powers and industry, and should
be glad to think highly of her. I have no doubt that she is
fascinating when there is time for talk. We have had two agreeable
_soirées_. Last Monday I was talking and listening for two hours to
Pierre Leroux--a dreamy genius. He was expounding to me his ideas. He
belongs neither to the school of Proudhon, which represents Liberty
only--nor to that of Louis Blanc, which represents Equality only--nor
to that of Cabet, which represents Fraternity. Pierre Leroux's system
is the _synthèse_ which combines all three. He has found the true
_pont_ which is to unite the love of self with love of one's neighbor.
He is, you know, a very voluminous writer. George Sand has dedicated
some of her books to him. He dilated on his views of the "Origin of
Christianity." Strauss deficient, because he has not shown the
_identity of the teaching of Jesus with that of the Essenes_. This is
Leroux's favorite idea. I told him of your brother. He, moreover,
traces Essenism back to Egypt, and thence to India--the cradle of all
religions, etc., etc., with much more, which he uttered with an
unction rather amusing in a _soirée tête-à-tête_. "Est ce que nous
sommes faits pour chercher le bonheur? Est ce là votre idée--dites
moi." "Mais non--nous sommes faits, je pense, pour nous développer le
plus possible." "Ah! c'est ça." He is in utter poverty, going to
lecture--_autrement il faut mourir_. Has a wife and children with him.
He came to London in his early days, when he was twenty-five, to find
work as a printer. All the world was in mourning for the Princess
Charlotte. "Et moi, je me trouvais avoir _un habit vert-pomme_." So he
got no work; went back to Paris; by hook or by crook founded the
_Globe_ journal; knew St. Simon; disagrees with him entirely, as with
all other theorists except Pierre Leroux.

We are trying Mazzini to write on "Freedom _v._ Despotism," and have
received an admirable article on "The New Puritanism,"[36] _i.e._,
"Physical Puritanism," from Dr. Browne, the chemist of Edinburgh,
which, I think, will go in the next number.

I am in a miserable state of languor and low spirits, in which
everything is a trouble to me. I must tell you a bit of Louis Blanc's
English, which Mr. Spencer was reciting the other night. The _petit
homme_ called on some one, and said, "I come to tell you how you are.
I was at you the other day, but you were not."

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 2d Feb. 1852.]

We went to quite a gay party at Mrs. Mackay's on Saturday. Good Mr.
Mackay has been taking trouble to get me to Hastings for my
health--calling on Miss Fellowes, daughter of the "Religion of the
Universe," and inducing her to write me a note of invitation. Sara
will be heartily welcome. Unfortunately, I had an invitation to the
Parkes's, to meet Cobden, on Saturday evening. I was sorry to miss
that. Miss Parkes[37] is a dear, ardent, honest creature; and I hope
we shall be good friends. I have nothing else to tell you. I am
steeped in dulness within and without. Heaven send some lions to-night
to meet Fox, who is coming. An advertisement we found in the _Times_
to-day--"To gentlemen. A _converted_ medical man, of gentlemanly
habits and fond of Scriptural conversation, wishes to meet with a
gentleman of Calvinistic views, thirsty after truth, in want of a
daily companion. A little temporal aid will be expected in return.
Address, Verax!"

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 8th Feb. 1852.]

We are going to Mr. Ellis's, at Champion Hill, to-morrow evening. I am
better now. Have rid myself of all distasteful work, and am trying to
love the glorious destination of humanity, looking before and after.
We shall be glad to have Sara.

     Miss Sara Hennell arrived on a visit to the Strand next
     day--the 9th February--and stayed till the 17th.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mr. Bray, 16th Feb. 1852.]

I have not merely had a headache--I have been really ill, and feel
very much shattered. We (Miss Evans and Miss Sara Hennell) dined
yesterday at Mrs. Peter Taylor's,[38] at Sydenham. I was not fit to
go, especially to make my _début_ at a strange place; but the country
air was a temptation. The thick of the work is just beginning, and I
am bound in honor not to run away from it, as I have shirked all labor
but what is strictly editorial this quarter.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 20th Feb. 1852.]

We went to the meeting of the Association for the Abolition of the
Taxes on Knowledge on Wednesday, that I might hear Cobden, in whom I
was wofully disappointed. George Dawson's speech was admirable. I
think it undesirable to fix on a London residence at present, as I
want to go to Brighton for a month or two next quarter. I am seriously
concerned at my languid body, and feel the necessity of taking some
measures to get vigor. Lewes inquired for Sara last Monday, in a tone
of interest. He was charmed with her, as who would not be that has any
taste? Do write to me, dear Cara; I want comforting: this world looks
ugly just now; all people rather worse than I have been used to think
them. Put me in love with my kind again, by giving me a glimpse of
your own inward self, since I cannot see the outer one.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 6th Mch. 1852.]

I can sympathize with you in your troubles, having been a housekeeper
myself, and known disappointment in trusted servants. Ah, well! we
have a good share of the benefits of our civilization, it is but fair
that we should feel some of the burden of its imperfections.

Thank you a thousand times for wishing to see me again. I should
really like to see you in your own nice, fresh, healthy-looking home
again; but until the end of March I fear I shall be a prisoner, from
the necessity for constant work. Still, it is possible that I may have
a day, though I am quite unable to say when.

You will be still more surprised at the notice of the _Westminster_ in
_The People_, when you know that Maccoll himself wrote it. I have not
seen it, but had been told of its ill-nature. However, he is too good
a man to write otherwise than sincerely; and our opinion of a book
often depends on the state of the liver!

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 25th Mch. 1852.]

I had two offers last night--not of marriage, but of music--which I
find it impossible to resist. Mr. Herbert Spencer proposed to take me
on Thursday to hear "William Tell," and Miss Parkes asked me to go
with her to hear the "Creation" on Friday. I have had so little music
this quarter, and these two things are so exactly what I should like,
that I have determined to put off, for the sake of them, my other
pleasure of seeing you. So, pray, keep your precious welcome warm for
me until Saturday, when I shall positively set off by the two o'clock
train. Harriet Martineau has written me a most cordial invitation to
go to see her before July, but that is impossible.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 27th Mch. 1852.]

I am grieved to find that you have to pay for that fine temperament
of yours in attacks of neuralgia. Your silence did not surprise me,
after the account you had given me of your domestic circumstances, but
I have wished for you on Monday evenings. Your cordial assurance that
you shall be glad to see me sometimes is one of those pleasant
things--those life-preservers--which relenting destiny sends me now
and then to buoy me up. For you must know that I am not a little
desponding now and then, and think that old friends will die off,
while I shall be left without the power to make new ones. You know how
sad one feels when a great procession has swept by one, and the last
notes of its music have died away, leaving one alone with the fields
and sky. I feel so about life sometimes. It is a help to read such a
life as Margaret Fuller's. How inexpressibly touching that passage
from her journal--"I shall always reign through the intellect, but the
life! the life! O my God! shall that never be sweet?" I am thankful,
as if for myself, that it was sweet at last. But I am running on about
feelings when I ought to tell you facts. I am going on Wednesday to my
friends in Warwickshire for about ten days or a fortnight. When I come
back, I hope you will be quite strong and able to receive visitors
without effort--Mr. Taylor too.

I _did_ go to the _conversazione_; but you have less to regret than
you think. Mazzini's speeches are better read than heard. Proofs are
come, demanding my immediate attention, so I must end this hasty
scribble.

     On the 3d April Miss Evans went to Rosehill, and stayed till
     the 14th. On her return she writes:

[Sidenote: Letter to Mr. Bray, 17th April, 1852.]

There was an article on the bookselling affair in the _Times_ of
yesterday, which must be the knell of the Association. Dickens is to
preside at a meeting in this house on the subject some day next week.
The opinions on the various articles in the _Review_ are, as before,
ridiculously various. The _Economist_ calls the article on Quakerism
"admirably written." Greg says the article on India is "very
masterly;" while he calls Mazzini's "sad stuff--mere verbiage."

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 21st April, 1852.]

If there is any change in my affection for you it is that I love you
more than ever, not less. I have as perfect a friendship for you as my
imperfect nature can feel--a friendship in which deep respect and
admiration are sweetened by a sort of flesh-and-blood sisterly feeling
and the happy consciousness that I have your affection, however
undeservedly, in return. I have confidence that this friendship can
never be shaken; that it must last while I last, and that the
supposition of its ever being weakened by a momentary irritation is
too contemptibly absurd for me to take the trouble to deny it. As to
your whole conduct to me, from the first day I knew you, it has been
so generous and sympathetic that, if I did not heartily love you, I
should feel deep gratitude--but love excludes gratitude. It is
impossible that I should ever love two women better than I love you
and Cara. Indeed, it seems to me that I can never love any so well;
and it is certain that I can never have any friend--not even a
husband--who would supply the loss of those associations with the past
which belong to you. Do believe in my love for you, and that it will
remain as long as I have my senses, because it is interwoven with my
best nature, and is dependent, not on any accidents of manner, but on
long experience, which has confirmed the instinctive attraction of
earlier days.

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 22d April, 1852.]

Our fortunes here are, as usual, checkered--

     "Twist ye, twine ye, even so
     Mingle human weal and woe."

Grote is very friendly, and has propitiated J. S. Mill, who will write
for us when we want him. We had quite a brilliant _soirée_ yesterday
evening. W. R. Greg, Forster (of Rawdon), Francis Newman, the Ellises,
and Louis Blanc, were the stars of greatest magnitude. I had a
pleasant talk with Greg and Forster. Greg was "much pleased to have
made my acquaintance." Forster, on the whole, appeared to think that
people should be glad to make _his_ acquaintance. Greg is a short man,
but his brain is large, the anterior lobe very fine, and a moral
region to correspond. Black, wiry, curly hair, and every indication of
a first-rate temperament. We have some very nice Americans here--the
Pughs--friends of the Parkes's, really refined, intellectual people.
Miss Pugh, an elderly lady, is a great abolitionist, and was one of
the Women's Convention that came to England in 1840, and was not
allowed to join the Men's Convention. But I suppose we shall soon be
able to say, _nous avons changé tout cela_.

I went to the opera on Saturday--"I Martiri," at Covent Garden--with
my "excellent friend, Herbert Spencer," as Lewes calls him. We have
agreed that we are not in love with each other, and that there is no
reason why we should not have as much of each other's society as we
like. He is a good, delightful creature, and I always feel better for
being with him.

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 2d May, 1852.]

I like to remind you of me on Sunday morning, when you look at the
flowers and listen to music; so I send a few lines, though I have not
much time to spare to-day. After Tuesday I will write you a longer
letter, and tell you all about everything. I am going to the opera
to-night to hear the "Huguenots." See what a fine thing it is to pick
up people who are short-sighted enough to like one.

     On the 4th of May a meeting, consisting chiefly of authors,
     was held at the house in the Strand, for the purpose of
     hastening the removal of the trade restrictions on the
     Commerce of Literature, and it is thus described in the
     following letter:

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 5th May, 1852.]

The meeting last night went off triumphantly, and I saluted Mr.
Chapman with "See the Conquering Hero Comes" on the piano at 12
o'clock; for not until then was the last magnate, except Herbert
Spencer, out of the house. I sat at the door for a short time, but
soon got a chair within it, and heard and saw everything.

Dickens in the chair--a position he fills remarkably well, preserving
a courteous neutrality of eyebrows, and speaking with clearness and
decision. His appearance is certainly disappointing--no benevolence in
the face, and, I think, little in the head; the anterior lobe not by
any means remarkable. In fact, he is not distinguished-looking in any
way--neither handsome nor ugly, neither fat nor thin, neither tall nor
short. Babbage moved the first resolution--a bad speaker, but a great
authority. Charles Knight is a beautiful, elderly man, with a modest
but firm enunciation; and he made a wise and telling speech which
silenced one or two vulgar, ignorant booksellers who had got into the
meeting by mistake. One of these began by complimenting
Dickens--"views held by such worthy and important gentlemen, _which is
your worthy person in the chair_." Dickens looked respectfully
neutral. The most telling speech of the evening was Prof. Tom
Taylor's--as witty and brilliant as one of George Dawson's. Prof.
Owen's, too, was remarkably good. He had a resolution to move as to
the bad effect of the trade restrictions on scientific works, and gave
his own experience in illustration. Speaking of the slow and small
sale of scientific books of a high class, he said, in his silvery,
bland way--alluding to the boast that the retail booksellers
_recommended_ the works of less known authors--"for which limited sale
we are doubtless indebted to the kind recommendation of our friends,
the retail booksellers"--whereupon these worthies, taking it for a
_bonâ fide_ compliment, cheered enthusiastically. Dr. Lankester, Prof.
Newman, Robert Bell, and others, spoke well. Owen has a tremendous
head, and looked, as he was, the greatest celebrity of the meeting.
George Cruikshank, too, made a capital speech, in an admirable moral
spirit. He is the most homely, genuine-looking man; not unlike the
pictures of Captain Cuttle.

I went to hear the "Huguenots" on Saturday evening. It was a rich
treat. Mario and Grisi and Formes, and that finest of orchestras under
Costa. I am going to a concert to-night. This is all very fine, but,
in the meantime, I am getting as haggard as an old witch under London
atmosphere and influences. I shall be glad to have sent me my
Shakespeare, Goethe, Byron, and Wordsworth, if you will be so good as
to take the trouble of packing them.

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, Monday, 12th(?) May, 1852.]

My days have slipped away in a most mysterious fashion
lately--chiefly, I suppose, in long walks and long talks. Our Monday
evenings are dying off--not universally regretted--but we are
expecting one or two people to-night. I have nothing to tell except
that I went to the opera on Thursday, and heard "La Juive," and,
moreover, fell in love with Prince Albert, who was unusually animated
and prominent. He has a noble, genial, intelligent expression, and is
altogether a man to be proud of. I am going next Thursday to see Grisi
in "Norma." She is quite beautiful this season, thinner than she was,
and really younger looking.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 27th May, 1852.]

My brightest spot, next to my love of _old_ friends, is the
deliciously calm, _new_ friendship that Herbert Spencer gives me. We
see each other every day, and have delightful _camaraderie_ in
everything. But for him my life would be desolate enough. What a
wretched lot of old, shrivelled creatures we shall be by and by. Never
mind, the uglier we get in the eyes of others the lovelier we shall be
to each other; that has always been my firm faith about friendship,
and now it is in a slight degree my experience. Mme. d'Albert has sent
me the sweetest letter, just like herself; and I feel grateful to have
such a heart remembering and loving me on the other side of the Jura.
They are very well and flourishing.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Wednesday, 2d June, 1852.]

I am bothered to death with article-reading and scrap-work of all
sorts: it is clear my poor head will never produce anything under
these circumstances; _but I am patient_. I am ashamed to tease you so,
but I must beg of you to send me George Sand's works; and also I shall
be grateful if you will lend me--what I think you have--an English
edition of "Corinne," and Miss Austen's "Sense and Sensibility."
Harriet Martineau's article on "Niebuhr" will not go in the July
number. I am sorry for it; it is admirable. After all, she is a
_trump_--the only Englishwoman that possesses thoroughly the art of
writing.

On Thursday morning I went to St. Paul's to see the charity children
assembled, and hear their singing. Berlioz says it is the finest thing
he has heard in England; and this opinion of his induced me to go. I
was not disappointed; it is worth doing once, especially as we got out
before the sermon. I had a long call from George Combe yesterday. He
says he thinks the _Westminster_, under _my_ management, the most
important means of enlightenment of a literary nature in existence;
the _Edinburgh_, under Jeffrey, nothing to it, etc.!!! I wish _I_
thought so too.

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 21st June, 1852.]

Your joint assurance of welcome strengthens the centripetal force that
would carry me to you; but, on the other hand, sundry considerations
are in favor of the centrifugal force, which, I suppose, will carry me
to Broadstairs or Ramsgate. On the whole, I prefer to keep my visit to
you as a _bonne-bouche_, when I am just in the best physical and
mental state for enjoying it. I hope to get away on Saturday, or on
Wednesday at the latest. I think the third number of the _Review_ will
be capital; thoroughly readable, and yet not frothy.

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, 23d June, 1852.]

I have assured Herbert Spencer that you will think it a sufficiently
formal answer to the invitation you sent him through Mr. Lewes, if I
tell you that he will prefer waiting for the pleasure of a visit to
you until I am with you--if you will have him then. I spent the
evening at Mr. Parkes's on Monday. Yesterday Herbert Spencer brought
his father to see me--a large-brained, highly informed man, with a
certain quaintness and simplicity, altogether very pleasing.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 25th June, (?) 1852.]

After all, I begin to hope that our next number will be the best yet.
Forbes is good; Froude ditto; and James Martineau, if I may judge from
a glance at a few of his pages, admirable. Lewes has written us an
agreeable article on "Lady Novelists." There is a mysterious
contribution to the independent section. We are hoping that an
article on "Edinburgh Literary Men," yet to come, will be very good.
If not, we shall put in "Niebuhr;" it is capital.

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, end of June, 1852.]

The opera, Chiswick Flower Show, the French play, and the Lyceum, all
in one week, brought their natural consequences of headache and
hysterics--all yesterday. At five o'clock I felt quite sure that life
was unendurable. This morning, however, the weather and I are both
better, having cried ourselves out and used up all our clouds; and I
can even contemplate living six months longer. Was there ever anything
more dreary than this June?

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Friday morning, 2d July,
1852.]

I am busy packing to-day, and am going to Mr. Parkes's to dinner. Miss
Parkes has introduced me to Barbara Smith,[39] whose expression I like
exceedingly, and hope to know more of her. I go to Broadstairs on
Saturday. I am sadly in want of the change, and would much rather
present myself to you all when I can do you more credit as a friend.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 4th July, 1852.]

I warn you against Ramsgate, which is a strip of London come out for
an airing. Broadstairs is perfect; and I have the snuggest little
lodging conceivable, with a motherly good woman and a nice little
damsel of fourteen to wait on me. There are only my two rooms in this
cottage, but lodgings are plentiful in the place. I have a
sitting-room about eight feet by nine, and a bedroom a little larger;
yet in that small space there is almost every comfort. I pay a guinea
a week for my rooms, so I shall not ruin myself by staying a month,
unless I commit excesses in coffee and sugar. I am thinking whether it
would not be wise to retire from the world and live here for the rest
of my days. With some fresh paper on the walls, and an easy-chair, I
think I could resign myself. Come and tell me your opinion.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 16th July, 1852.]

I thought of you last night, when I was in a state of mingled rapture
and torture--rapture at the sight of a glorious evening sky, torture
at the sight and hearing of the belaboring given to the poor donkey
which was drawing me from Ramsgate home.

I had a note from Miss Florence Nightingale yesterday. I was much
pleased with her. There is a loftiness of mind about her which is well
expressed by her form and manner. Glad you are pleased with the
_Westminster_. I do think it a rich number--matter for a fortnight's
reading and thought. Lewes has not half done it justice in the
_Leader_. To my mind the "Niebuhr" article is as good as any of them.
If you could see me in my quiet nook! I am half ashamed of being in
such clover, both spiritually and materially, while some of my friends
are on the dusty highways, without a tuft of grass or a flower to
cheer them. A letter from you will be delightful. We seem to have said
very little to each other lately. But I always know--rejoice to
know--that there is the same Sara for me as there is the same green
earth and arched sky, when I am good and wise enough to like the best
thing.

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, 21st July, 1852.]

Do not be anxious about me--there is no cause. I am profiting, body
and mind, from quiet walks and talks with nature, gathering "lady's
bedstraw" and "rest-harrow," and other pretty things; picking up
shells (not in the Newtonian sense, but literally); reading Aristotle,
to find out what is the chief good; and eating mutton-chops, that I
may have strength to pursue it. If you insist on my writing about
"emotions," why, I must get some up expressly for the purpose. But I
must own I would rather not, for it is the grand wish and object of my
life to get rid of them as far as possible, seeing they have already
had more than their share of my nervous energy. I shall not be in town
on the 2d of August--at least, I pray Heaven to forbid it.

     Mrs. Bray paid a visit to Broadstairs from the 3d to the 12th
     August, and the next letter is addressed to her.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, Thursday, 14th (?) Aug. 1852.]

Are you really the better for having been here? Since you left I have
been continually regretting that I could not make your visit
pleasanter. I was irritable and out of sorts; but you have an
apparatus for secreting happiness--that's it. Providence, seeing that
I wanted weaning from this place, has sent a swarm of harvest-bugs and
lady-birds. These, with the half-blank, half-dissipated feeling which
comes on after having companions and losing them, make me think of
returning to London on Saturday week with more resignation than I have
felt before. I am very well and "plucky"--a word which I propose to
substitute for happy, as more truthful.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 19th Aug. 1852.]

For the last two months I have been at this pretty, quiet place, which
"David Copperfield" has made classic, far away from London noise and
smoke.

I am sorry now that I brought with me Fox's "Lectures," which I had
not managed to read before I left town. But I shall return thither at
the end of next week, and I will at once forward the volume to Gary
Lane.

One sees no novels less than a year old at the sea-side, so I am
unacquainted with the "Blithedale Romance," except through the
reviews, which have whetted my curiosity more than usual. Hawthorne
is a grand favorite of mine, and I shall be sorry if he do not go on
surpassing himself. It is sad to hear of your only going out to
consult a physician. Illness seems to me the one woe for which there
is no comfort--no compensation. But perhaps you find it otherwise, for
you have a less rebellious spirit than I, and suffering seems to make
you look all the more gentle.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Houghton, 22d Aug. 1852.]

Thinking of you this morning--as I often do, though you may not
suppose so--it was "borne in on my mind" that I must write to you, and
I obey the inspiration without waiting to consider whether there may
be a corresponding desire on your part to hear from me. I live in a
world of cares and joys so remote from the one in which we used to
sympathize with each other that I find positive communication with you
difficult. But I am not unfaithful to old loves--they were sincere,
and they are lasting. I hope you will not think it too much trouble to
write me a little news of yourself. I want very much to know if your
health continues good, and if there has been any change in your
circumstances, that I may have something like a true conception of
you. All is well with me so far as my individuality is concerned, but
I have plenty of friends' troubles to sorrow over. I hope you have
none to add to the number.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 20th Aug. 1852.]

I celebrated my return to London by the usual observance--that is to
say, a violent headache, which is not yet gone, and of course I am in
the worst spirits, and my opinion of things is not worth a straw. I
tell you this that you may know why I only send you this scrap instead
of the long letter which I have _in petto_ for you, and which would
otherwise have been written yesterday.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 2d Sept. 1852.]

Somehow my letters--except those which come under the inexorable
imperative _must_ (the "ought" I manage well enough to shirk)--will
not get written. The fact is, I am in a croaking mood, and I am
waiting and waiting for it to pass by, so if my pen croaks in spite of
my resolutions to the contrary, please to take no notice of it. Ever
since I came back I have felt something like the madness which
imagines that the four walls are contracting and going to crush one.
Harriet Martineau (in a private letter shown to me), with
incomprehensible ignorance, jeers at Lewes for introducing
_psychology_ as a science in his Comte papers. Why, Comte himself
holds psychology to be a necessary link in the chain of science. Lewes
only suggests a change in its relations. There is a great, dreary
article on the Colonies by my side, asking for reading and abridgment,
so I cannot go on scribbling--indeed, my hands are so hot and
tremulous this morning that it will be better for you if I leave off.
Your little loving notes are very precious to me; but I say nothing
about matters of feeling till my good genius has returned from his
excursions; the evil one has possession just now.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 11th Sept. 1852.]

The week has really yielded nothing worth telling you. I am a few
degrees more wizened and muddle-headed; and the articles for the
_Review_ are, on the whole, unsatisfactory. I fear a discerning public
will think this number a sad falling-off. This is the greater pity,
that said public is patronizing us well at present. Scarcely a day
passes that some one does not write to order the _Review_, as a
permanent subscriber. You may as well expect news from an old spider
or bat as from me. I can only tell you what I think of the "Blithedale
Romance," of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and the American Fishery
Dispute--all which, I am very sure, you don't want to know. Do have
pity on me, and make a little variety in my life, by all sending me a
scrap--never mind if it be only six lines apiece. Perhaps something
will befall me one day or other. As it is, nothing happens to me but
the ringing of the dinner-bell and the arrival of a proof. I have no
courage to walk out.

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, 18th Sept. 1852.]

Lewes called on me the other day and told me of a conversation with
Professor Owen, in which the latter declared his conviction that the
cerebrum was not the organ of the mind, but the cerebellum rather. He
founds on the enormous comparative size of brain in the grampus! The
professor has a huge anterior lobe of his own. What would George Combe
say if I were to tell him? But every great man has his paradox, and
that of the first anatomist in Europe ought to be a startling one.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Saturday, Sept. 1852.]

We shall make a respectable figure after all--nine articles, and two
or three of them good, the rest not bad. The _Review_ has been selling
well lately, in spite of its being the end of the quarter. We have
made splendid provision for January--Froude, Harriet Martineau,
Theodore Parker, Samuel Brown, etc., etc. The autumnal freshness of
the mornings makes me dream of mellowing woods and gossamer threads. I
am really longing for my journey. Bessie Parkes spent last evening
with me, chatting of experience.

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 2d Oct. 1852.]

Pity me--I have had the headache for four days incessantly. But now I
am well, and even the Strand seems an elysium by contrast. I set off
on Tuesday for Edinburgh by express. This is awfully expensive, but it
seems the only way of reaching there alive with my frail body. I have
had the kindest notes from the Combes and from Harriet Martineau.

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 7th Oct. 1852.]

Here I am in this beautiful Auld Reekie once more--hardly recognizing
myself for the same person as the _damozel_ who left it by the coach
with a heavy heart some six years ago. The Combes are all kindness,
and I am in clover--an elegant house, glorious fires, and a
comfortable carriage--in short, just in the circumstances to nourish
sleek optimism, convince one that this is _le meilleur des mondes
possibles_, and make one shudder at the impiety of all who doubt it.
Last evening Mr. Robert Cox came to tea, to be introduced to me as my
_cicerone_ through the lions of Edinburgh. The talk last night was
pleasant enough, though, of course, all the interlocutors besides Mr.
Combe have little to do but shape elegant modes of negation and
affirmation, like the people who are talked to by Socrates in Plato's
dialogues--"Certainly," "that I firmly believe," etc. I have a
beautiful view from my room window--masses of wood, distant hills, the
Firth, and four splendid buildings, clotted far apart--not an ugly
object to be seen. When I look out in the morning, it is as if I had
waked up in Utopia or Icaria, or one of Owen's parallelograms. The
weather is perfect--all the more delightful to me for its northern
sharpness, which is just what I wanted to brace me. I have been out
walking and driving all day, and have only time before dinner to send
this _paar Worte_, but I may have still less time to-morrow.

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 12th Oct. 1852.]

Between the beauty of the weather and the scenery, and the kindness of
good people, I am tipsy with pleasure. But I shall tell you nothing of
what I see and do, because that would be taking off some of the edge
from your pleasure in seeing me. One's dear friend who has nothing at
all to tell one is a bore. Is it not so, honor bright? I enjoy talking
to Mr. Combe; he can tell me many things, especially about men in
America and elsewhere, which are valuable; and, besides, I sometimes
manage to get in more than a negative or affirmative. He and Mrs.
Combe are really affectionate to me, and the mild warmth of their
regard, with the perfect order and elegance of everything about me,
are just the soothing influence to do me good. They urge me to stay
longer, but I shall adhere to my original determination of going to
Miss Martineau's on the 20th, and I do not _mean_ to stay with her
longer than the 25th. We are going to-day to Craigcrook (Jeffrey's
place), a beautiful spot, which old October has mellowed into his
richest tints. Such a view of Edinburgh from it!

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 12th Oct. 1852.]

Those who know the article on Whewell to be Mill's, generally think it
good, but I confess to me it is unsatisfactory. The sun _does_ shine
here, albeit this is the 12th October. I wish you could see the view
from Salisbury Crag.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 19th Oct. 1852.]

Yes, he is an apostle. An apostle, it is true, with a back and front
drawing-room, but still earnest, convinced, consistent, having fought
a good fight, and now peacefully enjoying the retrospect of it. I
shall leave these good friends with regret, almost with repentings,
that I did not determine to pay them a longer visit. I have had a
pleasant note from Miss Martineau this morning, with a vignette of her
house--I suppose to make me like all the better the idea of going
there.

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, Thursday night, 22d Oct. 1852.]

The coach brought me to Miss Martineau's gate at half-past six
yesterday evening, and she was there, with a beaming face, to welcome
me. Mr. Atkinson joined us this morning, and is a very agreeable
addition. There has been an intelligent gentleman visitor to-day, who
is interested in Miss Martineau's building society; and we have been
trudging about, looking at cottages and enjoying the sight of the
mountains, spite of the rain and mist. The weather is not promising,
that is the worst of it. Miss M. is charming in her own home--quite
handsome from her animation and intelligence. She came behind me, put
her hands round me, and kissed me in the prettiest way this evening,
telling me she was so glad she had got me here. I send you her note
that you may have an idea of "The Knoll."

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 24th Oct. 1852.]

We had a fine day yesterday, and went to Borrowdale. I have not been
well since I have been here. Still I manage to enjoy, certainly not
myself, but my companions and the scenery. I shall set off from here
on Tuesday morning, and shall be due at the Coventry station, I
believe, at 5.50.

     After a pleasant ten days' visit to Rosehill, Miss Evans
     returned to London on the 3d November.

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 6th Nov. 1852.]

To get into a first-class carriage, fall asleep, and awake to find
one's self where one would be, is almost as good as having Prince
Hussein's carpet. This was my easy way of getting to London on
Thursday. By 5 o'clock I had unpacked my boxes and made my room tidy,
and then I began to feel some satisfaction in being settled down where
I am of most use just now. After dinner came Herbert Spencer, and
spent the evening. Yesterday morning Mr. Greg called on his way to
Paris, to express his regret that he did not see me at Ambleside. He
is very pleasing, but somehow or other he frightens me dreadfully. I
am going to plunge into Thackeray's novel now ("Esmond").

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, Saturday, Nov. (?) 1852.]

Oh, this hideous fog! Let me grumble, for I have had headache the last
three days, and there seems little prospect of anything else in such
an atmosphere. I am ready to vow that I will not live in the Strand
again after Christmas. If I were not choked by the fog, the time would
trot pleasantly withal, but of what use are brains and friends when
one lives in a light such as might be got in the chimney? "Esmond" is
the most uncomfortable book you can imagine. You remember how you
disliked "François le Champi." Well, the story of "Esmond" is just the
same. The hero is in love with the daughter all through the book, and
marries the mother at the end. You should read the debates on the
opening of Parliament in the _Times_. Lord Brougham, the greatest of
English orators, perpetrates the most delicious _non sequitur_ I have
seen for a long time. "My Lords, I believe that any disturbance of the
repose of the world is very remote, _because it is our undeniable
right and an unquestionable duty_ to be prepared with the means of
defence, should such an event occur." These be thy gods, O Israel!

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, Monday, 20th Nov. 1852.]

I perceive your reading of the golden rule is "Do as you are done by;"
and I shall be wiser than to expect a letter from you another Monday
morning, when I have not earned it by my Saturday's billet. The fact
is, both callers and work thicken--the former sadly interfering with
the latter. I will just tell you how it was last Saturday, and that
will give you an idea of my days. My task was to read an article of
Greg's in the _North British_ on "Taxation," a heap of newspaper
articles, and all that J. S. Mill says on the same subject. When I had
got some way into this _magnum mare_, in comes Mr. Chapman, with a
thick German volume. "Will you read enough of this to give me your
opinion of it?" Then of course I must have a walk after lunch, and
when I had sat down again, thinking that I had two clear hours before
dinner, rap at the door--Mr. Lewes, who, of course, sits talking till
the second bell rings. After dinner another visitor, and so behold me,
at 11 P.M., still very far at sea on the subject of Taxation, but too
tired to keep my eyes open. We had Bryant the poet last evening--a
pleasant, quiet, elderly man. Do you know of this second sample of
plagiarism by D'Israeli, detected by the _Morning Chronicle_?[40] It
is worth sending for its cool impudence. Write me some news about
trade, at all events. I could tolerate even Louis Napoleon, if somehow
or other he could have a favorable influence on the Coventry trade.

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 4th Dec. 1852.]

Another week almost "with the years beyond the flood." What has it
brought you? To me it has brought articles to read--for the most part
satisfactory--new callers, and letters to nibble at my time, and a
meeting of the Association for the Abolition of Taxes on Knowledge. I
am invited to go to the Leigh Smiths on Monday evening to meet Mr.
Robert Noel. Herbert Spencer is invited, too, because Mr. Noel wants
especially to see him. Barbara Smith speaks of Mr. R. Noel as their
"dear German friend." So the Budget is come out, and I am to pay
income-tax. All very right, of course. An enlightened personage like
me has no "ignorant impatience of taxation." I am glad to hear of the
Lectures to Young Men and the banquet of the Laborers' Friend Society.
"Be not weary in well-doing." Thanks to Sara for her letter. She must
not mind paying the income-tax; it is a right principle that Dizzy is
going upon; and with her great conscientiousness she ought to enjoy
being flayed on a right principle.

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 10th Dec. 1852.]

I am not well--all out of sorts--and what do you think I am minded to
do? Take a return ticket, and set off by the train to-morrow 12
o'clock, have a talk with you and a blow over the hill, and come back
relieved on Monday. I the rather indulge myself in this, because I
think I shall not be able to be with you until some time after
Christmas. Pray forgive me for not sending you word before. I have
only just made up my mind.

     This visit to Rosehill lasted only from the 11th to 13th
     December, and the following short note is the next
     communication:

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, 19th (?) Dec. 1852.]

I am very wretched to-day on many accounts, and am only able to write
you two or three lines. I have heard this morning that Mr. Clarke is
dangerously ill. Poor Chrissey and her children. Thank you for your
kind letter.

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, 21st Dec. 1852.]

I dare say you will have heard, before you receive this, that Edward
Clarke is dead. I am to go to the funeral, which will take place on
Friday. I am debating with myself as to what I ought to do now for
poor Chrissey, but I must wait until I have been on the spot and seen
my brother. If you hear no more from me, I shall trust to your
goodness to give me a bed on Thursday night.

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, Christmas Day, 25th Dec. 1852, from
Meriden.]

Your love and goodness are a comforting presence to me everywhere,
whether I am ninety or only nine miles away from you. Chrissey bears
her trouble much better than I expected. We hope that an advantageous
arrangement may be made about the practice; and there is a
considerable sum in debts to be collected. I shall return to town on
Wednesday. It would have been a comfort to see you again before going
back, but there are many reasons for not doing so. I am satisfied now
that my duties do not lie _here_, though the dear creatures here will
be a constant motive for work and economy.

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 31st Dec. 1852.]

I arrived here only yesterday. I had agreed with Chrissey that, all
things considered, it was wiser for me to return to town; that I could
do her no substantial good by staying another week, while I should be
losing time as to other matters.

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 7th Jan. 1853.]

I am out of spirits about the _Review_. I should be glad to run away
from it altogether. But one thing is clear, that it would be a great
deal worse if I were not here. This is the only thought that consoles
me. We are thinking of sending Chrissey's eldest boy to Australia. A
patient of his father's has offered to place him under suitable
protection at Adelaide, and I strongly recommend Chrissey to accept
her offer--that is, if she will let it be available a year hence; so I
have bought Sidney's book on Australia, and am going to send it to
Chrissey, to enlighten her about matters there, and accustom her mind
to the subject. You are "jolly," I dare say, as good people have a
right to be. Tell me as much of your happiness as you can, that I may
rejoice in your joy, having none of my own.

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, Jan. 1853.]

I begin to feel for other people's wants and sorrows a little more
than I used to do. Heaven help us! said the old religion; the new one,
from its very lack of that faith, will teach us all the more to help
one another. Tell Sara she is as good as a group of spice-islands to
me; she wafts the pleasantest influences, even from a distance.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 10th Jan. 1853.]

Pray do not lay the sins of the article on the "Atomic Theory" to poor
Lewes's charge. How you could take it for his I cannot conceive. It is
as remote from his style, both of thinking and writing, as anything
can be.

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 18th Jan. 1853.]

This week has yielded nothing to me but a crop of very large
headaches. The pain has gone from my head at last, but I am feeling
very much shattered, and find it easier to cry than to do anything
else.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 1st Feb. 1853.]

My complaint, of which I am now happily rid, was rheumatism in the
right arm; a sufficient reason, you will see, for my employing a
scribe to write that promise which I now fulfil. I am going into the
country, perhaps for a fortnight, so that, if you are kind enough to
come here on Wednesday evening, I shall not have the pleasure of
seeing you. All the more reason for writing to you, in spite of cold
feet and the vilest pens in the world.

Francis Newman is likely to come once or twice in the season; not
more. He has, of course, a multitude of engagements, and many more
attractive ones than a _soirée_ in the Strand.

Never mention me to him in the character of editress. I think--at
least, I am told--that he has no high estimate of woman's powers and
functions. But let that pass. He is a very pure, noble being, and it
is good only to look at such.

The article on "Slavery," in the last number of the
_Westminster_--which I think the best article of them all--is by W. E.
Forster, a Yorkshire manufacturer, who married Dr. Arnold's daughter.
He is a very earnest, independent thinker, and worth a gross of
literary hacks who have the "trick" of writing.

I hope you are interested in the Slavery question, and in America
generally--that cradle of the future. I used resolutely to turn away
from American politics, and declare that the United States was the
last region of the world I should care to visit. Even now I almost
loathe the _common_ American type of character. But I am converted to
a profound interest in the history, the laws, the social and religious
phases of North America, and long for some knowledge of them.

Is it not cheering to think of the youthfulness of this little planet,
and the immensely greater youthfulness of our race upon it? to think
that the higher moral tendencies of human nature are yet only in their
germ? I feel this more thoroughly when I think of that great western
continent, with its infant cities, its huge, uncleared forests, and
its unamalgamated races.

I dare say you have guessed that the article on "Ireland" is Harriet
Martineau's. Herbert Spencer did _not_ contribute to the last number.

_À propos_ of articles, do you see the _Prospective Review_? There is
an admirable critique of Kingsley's "Phaethon" in it, by James
Martineau. But perhaps you may not be as much in love with Kingsley's
genius, and as much "riled" by his faults, as I am.

Of course you have read "Ruth" by this time. Its style was a great
refreshment to me, from its finish and fulness. How women have the
courage to write, and publishers the spirit to buy, at a high price,
the false and feeble representations of life and character that most
feminine novels give, is a constant marvel to me. "Ruth," with all its
merits, will not be an enduring or classical fiction--will it? Mrs.
Gaskell seems to me to be constantly misled by a love of sharp
contrasts--of "dramatic" effects. She is not contented with the
subdued coloring, the half-tints, of real life. Hence she agitates one
for the moment, but she does not secure one's lasting sympathy; her
scenes and characters do not become typical. But how pretty and
graphic are the touches of description! That little attic in the
minister's house, for example, which, with its pure white dimity
bed-curtains, its bright-green walls, and the rich brown of its
stained floor, remind one of a snowdrop springing out of the soil.
Then the rich humor of Sally, and the sly satire in the description of
Mr. Bradshaw. Mrs. Gaskell has, certainly, a charming mind, and one
cannot help loving her as one reads her books.

A notable book just come out is Wharton's "Summary of the Laws
relating to Women." "Enfranchisement of women" only makes creeping
progress; and that is best, for woman does not yet deserve a much
better lot than man gives her.

I am writing to you the last thing, and am so tired that I am not
quite sure whether I finish my sentences. But your divining power will
supply their deficiencies.

     The first half of February was spent in visits to the Brays
     and to Mrs. Clarke, at Attleboro, and on returning to London
     Miss Evans writes:

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 15th Feb. 1853.]

I am only just returned to a sense of the real world about me, for I
have been reading "Villette," a still more wonderful book than "Jane
Eyre." There is something almost preternatural in its power.

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 19th Feb. 1853.]

Mrs. Follen showed me a delightful letter which she has had from Mrs.
Stowe, telling all about herself. She begins by saying: "I am a little
bit of a woman, rather more than forty, as withered and dry as a pinch
of snuff; never very well worth looking at in my best days, and now a
decidedly used-up article." The whole letter is most fascinating, and
makes one love her.

"Villette," "Villette"--have you read it?

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 25th Feb. 1853.]

We had an agreeable evening on Wednesday--a Mr. Huxley being the
centre of interest. Since then I have been headachy and in a perpetual
rage over an article that gives me no end of trouble, and will not be
satisfactory after all. I should like to stick red-hot skewers through
the writer, whose style is as sprawling as his handwriting. For the
rest, I am in excellent spirits, though not in the best health or
temper. I am in for loads of work next quarter, but I shall not tell
you what I am going to do.

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 19th Mch. 1853.]

I have been ready to tear my hair with disappointment about the next
number of the _Review_. In short, I am a miserable editor. I think I
shall never have the energy to move--it seems to be of so little
consequence where I am or what I do.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 28th Mch. 1853.]

On Saturday I was correcting proofs literally from morning till night;
yesterday ditto. The _Review_ will be better than I once feared, but
not so good as I once hoped. I suppose the weather has chilled your
charity as well as mine. I am very hard and Mephistophelian just now,
but I lay it all to this second winter. We had a pleasant evening last
Wednesday. Lewes, as always, genial and amusing. He has quite won my
liking, in spite of myself. Of course, Mr. Bray highly approves the
recommendation of the Commissioners on _Divorce_. I have been to
Blandford Square (Leigh Smith's) to an evening party this week. Dined
at Mr. Parkes's on Sunday, and am invited to go there again to-night
to meet the Smiths. Lewes was describing Currer Bell to me yesterday
as a little, plain, provincial, sickly looking old maid. Yet what
passion, what fire in her! Quite as much as in George Sand, only the
clothing is less voluptuous.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 11th April, 1853.]

What do you think of my going to Australia with Chrissey and all her
family?--to settle them, and then come back. I am just going to write
to her, and suggest the idea. One wants _something_ to keep up one's
faith in happiness--a ray or two for one's friends, if not for one's
self.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 16th April, 1853.]

We had an agreeable _soirée_ last Wednesday. I fell in love with Helen
Faucit. She is the most poetic woman I have seen for a long time;
there is the ineffable charm of a fine character which makes itself
felt in her face, voice, and manner. I am taking doses of agreeable
follies, as you recommend. Last night I went to the French theatre,
and to-night I am going to the opera to hear "William Tell." People
are very good to me. Mr. Lewes, especially, is kind and attentive, and
has quite won my regard, after having had a good deal of my
vituperation. Like a few other people in the world, he is much better
than he seems. A man of heart and conscience, wearing a mask of
flippancy. When the warm days come, and the bearskin is under the
acacia, you must have me again.

     6th May.--Went to Rosehill and returned on 23d to Strand.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 17th June, 1853.]

On Wednesday I dined at Sir James Clark's, where the Combes are
staying, and had a very pleasant evening. The Combes have taken
lodgings in Oxford Terrace, where I mean to go. It is better than the
Strand--trees waving before the windows, and no noise of omnibuses.
Last Saturday evening I had quite a new pleasure. We went to see
Rachel again, and sat on the stage between the scenes. When the
curtain fell we walked about and saw the green-room, and all the
dingy, dusty paraphernalia that make up theatrical splendor. I have
not yet seen the "Vashti" of Currer Bell in Rachel, though there was
some approach to it in Adrienne Lecouvreur.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 28th June, 1853.]

On Saturday we will go to Ockley, near Dorking, where are staying Miss
Julia Smith, Barbara Smith, and Bessie Parkes. I shall write to the
Ockley party to-day and tell them of the probability that they will
see you.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 3d Aug. 1853, from St. Leonards.]

I never felt the delight of the thorough change that the coast gives
one so much as now, and I shall be longing to be off with you again in
October. I am on a delightful hill looking over the heads of the
houses, and having a vast expanse of sea and sky for my only view. The
bright weather and genial air--so different from what I have had for a
year before--make me feel as happy and stupid as a well-conditioned
cow. I sit looking at the sea and the sleepy ships with a purely
animal _bien être_.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mr. Bray, 9th Aug. 1853.]

It would have been a satisfaction to your benevolence to see me
sitting on the beach laughing at the _Herald's_ many jokes, and
sympathizing with your indignation against Judge Maule. It always
helps me to be happy when I know that you are so; but I do not choose
to vindicate myself against doubts of that, because it is unworthy of
you to entertain them. I am going on as well as possible
physically--really getting stout. I should like to have a good laugh
with you immensely. How nice it would be to meet you and Cara on the
beach this evening, and instead of sending you such a miserable
interpreter of one's feelings as a letter, give you the look and the
hand of warm affection! This British Channel really looks as blue as
the Mediterranean to-day. What weather!

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 18th Aug. 1853.]

For the first time in my experience I am positively revelling in the
_Prospective_. James Martineau transcends himself in beauty of imagery
in the article on Sir William Hamilton, but I have not finished him
yet. Yesterday it rained _sans_ intermission, and of course I said
_cui bono?_ and found my troubles almost more than I could bear; but
to-day the sun shines, and there is blue above and blue below,
consequently I find life very glorious, and myself a particularly
fortunate _diavolessa_. The landlord of my lodgings is a German, comes
from Saxe-Weimar, knows well the Duchess of Orleans, and talked to me
this morning of _Mr._ Schiller and _Mr._ Goethe. _À propos_ of Goethe,
there is a most true, discriminating passage about him in the article
on Shakespeare in the _Prospective_. _Mr._ Goethe is one of my
companions here, and I had felt some days before reading the passage
the truth which it expresses.

     Subjoined is the passage from the _Prospective Review_ of
     August, 1853:

     "Goethe's works are too much in the nature of literary
     studies; the mind is often deeply impressed by them, but one
     doubts if the author was. He saw them as he saw the houses of
     Weimar and the plants in the act of metamorphosis. He had a
     clear perception of their fixed condition and their
     successive transitions, but he did not really (at least so it
     seems to us) comprehend their motive power. In a word, he
     appreciated their life but not their liveliness.... And we
     trace this not to a defect in imaginative power--a defect
     which it would be a simple absurdity to impute to Goethe--but
     to the tone of his character and the habits of his mind. He
     moved hither and thither through life, but he was always a
     man apart. He mixed with unnumbered kinds of men, with courts
     and academies, students and women, camps and artists, but
     everywhere he was with them, yet not of them. In every scene
     he was there, and he made it clear that he was there with a
     reserve and as a stranger. He went there _to experience_. As
     a man of universal culture, and well skilled in the order
     and classification of human life, the fact of any one class
     or order being beyond his reach or comprehension seemed an
     absurdity; and it was an absurdity. He thought that he was
     equal to moving in any description of society, and he was
     equal to it; but then, on that account, he was absorbed in
     none."

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 19th Sept. 1853.]

As for me, I am in the best health and spirits. I have had a letter
from Mr. Combe to-day, urging me to go to Edinburgh, but I have made
an engagement with Mr. Chapman to do work which will oblige me to
remain in London. Mrs. P. is a very bonny, pleasant-looking woman,
with a smart drawing-room and liberal opinions--in short, such a
friend as self-interest, well understood, would induce one to
cultivate. I find it difficult to meet with any lodgings at once
tolerable and cheap. My theory is to _live_ entirely--that is, pay
rent and find food--out of my positive income, and then work for as
large a surplus as I can get. The next number of the _Review_ will be
better than usual. Froude writes on the "Book of Job"! He at first
talked of an article on the three great _subjective_ poems--Job,
Faust, and Hamlet--an admirable subject--but it has shrunk to the Book
of Job alone.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 1st Oct. 1853.]

I have been busied about my lodgings all afternoon. I am not going to
Albion Street, but to 21 Cambridge Street, Hyde Park Square. I hope
you will be pleased with our present number. If you don't think the
"Universal Postulate" first-rate, I shall renounce you as a critic.
Why don't you write grumbling letters to me when you are out of humor
with life, instead of making me ashamed of myself for ever having
grumbled to you? I have been a more good-for-nothing correspondent
than usual lately; this affair of getting lodgings, added to my other
matters, has taken up my time and thoughts. I have promised to do some
work to-night and to-morrow for a person[41] who is rather more idle
than myself, so I have not a moment to spare.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 22d Oct. 1853.]

I am reading "The Religion of the Heart" (Leigh Hunt's), and am far
more pleased with it than I expected to be. I have just fallen on two
passages with which you will agree. "Parker ... is full of the poetry
of religion; Martineau equally so, with a closer style and incessant
eloquence of expression, perhaps a perilous superabundance of it as
regards the claims of matter over manner; and his assumptions of
perfection in the character of Jesus are so reiterated and peremptory
that in a man of less evident heart and goodness they might almost
look like a very unction of insincerity or of policy, of doubt forcing
itself to seem undoubting. Hennell's 'Christian Theism' is one long,
beautiful discourse proclaiming the great Bible of Creation, and
reconciling Pagan and Christian Philosophy."

Good Sir James Clark stopped me in the Park yesterday, as I was
sauntering along with eyes on the clouds, and made very fatherly
inquiries about me, urging me to spend a quiet evening with him and
Lady Clark next week--which I will certainly do; for they are two
capital people, without any snobbery. I like my lodgings--the
housekeeper cooks charming little dinners for me, and I have not one
disagreeable to complain of at present, save such as are inseparable
from a ground-floor.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mr. Bray, 29th Oct. 1853.]

Last night I saw the first fine specimen of a man in the shape of a
clergyman that I ever met with--Dawes, the Dean of Hereford. He is the
man who has been making the experiment of mingling the middle and
lower classes in schools. He has a face so intelligent and benignant
that children might grow good by looking at it. Harriet Martineau
called yesterday. She is going to her brother's at Birmingham soon.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 3d Nov. 1853.]

Mr. Lewes was at Cambridge about a fortnight ago, and found that
Herbert Spencer was a great deal talked of there for the article on
the "Universal Postulate," as well as other things. Mr. Lewes himself
has a knot of devotees there who make his "History of Philosophy" a
private text-book. Miss Martineau's "Comte" is out now. Do you mean to
_do_ it? or Mr. Lewes's? We can get no one to write an article on
Comte for the next number of the _Westminster_--Bain, our last hope,
refusing.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mr. Bray, 5th Nov. 1853.]

I think you would find some capital extracts for the _Herald_
(Coventry), in the article on "Church Parties" in the _Edinburgh_. The
_Record_ is attempting a reply to it, in which it talks of the
truculent infidelity of _Voltaire_ AND _Robespierre_! Has A. sent you
his book on the Sabbath? If ever I write a book I will make a present
of it to nobody; it is the surest way of taking off the edge of
appetite for it, if no more. I am as well as possible; and certainly,
when I put my head into the house in the Strand, I feel that I have
gained, or, rather, escaped, a great deal physically by my change.
Have you known the misery of writing with a _tired_ steel pen, which
is reluctant to make a mark? If so, you will know why I leave off.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Houghton, 7th Nov. 1853.]

Chrissey has just sent me a letter, which tells that you have been
suffering severely, and that you are yet very ill. I must satisfy my
own feelings by telling you that I grieve at this, though it will do
you little good to know it. Still, when _I_ am suffering, I do care
for sympathy, and perhaps you are of the same mind. If so, think of me
as your loving sister, who remembers all your kindness to her, all the
pleasant hours she has had with you, and every little particular of
her intercourse with you, however long and far she may have been
removed from you. Dear Fanny, I can never be indifferent to your
happiness or sorrow, and in this present sad affliction my thoughts
and love are with you. I shall tease you with no words about myself
_now_--perhaps by and by it will amuse you to have a longer letter.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mr. Bray, 8th Nov. 1853.]

Hitherto I have been spending £9 per month--at least after that
rate--but I have had frequent guests. I am exceedingly comfortable,
and feel quite at home now. Harriet Martineau has been very
kind--called again on Tuesday, and yesterday sent to invite me to go
to Lady Compton's, where she is staying, on Saturday evening. This,
too, in spite of my having vexed her by introducing Mr. Lewes to her,
which I did as a desirable bit of peacemaking.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 22d Nov. 1853 (thirty-fourth
birthday).]

I begin this year more happily than I have done most years of my life.
"Notre vraie destinée," says Comte, "se compose de _resignation_ et
_d'activité_"--and I seem more disposed to both than I have ever been
before. Let us hope that we shall both get stronger by the year's
activity--calmer by its resignation. I know it may be just the
contrary--don't suspect me of being a canting optimist. We _may_ both
find ourselves at the end of the year going faster to the hell of
conscious moral and intellectual weakness. Still, there is a
possibility--even a probability--the other way. I have not seen
Harriet Martineau's "Comte" yet--she is going to give me a copy--but
Mr. Lewes tells me it seems to him admirably well done. I told Mr.
Chapman yesterday that I wished to give up my connection with the
editorship of the _Westminster_. He wishes me to continue the present
state of things until April. I shall be much more satisfied on many
accounts to have done with that affair; but I shall find the question
of supplies rather a difficult one this year, as I am not likely to
get any money either for "Feuerbach" or for "The Idea of a Future
Life,"[42] for which I am to have "half profits"=0/0!

I hope you will appreciate this _bon-mot_ as I do--"C'est un homme
admirable--il se tait en sept langues!"[43]

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 2d Dec. 1853.]

I am going to detail all my troubles to you. In the first place, the
door of my sitting-room doesn't quite fit, and a draught is the
consequence. Secondly, there is a piano in the house which has
decidedly entered on its second childhood, and this piano is
occasionally played on by Miss P. with a really enviable _aplomb_.
Thirdly, the knocks at the door startle me--an annoyance inseparable
from a ground-floor room. Fourthly, Mrs. P. scolds the servants
_stringendo e fortissimo_ while I am dressing in the morning.
Fifthly--there is no fifthly. I really have not another discomfort
when I am well, which, alas! I have not been for the last ten days;
so, while I have been up to the chin in possibilities of enjoyment, I
have been too sick and headachy to use them. One thing is needful--a
good digestion.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 28th Dec. 1853.]

Spent Christmas Day alone at Cambridge Street. How shall I thank you
enough for sending me that splendid barrel of beet-root, so nicely
packed? I shall certainly eat it and enjoy it, which, I fancy, is the
end you sought, and not thanks. Don't suppose that I am looking
miserable--_au contraire_. My only complaints just now are idleness
and dislike-to-getting-up-in-the-morningness, whereby the day is made
too short for what I want to do. I resolve every day to conquer the
flesh the next, and, of course, am a little later in consequence. I
dined with Arthur Helps yesterday at Sir James Clark's--very
snug--only he and myself. He is a sleek man, with close-snipped hair;
has a quiet, humorous way of talking, like his books.

     At the beginning of January, 1854, there was another visit to
     Mrs. Clarke, at Attleboro, for ten days.

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, 6th Feb. 1854.]

In the last number of the _Scotsman_ which I sent you there was a
report of a speech by Dr. Guthrie at the Education meeting, containing
a passage which I meant to have copied. He is speaking of the
impossibility of teaching morality with the "Bible shut," and says
that in that case the teacher would be obliged to resort to "congruity
and the fitness of things," about which the boy knows nothing more
than that the apple is _fit_ for his mouth. What is wanted to convince
the boy of his sin is, "Thou God seest me," and "Thou bleeding Lamb,
the best morality is love of thee!" Mr. Lewes came a few minutes after
you left, and desired me to tell you that he was sorry to miss you.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Houghton, 6th April, 1854.]

Thank you for your very kind letter, which I received this morning. It
is pleasant to think of you as quite well, and enjoying your
sea-breezes.

But do you imagine me sitting with my hands crossed, ready to start
for any quarter of the world at the shortest notice. It is not on
those terms that people, not rich, live in London. I shall be deep in
proof-sheets till the end of May, and shall only dismiss them to make
material for new ones. I dare say you will pity me. But, as one of
Balzac's characters says, after maturity, "La vie n'est que l'exercice
d'une habitude dans un milieu préféré;" and I could no more live out
of my _milieu_ than the haddocks I dare say you are often having for
dinner.

My health is better. I had got into a labyrinth of headaches and
palpitations, but I think I am out of it now, and I hope to keep well.
I am not the less obliged to you, dear Fanny, for wishing to have me
with you. But to leave London now would not be agreeable to me, even
if it were morally possible. To see you again would certainly be a
pleasure, but I hope that will come to pass without my crossing the
Irish Channel.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, Saturday, 18th April, 1854.]

I am rather overdone with the week's work, and the prospect of what is
to come next. Poor Lewes is ill, and is ordered not to put pen to
paper for a month; so I have something to do for him in addition to my
own work, which is rather pressing. He is gone to Arthur Helps, in
Hampshire, for ten days, and I really hope this total cessation from
work, in obedience to a peremptory order, will end in making him
better than he has been for the last year. No opera and no fun for me
for the next month. Happily, I shall have no time to regret it. Plenty
of bright sun on your anemone bed. How lovely your place must look,
with its fresh leaves!

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, 23d May, 1854.]

It is quite possible that I may wish to go to the Continent, or twenty
other things. Mr. Lewes is going on a walking excursion to Windsor
to-day with his doctor, who pronounces him better, but not yet fit
for work. However, he is obliged to do a little, and must content
himself with an _approximation_ to his doctor's directions. In this
world all things are approximations, and in the system of the Dog Star
too, in spite of Dr. Whewell.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, Friday, no date, 1854.]

My troubles are purely psychical--self-dissatisfaction, and despair of
achieving anything worth the doing. I can truly say they vanish into
nothing before any fear for the happiness of those I love. Thank you
for letting me know how things are, for indeed I could not bear to be
shut out from your anxieties. When I spoke of myself as an island, I
did not mean that I was so exceptionally. We are all islands--

     "Each in his hidden sphere of joy or woe,
       Our hermit spirits dwell and roam apart"--

and this seclusion is sometimes the most intensely felt at the very
moment your friend is caressing you or consoling you. But this
gradually becomes a source of satisfaction instead of repining. When
we are young we think our troubles a mighty business--that the world
is spread out expressly as a stage for the particular drama of our
lives, and that we have a right to rant and foam at the mouth if we
are crossed. I have done enough of that in my time. But we begin at
last to understand that these things are important only to our own
consciousness, which is but as a globule of dew on a rose-leaf, that
at mid-day there will be no trace of. This is no high-flown
sentimentality, but a simple reflection, which I find useful to me
every day. I expect to see Mr. Lewes back again to-day. His poor
head--his only fortune--is not well yet; and he has had the misery of
being _ennuyé_ with idleness, without perceiving the compensating
physical improvement. Still, I hope the good he has been getting has
been greater than he has been conscious of. I expect "Feuerbach" will
be all in print by the end of next week, and there are no skippings,
except such as have been made on very urgent grounds.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, Tuesday, 6th June, 1854.]

Thanks for your assurance of welcome. I will trust to it when the gods
send favorable circumstances. But I see no probability of my being
able to be with you before your other midsummer visitors arrive. I
delight to think that you are all a little more cheery.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, Wednesday, 28th June, 1854.]

I reached the Euston Station as dusty as an old ledger, but with no
other "incommodity." I went to the Lyceum last night to see "Sunshine
through the Clouds,"[44] a wonderfully original and beautiful piece by
Mme. de Girardin, which makes one cry rather too much for pleasure.
Vestris acts finely the bereaved mother, passing through all the
gradations of doubt and hope to the actual recovery of her lost son.
My idea of you is rather bright just now, and really helps to make me
enjoy all that is enjoyable. That is part of the benefit I have had
from my pleasant visit, which was made up of sunshine, green fields,
pleasant looks, and good eatables--an excellent compound. Will you be
so kind as to send my books by railway, _without_ the Shelley?

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, Monday, 4th July, 1854.]

Pray consider the Strauss MSS. waste paper. _I_ shall never want them
again. I dined with your old acquaintance, Dr. Conolly, at Sir James
Clark's, the other day. He took me down to dinner, and we talked of
you.

     The translation of Ludwig Feuerbach's "Wesen des
     Christenthums" was published in July in "Chapman's Quarterly
     Series," with Miss Evans's name on the titlepage as the
     translator, the first and only time her real name appeared in
     print.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 10th July, 1854.]

I am going to pack up the Hebrew Grammar, the Apocryphal Gospels, and
your pretty Titian, to be sent to you. Shall I despatch them by rail
or deposit them with Mr. Chapman, to be asked for by Mr. Bray when he
comes to town? I shall soon send you a good-bye, for I am preparing to
go abroad (?). Herbert Spencer's article on the "Genesis of Science"
is a good one. He will stand in the Biographical Dictionaries of 1854
as "Spencer, Herbert, an original and profound philosophical writer,
especially known by his great work, ... which gave a new impulse to
psychology, and has mainly contributed to the present advanced
position of that science, compared with that which it had attained in
the middle of the last century. The life of this philosopher, like
that of the great Kant, offers little material for the narrator. Born
in the year 1820," etc.

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 20th July, 1854.]

Dear friends--all three--I have only time to say good-bye, and God
bless you. _Poste Restante_, Weimar, for the next six weeks, and
afterwards Berlin. Ever your loving and grateful Marian.

     We have now been led up to the most important event in George
     Eliot's life--her union with Mr. George Henry Lewes. Here, as
     elsewhere, it seems to me to be of the first importance that
     she should speak for herself; and there is, fortunately, a
     letter to Mrs. Bray, dated in September, 1855--fourteen
     months after the event--which puts on record the point of
     view from which she regarded her own action. I give this
     letter here (out of its place as to date); and I may add,
     what, I think, has not been mentioned before, that not only
     was Mr. Lewes's previous family life irretrievably spoiled,
     but his home had been wholly broken up for nearly two years.
     In forming a judgment on so momentous a question, it is,
     above all things, necessary to understand what was actually
     undertaken, what was actually achieved; and, in my opinion,
     this can best be arrived at, not from any outside statement
     or arguments, but by consideration of the whole tenor of the
     life which follows, in the development of which Mr. Lewes's
     true character, as well as George Eliot's, will unfold
     itself. No words that any one else can write, no arguments
     any one else can use, will, I think, be so impressive as the
     life itself.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 4th Sept. 1855.]

If there is any one action or relation of my life which is, and always
has been, profoundly serious, it is my relation to Mr. Lewes. It is,
however, natural enough that you should mistake me in many ways, for
not only are you unacquainted with Mr. Lewes's real character and the
course of his actions, but also it is several years now since you and
I were much together, and it is possible that the modifications my
mind has undergone may be quite in the opposite direction of what you
imagine. No one can be better aware than yourself that it is possible
for two people to hold different opinions on momentous subjects with
equal sincerity, and an equally earnest conviction that their
respective opinions are alone the truly moral ones. If we differ on
the subject of the marriage laws, I at least can believe of you that
you cleave to what you believe to be good; and I don't know of
anything in the nature of your views that should prevent you from
believing the same of me. _How far_ we differ I think we neither of us
know, for I am ignorant of your precise views; and, apparently, you
attribute to me both feelings and opinions which are not mine. We
cannot set each other quite right in this matter in letters, but one
thing I can tell you in few words. Light and easily broken ties are
what I neither desire theoretically nor could live for practically.
Women who are satisfied with such ties do _not_ act as I have done.
That any unworldly, unsuperstitious person who is sufficiently
acquainted with the realities of life can pronounce my relation to Mr.
Lewes immoral, I can only understand by remembering how subtile and
complex are the influences that mould opinion. But I _do_ remember
this: and I indulge in no arrogant or uncharitable thoughts about
those who condemn us, even though we might have expected a somewhat
different verdict. From the majority of persons, of course, we never
looked for anything but condemnation. We are leading no life of
self-indulgence, except, indeed, that, being happy in each other, we
find everything easy. We are working hard to provide for others better
than we provide for ourselves, and to fulfil every responsibility that
lies upon us. Levity and pride would not be a sufficient basis for
that. Pardon me if, in vindicating myself from some unjust
conclusions, I seem too cold and self-asserting. I should not care to
vindicate myself if I did not love you and desire to relieve you of
the pain which you say these conclusions have given you. Whatever I
may have misinterpreted before, I do not misinterpret your letter this
morning, but read in it nothing else than love and kindness towards
me, to which my heart fully answers yes. I should like never to write
about myself again; it is not healthy to dwell on one's own feelings
and conduct, but only to try and live more faithfully and lovingly
every fresh day. I think not one of the endless words and deeds of
kindness and forbearance you have ever shown me has vanished from my
memory. I recall them often, and feel, as about everything else in the
past, how deficient I have been in almost every relation of my life.
But that deficiency is irrevocable, and I can find no strength or
comfort except in "pressing forward towards the things that are
before," and trying to make the present better than the past. But if
we should never be very near each other again, dear Cara, do bear this
faith in your mind, that I was not insensible or ungrateful to all
your goodness, and that I am one among the many for whom you have not
lived in vain. I am very busy just now, and have been obliged to write
hastily. Bear this in mind, and believe that no meaning is mine which
contradicts my assurance that I am your affectionate and earnest
friend.


_SUMMARY._

MARCH, 1850, TO JULY, 1854.

     Return to England with M. d'Albert--Depressing effect of
     change--Visit to Rosehill--Visit to brother and sister at
     Griff and Meriden--Deeper depression--To Rosehill again with
     M. d'Albert--Makes her home there for sixteen months--Reviews
     Mackay's "Progress of the Intellect" in _Westminster_--Meets
     Mr. Chapman, the editor of the _Westminster_--Helps to settle
     Prospectus of new series of the _Review_--Visits Robert Noel
     at Bishop Steignton with Mrs. Bray--Visit to London--Crystal
     Palace--Returns to Rosehill, and meets Mr. and Mrs. George
     Combe--Goes to London as assistant editor of the _Westminster
     Review_--Letters to Brays--Review writing: Dr. Brabant,
     Foxton, Wilson--Meets Mr. Herbert Spencer--Miss
     Martineau--Distractions of London--Low health--Miss
     Bremer--Introduction to Mr. Lewes--Opinion of House of
     Lords--Carlyle's "Life of Sterling"--Carlyle
     anecdotes--Mackay--James Martineau--J. H. Newman's
     Lectures--Translation of Schleiermacher--Letter from
     Carlyle--Intimacy begins with Mr. Lewes--Reviews Carlyle's
     "Sterling" in _Westminster_--Visit to Rosehill--Returns to
     Strand--Harriet Martineau--Pierre Leroux--Louis Blanc--Miss
     Bessie Parkes--Mrs. Peter Taylor--"Margaret Fuller's
     Life"--Description of _Westminster_ reviewers--Growing
     intimacy with Mr. Herbert Spencer--Meeting of authors and
     booksellers at Mr. Chapman's--Admiration of Prince
     Albert--Grisi--Hack work of _Review_--Appreciation of Miss
     Martineau's writings--Singing of charity children at St.
     Paul's--George Combe's opinion of _Westminster_
     editing--Barbara Leigh Smith--Visit to Broadstairs--Florence
     Nightingale--Return to Strand--Depression--Professor Owen on
     the Cerebellum--Visit to Combes at Edinburgh, and to Harriet
     Martineau at Ambleside--Return to London--Reading
     "Esmond"--Lord Brougham's speech--Work in
     Strand--Bryant--Visit to Rosehill--Death of Edward
     Clarke--Visit to widowed sister at Meriden--Return to
     Strand--Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor--Views on
     America--"Ruth"--Visit to Rosehill, and to Mrs. Clarke at
     Attleboro--Return to Strand--Reading "Villette"--Letter from
     Mrs. Stowe to Mrs. Follen--Meets Huxley--Thinks of going to
     Australia to settle Mrs. Clarke--Admiration of Helen
     Faucit--Growing regard for Mr. Lewes--Kindness of Sir James
     Clark--Visit to Ockley--Change to St. Leonard's--Improvement
     in health--Return to Strand--Spencer's "Universal
     Postulate"--Removal to 21 Cambridge Street--Leigh Hunt's
     "Religion of the Heart"--Dawes, Dean of Hereford--Harriet
     Martineau--Comte--Contemplates publishing "The Idea of a
     Future Life"--Meets Arthur Helps--Intimate relations with Mr.
     Lewes--Translation of Feuerbach--Visit to Rosehill--Return to
     London--Feuerbach completed--Estimate of Herbert
     Spencer--Good-bye to Brays--Union with Mr. Lewes--Letter to
     Mrs. Bray thereon.

FOOTNOTES:

[31] Frederick Foxton, author of "Popular Christianity: its Transition
State and Probable Development."

[32] "Man's Nature and Development," by Martineau and Atkinson.

[33] This was a merely formal and casual introduction. That George
Eliot was ever brought into close relations with Mr. Lewes was due to
Mr. Herbert Spencer having taken him to call on her in the Strand
later in this year.

[34] Appeared in January, 1852, number of the _Westminster Review_,
No. 1 of the New Series.

[35] Review of Carlyle's "Life of Sterling" in _Westminster_, Jan.
1852.

[36] Published in the April, 1852, number of the _Westminster_.

[37] Now Madame Belloc, who remained to the end one of George Eliot's
closest friends.

[38] Mrs. Peter Taylor remained a lifelong and a valued friend of
George Eliot's, and many interesting letters in this volume are
addressed to her. I am glad also to take this opportunity of
expressing my thanks to her for procuring for me two other sets of
correspondence--the letters addressed to Mrs. Beecher Stowe and to
Mrs. William Smith.

[39] Afterwards Madame Bodichon--one of the three or four most
intimate friends of George Eliot, whose name will very often appear in
subsequent pages.

[40] Funeral oration on the Duke of Wellington.

[41] Correcting _Leader_ proofs for Mr. Lewes.

[42] Advertised in 1853-54 as to appear by "Marian Evans" in
"Chapman's Quarterly Series," but never published.

[43] Lord Acton tells me he first heard this _bon-mot_, in 1855,
related of Immanuel Bekker, the philologist.

[44] Translated and adapted from the French, "La joie fait peur," by
Mr. Lewes, under the name of Slingsby Lawrence.




CHAPTER VI.


[Sidenote: Journal, 20th July, 1854.]

I said a last farewell to Cambridge Street on 20th July, 1854, and
found myself on board the _Ravensbourne_, bound for Antwerp. The day
was glorious, and our passage perfect. The sunset was lovely, but
still lovelier the dawn as we were passing up the Scheldt between two
and three in the morning. The crescent moon, the stars, the first
faint blush of the dawn reflected in the glassy river, the dark mass
of clouds on the horizon, which sent forth flashes of lightning, and
the graceful forms of the boats and sailing-vessels, painted in
jet-black on the reddish gold of the sky and water, made up an
unforgettable picture. Then the sun rose and lighted up the sleepy
shores of Belgium, with their fringe of long grass, their rows of
poplars, their church spires and farm buildings.

[Sidenote: 21st July.]

The great treat at Antwerp was the sight of the Descent from the
Cross, which, with its pendant, the Elevation of the Cross, has been
undergoing restoration. In the latter the face of Jesus is sublime in
its expression of agony and trust in the Divine. It is certainly the
finest conception of the suffering Christ I have ever seen. The rest
of the picture gave me no pleasure. But in the Descent from the Cross,
color, form, and expression alike impressed me with the sense of
grandeur and beauty. A little miserable copy of the picture placed
near it served as an admirable foil.

[Sidenote: 22d July.]

We went to the museum and saw Rubens's Crucifixion, even more
beautiful to me than the Descent from the Cross. These two pictures
profoundly impressed me with the miserable lack of breadth and
grandeur in the conceptions of our living artists. The reverence for
the old masters is not all humbug and superstition.

[Sidenote: 30th July.]

We breakfasted in the public room at the hotel at Cologne, and were
joined there by Dr. Brabant and Strauss. After a short interview with
them we went on board the steamboat which was to take us to Coblentz.

[Sidenote: Weimar, Description, Aug.-Oct. 1854.]

It was very pretty to look out of the window, when dressing, on a
garden that reminded one of an English village: the town is more like
a huge village, or market-town, than the precincts of a court.

G. called on Schöll, and in the afternoon he (Schöll) came and took us
to the _Schloss_, where we saw the Dichter Zimmer--a suite of rooms
dedicated to Goethe, Schiller, and Wieland. In each room there is the
bust of the poet who is its presiding genius; and the walls of the
Goethe and Schiller rooms are decorated with frescoes representing
scenes from their works. The Wieland room is decorated with arabesques
only. The idea of these rooms is a very pretty one, but the frescoes
are badly executed. I am delighted with Schöll. He is a
bright-looking, well-made man, with his head finely set on his
shoulders, very little like a German. We discovered, after we had
known him some time, that he is an Austrian, and so has more southern
blood in his veins than the heavy Thuringians. His manners are hearty
and cordial, and his conversation really instructive: his ideas are so
thoroughly shaped and so admirably expressed. Sauppe is also a
_Gelehrter_, director of the gymnasium, and editor of a series of
classics which are being brought out; and he is evidently thought a
great deal of in Weimar. We went with the Schölls and Sauppes to
Tiefurt, and saw the queer little _Schloss_ which used to be Amalia's
residence. Tiefurt was a favorite resort of ours, for the walk to it
is a very pleasant one, and the Tiefurt park is a little paradise. The
Ilm is seen here to the best advantage: it is clearer than at Weimar,
and winds about gracefully among fine trees. One of the banks is a
high, steep declivity, which shows the trees in all their perfection.
In autumn, when the yellow and scarlet were at their brightest, these
banks were fairy-like in their beauty. It was here that Goethe and his
court friends got up the performance of "Die Fischerin" by torchlight.

About ten days after our arrival at Weimar we made an excursion to
Ettersburg, one of the duke's summer residences, interesting to us
beforehand as the scene of private theatricals and _sprees_ in the
Goethe days. We carried provisions with us, and Keats's poems. The
morning was one of the brightest and hottest that August ever
bestowed, and it required some resolution to trudge along the
shadeless _chaussée_, which formed the first two or three miles of our
way. One compensating pleasure was the sight of the beautiful mountain
ashes in full berry, which, alternately with cherry-trees, border the
road for a considerable distance. I felt a child's love for the
bunches of coral standing out against the blue sky. The _Schloss_ is a
house of very moderate size, and no pretension of any kind. Two
flights of steps lead up to the door, and the balustrades are
ornamented with beautiful creepers. A tiny sort of piazza under the
steps is ornamented with creepers too, and has pretty earthenware
vases filled with plants hanging from the ceiling. We felt how much
beauty might be procured at small expense in looking at these things.
A beautiful walk through a beech wood took us to the _Mooshütte_,
before which stands the beech whereon Goethe and his friends cut their
names, and from which Goethe denounced Waldemar. We could recognize
some of the initials. With Ettersburg I shall always associate Arthur
Helps, for he was with us on the second and last time we saw it. He
came to Weimar quite unexpectedly on the 29th August, and the next
evening we all three drove to Ettersburg. He said the country just
round Weimar reminded him of Spain. This led him to talk of his
Spanish travels, and he told us some delightful stories in a
delightful way. At one inn he was considerably embarrassed in eating
his dinner by the presence of a handsome woman, who sat directly
opposite to him, resting on her elbows, and fixing her dark eyes on
him with a fearful intensity of interest. This woman was the cook,
anxious to know that her dishes were acceptable to the stranger. Under
this terrible surveillance he did not dare to omit a single dish,
though sorely longing to do so.

Our greatest expedition from Weimar was to Ilmenau. We set out with a
determination to find the Gabel-Bach and Kickel-hahn (Goethe's
residence) without the encumbrance of a guide. We found the man who
inhabits the simple wooden house which used to be Carl August's
hunting-box. He sent a man on with us to show us the way to the
Kickel-hahn, which we at last reached--I with weary legs. There is a
magnificent view of hills from this spot; but Goethe's tiny wooden
house is now closely shut in by fir-trees, and nothing can be seen
from the windows. His room, which forms the upper floor of the house,
is about ten or twelve feet square. It is now quite empty, but there
is an interesting memorial of his presence in these wonderful lines,
written by his own hand, near the window-frame:

     "Ueber allen Gipfeln
     Ist Ruh,
     In allen Wipfeln
     Spürest du
     Kaum einen Hauch;
     Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
     Warte nur, balde
     Ruhest du auch."

We wrote our names near one of the windows.

About the middle of September the theatre opened, and we went to hear
"Ernani." Liszt looked splendid as he conducted the opera. The grand
outline of his face and floating hair were seen to advantage as they
were thrown into dark relief by the stage lamps. We were so fortunate
as to have all three of Wagner's most celebrated operas while we were
at Weimar. G., however, had not patience to sit out more than two acts
of "Lohengrin;" and, indeed, I too was weary. The declamation appeared
to me monotonous, and situations, in themselves trivial or
disagreeable, were dwelt on fatiguingly. Without feeling competent to
pass a judgment on this opera as music, one may venture to say that it
fails in one grand requisite of art, based on an unchangeable element
in human nature--the need for contrast. With the "Fliegender
Holländer" I was delighted; the poem and the music were alike
charming. The "Tannhäuser," too, created in me a great desire to hear
it again. Many of the situations, and much of the music, struck me as
remarkably fine. And I appreciated these operas all the better
retrospectively when we saw "Der Freischütz," which I had never
before heard and seen on the stage. The effect of the delicious music,
with which one is so familiar, was completely spoiled by the absence
of recitative, and the terrible _lapsus_ from melody to ordinary
speech. The bacchanalian song seemed simply ridiculous, sung at a
little pot-house table at a party of _two_, one of whom was sunk in
melancholy; and the absurdity reached a _ne plus ultra_ when Caspar
climbed the tree, apparently with the sole purpose of being shot. _À
propos_ of the theatre, we were immensely amused to learn that a fair,
small-featured man, who somehow always looked to me as if he had just
come out of the shell, had come to Weimar to fit himself for a
dramatic writer by going behind the scenes! He had as yet written
nothing, but was going to work in what he considered a _gründlich_
way.

When we passed along the Schiller Strasse, I used to be very much
thrilled by the inscription, "Hier wohnte Schiller," over the door of
his small house. Very interesting it is to see his study, which is
happily left in its original state. In his bedroom we saw his skull
for the first time, and were amazed at the smallness of the
intellectual region. There is an intensely interesting sketch of
Schiller lying dead, which I saw for the first time in the study; but
all pleasure in thinking of Schiller's portraits and bust is now
destroyed to me by the conviction of their untruthfulness. Rauch told
us that he had a _miserabled Stirne_.[45] Waagen says that Tieck the
sculptor told him there was something in Schiller's whole person which
reminded him of a _camel_.

Goethe's house is much more important-looking, but, to English eyes,
far from being the palatial residence which some German writers think
it. The entrance-hall is certainly rather imposing, with its statues
in niches, and broad staircase. The latter was made after his own
design, and was an "after-shine" of Italian tastes. The pictures are
wretched, the casts not much better--indeed, I remember nothing which
seemed intrinsically worth looking at. The MS. of his "Römische
Elegien," written by himself in the Italian character, is to be seen
here; and one likes to look at it better than at most of the other
things. G. had obtained permission from Frau v. Goethe to see the
studio and Schlafzimmer, which are not open to the public, and here
our feelings were deeply moved. We entered first a small room
containing drawers and shelves devoted to his mineralogical
collections. From these we passed into the study. It is rather a dark
room, for there are only two small windows--German windows. A plain
deal table stands in the middle, and near the chair, against this
table, is a high basket, where, I was afterwards told, Goethe used to
put his pocket-handkerchief. A long sort of writing-table and bookcase
united stands against one wall. Here hangs the pin-cushion, just as he
left it, with visiting-cards suspended on threads, and other trifles
which greatness and death have made sacred. Against the opposite wall,
where you enter the bedroom, there is a high writing-desk, on which
stands a little statue of Napoleon in creamy glass. The bedroom is
very small. By the side of the bed stands a stuffed arm-chair, where
he used to sit and read while he drank his coffee in the morning. It
was not until very late in his life that he adopted the luxury of an
arm-chair. From the other side of the study one enters the library,
which is fitted up in a very makeshift fashion, with rough deal
shelves, and bits of paper, with Philosophy, History, etc., written on
them, to mark the classification of the books. Among such memorials
one breathes deeply, and the tears rush to one's eyes. There is one
likeness of Goethe that is really startling and thrilling from the
idea it gives one of perfect resemblance. It is painted on a cup, and
is a tiny miniature, but the execution is so perfect that, on applying
a magnifying glass, every minute stroke has as natural an appearance
as the texture of a flower or the parts of an insect under the
microscope.

Equally interesting is the _Gartenhaus_, which we used to see almost
every day in our walks. Within, it is a not uncomfortable, homely sort
of cottage; no furniture is left in it, and the family want to sell
it. It stands on a pleasant slope fronting the west, and there is a
charming bit of garden and orchard attached to it. Close to the garden
hedge runs the road which leads to Ober Weimar, and on the other side
of this road a meadow stretches to the trees which border the Ilm. A
bridge nearly opposite the Gartenhaus takes one to the Borkenhaus,
Carl August's little retreat, from which he used to telegraph to
Goethe. The road to Ober Weimar was one of our favorite walks,
especially towards the end of our stay at Weimar, when we were glad of
all the sunshine we could get. Sometimes we used to turn out of it, up
a grove of weeping birches, into the ploughed fields at the top of the
slope on which the Gartenhaus and other little villas stand. Here we
enjoyed many a lovely sunset; one, in particular, was marvellously
splendid. The whole hemisphere was golden, towards the east tinted
with rose-color. From this little height we looked on the plantations
of the park, in their autumnal coloring, the town, with its
steep-roofed church and its castle tower, colored a gay green, the
line of chestnuts along the Belvedere Chaussée, and Belvedere itself
peeping from its nest of trees.

Another very favorite walk of mine was the _Webicht_, a beautiful wood
through which ran excellent carriage-roads and grassy footpaths. How
richly have I enjoyed skirting this wood and seeing, on the other
side, the sky arching grandly down over the open fields, the evening
red flushing the west over the town, and the bright stars come out as
if to relieve the sun in his watch over mortals. And then the winding
road through the Webicht on the side towards Tiefurt, with its tall,
overarching trees now bending their mossy trunks forward, now standing
with stately erectness like lofty pillars; and the charming grassy
paths through the heart of the wood, among its silvery-barked birches!
The Webicht lies towards Tiefurt, and one side of it is bordered by
the road thither. I remember, as we were returning from Tiefurt one
evening, a beautiful effect of the setting sunlight pouring itself
under the trees, and making the road before us almost crimson.

One of our pleasantest acquaintances at Weimar was the French
ambassador, the Marquis de Ferrière, a very favorable specimen of a
Frenchman, but intensely French. His genial soul and perfect
good-humor gave one the same sort of _bien-être_ as a well-stuffed
arm-chair and a warm hearthrug. In the course of conversation,
speaking of Yvan's accounts of his travels (the marquis was first
secretary to the Chinese embassy which Yvan accompanied), he said,
"C'était faux d'un bout à l'autre; mais c'était spirituel, paradoxal,
amusant--enfin _tout ce qu'il fallait pour un journal_." Another day
he observed that the famous words of Napoleon to his Egyptian army,
"Forty centuries look down on you from the summits of these pyramids,"
were characteristic of the French national feeling, as those of
Nelson, "England expects the man to make his duty" were of the
English. This is a fair specimen of the correctness with which one
generally hears English quoted; and we often reminded ourselves that
it was a mirror in which we might see our own German.

Liszt's conversation is charming. I never met with a person whose
manner of telling a story was so piquant. The last evening but one
that he called on us, wishing to express his pleasure in G.'s article
about him, he very ingeniously conveyed that expression in a story
about Spontini and Berlioz. Spontini visited Paris while Liszt was
living there, and haunted the opera--a stiff, self-important
personage, with high shirt-collars, the least attractive individual
imaginable; Liszt turned up his own collars, and swelled out his
person, so as to give us a vivid idea of the man. Every one would have
been glad to get out of Spontini's way--indeed, elsewhere "on feignait
de le croire mort," but at Paris, as he was a member of the Institute,
it was necessary to recognize his existence. Liszt met him at Erard's
more than once. On one of these occasions Liszt observed to him that
Berlioz was a great admirer of his (Spontini's), whereupon Spontini
burst into a terrible invective against Berlioz as a man who, with the
like of him, was ruining art, etc. Shortly after the "Vestale" was
performed, and forthwith appeared an enthusiastic article by Berlioz
on Spontini's music. The next time Liszt met him of the high collars
he said, "You see I was not wrong in what I said about Berlioz's
admiration of you." Spontini swelled in his collars, and replied,
"Monsieur, Berlioz a du talent comme critique!"

Liszt's replies were always felicitous and characteristic. Talking of
Mme. d'Agoult, he told us that when her novel "Nelida" appeared, in
which Liszt himself is pilloried as a delinquent, he asked her, "Mais
pourquoi avez-vous tellement maltraité ce pauvre Lehmann?" The first
time we were asked to breakfast at his house, the Altenburg, we were
shown into the garden, where, in a saloon formed by overarching trees,
the _déjeuner_ was set out. We found Hoffmann von Fallersleben, the
lyric poet, Dr. Schade--a _Gelehrter_, and Cornelius. Presently came a
Herr--or Doctor--Raff, a musician, who has recently published a volume
called "Wagnerfrage." Soon after we were joined by Liszt and the
Princess Marie, an elegant, gentle-looking girl of seventeen, and last
by the Princess Wittgenstein, with her nephew, Prince Eugène, and a
young French artist, a pupil of Scheffer. The princess was tastefully
dressed in a morning-robe of some semi-transparent white material,
lined with orange-color, which formed the bordering and ornamented the
sleeves, a black lace jacket, and a piquant cap set on the summit of
her comb, and trimmed with violet color. When the cigars came, Hoffman
was requested to read some of his poetry, and he gave us a
bacchanalian poem with great spirit. I sat next to Liszt, and my great
delight was to watch him and observe the sweetness of his expression.
Genius, benevolence, and tenderness beam from his whole countenance,
and his manners are in perfect harmony with it. Then came the thing I
had longed for--his playing. I sat near him, so that I could see both
his hands and face. For the first time in my life I beheld real
inspiration--for the first time I heard the true tones of the piano.
He played one of his own compositions--one of a series of religious
fantasies. There was nothing strange or excessive about his manner.
His manipulation of the instrument was quiet and easy, and his face
was simply grand--the lips compressed, and the head thrown a little
backward. When the music expressed quiet rapture or devotion a smile
flitted over his features; when it was triumphant the nostrils
dilated. There was nothing petty or egoistic to mar the picture. Why
did not Scheffer paint him thus, instead of representing him as one of
the three Magi? But it just occurs to me that Scheffer's idea was a
sublime one. There are the two aged men who have spent their lives in
trying to unravel the destinies of the world, and who are looking for
the Deliverer--for the light from on high. Their young fellow-seeker,
having the fresh inspiration of early life, is the first to discern
the herald star, and his ecstasy reveals it to his companions. In this
young Magus, Scheffer has given a portrait of Liszt; but even here,
where he might be expected to idealize unrestrainedly, he falls short
of the original. It is curious that Liszt's face is the type that one
sees in all Scheffer's pictures; at least, in all I have seen.

In a little room which terminates the suite at the Altenburg there is
a portrait of Liszt, also by Scheffer--the same of which the engraving
is familiar to every one. This little room is filled with memorials of
Liszt's triumphs and the worship his divine talent has won. It was
arranged for him by the princess, in conjunction with the Arnims, in
honor of his birthday. There is a medallion of him by Schwanthaler, a
bust by an Italian artist, also a medallion by Rietschl--very
fine--and cabinets full of jewels and precious things--the Weimar
gifts of the great. In the music _salon_ stand Beethoven's and
Mozart's pianos. Beethoven's was a present from Broadwood, and has a
Latin inscription intimating that it was presented as a tribute to his
illustrious genius. One evening Liszt came to dine with us at the Erb
Prinz, and introduced M. Rubinstein, a young Russian, who is about to
have an opera of his performed in Weimar. Our expenses at Weimar,
including wine and washing, were £2 6_s._ per week. Dear Weimar! We
were sorry to say good-bye to it, with its pleasant group of friends.
On the 4th of November, after a stay of just three months, we turned
our backs on it "to seek fresh streets and faces new" at Berlin.

[Sidenote: Berlin, Recollections, Nov. 1854 to Mch. 1855.]

There are certain persons without any physiognomy, the catalogue of
whose features, as, item, a Roman nose, item, a pair of black eyes,
etc., gives you the entire contents of their faces. There is no
difference of opinion about the looks of such people. All the world is
agreed either that they are pretty or ugly. So it is with Berlin.
Every one tells you it is an uninteresting modern city, with broad,
monotonous streets; and when you see it, you cannot for the life of
you get up an emotion of surprise, or make a remark about the place
which you have not heard before.

The day after our arrival was Sunday, 6th November; the sun shone
brightly, and we went to walk in the Linden, elbowing our way among
the _promeneurs endimanchés_, who looked remarkably smart and handsome
after the Thuringians. We had not gone far when we met a nice-looking
old gentleman, with an order round his neck, and a gold-headed cane in
his hand, who exclaimed, on seeing G., "Ist's möglich?" and then bade
him heartily welcome. I saw at once it was the Varnhagen of whom I
had heard so often. His niece, arrayed in smiles and a pink bonnet,
was with him.

For the first six weeks, when the weather permitted, we took long
walks in the Thiergarten, where the straight and uniform avenues of
insignificant trees contrasted very disadvantageously with the
charming variety of our beloved park at Weimar. Still, we now and then
noticed a beautiful wintry effect, especially in the part most remote
from the town, where the trees are finer and the arrangements more
varied. One walk, which skirted the Thiergarten on the right-hand side
coming from the town, we were particularly fond of, because it gave us
on one side an open view, with water and a boat or two, which, touched
by the magic of sunshine, was pleasant to see. At Berlin it was "a day
of small things" with regard to the beautiful, and we made much of
little.

Our little circle of acquaintances was very agreeable and varied.
Varnhagen was a real treasure to G., for his library supplied all the
deficiencies of the public one, where to ask for books was generally
like "sinking buckets into empty wells." He is a man of real culture,
kindliness, and polish (Germanly speaking); and he has besides that
thorough liberalism, social, religious, and political, which sets the
mind at ease in conversation, and delivers it from the fear of running
against some prejudice, or coming suddenly on the sunk fence of some
miserable limitation. The first morning he called on us he talked of
his terrible disappointment in Carlyle, a subject to which he often
returned. He evidently felt an antipathy to the "Teufelsdröckh,"
which, indeed, it was not difficult to understand from the mere
_manière d'étre_ of the two men. They had corresponded for years
before they saw each other; and Varnhagen was, and is, a great
admirer of Carlyle's best work, but he was thoroughly repelled by his
rough, paradoxical talk, and, more justifiably, by the despotic
doctrines which it has been his humor to teach of late. We were amused
to hear that Carlyle said he should think no one could die at Berlin,
"for in beds _without curtains_ what Christian could give up the
ghost?"

At Varnhagen's we met, for the first time, Professor Stahr, who was
there with Fanny Lewald, Fräulein Solmar, Frau Muisch, Dr. Ring, Dr.
Vehse, Gräfin von Kalkreuth, and Director Wilhelm Schadow, author of
"Der Moderne Vasari." We talked of Goethe. Varnhagen brought out
autographs and portraits, and read us an epigram of his own on the
want of liberality which Goethe's family show about opening his house
to the public. He showed us a portrait of Kleist, who shot himself, in
company with Frau Vogel, near an inn on the way to Potsdam. There was
no love-affair between them; they were both thoroughly unhappy--he
poor and hopeless for the future; and she suffering from an incurable
disease. In the evening they both wrote, on a single sheet of paper,
letters to their friends, communicating their intention (this sheet
Varnhagen possesses). Early in the morning they rose, took a cup of
coffee, went to the brink of a piece of water in the neighborhood of
the inn, and there shot themselves.

Du Bois Reymond spoke very decidedly of the German civilization as
inferior to the English.

Varnhagen, when well, is a regular visitor at Fräulein Solmar's, who
for many years has kept an open _salon_ for her friends every evening
but one in the week. Here the three-cornered chair next the sofa was
reserved for him, except when General Pfuhl was there. This General
Pfuhl is a fine specimen of an old soldier, who is at the same time a
man of instruction and of strong social sympathies. He has been in the
service of Prussia, has been within a hair's-breadth of being frozen
to death, "and so following." He spoke French admirably, and always
had something interesting and characteristic to tell or say. His
appreciatory groans, always in the right place, when G. was reading
"Shylock" did us both good, under the chills of a German audience.
Fräulein Solmar is a remarkably accomplished woman--probably between
fifty and sixty, but of that agreeable _Wesen_ which is so free from
anything startling in person or manner, and so at home in everything
one can talk of, that you think of her simply as a delightful
presence, and not as a woman of any particular age. She converses
perfectly in French, well in English, and well also, as we were told,
in Italian. There is not the slightest warmth of manner or expression
in her, but always the same even cheerfulness and intelligence--in
fact, she is the true type of the mistress of the _salon_. During the
first half of our stay in Berlin we went about once a week to her
house; but bad health and bad weather kept us away during the last six
weeks, except for one or two evenings. Baron Sternberg, the novelist,
used frequently to glide in when we were there, and cast strange, cold
glances around, talking quietly to Fräulein Assing or some other lady
who sat in a distant parallel of latitude.

One evening a Frenchman there amused us by saying that he found in
Meyerbeer's "Huguenots" the whole spirit of the epoch of Charles IX.
"Lisez les Chroniques"--"de Froissart?" suggested Mlle. Solmar. "Oui,
quelque chose comme ça; ou bien les Chroniques de Brantôme ou de
_Mérimée_, et vous trouverez que Meyerbeer a parfaitement exprimé tout
cela; du moins c'est ce que je trouve, moi." I said, "Mais peut-être,
Monsieur, c'est votre génie à vous qui a fait entrer les idées dans la
musique." He answered with complacent deprecation. G. looked immovably
serious, but was inwardly tickled by the audacity of my compliment,
and the evident acceptance of it.

A still more interesting acquaintance was Professor Gruppe, who has
written great books on the Greek drama and on Philosophy; has been a
political writer; is a lyric and epic poet; has invented a beautiful
kind of marbled paper for binding books; is an enthusiastic huntsman,
and, withal, the most simple, kind-hearted creature in the world. His
little wife, who is about twenty years younger than himself, seems to
adore him, and it is charming to see the group they and their two
little children make in their dwelling, up endless flights of stairs
in the Leipziger Platz. Very pleasant evenings we had there, chatting
or playing whist, or listening to readings of Gruppe's poems. We used
to find him in a gray cloth _Schlafrock_, which I fancy was once a
great-coat, and a brown velvet cap surmounting his thin gray hairs. I
never saw a combination at all like that which makes up Gruppe's
character. Talent, fertility, and versatility that seem to indicate a
fervid temperament, and yet no scintillation of all this in his talk
and manner; on the contrary, he seems slow at apprehending other
people's ideas, and is of an almost childish _naiveté_ in the value he
attaches to poor jokes, and other trivialities. _À propos_ of jokes,
we noticed that during the whole seven months of our stay in Germany
we never heard one witticism, or even one felicitous idea or
expression, from a German!

Gruppe has a delightful library, with rare books, and books too good
to be rare; and we often applied to him for some of them. He lent me
"Lessing," and that is an additional circumstance to remember with
pleasure in connection with the Laocoon. He one evening gave us an
interesting account of his work on the cosmic system of the Greeks,
and read us a translation, by himself, of one of the Homeric
hymns--Aphrodite--which is very beautiful, a sort of _Gegenstück_ to
"Der Gott und die Bajadere:" and generally we were glad when he took
up the book. He read us a specimen of his epic poem, "Firdusi," which
pleased us. The fable on which this poem is founded is fine. The
sultan had engaged Firdusi to write a great poem on his exploits, and
had promised to pay for this one hundred thousand pieces (gold being
understood). Firdusi had delighted in the thought of this sum, which
he intended to devote to the benefit of his native city. When the poem
was delivered, and the sack of money given to Firdusi, he found that
the pieces were silver! He burst into a song of scorn against the
sultan, and paid the miserable sum to his bath-man. Gruppe thinks
Shakespeare more extensively sold in Germany than any other book,
except the Bible and Schiller! One night we attempted "Brag" or
"Pocher," but Gruppe presently became alarmed at G.'s play, and said
"Das würde an zwölf Groschen reichen." He drew some Jews' faces with a
pen admirably.

We were invited to meet Waagen, whom we found a very intelligent and
amusing man. He told us a story about Goethe, who said of some one, "I
thank thee, Almighty God, that thou hast produced no second edition of
this man!" and an amusing judgment passed on Goethe himself, that he
was "Kein dummer Mann!" Also a story of a lady who went to see him,
as an intellectual adorer, and began to spout to him, as his
masterpiece, "Fest gemauert in der Erden,"[46] etc.

Another pleasant friend was Edward Magnus, the portrait-painter, an
acute, intelligent, kind-hearted man, with real talent in his art. He
was the only German we met with who seemed conscious of his
countrymen's deficiencies. He showed in every possible way a hearty
desire to do us service--sent us books, came to chat with us, showed
us his portraits, and, when we were going away, brought us lithographs
of some paintings of his, that we might carry away a remembrance of
him. He has travelled very extensively, and had much intercourse with
distinguished people, and these means of culture have had some of
their best effects on his fine temperament and direct, truthful mind.
He told us a rich story about Carlyle. At a dinner-party, given by
Magnus in his honor, Wiese and Cornelius were deploring Goethe's want
of evangelical sentiment. Carlyle was visibly uneasy, fumbling with
his dinner-napkin. At last he broke out thus: "Meine Herren kennen sie
die Anekdote von dem Manne der die Sonne lästerte weil sie ihm sein
Cigarre nicht anstecken liess?"[47]

In the little room where we used to be ushered to wait for him there
was a portrait of Thorwaldsen and one of Mendelssohn, both of whom he
knew well. I was surprised to find in his _atelier_ the original of the
portrait of Jenny Lind, with which I was so familiar. He was going to
send it, together with Sontag's portrait, to the exhibition at Paris.
His brother, the chemist, was also a bright, good-natured-looking man.
We were invited to a large evening party at his house, and found very
elegant rooms, with a remarkable assemblage of celebrated men--Johannes
Müller, Du Bois Reymond, Rose, Ehrenberg, etc. Some of the women were
very pretty and well dressed. The supper, brought round on trays, was
well appointed; and altogether the party was well managed.

We spent one evening with Professor Stahr and his wife--Fanny
Lewald--after their marriage. Stahr has a copy of the charming
miniature of Schiller, taken when he was about thirty--a miniature in
the possession of a certain Madame von Kalb. There are the long
_Gänsehals_,[48] the aquiline nose, the blue eyes and auburn hair. It
is a most real and striking portrait. I saw also a portrait and bust of
Madame d'Agoult here, both rather handsome. The first evening Stahr
told us some of the grievances which the Prussians have to bear from
their government, and among the rest the vexatious necessity for a
"concession" or license, before any, the simplest vocation, can be
entered on. He observed, with justice, that the English are apt to
suppose the German Revolution of '48 was mere restlessness and aping of
other nations, when in fact there were real oppressions which the
Germans had to bear, and which they had borne with a patience that
the English would not imitate for a month. By far the most
distinguished-looking man we saw at Berlin, and, indeed, next to Liszt,
in Germany, was Rauch the sculptor. Schöll had given G. a letter for
him, and soon after it had been left at his house he called on us in
the evening, and at once won our hearts by his beautiful person and the
benignant and intelligent charm of his conversation. He is indeed the
finest old man I ever saw--more than seventy-six, I believe, but
perfectly upright, even stately, in his carriage. His features are
harmonious, his complexion has a delicate freshness, his silky white
hair waves gracefully round his high forehead, and his brown eyes beam
with benevolence and intelligence. He is above the common height, and
his stature and beauty together ennoble the gray working surtout and
cap which he wears in his _atelier_ into a picturesque and
distinguished costume. The evening he was with us he talked
delightfully of Goethe, dwelling especially on his lovable nature. He
described very graphically Goethe's way of introducing subjects,
showing plates, etc., bringing in the cast of Schiller's skull, and
talking of it and other little particulars of interest. We went one
morning to his _atelier_, and found him superintending his pupil's work
at a large group representing Moses with his hands held up by Aaron and
Hur. It was extremely interesting to me to see Rauch's original little
clay model of this group, for I had never seen statuary in that first
stage before. The intense expression of entreaty in the face of the
Moses was remarkable. But the spirit of this group is so alien to my
sympathies that I could feel little pleasure in the idea of its
production. On the other hand, my heart leaped at the sight of old
Kant's quaint figure, of which Rauch is commissioned to produce a
colossal statue for Königsberg. In another _atelier_, where the work is
in a different stage, we saw a splendid marble monument, nearly
completed, of the late king of Hanover. Pitiable that genius and
spotless white marble should be thrown away on such human trash! Our
second visit to Rauch's _atelier_ was paid shortly before we left
Berlin. The group of Moses, Aaron, and Hur was clothed up, and the
dark-eyed, olive-complexioned pupil was at work on a pretty little
figure of Hope--a child stepping forward with upturned face, a bunch of
flowers in her hand. In the other _atelier_ we saw a bust of
Schleiermacher, which, with the equestrian statue of Fritz, and its
pedestal, Rauch was going to send to the Paris Exhibition.
Schleiermacher's face is very delicately cut, and indicates a highly
susceptible temperament. The colossal head of Fritz, seen on a level
with one's eye, was perfectly startling from its living expression. One
can't help fancying that the head is thinking and that the eyes are
seeing.

Dessoir the actor was another pleasant variety in our circle of
acquaintance. He created in us a real respect and regard for him, not
only by his sincere devotion to his art, but by the superiority of
feeling which shone through all the little details of his conduct and
conversation. Of lowly birth, and entirely self-taught, he is by
nature a gentleman. Without a single physical gift as an actor, he
succeeds, by force of enthusiasm and conscientious study, in arriving
at a representation which commands one's attention and feelings. I was
very much pleased by the simplicity with which he one day said,
"Shakespeare ist mein Gott; ich habe keinen anderen Gott:" and indeed
one saw that his art was a religion to him. He said he found himself
inevitably led into singsong declamation by Schiller, but with
Shakespeare it was impossible to be declamatory. It was very agreeable
to have him as a companion now and then in our walks, and to have him
read or discuss Shakespeare for an hour or two in the evening. He told
us an amusing story about his early days. When he was a youth of
sixteen or seventeen, acting at Spandau, he walked to Berlin (about
nine miles) and back in the evening, accompanied by a watchmaker
named Naundorff, an enthusiast for the theatre. On their way Dessoir
declaimed at the top of his voice, and was encouraged by the applause
of his companion to more and more exertion of lungs and limbs, so that
people stared at them, and followed them, as if they thought them two
madmen. This watchmaker was Louis XVII.! Dessoir also imitated
admirably Aldridge's mode of advancing to kill Duncan--like a wild
Indian lurking for a not much wilder beast. He paid us the very pretty
attention of getting up a dinner for us at Dietz's, and inviting
Rötscher and Förster to meet us; and he supplied us with tickets for
the theatre, which, however, was a pleasure we used sparingly. The
first time we went was to see "Nathan der Weise"--a real enjoyment,
for the elegant theatre was new to us, and the scenery was excellent;
better than I saw there on any subsequent occasion. Döring performed
Nathan, and we thus saw him for the first time to great advantage;
for, though he drags down this part, as he does all others, the
character of Nathan sets limits which he cannot overstep; and though
we lose most of its elevation in Döring's acting, we get, _en
revanche_, an admirable ease and naturalness. His fine, clear voice
and perfect enunciation told excellently in the famous monologue, and
in the whole scene with Saladin. Our hearts swelled and the tears came
into our eyes as we listened to the noble words of dear Lessing, whose
great spirit lives immortally in this crowning work of his.

Our great anxiety was to see and hear Johanna Wagner, so we took
tickets for the "Orpheus," which Mlle. Solmar told us she thought her
best part. We were thoroughly delighted both with her and her music.
The caricatures of the Furies, the ballet-girls, and the butcher-like
Greek shades in Elysium, the ugly, screaming Eurydice, and the droll
appearance of Timzek as Amor, in which she looked like a shop-girl who
has donned a masquerade dress impromptu, without changing her
headdress--all these absurdities were rather an amusement than a
drawback to our pleasure; for the Orpheus was perfect in himself, and
looked like a noble horse among mules and donkeys.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 9th Jan. 1855.]

Our days are so accurately parcelled out that my time for
letter-writing is rather restricted, and for every letter I write I
have to leave out something which we have learned to think necessary.
We have been to hear "Fidelio" this evening--not well executed, except
so far as the orchestra was concerned; but the divine music positively
triumphs over the defects of execution. One is entirely wrapped in the
_idea_ of the composer. Last week we had "Orpheus and Eurydice," and I
heard, for the first time, at once an opera of Gluck's and Johanna
Wagner. It is one of the glories of Berlin to give Gluck's operas, and
it is also something of a glory to have "die Wagner." She is really a
fine actress and a fine singer; her voice is not ravishing, but she is
mistress of it. I thought of you that evening, and wished you could
hear and see what I know would interest you greatly--I refer rather to
Gluck's opera than to Johanna Wagner. The scene in which Orpheus
(Johanna Wagner) enters Tartarus, is met by the awful Shades, and
charms them into ecstatic admiration till they make way for him to
pass on, is very fine. The voices--except in the choruses--are all
women's voices; and there are only three characters--Orpheus, Amor,
and Eurydice. One wonders that Pluto does not come as a basso; and one
would prefer Mercury as a tenor to Amor in the shape of an ugly
German soprano; but Gluck wished it otherwise, and the music is
delightful. I am reading a charming book by Professor Stahr--who is
one of our acquaintances here--"Torso: Kunst, Künstler, und Kunst
Werke der Alten." It feeds the fresh interest I am now feeling in art.
Professor Stahr is a very erudite man, and, what is very much rarer
among Germans, a good writer, who knows how to select his materials,
and has, above all, a charming talent for description. We saw at his
house the other night the first portrait of Schiller which _convinces_
me of a likeness to him. It is the copy of a miniature which has never
been engraved. The face is less beautiful than that of the ordinary
busts and portraits, but is very remarkable--the eyes blue, the
complexion very fair (the picture was taken in his youth), and the
hair sunny. He has the long "goose-neck" which he describes as
belonging to Carl Moor in the "Robbers," and the forehead is _fuyant_
in correspondence with the skull. The piteous contrast there is
between the anxiety poor Schiller is constantly expressing about a
livelihood--about the thalers he has to pay for this and the thalers
he has to receive for that--and Goethe's perfect ease in that respect!
For the "History of the Netherlands" he got little more than fifteen
shillings per sheet. I am very much interested in Professor Gruppe as
a type of the German _Gelehrter_. He has written books on
everything--on the Greek drama, a great book on the cosmic system of
the Greeks, an epic, numberless lyric poems, etc.; he has a
philosophical work and a history of literature in the press; is
professor of philosophy at the university; is enthusiastic about
boar-hunting, and has written a volume of hunting poems--and _ich
weiss nicht was_. Withal he is as simple as a child. When we go to
see them in the evening we find him wrapped in a moth-eaten gray coat
and a cap on his head. Then he reads us a translation of one of the
Homeric hymns, and goes into the most naïve _impersonal_ ecstasy at
the beauty of his own poetry (which is really good). The other night
he read us part of an epic which is still in MS., and is to be read
before the king--such is the fashion here. And his little wife, who is
about twenty years younger than himself, listens with loving
admiration. Altogether, they and their two little children are a
charming picture.

[Sidenote: Berlin, Recollections, 1854-55.]

We went to only one concert, for which Vivier was kind enough to send
us tickets. It was given by him and Roger, assisted by Arabella
Goddard and Johanna Wagner. Roger's singing of the "Erl King" was a
treat not to be forgotten. He gave the full effect to Schubert's
beautiful and dramatic music; and his way of falling from melody into
awe-struck speech in the final words "_War todt_" abides with one. I
never felt so thoroughly the beauty of that divine ballad before. The
king was present in all his toothlessness and blinkingness; and the
new princess from Anhalt Dessau, young and delicate-looking, was there
too. Arabella Goddard played the "Harmonious Blacksmith" charmingly,
and then Wagner sang badly two ineffective German songs, and Halévy's
duet from the "Reine de Chypre" with Roger.

Vivier is amusing. He says Germans take off their hats on all possible
pretexts--not for the sake of politeness, but _pour être
embarrassants_. They have wide streets, simply to embarrass you, by
making it impossible to descry a shop or a friend. A German always has
_three_ gloves--"On ne sait pas pourquoi." There is a dog-tax in order
to maintain a narrow _trottoir_ in Berlin, and every one who keeps a
dog feels authorized to keep the _trottoir_ and move aside for no one.
If he has two dogs he drives out of the _trottoir_ the man who has
only one: the very dogs begin to be aware of it. If you kick one when
he is off the _trottoir_ he will bear it patiently, but on the
_trottoir_ he resents it vehemently. He gave us quite a bit of Molière
in a description of a mystification at a restaurant. He says to the
waiter--"Vous voyez ce monsieur là. C'est le pauvre M. Colignon." (Il
faut qu'il soit quelq'un qui prend très peu--une tasse de café ou
comme ça, et qui ne dépense pas trop.) "Je suis son ami. Il est fou.
Je le garde. Combien doit-il payer?" "Un franc." "Voilà." Then Vivier
goes out. Presently the so-called M. Colignon asks how much he has to
pay, and is driven to exasperation by the reiterated assurance of the
waiter--"C'est payé, M. Colignon."

The first work of art really worth looking at that one sees at Berlin
is the "Rosse-bändiger" in front of the palace. It is by a sculptor
named Cotes, who made horses his especial study; and certainly, to us,
they eclipsed the famous Colossi at Monte Cavallo, casts of which are
in the new museum.

The collection of pictures at the old museum has three gems, which
remain in the imagination--Titian's Daughter, Correggio's Jupiter and
Io, and his Head of Christ on the Handkerchief. I was pleased also to
recognize among the pictures the one by Jan Steen, which Goethe
describes in the "Wahlverwandschaften" as the model of a _tableau
vivant_, presented by Luciane and her friends. It is the daughter
being reproved by her father, while the mother is emptying her
wine-glass. It is interesting to see the statue of Napoleon, the
worker of so much humiliation to Prussia, placed opposite that of
Julius Cæsar.

They were very happy months we spent at Berlin, in spite of the bitter
cold which came on in January and lasted almost till we left. How we
used to rejoice in the idea of our warm room and coffee as we battled
our way from dinner against the wind and snow! Then came the
delightful long evening, in which we read Shakespeare, Goethe, Heine,
and Macaulay, with German _Pfefferkuchen_ and _Semmels_ at the end to
complete the _noctes cenæque deûm_.

We used often to turn out for a little walk in the evening, when it
was not too cold, to refresh ourselves by a little pure air as a
change from the stove-heated room. Our favorite walk was along the
Linden, in the broad road between the trees. We used to pace to old
Fritz's monument, which loomed up dark and mysterious against the sky.
Once or twice we went along the gas-lighted walk towards Kroll's. One
evening in our last week we went on to the bridge leading to the
Wilhelm Stadt, and there by moon and gas light saw the only bit of
picturesqueness Berlin afforded us. The outline of the Schloss towards
the water is very varied, and a light in one of the windows near the
top of a tower was a happy accident. The row of houses on the other
side of the water was shrouded in indistinctness, and no ugly object
marred the scene. The next day, under the light of the sun, it was
perfectly prosaic.

Our _table d'hôte_ at the Hotel de l'Europe was so slow in its
progress from one course to another, and there was so little
encouragement to talk to our neighbors, that we used to take our books
by way of beguiling the time. Lessing's "Hamburgische Briefe," which I
am not likely to take up again, will thus remain associated in my
memory with my place at the _table d'hôte_. The company here, as
almost everywhere else in Berlin, was sprinkled with officers. Indeed,
the swords of officers threaten one's legs at every turn in the
streets, and one sighs to think how these unproductive consumers of
_Wurst_, with all their blue and scarlet broadcloth, are maintained
out of the pockets of the community. Many of the officers and privates
are startlingly tall; indeed, some of them would match, I should
think, with the longest of Friedrich Wilhelm's _lange Kerle_.

It was a bitterly cold, sleety morning--the 11th of March--when we set
out from Berlin, leaving behind us, alas! G.'s rug, which should have
kept his feet warm on the journey. Our travelling companions to
Cologne were fat Madame Roger, her little daughter, and her dog, and a
queen's messenger--a very agreeable man, who afterwards persuaded
another of the same vocation to join us for the sake of warmth. This
poor man's teeth were chattering with cold, though he was wrapped in
fur; and we, all furless as we were, pitied him, and were thankful
that at least we were not feverish and ill, as he evidently was. We
saw the immortal old town of Wolfenbüttel at a distance, as we rolled
along; beyond this there was nothing of interest in our first day's
journey, and the only incident was the condemnation of poor Madame
Roger's dog to the dog-box, apart from its mistress with her warm
cloaks. She remonstrated in vain with a brutal German official, and it
was amusing to hear him say to her in German, "Wenn sie Deutsch nicht
verstehen können." "Eh bien--prenez la." "Ah! quel satan de pays!" was
her final word, as she held out the shivering little beast.

We stayed at Cologne, and next morning walked out to look at the
cathedral again. Melancholy as ever in its impression upon me! From
Cologne to Brussels we had some rather interesting companions, in two
French artists who were on their way from Russia. Strange beings they
looked to us at first, in their dirty linen, Russian caps, and other
queer equipments; but in this, as in many other cases, I found that a
first impression was an extremely mistaken one--for instead of being,
as I imagined, common, uncultivated men, they were highly intelligent.

At Brussels, as we took our supper, we had the pleasure of looking at
Berlioz's fine head and face, he being employed in the same way on the
other side of the table. The next morning to Calais.

     They were pleasant days those at Weimar and Berlin, and they
     were working days. Mr. Lewes was engaged in completing his
     "Life of Goethe," which had been begun some time before, but
     which was now for the most part rewritten. At Weimar, George
     Eliot wrote the article on Victor Cousin's "Madame de Sablé"
     for the _Westminster Review_. It was begun on 5th August, and
     sent off on 8th September. At Berlin she nearly finished the
     translation of Spinoza's "Ethics"--begun on 5th November--and
     wrote an article on Vehse's "Court of Austria," which was
     begun on 23d January, and finished 4th March, 1855. Besides
     this writing, I find the following among the books that were
     engaging their attention; and in collecting the names from
     George Eliot's Journal, I have transcribed any remarks she
     makes on them:

Sainte-Beuve, Goethe's "Wahlverwandschaften," Rameau's "Neffe,"
"Egmont," "The Hoggarty Diamond," Moore's "Life of Sheridan"--a
first-rate specimen of bad biographical writing; "Götz" and the
"Bürger General," Uhland's poems, "Wilhelm Meister," Rosenkranz on the
Faust Sage, Heine's poems, Shakespeare's plays ("Merchant of Venice,"
"Romeo and Juliet," "Julius Cæsar"--very much struck with the
masculine style of this play, and its vigorous moderation, compared
with "Romeo and Juliet"--"Antony and Cleopatra," "Henry IV.,"
"Othello," "As You Like It," "Lear"--sublimely powerful--"Taming of
the Shrew," "Coriolanus," "Twelfth Night," "Measure for Measure,"
"Midsummer-Night's Dream," "Winter's Tale," "Richard III.," "Hamlet");
Lessing's "Laocoon"--the most un-German of all the German books that
I have ever read. The style is strong, clear, and lively; the thoughts
acute and pregnant. It is well adapted to rouse an interest both in
the classics and in the study of art; "Emilia Galotti" seems to me a
wretched mistake of Lessing's. The Roman myth of Virginius is grand,
but the situation, transported to modern times and divested of its
political bearing, is simply shocking. Read "Briefe über Spinoza"
(Jacobi's), "Nathan der Weise," Fanny Lewald's "Wandlungen," "Minna
von Barnhelm," "Italiänische Reise," the "Residence in Rome;" a
beautiful description of Rome and the Coliseum by moonlight--a fire
made in the Coliseum sending its smoke, silvered by the moonlight,
through the arches of the mighty walls. Amusing story of Goethe's
landlady's cat worshipping Jupiter by licking his beard--a miracle,
in her esteem, explained by Goethe as a discovery the cat had made of
the oil lodging in the undulations of the beard. "Residence in
Naples"--pretty passage about a star seen through a chink in the
ceiling as he lay in bed. It is remarkable that when Goethe gets to
Sicily he is, for the first time in Italy, enthusiastic in his
descriptions of natural beauty. Read Scherr's "Geschichte Deutscher
Cultur und Sitte"--much interested in his sketch of German poetry in
the Middle Ages; "Iphigenia." Looked into the "Xenien," and amused
ourselves with their pointlessness. "Hermann and Dorothea," "Tasso,"
"Wanderjahre"--_à mourir d'ennui_; Heine's "Geständnisse"--immensely
amused with the wit of it in the first fifty pages, but afterwards it
burns low, and the want of principle and purpose make it wearisome.
Lessing's "Hamburgische Briefe." Read Goethe's wonderful observations
on Spinoza. Particularly struck with the beautiful modesty of the
passage in which he says he cannot presume to say that he thoroughly
understands Spinoza. Read "Dichtung und Wahrheit," Knight's "Studies
of Shakespeare." Talked of the "Wahlverwandschaften" with Stahr--he
finding fault with the _dénouement_, which I defended. Read Stahr's
"Torso"--too long-winded a style for reading aloud. Knight's "History
of Painting." Compared several scenes of "Hamlet" in Schlegel's
translation with the original. It is generally very close, and often
admirably well done; but Shakespeare's strong, concrete language is
almost always weakened. For example, "Though this hand were _thicker
than_ itself in brother's blood" is rendered, "Auch um und um in
Bruder's Blut getauchet." The prose speeches of Hamlet lose all their
felicity in the translation. Read Stahr on the Eginetan Sculptures,
"Die Neue Melusine," "West-Östliche Divan," Gervinus on
Shakespeare--found it unsatisfactory; Stahr's "Ein Jahr in
Italien"--the description of Florence excellent. Read the wonderfully
beautiful "Römische Elegien" again, and some of the Venetian
epigrams, Vehse's "Court of Austria"--called on Miss Assing to try and
borrow the book from Varnhagen. He does not possess it, so G. called
on Vehse, and asked him to lend it to me. He was very much pleased to
do so. Read the "Zueignung," the "Gedichte," and several of the
ballads. Looked through Wraxall's "Memoirs." Read Macaulay's "History
of England." Wrote article on Stahr.

     This writing and reading, combined with visiting,
     theatre-going, and opera-going, make a pretty full life for
     these eight months--a striking contrast to the coming months
     of complete social quietness in England. Both lives had their
     attractions, the superficial aspects of which may be summed
     up in a passage from the Journal, dated 13th March, 1855, on
     arrival at the Lord Warden Hotel, at Dover:

English mutton and an English fire were likely to be appreciated by
creatures who had had eight months of Germany, with its questionable
meat and its stove-heated rooms. The taste and quietude of a
first-rate English hotel were also in striking contrast with the heavy
finery, the noise, and the indiscriminate smoking of German inns. But,
after all, Germany is no bad place to live in; and the Germans, to
counterbalance their want of taste and politeness, are at least free
from the bigotry of exclusiveness of their more refined cousins. I
even long to be among them again--to see Dresden and Munich and
Nürnberg and the Rhine country. May the day soon come!


_SUMMARY._

JULY, 1854, TO MARCH, 1855.

     Leaves London with Mr. Lewes for Antwerp--Rubens's
     pictures--Cologne--Dr. Brabant and
     Strauss--Weimar--Schöll--The Dichter
     Zimmer--Sauppe--Tiefurt--Ettersburg--Arthur Helps--Gabel-Bach
     and Kickel-hahn--Liszt--Wagner's operas--"Der
     Freischütz"--Schiller's house--Goethe's
     house--Gartenhaus--Ober Weimar--The Webicht--Marquis de
     Ferrière--Liszt anecdotes--Cornelius--Raff--Princess
     Wittgenstein--Liszt's playing--Scheffer's picture--Expenses
     at Weimar--Leave for Berlin--Meet
     Varnhagen--Thiergarten--Acquaintances in Berlin--Fräulein
     Solmar--Professor Gruppe--Epic of Firdusi--Waagen--Edward
     Magnus--Professor Stahr and Fanny Lewald--Rauch the
     sculptor--Kant's statue--Dessoir the actor--"Nathan der
     Weise"--Döring's acting--Johanna Wagner--Letter to Miss
     Hennell--"Fidelio"--Reading Stahr's "Torso"--Likeness of
     Schiller--Vivier--Roger and Arabella Goddard--The
     Rosse-bändiger--Pictures--Cold in Berlin--View of Schloss
     from bridge--Leave Berlin for England--Books read--Article
     written on "Madame de Sablé"--Translation of Spinoza's
     "Ethics"--Article on Vehse's "Court of Austria"--Article on
     Stahr.

FOOTNOTES:

[45] A wretched forehead.

[46] First line of Schiller's "Song of the Bell."

[47] "Gentlemen, do you know the story of the man who railed at the
sun because it would not light his cigar?"

[48] Goose-neck.




CHAPTER VII.


[Sidenote: Journal, Mch. 1855.]

_March 14._--Took lodgings at 1 Sydney Place, Dover.

_March 15._--A lovely day. As I walked up the Castle hill this
afternoon the town, with its background of softly rounded hills
shrouded in sleepy haze, its little lines of water looking golden in
the sun, made a charming picture. I have written the preface to the
Third Book of "Ethics," read Scherr, and Shakespeare's "Venus and
Adonis."

_March 16._--I read Shakespeare's "Passionate Pilgrim" at breakfast,
and found a sonnet in which he expresses admiration of Spenser (Sonnet
viii.):

     "Dowland to thee is dear, whose heavenly touch
       Upon the lute doth ravish human sense;
     Spenser to me, whose deep conceit is such
       As, passing all conceit, needs no defence."[49]

I must send word of this to G., who has written in his "Goethe" that
Shakespeare has left no line in praise of a contemporary. I could not
resist the temptation of walking out before I sat down to work. Came
in at half-past ten, and translated Spinoza till nearly one. Walked
out again till two. After dinner read "Two Gentlemen of Verona" and
some of the "Sonnets." That play disgusted me more than ever in the
final scene, where Valentine, on Proteus's mere begging pardon, when
he has no longer any hope of gaining his ends, says: "All that was
mine in Sylvia, I give thee!" Silvia standing by. Walked up the Castle
hill again, and came in at six. Read Scherr, and found an important
hint that I have made a mistake in a sentence of my article on
"Austria" about the death of Franz von Sickingen.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 16th Mch. 1855.]

I dare say you will be surprised to see that I write from Dover. We
left Berlin on the 11th. I have taken lodgings here for a little
while, until Mr. Lewes has concluded some arrangements in London; and,
with the aid of lovely weather, am even enjoying my solitude, though I
don't mind how soon it ends. News of you all at Rosehill--how health
and business and all other things are faring--would be very welcome to
me, if you can find time for a little note of homely details. I am
well and calmly happy--feeling much stronger and clearer in mind for
the last eight months of new experience. We were sorry to leave our
quiet rooms and agreeable friends in Berlin, though the place itself
is certainly ugly, and _am Ende_ must become terribly wearisome for
those who have not a vocation there. We went again and again to the
new museum to look at the casts of the Parthenon Sculptures, and
registered a vow that we would go to feast on the sight of the
originals the first day we could spare in London. I had never cast
more than a fleeting look on them before, but now I can in some degree
understand the effect they produced on their first discovery.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1855.]

_March 25._--A note from Mr. Chapman, in which he asks me to undertake
part of the Contemporary Literature for the _Westminster Review_.

_April 18._--Came to town, to lodgings in Bayswater.

_April 23._--Fixed on lodgings at East Sheen.

_April 25._--Went to the British Museum.

_April 28._--Finished article on "Weimar," for _Fraser_.

     During this month George Eliot was finishing the translating
     and revising of Spinoza's "Ethics," and was still reading
     Scherr's book, Schrader's "German Mythology"--a poor
     book--"The Tempest," "Macbeth," "Niebelungenlied," "Romeo and
     Juliet," article on "Dryden" in the _Westminster_, "Reineke
     Fuchs," "Genesis of Science," Gibbon, "Henry V.," "Henry
     VIII.," first, second, and third parts of "Henry VI.,"
     "Richard II."

_May 2._--Came to East Sheen, and settled in our lodgings.

_May 28._--Sent Belles-lettres section to _Westminster Review_. During
May several articles were written for the _Leader_.

_June 13._--Began Part IV. of Spinoza's "Ethics." Began also to read
Cumming, for article in the _Westminster_. We are reading in the
evenings now Sydney Smith's letters, Boswell, Whewell's "History of
Inductive Sciences," "The Odyssey," and occasionally Heine's
"Reisebilder." I began the second book of the "Iliad," in Greek, this
morning.

_June 21._--Finished article on Brougham's "Lives of Men of Letters."

_June 23._--Read "Lucrezia Floriani." We are reading White's "History
of Selborne" in the evening, with Boswell and the "Odyssey."

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 23d June, 1855.]

I have good hope that you will be deeply interested in the "Life of
Goethe." It is a book full of feeling, as well as of thought and
information, and I even think will make you love Goethe as well as
admire him. Eckermann's is a wonderful book, but only represents
Goethe at eighty. We were fortunate enough to be in time to see poor
Eckermann before his _total_ death. His mind was already half gone,
but the fine brow and eyes harmonized entirely with the interest we
had previously felt in him. We saw him in a small lodging, surrounded
by singing birds, and tended by his son--an intelligent youth of
sixteen, who showed some talent in drawing. I have written a
castigation of Brougham for the _Leader_, and shall be glad if your
sympathy goes along with it. Varnhagen has written "Denkwurdigkeiten,"
and all sorts of literature, and is, or, rather was, the husband of
_Rahel_, the greatest of German women.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 21st July, 1855.]

It was surely you who wrote the notice of the _Westminster_ in the
_Herald_ (Coventry) which we received this morning. I am very much
pleased with your appreciation of Mr. Lewes's article. You hardly do
justice to Froude's article on "Spinoza." I don't at all agree with
Froude's own views, but I think his account of Spinoza's doctrines
admirable. Mr. Lewes is still sadly ailing--tormented with tooth and
face ache. This is a terrible trial to us poor scribblers, to whom
health is money, as well as all other things worth having. I have just
been reading that Milton suffered from indigestion--quite an affecting
fact to me. I send you a letter which I have had from Barbara Smith. I
think you will like to see such a manifestation of her strong, noble
nature.

     On 1st August, 1855, Mr. Lewes went down to Ramsgate for
     change, taking his three boys with him for a week's holiday.
     Meantime George Eliot was continuing her article-writing, and
     in this week wrote an article for the _Leader_, having
     written one for the same journal three weeks before. On 22d
     August she wrote another article for the _Leader_, and on
     the 24th she finished the one on Cumming for the
     _Westminster_. Mr. C. Lewes tells me that he remembers it was
     after reading this article that his father was prompted to
     say to George Eliot, while walking one day with her in
     Richmond Park, that it convinced him of the true genius in
     her writing. Mr. Lewes was not only an accomplished and
     practised literary critic, but he was also gifted with the
     inborn insight accompanying a fine artistic temperament,
     which gave unusual weight to his judgment. Up to this time he
     had not been quite sure of anything beyond great talent in
     her productions.

     The first three weeks in September were again busily occupied
     in article-writing. She contributed three papers to the
     _Leader_, as well as the Belles-lettres section for the
     October number of the _Westminster_. On the 19th September
     they left East Sheen, and after spending a couple of weeks at
     Worthing for a sea change, they took rooms at 8 Park Shot,
     Richmond, which remained their home for more than three
     years. Here some of George Eliot's most memorable literary
     work was accomplished. Both she and Mr. Lewes were now
     working very hard for what would bring immediate profit, as
     they had to support not only themselves but his children and
     their mother. They had only one sitting-room between them;
     and I remember, in a walk on St. George's Hill, near
     Weybridge, in 1871, she told me that the scratching of
     another pen used to affect her nerves to such an extent that
     it nearly drove her wild. On the 9th October she finished an
     article on Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft, and on
     the 12th October one on Carlyle for the _Leader_, and began
     an article on Heine for the January number of the
     _Westminster_. In October there are the following letters to
     the Brays:

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, Monday, Oct. (?) 1855.]

Since you have found out the "Cumming," I write by to-day's post just
to say that it _is_ mine, but also to beg that you will not mention it
as such to any one likely to transmit the information to London, as we
are keeping the authorship a secret. The article appears to have
produced a strong impression, and that impression would be a little
counteracted if the author were known to be a _woman_. I have had a
letter addressed "to the author of Article No. 4," begging me to print
it separately "for the good of mankind in general!" It is so kind of
you to rejoice in anything I do at all well. I am dreadfully busy
again, for I am going to write an article for the _Westminster Review_
again, besides my other work. We enjoy our new lodgings very
much--everything is the pink of order and cleanliness.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 16th Oct. 1855.]

Why you should object to Herbert Spencer speaking of Sir William
Hamilton's contributions to a theory of perception as "valuable" I am
unable to conceive. Sir William Hamilton has been of service to him as
well as to others; and instead of repressing acknowledgments of merit
in others, I should like them to be more freely given. I see no
dignity, or anything else that is good, in ignoring one's
fellow-beings. Herbert Spencer's views, like every other man's views,
could not have existed without the substratum laid by his
predecessors. But perhaps you mean something that I fail to perceive.
Your bit of theology is very fine. Here is a delicious Hibernicism in
return. In a treatise on consumption, sent yesterday, the writer says:
"There is now hardly any _difference_ on this subject--at least _I_
feel none." Our life has no incidents except such as take place in
our own brains, and the occasional arrival of a longer letter than
usual. Yours are always read aloud and enjoyed. Nevertheless our life
is intensely occupied, and the days are far too short. We are reading
Gall's "Anatomie et Physiologie du Cerveau," and Carpenter's
"Comparative Physiology," aloud in the evenings; and I am trying to
fix some knowledge about plexuses and ganglia in my soft brain, which
generally only serves me to remember that there is something I ought
to remember, and to regret that I did not put the something down in my
note-book. For "Live and learn," we should sometimes read "Live and
grow stupid."

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, 21st Nov. 1855.]

You will receive by rail to-morrow a copy of the "Life and Works of
Goethe" (published on 1st November), which I hope you will accept as a
keepsake from me. I should have been glad to send it you earlier, but
as Mr. Lewes has sold the copyright of the first edition, he has only
a small number of copies at his disposal, and so I doubted whether I
ought to ask for one. I think you will find much to interest you in
the book. I can't tell you how I value it, as the best product of a
mind which I have every day more reason to admire and love. We have
had much gratification in the expression of individual opinion. The
press is very favorable, but the notices are for the most part too
idiotic to give us much pleasure, except in a pecuniary point of view.
I am going out to-day, for the first time for nearly a fortnight.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 29th Nov. 1855.]

I have just finished a long article on Heine for the _Westminster
Review_, which none of you will like. _En revanche_, Mr. Lewes has
written one on "Lions and Lion Hunters," which you will find amusing.

     On the 12th December the Belles-lettres section for the
     January number of the _Westminster Review_ was finished and
     sent off, and the next entry in the Journal is dated:

[Sidenote: Journal, 1855.]

_Dec. 24, 1855._--For the last ten days I have done little, owing to
headache and other ailments. Began the "Antigone," read Von Bohlen on
"Genesis," and Swedenborg. Mr. Chapman wants me to write an article on
"Missions and Missionaries," for the April number of the
_Westminster_, but I think I shall not have it ready till the July
number. In the afternoon I set out on my journey to see my sister, and
arrived at her house about eight o'clock, finding her and her children
well.

_Dec. 29, 1855._--Returned to Richmond. G. away at Vernon Hill (Arthur
Helps's), having gone thither on Wednesday.

_Dec. 30, 1855._--Read the "Shaving of Shagpat" (George Meredith's).

_Dec. 31, 1855._--Wrote a review of "Shagpat."

[Sidenote: Journal, 1856.]

_Jan. 1, 1856._--Read Kingsley's "Greek Heroes," and began a review of
Von Bohlen.

_Jan. 5, 1856._--G. came home.

_Jan. 6, 1856._--Began to revise Book IV. of Spinoza's "Ethics," and
continued this work through the week, being able to work but slowly.
Finished Kahnis's "History of German Protestantism."

_Jan. 16, 1856._--Received a charming letter from Barbara Smith, with
a petition to Parliament that women may have a right to their
earnings.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 18th Jan. 1856.]

I believe there have been at least a thousand copies of the "Goethe"
sold, which is a wonderfully good sale in less than three months for a
thirty-shilling book. We have a charming collection of letters, both
from remarkable acquaintances and remarkable non-acquaintances,
expressing enthusiastic delight in the book--letters all the more
delightful because they are quite spontaneous, and spring from a
generous wish to let the author know how highly the writers value his
work. If you want some idle reading, get the "Shaving of Shagpat,"
which, I think, you will say deserves all the praise I gave it.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1856.]

_Feb. 19, 1856._--Since the 6th January I have been occupied with
Spinoza; and, except a review of Griswold's "American Poets," have
done nothing else but translate the Fifth Book of the "Ethics," and
revise the whole of my translation from the beginning. This evening I
have finished my revision.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 19th Feb. 1856.]

I was so glad to have a little news of you. I should like to hear much
oftener, but our days are so accurately parcelled out among regular
occupations that I rarely manage to do anything not included in the
programme; and, without reading Mrs. Barbauld on the "Inconsistency of
Human Expectations," I know that receiving letters is inconsistent
with not writing any. Have you seen any numbers of the _Saturday
Review_, a new journal, on which "all the talents" are engaged? It is
not properly a newspaper, but--what its title expresses--a political
and literary review. We are delighting ourselves with Ruskin's third
volume, which contains some of the finest writing I have read for a
long time (among recent books). I read it aloud for an hour or so
after dinner; then we jump to the old dramatists, when Mr. Lewes reads
to me as long as his voice will hold out, and after this we wind up
the evening with Rymer Jones's "Animal Kingdom," by which I get a
confused knowledge of branchiæ, and such things--perhaps, on the
whole, a little preferable to total ignorance. These are our
_noctes_--without _cenæ_ for the present--occasionally diversified by
very dramatic singing of Figaro, etc., which, I think, must alarm
"that good man, the clergyman," who sits below us. We have been half
laughing, half indignant, over Alison's new volume of his "History of
Europe," in which he undertakes to give an account of German
literature.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 25th Feb. 1856.]

What you tell me of Harriet Martineau interests me very much. I feel
for her terrible bodily suffering, and think of her with deep respect
and admiration. Whatever may have been her mistakes and weaknesses,
the great and good things she has done far outweigh them; and I should
be grieved if anything in her memoir should cast a momentary shadow
over the agreeable image of her that the world will ultimately keep in
its memory. I wish less of our piety were spent on imaginary perfect
goodness, and more given to real _im_perfect goodness.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, end of Feb. 1856.]

I am very happy for you to keep the sheets, and to get signatures (for
the Women's Petition that they should have legal right to their own
earnings). Miss Barbara Smith writes that she must have them returned
to her before the 1st of March. I am glad you have taken up the cause,
for I do think that, with proper provisos and safeguards, the proposed
law would help to raise the position and character of women. It is one
round of a long ladder stretching far beyond our lives.

     During March, George Eliot wrote only the Belles-lettres
     section for the April number of the _Westminster_, having
     resigned the subject of "Missions" to Harriet Martineau. She
     also wrote two articles for the _Saturday Review_, and two
     for the _Leader_. And there are the following letters in
     March to the Brays, in which allusion is made to their
     leaving the old home at Rosehill, owing to the unsatisfactory
     state of the Coventry business.

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, 26th Mch. 1856.]

We are flourishing in every way except in health. Mr. Lewes's head is
still infirm, but he manages, nevertheless, to do twice as much work
as other people. I am always a croaker, you know, but my ailments are
of a small kind, their chief symptoms being a muddled brain; and, as
my pen is not of the true literary order which will run along without
the help of brains, I don't get through so much work as I should like.
By the way, when the Spinoza comes out, be so good as not to mention
my name in connection with it. I particularly wish not to be known as
the translator of the "Ethics," for reasons which it would be "too
tedious to mention." You don't know what a severely practical person I
am become, and what a sharp eye I have to the main chance. I keep the
purse, and dole out sovereigns with all the pangs of a miser. In fact,
if you were to feel my bump of acquisitiveness, I dare say you would
find it in a state of inflammation, like the "veneration" of that
clergyman to whom Mr. Donovan said, "Sir, you have recently been
engaged in prayer." I hope you recognized your own wit about the
one-eyed dissenters, which was quoted in the _Leader_ some time ago.
You always said no one did so much justice to your jokes as I did.

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, 31st Mch. 1856.]

My mind is more rebellious than yours, and I can't help being saddened
by the idea of you and Cara being in any other home than the dear old
one. But I know that your cheerful courage is yet stronger in deed
than in word. Will not business or pleasure bring you to London soon,
and will you not come to see us? We can give you a bed--not a
sumptuous one, but one which you will perhaps not find intolerable for
a night. I know the trip up the Thames is charming, and we should
like to do it with you, but I don't think we can manage it this
summer. We are going to send or take the boys (Mr. Lewes's sons) to
school in Germany at midsummer, and are at present uncertain about our
arrangements. If we can _send_ them, we shall go to the coast as soon
as the warm weather comes, and remain there for three months. But our
plans are not yet crystallized.

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, 1st April, 1856.]

After I wrote you yesterday morning we had a letter from Germany which
has made Mr. Lewes incline to defer sending the boys thither till next
year. But he is anxious to remove them from their present school: and,
in the course of our consultations on the subject, we thought of Mr.
John Sibree as a person in whom we should feel confidence as to the
moral influence he would exercise as a tutor. The risk of placing
children with entire strangers is terrible. So I tease you with
another letter to ask you if Mr. J. Sibree continues in the same
position as formerly, and if he is still anxious to obtain pupils.
What a delicious day! We are going to have a holiday at the Zoological
Gardens.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 7th April, 1856.]

Thank you for taking the trouble to write me a full account of matters
so interesting to me. I hope you will be able thoroughly to enjoy this
last precious summer on the pretty lawn, where it is one of my
pleasures on sunshiny days to think of you all strolling about or
seated on the Bearskin. We are very thankful for the Hofwyl circular,
and have almost decided to send the two eldest boys there. But it is
necessary to weigh all things carefully before coming to a
determination; as, not being either swindlers or philanthropists, we
don't like to incur obligations which there is not a reasonable
certainty of our being able to meet. I am much obliged to Mr. Bray,
too, for sending Mr. John Sibree's letter. Mr. Lewes had already
received an answer from him declining his proposition, but we were
interested to read his very characteristic letter to his sister, which
proved to Mr. Lewes that I had given him a correct description of the
man.

     The next few weeks are, perhaps, the most signally important
     and interesting of all in George Eliot's development. There
     are unmistakable signs of the rising of the sap of creative
     production.

     In the middle of April Mr. Herbert Spencer, who had been
     abroad for some time, returned to England, and dined with
     them at Park Shot on the 15th, and on the 18th they went with
     him to Sydenham. On the 22d April George Eliot began her
     article on Young; and on the 29th she began to read Riehl's
     book,[50] on which she was to write another article for the
     _Westminster_. On the 8th of May they set off for Ilfracombe,
     and we have the following "recollections" of that place:

[Sidenote: Ilfracombe, Recollections, 1856.]

It was a cold, unfriendly day--the 8th of May--on which we set out for
Ilfracombe with our hamper of glass jars, which we meant for our
sea-side vivarium. We had to get down at Windsor, and were not sorry
that the interval was long enough to let us walk round the castle,
which I had never seen before except from a distance. The famous
"slopes," the avenues in the park, and the distant landscape, looked
very lovely in the fresh and delicate greens of spring; and the castle
is surely the most delightful royal residence in the world. We took
our places from Windsor all the way to Exeter; and at Bristol, where
we had to wait three hours, the misery of my terrible headache was
mitigated by the interest we felt in seeing the grand old Church of
St. Mary Redcliffe, forever associated with the memory of Chatterton.

     "It stands, the maestrie of a human hand,
     The pride of Bristowe and the western land."

It was cheering, the next morning after our arrival at Ilfracombe, to
get up with a head rather less aching, and to walk up and down the
little garden of Runnymede Villa in the bright sunshine. I had a great
deal of work before me--the writing of an article on Riehl's book,
which I had not half read, as well as the article on Belles-lettres;
but my head was still dizzy, and it seemed impossible to sit down to
writing at once in these new scenes, so we determined to spend the day
in explorations.

From our windows we had a view of the higher part of the town, and
generally it looked uninteresting enough; but what is it that light
cannot transfigure into beauty? One evening, after a shower, as the
sun was setting over the sea behind us, some peculiar arrangement of
clouds threw a delicious evening light on the irregular cluster of
houses, and merged the ugliness of their forms in an exquisite flood
of color--as a stupid person is made glorious by a noble deed. A
perfect rainbow arched over the picture. From one end of the Capstone
we have an admirable bit for a picture. In the background rises old
Helesborough, jutting out far into the sea--rugged and rocky as it
fronts the waves, green and accessible landward; in front of this
stands Lantern Hill, a picturesque mass of green and gray, surmounted
by an old bit of building that looks as if it were the habitation of
some mollusk that had secreted its shell from the material of the
rock; and quite in the foreground, contrasting finely in color with
the rest, are some lower perpendicular rocks of dark-brown tints,
patched here and there with vivid green. In hilly districts, where
houses and clusters of houses look so tiny against the huge limbs of
mother earth, one cannot help thinking of man as a parasitic
animal--an epizoan making his abode in the skin of the planetary
organism. In a flat country, a house or a town looks imposing; there
is nothing to rival it in height, and we may imagine the earth a mere
pedestal for us. But when one sees a house stuck on the side of a
great hill, and, still more, a number of houses, looking like a few
barnacles, clustered on the side of a great rock, we begin to think of
the strong family likeness between ourselves and all other building,
burrowing, house-appropriating, and shell-secreting animals. The
difference between a man with his house and a mollusk with its shell
lies in the number of steps or phenomena interposed between the fact
of individual existence and the completion of the building. Whatever
other advantages we may have over mollusks and insects in our
habitations, it is clear that their architecture has the advantage of
ours in beauty--at least, considered as the architecture of the
species. Look at man in the light of a shell-fish, and it must be
admitted that his shell is generally ugly; and it is only after a
great many more "steps or phenomena" that he secretes here and there a
wonderful shell in the shape of a temple or a palace.

On our first zoophyte hunt it was characteristic of the wide difference
there is between having eyes and _seeing_, that in this region of
sea-anemones, where the Mesembryanthemum especially is as plenty as
blackberries, we climbed about for two hours without seeing one
anemone, and went in again with scarcely anything but a few stones and
weeds to put into our jars. On our next hunt, however, after we had
been out some time, G. exclaimed, "I see an anemone!" and we were
immensely excited by the discovery of this little red Mesembryanthemum,
which we afterwards disdained to gather, as much as if it had been a
nettle. It was a _crescendo_ of delight when we found a "strawberry,"
and a _fortissimo_ when I, for the first time, saw the pale,
fawn-colored tentacles of an _Anthea cereus_ viciously waving like
little serpents in a low-tide pool. But not a polype for a long, long
while could even G. detect, after all his reading; so necessary is it
for the eye to be educated by objects as well as ideas. Every day I
gleaned some little bit of naturalistic experience, either through G.'s
calling on me to look through the microscope, or from hunting on the
rocks; and this in spite of my preoccupation with my article, which I
worked at considerably _à contre-coeur_, despairing of it ever being
worth anything. When at last, by the 17th of June, both my articles
were despatched, I felt delightfully at liberty, and determined to pay
some attention to seaweeds, which I had never seen in such beauty as at
Ilfracombe. For hitherto I had been chiefly on chalky and sandy shores,
where there were no rock-pools to show off the lovely colors and forms
of the algæ. There are tide-pools to be seen almost at every other step
on the shore at Ilfracombe; and I shall never forget their appearance
when we first arrived there. The _Corallina officinalis_ was then in
its greatest perfection, and with its purple-pink fronds threw into
relief the dark olive fronds of the Laminariæ on one side, and the
vivid green of the Ulva and Enteromorpha on the other. After we had
been there a few weeks the Corallina was faded; and I noticed the
_Mesagloia vermicularis_ and the _M. virescens_, which look very lovely
in the water, from the white cilia, which make the most delicate fringe
to their yellow-brown, whip-like fronds, and some of the common
Polysiphoniæ. These tide-pools made me quite in love with seaweeds, so
I took up Landsborough's book and tried to get a little more light on
their structure and history.

Our zoological expeditions alternated with delicious inland walks. I
think the country looked its best when we arrived. It was just that
moment in spring when the leaves are in full leaf, but still keep
their delicate varieties of coloring, and that _transparency_ which
belongs only to this season. And the furze was in all its golden
glory! It was almost like the fading away of the evening red, when the
furze blossoms died off from the hills, and the only contrast left was
that of the marly soil with the green crops and woods. The primroses
were the contemporaries of the furze, and sprinkled the sides of the
hills with their pale stars almost as plentifully as daisies or
buttercups elsewhere. But the great charm of all Devonshire lanes is
the springs that you detect gurgling in shady recesses, covered with
liverwort, with here and there waving tufts of fern and other
broad-leaved plants that love obscurity and moisture.

We seemed to make less of our evenings at Ilfracombe than we have ever
done elsewhere. We used often to be tired with our hunting or walking;
and we were reading books which did not make us take them up very
eagerly--Gosse's "Rambles on the Devonshire Coast," for example;
Trench's "Calderon," and other volumes, taken up in a desultory way.
One bit of reading we had there, however, which interested me deeply.
It was Masson's "Life of Chatterton," which happily linked itself with
the impressions I had received from the sight of the old church at
Bristol.

Mr. Tugwell's (the curate) acquaintance was a real acquisition to us,
not only because he was a companion and helper in zoological pursuits,
but because to know him was to know of another sweet nature in the
world. It is always good to know, if only in passing, a charming human
being; it refreshes one like flowers and woods and clear brooks. One
Sunday evening we walked up to his pretty house to carry back some
proofs of his, and he induced us to go in and have coffee with him. He
played on his harmonium, and we chatted pleasantly. The last evening
of our stay at Ilfracombe he came to see us in Mrs. Webster's
drawing-room, and we had music till nearly eleven o'clock--a pleasant
recollection!

We only twice took the walk beyond Watermouth towards Berrynarbor. The
road lies through what are called the "Meadows," which look like a
magnificent park. A stream, fringed with wild-flowers and willows,
runs along the valley, two or three yards from the side of the road.
This stream is clear as crystal, and about every twenty yards it falls
over a little artificial precipice of stones. The long grass was
waving in all the glory of June, before the mower has come to make it
suffer a "love change" from beauties into sweet odors; and the slopes
on each side of us were crowned or clothed with fine trees. The last
time we went through these meadows was on our last day at Ilfracombe.
Such sunlight and such deep peace on the hills and by the stream!
Coming back, we rested on a gate under the trees, and a blind man came
up to rest also. He told us, in his slow way, what a fine, "healthy
spot" this was--yes, a very healthy spot--a healthy spot. And then we
went on our way, and saw his face no more.

I have talked of the Ilfracombe lanes without describing them, for to
describe them one ought to know the names of all the lovely
wild-flowers that cluster on their banks. Almost every yard of these
banks is a "Hunt" picture--a delicious crowding of mosses and delicate
trefoil and wild strawberries and ferns great and small. But the
crowning beauty of the lanes is the springs that gush out in little
recesses by the side of the road--recesses glossy with liverwort and
feathery with fern. Sometimes you have the spring when it has grown
into a brook, either rushing down a miniature cataract by the
lane-side, or flowing gently as a "braided streamlet" across your
path. I never before longed so much to know the names of things as
during this visit to Ilfracombe. The desire is part of the tendency
that is now constantly growing in me to escape from all vagueness and
inaccuracy into the daylight of distinct, vivid ideas. The mere fact
of naming an object tends to give definiteness to our conception of
it. We have then a sign which at once calls up in our minds the
distinctive qualities which mark out for us that particular object
from all others.

We ascended the Tors only twice; for a tax of 3_d._ per head was
demanded on this luxury, and we could not afford a sixpenny walk very
frequently: yet the view is perhaps the very finest to be had at
Ilfracombe. Bay behind bay, fringed with foam, and promontory behind
promontory, each with its peculiar shades of purple light--the sweep
of the Welsh coast faintly visible in the distance, and the endless
expanse of sea, flecked with ships, stretching on our left.

[Sidenote: Ilfracombe, Recollections, June, 1856.]

One evening we went down to the shore through the "Tunnels" to see the
sunset. Standing in the "Ladies' Cove," we had before us the sharp
fragments of rock jutting out of the waves and standing black against
the orange and crimson sky. How lovely to look into that brilliant
distance and see the ship on the horizon seeming to sail away from the
cold and dim world behind it right into the golden glory! I have
always that sort of feeling when I look at sunset; it always seems to
me that there in the West lies a land of light and warmth and love.

On the 26th of June we said good-bye to Ilfracombe. The sight of the
cockle-women at Swansea, where we had to wait, would make a fine
subject for a painter. One of them was the grandest woman I ever
saw--six feet high, carrying herself like a Greek warrior, and
treading the earth with unconscious majesty. Her face was
weather-beaten and wizened, but her eyes were bright and piercing, and
the lines of her face, with its high cheek-bones, strong and
characteristic. The guard at the railway station told us that one of
the porters had been insolent the other day to a cockle-woman, and
that she immediately pitched him off the platform into the road below!

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 6th June, 1856.]

When we arrived here I had not even read a great book on which I had
engaged to write a long article by the beginning of this month; so
that between work and zoology and bodily ailments my time has been
full to overflowing. We are enchanted with Ilfracombe. I really think
it is the loveliest sea-place I ever saw, from the combination of fine
rocky coast with exquisite inland scenery. But it would not do for any
one who can't climb rocks and mount perpetual hills; for the
peculiarity of this country is, that it is all hill and no valley.
You have no sooner got to the foot of one hill than you begin to mount
another. You would laugh to see our room decked with yellow
pie-dishes, a _foot-pan_, glass jars and phials, all full of
zoophytes, or mollusks, or anellides--and, still more, to see the
eager interest with which we rush to our "preserves" in the morning to
see if there has been any mortality among them in the night. We have
made the acquaintance of a charming little zoological curate here, who
is a delightful companion on expeditions, and is most good-natured in
lending and giving apparatus and "critturs" of all sorts. Mr.
Pigott[51] is coming here with his yacht at the end of June, and we
hope then to go to Clovelly--Kingsley's Clovelly--and perhaps other
places on the coast that we can't reach on foot. After this we mean to
migrate to Tenby, for the sake of making acquaintance with its
mollusks and medusæ.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 8th June, 1856.]

I received your kind letter only yesterday, but I write a few words in
answer at once, lest, as it so often happens, delay should beget
delay.

It is never too late to write generous words, and although
circumstances are not likely to allow of our acquiring a more intimate
knowledge of each other from personal intercourse, it will always be a
pleasant thought to me that you have remembered me kindly, and
interpreted me nobly. You are one of the minority who know how to "use
their imagination in the service of charity."

I have suffered so much from misunderstanding created by letters, even
to old friends, that I never write on private personal matters, unless
it be a rigorous duty or necessity to do so. Some little phrase or
allusion is misinterpreted, and on this false basis a great fabric of
misconception is reared, which even explanatory conversations will not
remove. Life is too precious to be spent in this weaving and unweaving
of false impressions, and it is better to live quietly on under some
degree of misrepresentation than to attempt to remove it by the
uncertain process of letter-writing.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 29th June, 1856.]

Yes, indeed, I do remember old Tenby days, and had set my heart on
being in the very same house again; but, alas! it had just been let.
It is immensely smartened up, like the place generally, since those
old times, and is proportionately less desirable for quiet people who
have no flounces and do not subscribe to new churches. Tenby looks
insignificant in picturesqueness after Ilfracombe; but the two objects
that drew us hither, zoology and health, will flourish none the worse
for the absence of tall precipices and many-tinted rocks. The air is
delicious--soft, but not sultry--and the sands and bathing such as are
to be found nowhere else. St. Catherine's Rock, with its caverns, is
our paradise. We go there with baskets, hammers and chisels, and jars
and phials, and come home laden with spoils. Altogether, we are
contented to have been driven away from Ilfracombe by the cold wind,
since a new place is new experience, and Mr. Lewes has never been here
before. To me there is the additional pleasure--half melancholy--of
recalling all the old impressions and comparing them with the new. I
understand your wish to have as much of Rosehill as possible this
year, and I am so glad that you will associate a visit from Herbert
Spencer with this last summer. I suppose he is with you now. If so,
give him my very evil regards, and tell him that because he has not
written to us we will diligently _not_ tell him a great many things
he would have liked to know. We have a project of going into St.
Catherine's caverns with lanterns, some night when the tide is low,
about eleven, for the sake of seeing the zoophytes preparing for their
midnight revels. The Actiniæ, like other belles, put on their best
faces on such occasions. Two things we have lost by leaving Ilfracombe
for which we have no compensation--the little zoological curate, Mr.
Tugwell, who is really one of the best specimens of the clergyman
species I have seen; and the pleasure of having Miss Barbara Smith
there for a week, sketching the rocks, and putting our love of them
into the tangible form of a picture. We are looking out now for Mr.
Pigott in his yacht; and his amiable face will make an agreeable
variety on the sands. I thought "Walden"[52] (you mean "Life in the
Woods," don't you?) a charming book, from its freshness and sincerity
as well as for its bits of description. It is pleasant to think that
Harriet Martineau can make so much of her last days. Her energy and
her habit of useful work are admirable.

     During the stay at Ilfracombe and Tenby not much literary
     work was done, except the articles on Young and on Riehl's
     book. There was a notice of Masson's Essays and the
     Belles-lettres section for the July number of the
     _Westminster_, and a review for the _Leader_. There is
     mention, too, of the reading of Beaumarchais' "Memoirs,"
     Milne Edwards's "Zoology," Harvey's sea-side book, and
     "Coriolanus," and then comes this significant sentence in her
     Journal:

[Sidenote: Journal, 1856.]

_July 20, 1856._--The fortnight has slipped away without my being
able to show much result for it. I have written a review of the
"Lover's Seat," and jotted down some recollections of Ilfracombe;
besides these trifles, and the introduction to an article already
written, I have done no _visible_ work. But I have absorbed many ideas
and much bodily strength; indeed, I do not remember ever feeling so
strong in mind and body as I feel at this moment. On Saturday, the
12th, Barbara Smith arrived, and stayed here till Wednesday morning.
We enjoyed her society very much, but were deeply touched to see that
three years had made her so much older and sadder. Her activity for
great objects is admirable; and contact with her is a fresh
inspiration to work while it is day. We have now taken up Quatrefages
again. The "Memoirs" of Beaumarchais yielded me little fruit. Mr.
Chapman invites me to contribute to the _Westminster_ for this
quarter. I am anxious to begin my fiction-writing, and so am not
inclined to undertake an article that will give me much trouble, but,
at all events, I will finish my article on Young.

_July 21._--We had a delightful walk on the north sands, and hunted
with success. A sunny, happy day.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 29th July, 1856.]

Glad to hear at last some news of your Essay--hoping to hear more and
better by and by. I didn't like to think that your labor would be
thrown away, except so far as it must do good to yourself by clearing
up your ideas. Not that your ideas were muddy, but the last degree of
clearness can only come by writing. Mr. Pigott is with us just now,
and we are meditating a nocturnal visit to St. Catherine's caves with
him. Our visit to Tenby has been very useful zoologically, but we are
not otherwise greatly in love with the place. It seems tame and vulgar
after Ilfracombe.

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, 6th Aug. 1856.]

Thank you for your kind note,[53] so like yourself. Such things
encourage me, and help me to do better. I never think what I write is
good for anything till other people tell me so, and even then it
always seems to me as if I should never write anything _else_ worth
reading. Ah, how much good we may do each other by a few friendly
words, and the opportunities for them are so much more frequent than
for friendly deeds! We want people to feel with us more than to act
for us. Mr. Lewes sends his kind regards to you. He, too, was very
pleased with your letter, for he cares more about getting approbation
for me than for himself. _He_ can do very well without it.

     On the 8th August they left Tenby, and on 9th arrived at
     Richmond "with terrible headache, but enjoyed the sense of
     being 'at home' again." On the 18th, "walked in Kew Park, and
     talked with G. of my novel. Finished 'César Birotteau'
     aloud." On the 25th August Mr. Lewes set off for Hofwyl, near
     Berne, taking his two eldest boys, Charles and Thornton, to
     place them at school there. He returned on 4th September, and
     in his absence George Eliot had been busy with her article on
     "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists." This was finished on the
     12th September, and on the 19th she sent off the
     Belles-lettres section for the October number of the
     _Westminster_.

     We have now arrived at the period of the new birth, and,
     fortunately, in the following memorandum, we have George
     Eliot's own words as to how it came about:

[Sidenote: How I came to write fiction.]

September, 1856, made a new era in my life, for it was then I began to
write fiction. It had always been a vague dream of mine that some time
or other I might write a novel; and my shadowy conception of what the
novel was to be, varied, of course, from one epoch of my life to
another. But I never went further towards the actual writing of the
novel than an introductory chapter describing a Staffordshire village
and the life of the neighboring farm-houses; and as the years passed
on I lost any hope that I should ever be able to write a novel, just
as I desponded about everything else in my future life. I always
thought I was deficient in dramatic power, both of construction and
dialogue, but I felt I should be at my ease in the descriptive parts
of a novel. My "introductory chapter" was pure description, though
there were good materials in it for dramatic presentation. It happened
to be among the papers I had with me in Germany, and one evening at
Berlin something led me to read it to George. He was struck with it as
a bit of concrete description, and it suggested to him the possibility
of my being able to write a novel, though he distrusted--indeed,
disbelieved in--my possession of any dramatic power. Still, he began
to think that I might as well try some time what I could do in
fiction, and by and by, when we came back to England, and I had
greater success than he ever expected in other kinds of writing, his
impression that it was worth while to see how far my mental power
would go towards the production of a novel, was strengthened. He began
to say very positively, "You must try and write a story," and when we
were at Tenby he urged me to begin at once. I deferred it, however,
after my usual fashion with work that does not present itself as an
absolute duty. But one morning, as I was thinking what should be the
subject of my first story, my thoughts merged themselves into a dreamy
doze, and I imagined myself writing a story, of which the title was
"The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton." I was soon wide awake
again and told G. He said, "Oh, what a capital title!" and from that
time I had settled in my mind that this should be my first story.
George used to say, "It may be a failure--it may be that you are
unable to write fiction. Or, perhaps, it may be just good enough to
warrant your trying again." Again, "You may write a _chef-d'oeuvre_ at
once--there's no telling." But his prevalent impression was, that
though I could hardly write a _poor_ novel, my effort would want the
highest quality of fiction--dramatic presentation. He used to say,
"You have wit, description, and philosophy--those go a good way
towards the production of a novel. It is worth while for you to try
the experiment."

We determined that if my story turned out good enough we would send it
to Blackwood; but G. thought the more probable result was that I
should have to lay it aside and try again.

But when we returned to Richmond I had to write my article on "Silly
Novels," and my review of Contemporary Literature for the
_Westminster_, so that I did not begin my story till September 22.
After I had begun it, as we were walking in the park, I mentioned to
G. that I had thought of the plan of writing a series of stories,
containing sketches drawn from my own observation of the clergy, and
calling them "Scenes from Clerical Life," opening with "Amos Barton."
He at once accepted the notion as a good one--fresh and striking; and
about a week afterwards, when I read him the first part of "Amos," he
had no longer any doubt about my ability to carry out the plan. The
scene at Cross Farm, he said, satisfied him that I had the very
element he had been doubtful about--it was clear I could write good
dialogue. There still remained the question whether I could command
any pathos; and that was to be decided by the mode in which I treated
Milly's death. One night G. went to town on purpose to leave me a
quiet evening for writing it. I wrote the chapter from the news
brought by the shepherd to Mrs. Hackit, to the moment when Amos is
dragged from the bedside, and I read it to G. when he came home. We
both cried over it, and then he came up to me and kissed me, saying,
"I think your pathos is better than your fun."

     The story of the "Sad Fortunes of Amos Barton" was begun on
     22d September and finished on the 5th November, and I subjoin
     the opening correspondence between Mr. Lewes and Mr. John
     Blackwood, to exhibit the first effect it produced:

[Sidenote: Letter from G. H. Lewes, to John Blackwood, 6th Nov. 1856.]

     "I trouble you with a MS. of 'Sketches of Clerical Life'
     which was submitted to me by a friend who desired my good
     offices with you. It goes by this post. I confess that before
     reading the MS. I had considerable doubts of my friend's
     powers as a writer of fiction; but, after reading it, these
     doubts were changed into very high admiration. I don't know
     what you will think of the story, but, according to my
     judgment, such humor, pathos, vivid presentation, and nice
     observation have not been exhibited (in this style) since the
     'Vicar of Wakefield;' and, in consequence of that opinion, I
     feel quite pleased in negotiating the matter with you.

     "This is what I am commissioned to say to you about the
     proposed series. It will consist of tales and sketches
     illustrative of the actual life of our country clergy about a
     quarter of a century ago--but solely in its _human_, and not
     at all in its _theological_ aspects; the object being to do
     what has never yet been done in our literature, for we have
     had abundant religious stories, polemical and doctrinal, but
     since the 'Vicar' and Miss Austen, no stories representing
     the clergy like every other class, with the humors, sorrows,
     and troubles of other men. He begged me particularly to add,
     that--as the specimen sent will sufficiently prove--the tone
     throughout will be sympathetic, and not at all antagonistic.

     "Some of these, if not all, you may think suitable for
     'Maga.' If any are sent of which you do not approve, or which
     you do not think sufficiently interesting, these he will
     reserve for the separate republication, and for this purpose
     he wishes to retain the copyright. Should you only print one
     or two, he will be well satisfied; and still better, if you
     should think well enough of the series to undertake the
     separate republication."

[Sidenote: Letter from John Blackwood, to G. H. Lewes, 12th Nov.
1856.]

     "I am happy to say that I think your friend's reminiscences
     of Clerical Life will do. If there is any more of the series
     written I should like to see it, as, until I saw more, I
     could not make any decided proposition for the publication of
     the tales, in whole or in part, in the Magazine. This first
     specimen, 'Amos Barton,' is unquestionably very pleasant
     reading. Perhaps the author falls into the error of trying
     too much to explain the characters of his actors by
     description instead of allowing them to evolve in the action
     of the story; but the descriptions are very humorous and
     good. The death of Milly is powerfully done, and affected me
     much. I am not sure whether he does not spoil it a little by
     specifying so minutely the different children and their
     names. The wind-up is perhaps the lamest part of the story;
     and there, too, I think the defect is caused by the
     specifications as to the fortunes of parties of whom the
     reader has no previous knowledge, and cannot, consequently,
     feel much interest. At first, I was afraid that in the
     amusing reminiscences of childhood in church there was a want
     of some softening touch, such as the remembrance of a father
     or mother lends, in after-years, to what was at the time
     considerable penance.

     "I hate anything of a sneer at real religious feeling as
     cordially as I despise anything like cant, and I should think
     this author is of the same way of thinking, although his
     clergymen, with one exception, are not very attractive
     specimens of the body. The revulsion of feeling towards poor
     Amos is capitally drawn, although the asinine stupidity of
     his conduct about the countess had disposed one to kick him.

     "I dare say I shall have a more decided opinion as to the
     merits of the story when I have looked at it again and
     thought over it; but in the meantime I am sure that there is
     a happy turn of expression throughout, also much humor and
     pathos. If the author is a new writer, I beg to congratulate
     him on being worthy of the honors of print and pay. I shall
     be very glad to hear from you or him soon."

[Sidenote: Letter from G. H. Lewes to John Blackwood, Saturday, Nov.
1856.]

     "I have communicated your letter to my clerical friend, who,
     though somewhat discouraged by it, has taken my advice, and
     will submit the second story to you when it is written. At
     present he has only written what he sent you. His avocations,
     he informs me, will prevent his setting to work for the next
     three weeks or so, but as soon as he is at liberty he will
     begin.

     "I rate the story much higher than you appear to do, from
     certain expressions in your note, though you too appreciate
     the humor and pathos and the happy turn of expression. It
     struck me as being fresher than any story I have read for a
     long while, and as exhibiting, in a high degree, that faculty
     which I find to be the rarest of all--viz., the dramatic
     ventriloquism.

     "At the same time I told him that I thoroughly understood
     your editorial caution in not accepting from an unknown hand
     a series on the strength of one specimen."

[Sidenote: Letter from John Blackwood to G. H. Lewes, 18th Nov. 1856.]

     "I was very far from intending that my letter should convey
     anything like disappointment to your friend. On the contrary,
     I thought the tale very good, and intended to convey as much.
     But I dare say I expressed myself coolly enough. Criticism
     would assume a much soberer tone were critics compelled
     _seriously to act_ whenever they expressed an opinion.
     Although not much given to hesitate about anything, I always
     think twice before I put the decisive mark 'In type for the
     Magazine' on any MS. from a stranger. Fancy the intense
     annoyance (to say nothing of more serious considerations) of
     publishing, month after month, a series about which the
     conviction gradually forces itself on you that you have made
     a total blunder.

     "I am sorry that the author has no more written, but if he
     cares much about a speedy appearance, I have so high an
     opinion of this first tale that I will waive my objections,
     and publish it without seeing more--not, of course,
     committing myself to go on with the other tales of the series
     unless I approved of them. I am very sanguine that I will
     approve, as, in addition to the other merits of 'Amos,' I
     agree with you that there is great freshness of style. If you
     think also that it would stimulate the author to go on with
     the other tales with more spirit, I will publish 'Amos' at
     once. He could divide into two parts. I am blocked up for
     December, but I could start him in January.

     "I am glad to hear that your friend is, as I supposed, a
     clergyman. Such a subject is best in clerical hands, and some
     of the pleasantest and least-prejudiced correspondents I have
     ever had are English clergymen.

     "I have not read 'Amos Barton' a second time, but the
     impression on my mind of the whole character, incidents, and
     feeling of the story is very distinct, which is an excellent
     sign."

[Sidenote: Letter from G. H. Lewes to John Blackwood, Saturday, Nov.
1856.]

     "Your letter has greatly restored the shaken confidence of my
     friend, who is unusually sensitive, and, unlike most writers,
     is more anxious about _excellence_ than about appearing in
     print--as his waiting so long before taking the venture
     proves. He is consequently afraid of failure, though not
     afraid of obscurity; and by failure he would understand that
     which I suspect most writers would be apt to consider as
     success--so high is his ambition.

     "I tell you this that you may understand the sort of shy,
     shrinking, ambitious nature you have to deal with. I tried
     to persuade him that you really _did_ appreciate his story,
     but were only hesitating about committing yourself to a
     series; and your last letter has proved me to have been
     right--although, as he never contemplated binding you to the
     publication of any portion of the series to which you might
     object, he could not at first see your position in its true
     light.

     "All is, however, clear now. He will be gratified if you
     publish 'Amos Barton' in January, as it will give him ample
     time to get the second story ready, so as to appear when
     'Barton' is finished, should you wish it. He is anxious,
     however, that you should publish the general title of 'Scenes
     of Clerical Life;' and I think you may do this with perfect
     safety, since it is quite clear that the writer of 'Amos
     Barton' is capable of writing at least one more story
     suitable to 'Maga;' and two would suffice to justify the
     general title.

     "Let me not forget to add that when I referred to 'my
     clerical friend,' I meant to designate the writer of the
     clerical stories--not that he was a clericus. I am not at
     liberty to remove the veil of anonymity, even as regards
     social position. Be pleased, therefore, to keep the whole
     secret, and not even mention _my_ negotiation, or in any way
     lead guessers (should any one trouble himself with such a
     guess--_not_ very likely) to jump from me to my friend."

     On Christmas Day, 1856, "Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story" was begun,
     and during December and January the following are mentioned
     among the books read: The "Ajax" of Sophocles, Miss
     Martineau's "History of the Peace," Macaulay's "History"
     finished, Carlyle's "French Revolution," Burke's "Reflections
     on the French Revolution," and "Mansfield Park."

[Sidenote: Letter from John Blackwood, to the author of "Amos Barton,"
29th Dec. 1856.]

     "Along with this I send a copy of the January number of the
     Magazine, in which you will find the first part of 'Amos
     Barton.' It gives me very great pleasure to begin the number
     with 'Amos,' and I put him in that position because his
     merits well entitle him to it, and also because it is a vital
     point to attract public attention to the _first_ part of a
     series, to which end being the first article of the first
     number of the year may contribute.

     "I have already expressed to our friend Mr. Lewes the very
     high opinion I entertain of 'Amos,' and the expectations I
     have formed of the series, should his successors prove equal
     to him, which I fully anticipate.

     "It is a long time since I have read anything so fresh, so
     humorous, and so touching. The style is capital, conveying so
     much in so few words.

     "Those who have seen the tale here are chiefly members of my
     own family, and they are all enthusiastic in praise.

     "You may recollect that I expressed a fear that in the
     affecting and highly wrought scene of poor Milly's death, the
     attempt to individualize the children by reiterating their
     names weakened the effect, as the reader had not been
     prepared to care for them individually, but simply as a
     group--the children of Milly and the sorrow-stricken curate.
     My brother says, 'No. Do not advise the author to touch
     anything so exquisite.' Of course you are the best judge.

     "I now send proof of the conclusion of 'Amos,' in
     acknowledgment of which, and of the first part, I have the
     pleasure of enclosing a check for £52 10_s._--fifty guineas.

     "If the series goes on as I anticipate, there is every
     prospect that a republication as a separate book, at some
     time or other, will be advisable. We would look upon such
     republication as a joint property, and would either give you
     a sum for your interest in it, or publish on the terms of one
     half of the clear profits, to be divided between author and
     publisher, as might be most agreeable to you.

     "I shall be very glad to hear from you, either direct or
     through Mr. Lewes; and any intelligence that the successors
     of 'Amos' are taking form and substance will be very
     acceptable.

     "I shall let you know what the other contributors and the
     public think of 'Amos' as far as I can gather a verdict, but
     in the meantime I may congratulate you on having achieved a
     preliminary success at all events."

[Sidenote: Letter from the author of "Amos Barton" to John Blackwood,
Jan. 1857.]

Your letter has proved to me that the generous editor and
publisher--generous both in word and in deed--who makes the author's
path smooth and easy, is something more than a pleasant tradition. I
am very sensitive to the merits of checks for fifty guineas, but I am
still more sensitive to that cordial appreciation which is a guarantee
to me that my work was worth doing for its own sake.

If the "Scenes of Clerical Life" should be republished, I have no
doubt we shall find it easy to arrange the terms. In the meantime, the
most pressing business is to make them worth republishing.

I think the particularization of the children in the deathbed scene
has an important effect on the imagination. But I have removed all
names from the "conclusion" except those of Patty and Dickey, in whom,
I hope, the reader has a personal interest.

I hope to send you the second story by the beginning of February. It
will lie, for the most part, among quite different scenes and persons
from the last--opening in Shepperton once more, but presently moving
away to a distant spot and new people, whom, I hope, you will not like
less than "Amos" and his friends. But if any one of the succeeding
stories should seem to you unsuitable to the pages of "Maga," it can
be reserved for publication in the future volume, without creating any
difficulty.

Thank you very warmly for the hearty acceptance you have given to my
first story.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1857.]

The first part of "Amos Barton" appeared in the January number of
_Blackwood_. Before the appearance of the Magazine, on sending me the
proof, Mr. John Blackwood already expressed himself with much greater
warmth of admiration; and when the first part had appeared he sent me
a charming letter, with a check for fifty guineas, and a proposal
about republication of the series. When the story was concluded he
wrote me word how Albert Smith had sent him a letter saying he had
never read anything that affected him more than Milly's death, and,
added Blackwood, "The men at the club seem to have mingled their tears
and their tumblers together. It will be curious if you should be a
member and be hearing your own praises." There was clearly no
suspicion that I was a woman. It is interesting, as an indication of
the value there is in such conjectural criticism generally, to
remember that when G. read the first part of "Amos" to a party at
Helps's, they were all sure I was a clergyman--a Cambridge man.
Blackwood seemed curious about the author, and, when I signed my
letter "George Eliot," hunted up some old letters from Eliot
Warburton's brother to compare the handwritings, though, he said,
"'Amos' seems to me not in the least like what that good artilleryman
would write."

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 4th Feb. 1857.]

Thank you for fulfilling your promise to let me know something of the
criticisms passed on my story. I have a very moderate respect for
"opinions of the press," but the private opinions of intelligent
people may be valuable to me.

In reference to artistic presentation much adverse opinion will, of
course, arise from a dislike to the _order_ of art rather than from a
critical estimate of the execution. Any one who detests the Dutch
school in general will hardly appreciate fairly the merits of a
particular Dutch painting. And against this sort of condemnation one
must steel one's self as one best can. But objections which point out
to me any vice of manner, or any failure in producing an intended
effect, will be really profitable. For example, I suppose my
scientific illustrations must be at fault, since they seem to have
obtruded themselves disagreeably on one of my readers. But if it be a
sin to be at once a man of science and a writer of fiction, I can
declare my perfect innocence on that head, my scientific knowledge
being as superficial as that of the most "practised writers." I hope
to send you a second story in a few days, but I am rather behindhand
this time, having been prevented from setting to work for some weeks
by other business.

Whatever may be the success of my stories, I shall be resolute in
preserving my _incognito_, having observed that a _nom de plume_
secures all the advantages without the disagreeables of reputation.
Perhaps, therefore, it will be well to give you my prospective name,
as a tub to throw to the whale in case of curious inquiries; and
accordingly I subscribe myself, best and most sympathizing of editors,
yours very truly, GEORGE ELIOT.

     I may mention here that my wife told me the reason she fixed
     on this name was that George was Mr. Lewes's Christian name,
     and Eliot was a good, mouth-filling, easily pronounced word.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 18th Feb. 1857.]

First let me thank you very heartily for your letter of the 10th.
Except your own very cordial appreciation, which is so much beyond a
mere official acceptance, that little fact about Albert Smith has
gratified me more than anything else in connection with the effect of
"Amos." If you should happen to hear an opinion from Thackeray, good
or bad, I should like to know it.

You will see that I have availed myself of your suggestions on points
of language. I quite recognize the justice of your criticisms on the
French phrases. They are not in keeping with my story.

But I am unable to alter anything in relation to the delineation or
development of character, as my stories always grow out of my
psychological conception of the _dramatis personæ_. For example, the
behavior of Caterina in the gallery is essential to my conception of
her nature, and to the development of that nature in the plot. My
artistic bent is directed not at all to the presentation of eminently
irreproachable characters, but to the presentation of mixed human
beings in such a way as to call forth tolerant judgment, pity, and
sympathy. And I cannot stir a step aside from what I _feel_ to be
_true_ in character. If anything strikes you as untrue to human nature
in my delineations, I shall be very glad if you will point it out to
me, that I may reconsider the matter. But, alas! inconsistencies and
weaknesses are not untrue. I hope that your doubts about the plot will
be removed by the further development of the story. Meanwhile, warmest
thanks for your encouraging letters.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 24th Feb. 1857.]

I am the more inclined to think that I shall admire your book because
you are suspected of having given undue preponderance to the Christian
argument: for I have a growing conviction that we may measure true
moral and intellectual culture by the comprehension and veneration
given to all forms of thought and feeling which have influenced large
masses of mankind--and of all intolerance the intolerance calling
itself philosophical is the most odious to me.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 1st Mch. 1857.]

Thank you for the copy of "Maga" and for the accompanying check. One
has not many correspondents whose handwriting has such agreeable
associations as yours.

I was particularly pleased with that extract you were so good as to
send me from Mr. Swayne's letter. Dear old "Goldie" is one of my
earliest and warmest admirations, and I don't desire a better fate
than to lie side by side with him in people's memories.

     The Rev. Mr. Swayne had written to Blackwood saying that
     "Amos," in its charming tendencies, reminded him of the
     "Vicar of Wakefield." Blackwood had written, much delighted
     with the two first parts of "Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story," which
     were sent to him together.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 2d Mch. 1857.]

I began, oddly enough you will perhaps think, by reading through the
"Answers of Infidelity,"[54] those being the most interesting parts of
the book to me. Some of your own passages I think very admirable--some
of them made me cry, which is always a sign of the highest pleasure
writing can give me. But in many of the extracts, I think, Infidelity
cuts a very poor figure. Some are feeble, some _bad_, and terribly
discrepant in the tone of their thought and feeling from the passages
which come fresh from your own mind. The disadvantage arising from the
perpetual shifting of the point of view is a disadvantage, I suppose,
inseparable from the plan, which I cannot admire or feel to be
effective, though I can imagine it may be a serviceable form of
presentation to some inquirers. The _execution_ I do admire. I think it
shows very high and rare qualities of mind--a self-discipline and
largeness of thought which are the highest result of culture. The
"Objections of Christianity," which I have also read, are excellently
put, and have an immense advantage over the "Answers of Infidelity" in
their greater homogeneity. The first part I have only begun and glanced
through, and at present have no other observation to make than that I
think you might have brought a little more artillery to bear on
Christian morality. But nothing is easier than to find fault--nothing
so difficult as to _do_ some real work.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 5th Mch. 1857.]

I think I wrote very brusquely and disagreeably to you the other day,
but the impertinence was altogether in the form and not at all in
the feeling. I always have uncomfortable sensations after writing
objections and criticisms when they relate to things I substantially
admire. It is inflicting a hurt on my own veneration.

I showed the passage on the eye, p. 157, to Herbert Spencer, and he
agrees with us that you have not stated your idea so as to render it a
logical argument against design. You appear to imply that development
and gradation in organs and functions are opposed to that conception,
which they are not. I suppose you are aware that we all three hold the
conception of creative design to be untenable. We only think you have
not made out a good case against it.

Thank you for sending me some news of Harriet Martineau. I have often
said lately, "I wonder how she is."

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 14th Mch. 1857.]

I am glad you retain a doubt in favor of the _dagger_, and wish I
could convert you to entire approval, for I am much more satisfied
when your feeling is thoroughly with me. But it would be the death of
my story to substitute a dream for the real scene. Dreams usually play
an important part in fiction, but rarely, I think, in actual life.

So many of us have reason to know that criminal impulses may be felt
by a nature which is nevertheless guarded by its entire constitution
from the commission of crime, that I can't help hoping that my
Caterina will not forfeit the sympathy of all my readers.

The answer you propose to give to curious inquirers is the best
possible. For several reasons I am very anxious to retain my
_incognito_ for some time to come, and, to an author not already
famous, anonymity is the highest _prestige_. Besides, if George Eliot
turns out a dull dog and an ineffective writer--a mere flash in the
pan--I, for one, am determined to cut him on the first intimation of
that disagreeable fact.

The fates have willed that this shall be a very melancholy story, and
I am longing to be a little merrier again.

     On the 16th March Mr. Lewes and George Eliot started for
     Plymouth, Penzance, and the Scilly Isles, and we have the
     following recollections of their stay there:

[Sidenote: Recollections, Scilly Isles, March-May, 1857.]

I had never before seen a granite coast, and on the southern side of
the island of St. Mary's one sees such a coast in its most striking
and characteristic forms. Rectangular crevices, the edges of which
have been rounded by weather, give many of the granite masses a
resemblance to bales of wool or cotton heaped on each other; another
characteristic form is the mushroom-shaped mass, often lying poised on
the summits of more cubical bowlders or fragments; another is the
immense flat platform stretching out like a pier into the sea; another
the oval basins formed by the action of the rain-water on the summits
of the rocks and bowlders. The coloring of the rocks was very various
and beautiful; sometimes a delicate grayish-green, from the shaggy
byssus which clothes it, chiefly high up from the water; then a light,
warm brown; then black; occasionally of a rich yellow; and here and
there purplish. Below the rocks, on the coast, are almost everywhere
heaps of white bowlders, sometimes remarkably perfect ovals, and
looking like huge eggs of some monstrous bird. Hardly any weed was to
be seen on the granite, except here and there in a rock-pool, green
with young ulva; and no barnacles incrust the rock, no black mussels,
scarcely any limpets. The waves that beat on this coast are clear as
crystal, and we used to delight in watching them rear themselves like
the horses of a mighty sea-god as they approached the rocks on which
they were broken into eddies of milky foam. Along a great part of this
southern coast there stretch heathy or furzy downs, over which I used
to enjoy rambling immensely; there is a sense of freedom in those
unenclosed grounds that one never has in a railed park, however
extensive. Then, on the north side of the island, above Sandy Bar,
what a view we used to get of the opposite islands and reefs, with
their delicious violet and yellow tints--the tall ship or two anchored
in the Sound, changing their aspect like living things, and when the
wind was at all high the white foam prancing round the reefs and
rising in fountain-like curves above the screen of rocks!

Many a wet and dirty walk we had along the lanes, for the weather was
often wet and almost always blustering. Now and then, however, we had
a clear sky and a calm sea, and on such days it was delicious to look
up after the larks that were soaring above us, or to look out on the
island and reef studded sea. I never enjoyed the lark before as I
enjoyed it at Scilly--never felt the full beauty of Shelley's poem on
it before. A spot we became very fond of towards the close of our stay
was Carne Lea, where, between two fine, jutting piles of granite,
there was a soft down, gay with the pretty pink flowers of the thrift,
which, in this island, carpets the ground like greensward. Here we
used to sit and lie in the bright afternoons, watching the silver
sunlight on the waves--bright silver, not golden--it is the morning
and evening sunlight that is golden. A week or two after our arrival
we made the acquaintance of Mr. Moyle, the surgeon, who became a
delightful friend to us, always ready to help with the contents of his
surgery or anything else at his command. We liked to have him come and
smoke a cigar in the evening, and look in now and then for a little
lesson in microscopy. The little indications of the social life at
Scilly that we were able to pick up were very amusing. I was
repeatedly told, in order to make me aware who Mr. Hall was, that he
married a Miss Lemon. The people at St. Mary's imagine that the
lawyers and doctors at Penzance are a sort of European characters that
every one knows. We heard a great deal about Mr. Quill, an Irishman,
the Controller of the Customs; and one day, when we were making a call
on one of the residents, our host said two or three times, at
intervals, "I wish you knew Quill!" At last, on our farewell call, we
saw the distinguished Quill, with his hair plastered down, his
charming smile, and his trousers with a broad stripe down each leg.
Our host amused us by his contempt for curs: "Oh, I wouldn't have a
cur--there's nothing to look at in a cur!"[55]

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 5th April, 1857.]

The smallest details, written in the hastiest way, that will enable me
to imagine you as you are, are just what I want; indeed, all I care
about in correspondence. We are more and more in love with these
little islands. There is not a tree to be seen, but there are grand
granite hills on the coast, such as I never saw before, and
furze-covered hills with larks soaring and singing above them, and
zoological wonders on the shore to fill our bottles and our souls at
once. For some time I have been unusually weak and knock-up-able. Our
landlady is an excellent woman, but, like almost all peculiarly
domestic women, has not more than rudimentary ideas of cooking; and in
an island where you can get nothing but beef, except by sending to
Penzance, that supreme science has its maximum value. She seems to
think eating a purely arbitrary procedure--an abnormal function of mad
people who come to Scilly; and if we ask her what the people live on
here, is quite at a loss to tell us, apparently thinking the question
relates to the abstruser portion of natural history. But I insist,
and give her a culinary lecture every morning, and we do, in the end,
get fed. Altogether our life here is so far better than the golden age
that we work as well as play. That is the happy side of things. But
there is a very sad one to me which I shall not dwell upon--only tell
you of. More than a week ago I received the news that poor Chrissey
had lost one of her pretty little girls of fever; that the other
little one--they were the only two she had at home with her--was also
dangerously ill, and Chrissey herself and her servant apparently
attacked by typhus too. The thought of her in this state is a
perpetual shadow to me in the sunshine.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 16th April, 1857.]

I shudder at entering on such great subjects (as "Design") in letters;
my idle brain wants lashing to work, like a negro, and will do nothing
under a slighter stimulus. We are enjoying a retrogression to
old-fashioned reading. I rush on the slightest pretext to Sophocles,
and am as excited about blind old Oedipus as any young lady can be
about the latest hero with magnificent eyes. But there is _one_ new
book we have been enjoying, and so, I hope, have you--the "Life of
Charlotte Brontë." Deeply affecting throughout; in the early part
romantic, poetic, as one of her own novels; in the later years tragic,
especially to those who know what sickness is. Mrs. Gaskell has done
her work admirably, both in the industry and care with which she has
gathered and selected her material, and in the feeling with which she
has presented it. There is one exception, however, which I regret very
much. She sets down Branwell's conduct entirely to remorse. Remorse
may make sad work with a man, but it will not make such a life as
Branwell's was in the last three or four years, unless the germs of
vice had sprouted and shot up long before, as it seems clear they had
in him. What a tragedy!--that picture of the old father and the three
sisters trembling, day and night, in terror at the possible deeds of
their drunken, brutal son and brother! That is the part of the life
which affects me most.

[Sidenote: Letter to Isaac P. Evans, 16th April, 1857.]

I have been looking anxiously for some further tidings of Chrissey
since your last letter, which told me that she and Kate were better,
though not out of danger. I try to hope that no news is good news; but
if you do not think it troublesome to write, I shall be thankful to
have that hope changed into certainty.

Meanwhile, to save multiplying letters--which I know you are not fond
of--I mention now what will take no harm from being mentioned rather
prematurely. I should like Chrissey to have £15 of my next half-year's
income, due at the beginning of June, to spend in taking a change of
air as soon as she is able to do so; and perhaps, if it were desirable
for her to leave before the money has been paid in, you would be so
kind as to advance it for a few weeks. I am writing, of course, in
ignorance of her actual state; but I should think it must be good for
her, as soon as she is able to move, to leave that fever-infected
place for a time, and I know the money must have gone very fast in
recent expenses. I only suggest the change of air as the thing that I
should think best for Chrissey; but, in any case, I should like her to
have the money, to do what she pleases with it. If she is well enough
please to give her the enclosed note, in which I have suggested to her
what I have just written to you.

I am much obliged to you for your last letter, and shall be still more
so if you will write me word of Chrissey's present condition.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 1st May, 1857.]

Thank you for the pleasant notes of impressions concerning my story,
sent to me through Lewes.

I will pay attention to your caution about the danger of huddling up
my stories. Conclusions are the weak point of most authors, but some
of the fault lies in the very nature of a conclusion, which is at best
a negation.

There must be something wrong in the winding-up of "Amos," for I have
heard of two persons who are disappointed with the conclusion. But the
story never presented itself to me as possible to be protracted after
Milly's death. The drama ends there.

I am thinking of writing a short epilogue to "Mr. Gilfil's
Love-Story," and I will send it you with the proof from Jersey, where,
on a strict promise that I am not to be dissected, I shall shortly
join our friend Lewes.

The third story will be very different from either of the preceding,
which will perhaps be an advantage, as poor Tina's sad tale was
necessarily rather monotonous in its effects.

     The epilogue to "Mr. Gilfil" was written sitting on the
     Fortification Hill, Scilly Isles, one sunshiny morning.

[Sidenote: Jersey, Recollections, 1857.]

It was a beautiful moment (12th May) when we came to our lodgings at
Gorey. The orchards were all in blossom--and this is an island of
orchards. They cover the slopes; they stretch before you in shady,
grassy, indefinite extent through every other gateway by the roadside;
they flourish in some spots almost close to the sea. What a contrast
to the Scilly Isles! There you stand on the hills like a sparrow on
the housetop; here you are like the same sparrow when he is hopping
about on the branches with green above him, green below, and green
all round. Gorey stands in Granville Bay, where the grand old castle
of Mont Orgueil stands and keeps guard on a fine rocky promontory
overlooking the little harbor dotted with fishing craft. There is a
charming piece of common, or down, where you can have the quietest,
easiest walking, with a carpet of minute wild-flowers that are not
hindered from flourishing by the sandy rain of the coast. I delighted
extremely in the brownish-green softness of this undulating common,
here and there varied with a patch of bright green fern--all the
prettier for two little homesteads set down upon it, with their
garden-fence and sheltering trees. It was pretty in all lights, but
especially the evening light, to look round at the castle and harbor,
the village and the scattered dwellings peeping out from among trees
on the hill. The castle is built of stone which has a beautiful
pinkish-gray tint, and the bright green ivy hangs oblique curtains on
its turreted walls, making it look like a natural continuation or
outgrowth of the rocky and grassy height on which it stands. Then the
eye wanders on to the right and takes in the church standing half-way
down the hill, which is clothed with a plantation, and shelters the
little village, with its cloud of blue smoke; still to the right, and
the village breaks off, leaving nothing but meadows in front of the
slope that shuts out the setting sun, and only lets you see a hint of
the golden glory that is reflected in the pink, eastern clouds.

The first lovely walk we found inland was the Queen's Fern Valley,
where a broad strip of meadow and pasture lies between two high slopes
covered with woods and ferny wilderness. When we first saw this valley
it was in the loveliest spring-time; the woods were a delicious
mixture of red and tender green and purple. We have watched it losing
that spring beauty and passing into the green and flowery luxuriance
of June, and now into the more monotonous summer tint of July.

When the blossoms fell away from the orchards my next delight was to
look at the grasses mingled with the red sorrel; then came the white
umbelliferous plants, making a border or inner frame for them along
the hedgerows and streams. Another pretty thing here is the luxuriance
of the yellow iris, that covers large pieces of moist ground with its
broad blades. Everywhere there are tethered cows, looking at you with
meek faces--mild-eyed, sleek, fawn-colored creatures, with delicate,
downy udders.

Another favorite walk of ours was round by Mont Orgueil, along the
coast. Here we had the green or rocky slope on one side of us, and on
the other the calm sea stretching to the coast of France, visible on
all but the murkiest days. But the murky days were not many during our
stay, and our evening walks round the coast usually showed us a
peaceful, scarcely rippled sea, plashing gently on the purple pebbles
of the little scalloped bays. There were two such bays within the
boundary of our sea-side walk in that direction, and one of them was a
perpetual wonder to us, in the luxuriant verdure of meadows and
orchards and forest-trees that sloped down to the very shore. No
distressed look about the trees as if they were ever driven harshly
back by the winter winds--it was like an inland slope suddenly carried
to the coast.

As for the inland walks, they are inexhaustible. The island is one
labyrinth of delicious roads and lanes, leading you by the most
charming nooks of houses with shady grounds and shrubberies,
delightful farm homesteads, and trim villas.

It was a sweet, peaceful life we led here. Good creatures, the Amys,
our host and hostess, with their nice boy and girl, and the little
white kid--the family pet. No disagreeable sounds to be heard in the
house, no unpleasant qualities to hinder one from feeling perfect love
to these simple people. We have had long rambles and long readings.
But our choice of literature has been rather circumscribed in this
out-of-the-way place. The "Life of George Stephenson" has been a real
profit and pleasure. I have read Draper's "Physiology" aloud for grave
evening hours, and such books as Currer Bell's "Professor," Mlle.
d'Auny's "Mariage en Province," and Miss Ferrier's "Marriage," for
lighter food. The last, however, we found ourselves unable to finish,
notwithstanding Miss Ferrier's high reputation. I have been getting a
smattering of botany from Miss Catlow and from Dr. Thomson's little
book on wild-flowers, which have created at least a longing for
something more complete on the subject.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 22d May, 1857.]

Such hedgerows in this island! Such orchards, white against the green
slopes, and shady walks by the woodside, with distracting
wild-flowers. We enjoy the greenery and variety of this bushy island
all the better for our stay on bare Scilly, which we had gone to and
fro upon till we knew it by heart. Our little lodgings are very
snug--only 13_s._ a week--a nice little sitting-room, with a workroom
adjoining for Mr. Lewes, who is at this moment in all the bliss of
having discovered a parasitic worm in a cuttlefish. We dine at five,
and our afternoons are almost exhausted in rambling. I hope to get up
my strength in this delicious quiet, and have fewer interruptions to
work from headache than I have been having since Christmas. I wonder
if I should have had the happiness of seeing Cara if I had been at
Richmond now. I would rather see her than any one else in the
world--except poor Chrissey. Tell me when you have read the life of
Currer Bell. Some people think its revelations in bad taste--making
money out of the dead, wounding the feelings of the living, etc. What
book is there that some people or other will not find abominable? We
thought it admirable, cried over it, and felt the better for it. We
read Cromwell's letters again at Scilly with great delight.

     In May Mr. Lewes writes to Mr. John Blackwood: "We were both
     amused with the divination of the Manx seer and his friend
     Liggers." This is the first mention of the individual, whose
     real name was Liggins of Nuneaton, who afterwards became
     notorious for laying claim to the authorship of the "Scenes
     of Clerical Life" and "Adam Bede."

     "Janet's Repentance" had been begun on the 18th April, and
     the first three parts were finished in Jersey. In reference
     to the "Scenes of Clerical Life" there are the following
     entries in the Journal:

[Sidenote: Journal, 1857.]

_May 2._--Received letter from Blackwood expressing his approbation of
Part IX. of "Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story." He writes very pleasantly, says
the series is attributed by many to Bulwer, and that Thackeray thinks
highly of it. This was a pleasant fillip to me, who am just now ready
to be dispirited on the slightest pretext.

_May 21._--The other day we had a pleasant letter from Herbert
Spencer, saying that he had heard "Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story" discussed
by Baynes and Dallas, as well as previously by Pigott, all expressing
warm approval, and curiosity as to the author.

_May 26._--Received a pleasant letter from Blackwood, enclosing one
from Archer Gurney to the author of "Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story."

     I subjoin this letter, as it is the first she received in her
     character of a creative author, and it still bears a pencil
     memorandum in her writing: "This letter he brought up to me
     at Jersey after reading it, saying, with intense joy, 'Her
     fame is beginning.'"

[Sidenote: Letter from Rev. Archer Gurney, to the author of "Mr.
Gilfil's Love-Story," 14th May, 1857.]

            "BUCKINGHAM (BUCKS), _Thursday, 14th May, 1857_.

     "Sir,--Will you consider it impertinent in a brother author
     and old reviewer to address a few lines of earnest sympathy
     and admiration to you, excited by the purity of your style,
     originality of your thoughts, and absence of all vulgar
     seeking for effect in those 'Scenes of Clerical Life' now
     appearing in _Blackwood_? If I mistake not much, your muse of
     invention is no hackneyed one, and your style is too peculiar
     to allow of your being confounded with any of the already
     well-known writers of the day. Your great and characteristic
     charm is, to my mind, Nature. You frequently, indeed, express
     what I may call brilliant ideas, but they always seem to come
     unsought for, never, as in Lytton, for instance, to be
     elaborated and placed in the most advantageous light. I
     allude to such brief aphoristic sayings as 'Animals are such
     agreeable friends, they ask no questions, they pass no
     criticisms'--'All with that brisk and cheerful air which a
     sermon is often observed to produce when it is quite
     finished.' By-the-bye. I am one of the cloth, and might take
     exception to certain hints, perhaps, but these are dubious.
     What I see plainly I admire honestly, and trust that more
     good remains behind. Will you always remain equally natural?
     That is the doubt. Will the fear of the critic, or the
     public, or the literary world, which spoils almost every one,
     never master you? Will you always write to please yourself,
     and preserve the true independence which seems to mark a real
     supremacy of intellect? But these questions are, I fear,
     impertinent. I will conclude. Pardon this word of greeting
     from one whom you may never see or know, and believe me your
     earnest admirer,

                                              ARCHER GURNEY.

     "The Author of
       'Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story.'"


[Sidenote: Journal, 1857.]

_June._--Blackwood writes from London that he hears nothing but
approval of "Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story." Lord Stanley, among other
people, had spoken to him about the "Clerical Scenes," at Bulwer's,
and was astonished to find Blackwood in the dark as to the author.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 2d June, 1857.]

I send you by the same post with this the first part of my third
story, which I hope will not disappoint you. The part is, I think,
rather longer than my parts have usually been, but it would have been
injurious to the effect of the story to pause earlier.

Pleasant letters like yours are the best possible stimulus to an
author's powers, and if I don't write better and better the fault will
certainly not lie in my editor, who seems to have been created in
pre-established harmony with the organization of a susceptible
contributor.

This island, too, with its grassy valleys and pretty, indented coast
is not at all a bad haunt for the Muses, if, as one may suppose, they
have dropped their too scanty classical attire, and appear in long
dresses and brown hats, like decent Christian women likely to inspire
"Clerical Scenes."

Moreover, having myself a slight zoological weakness, I am less
alarmed than most people at the society of a zoological maniac. So
that, altogether, your contributor is in promising circumstances, and
if he doesn't behave like an animal in good condition, is clearly
unworthy of his keep.

I am much gratified to have made the conquest of Professor Aytoun; but
with a parent's love for the depreciated child, I can't help standing
up for "Amos" as better than "Gilfil."

Lewes seems to have higher expectations from the third story than from
either of the preceding; but I can form no judgment myself until I
have quite finished a thing, and see it aloof from my actual self. I
can only go on writing what I feel, and waiting for the proof that I
have been able to make others feel.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 5th June, 1857.]

Richmond is _not_ fascinating in "the season" or through the summer.
It is hot, noisy, and haunted with Cockneys; but at other times we
love the Park with an increasing love, and we have such a kind, good
landlady there, that it always seems like going home when we return to
Park Shot. She writes to us: "I hope you will make your fortune--but
you must always live with me," which, considering that she gets less
out of us than other lodgers, is a proof of affection in a landlady.
Yes! we like our wandering life at present, and it is fructifying, and
brings us material in many ways; but we keep in perspective the idea
of a cottage among green fields and cows, where we mean to settle
down (after we have once been to Italy), and buy pots and kettles and
keep a dog. Wherever we are we work hard--and at work which brings
_present_ money; for we have too many depending on us to be
_dilettanti_ or idlers.

I wish it to be understood that I should never invite any one to come
and see me who did not ask for the invitation.

You wonder how my face has changed in the last three years. Doubtless
it is older and uglier, but it ought not to have a bad expression, for
I never have anything to call out my ill-humor or discontent, which
you know were always ready enough to come on slight call, and I have
everything to call out love and gratitude.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. John Cash (Miss Mary Sibree), 6th June,
1857.]

Your letter was very sweet to me. The sense of my deficiencies in the
past often presses on me with a discouraging weight, and to know that
any one can remember me lovingly, helps me to believe that there has
been some good to balance the evil. I like to think of you as a happy
wife and mother; and since Rosehill must have new tenants, I like to
think that you and yours are there rather than any one else, not only
because of my own confidence in your nature, but because our dear
friends love you so much as a neighbor. You know I can never feel
otherwise than sorry that they should not have ended their days in
that pretty home; but the inevitable regret is softened as much as
possible by the fact that the home has become yours.

It is very nice to hear that Mrs. Sibree can relish anything of my
writing. She was always a favorite with me; and I remember very
vividly many pleasant little conversations with her. Seventy-two! How
happy you are to have a dear, aged mother, whose heart you can
gladden.

I was a good deal touched by the letter your brother wrote to you
about accepting, or, rather, declining, more pupils. I feel sure that
his sensitive nature has its peculiar trials and struggles in this
strange life of ours, which some thick-skinned mortals take so easily.

I am very happy--happy in the highest blessing life can give us, the
perfect love and sympathy of a nature that stimulates my own to
healthful activity. I feel, too, that all the terrible pain I have
gone through in past years, partly from the defects of my own nature,
partly from outward things, has probably been a preparation for some
special work that I may do before I die. That is a blessed hope, to be
rejoiced in with trembling. But even if that hope should be
unfulfilled, I am contented to have lived and suffered for the sake of
what has already been. You see your kind letter has made me inclined
to talk about myself, but, as we do not often have any communication
with each other, I know it will be a gratification to your sympathetic
nature to have a few direct words from me that will assure you of my
moral well-being.

I hope your little ones are just like you--just as fair and
sweet-tempered.

[Sidenote: Journal, June, 1857.]

I sent off the first part of "Janet's Repentance," but to my
disappointment Blackwood did not like it so well--seemed to
misunderstand the characters, and to be doubtful about the treatment
of clerical matters. I wrote at once to beg him to give up printing
the story if he felt uncomfortable about it, and he immediately sent a
very anxious, cordial letter, saying the thought of putting a stop to
the series "gave him quite a turn:" he "did not meet with George
Eliots every day"--and so on.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 11th June, 1857.]

I am not much surprised and not at all hurt by your letter received
to-day with the proof. It is a great satisfaction--in fact, my only
satisfaction--that you should give me your judgment with perfect
frankness. I am able, I think, to enter into an editor's doubts and
difficulties, and to see my stories in some degree from your point of
view as well as my own. My answer is written after considering the
question as far as possible on all sides, and as I feel that I shall
not be able to make any other than _superficial_ alterations in the
proof, I will, first of all, say what I can in explanation of the
spirit and future course of the present story.

The collision in the drama is not at all between "bigoted
churchmanship" and evangelicalism, but between _ir_religion and
religion. Religion in this case happens to be represented by
evangelicalism; and the story, so far as regards the _persecution_, is
a real bit in the religious history of England, that happened about
eight-and-twenty years ago. I thought I had made it apparent in my
sketch of Milby feelings, on the advent of Mr. Tryan, that the
conflict lay between immorality and morality--irreligion and religion.
Mr. Tryan will carry the reader's sympathy. It is through him that
Janet is brought to repentance. Dempster's vices have their natural
evolution in deeper and deeper moral deterioration (though not without
softening touches), and death from intemperance. Everything is
softened from the fact, so far as art is permitted to soften and yet
to remain essentially true.

My sketches, both of Churchmen and Dissenters, with whom I am almost
equally acquainted, are drawn from close observation of them in real
life, and not at all from hearsay or from the descriptions of
novelists. If I were to undertake to alter language or character. I
should be attempting to represent some vague conception of what may
possibly exist in other people's minds, but has no existence in my
own. Such of your marginal objections as relate to a mere detail I can
meet without difficulty by alteration; but as an artist I should be
utterly powerless if I departed from my own conceptions of life and
character. There is nothing to be done with the story, but either to
let Dempster and Janet and the rest be as I _see_ them, or to renounce
it as too painful. I am keenly alive at once to the scruples and
alarms an editor may feel, and to my own utter inability to write
under cramping influence, and on this double ground I should like you
to consider whether it will not be better to close the series for the
Magazine _now_. I dare say you will feel no difficulty about
publishing a volume containing the story of "Janet's Repentance," and
I shall accept that plan with no other feeling than that you have been
to me the most liberal and agreeable of editors, and are the man of
all others I would choose for a publisher.

My irony, so far as I understand myself, is not directed against
opinions--against any class of religious views--but against the vices
and weaknesses that belong to human nature in every sort of clothing.
But it is possible that I may not affect other minds as I intend and
wish to affect them, and you are a better judge than I can be of the
degree in which I may occasionally be offensive. I should like _not_
to be offensive--I should like to touch every heart among my readers
with nothing but loving humor, with tenderness, with belief in
goodness. But I may have failed in this case of "Janet," at least so
far as to have made you feel its publication in the Magazine a
disagreeable risk. If so, there will be no harm done by closing the
series with No. 2, as I have suggested. If, however, I take your
objections to be deeper than they really are--if you prefer inserting
the story in spite of your partial dissatisfaction, I shall, of
course, be happy to appear under "Maga's" wing still.

When I remember what have been the successes in fiction, even as
republications from "Maga," I can hardly believe that the public will
regard my pictures as exceptionally coarse. But in any case there are
too many prolific writers who devote themselves to the production of
pleasing pictures, to the exclusion of all disagreeable truths, for me
to desire to add to their number. In this respect, at least, I may
have some resemblance to Thackeray, though I am not conscious of being
in any way a disciple of his, unless it constitute discipleship to
think him, as I suppose the majority of people with any intellect do,
on the whole the most powerful of living novelists.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 8th June, 1857.]

I feel every day a greater disinclination for theories and arguments
about the origin of things in the presence of all this mystery and
beauty and pain and ugliness that floods one with conflicting
emotions.

We are reading "Aurora Leigh" for the third time, with more enjoyment
than ever. I know no book that gives me a deeper sense of communion
with a large as well as beautiful mind. It is in process of appearing
in a third edition, and no wonder.

If I live five years longer the positive result of my existence on the
side of truth and goodness will outweigh the small negative good that
would have consisted in my not doing anything to shock others, and I
can conceive no consequences that will make me repent the past. Do not
misunderstand me, and suppose that I think myself heroic or great in
any way. Far enough from that! Faulty, miserably faulty I am--but
least of all faulty where others most blame.

     On the 24th July the pleasant sojourn at Jersey came to an
     end. The travellers returned to 8 Park Shot, Richmond, where
     Miss Sara Hennell paid them a visit at the end of the month,
     and Dr. and Mrs. Bodichon (_née_ Miss Barbara L. Smith) came
     on the 4th of August. On the 12th August there is an entry in
     the Journal, "Finished the 'Electra' of Sophocles, and began
     Æschylus's 'Agamemnon,'" and then come the following letters:

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, Tuesday, 17th Aug. 1857.]

Lewes has just given me your letter of the 15th, with the accompanying
one from the Rev. W. P. Jones.

Mr. Tryan is not a portrait of any clergyman, living or dead. He is an
ideal character, but I hope probable enough to resemble more than one
evangelical clergyman of his day.

If Mr. Jones's deceased brother was like Mr. Tryan so much the better,
for in that case he was made of human nature's finer clay. I think you
will agree with me that there are few clergymen who would be
depreciated by an identification with Mr. Tryan. But I should rather
suppose that the old gentleman, misled by some similarity in outward
circumstances, is blind to the discrepancies which must exist where no
portrait was intended. As to the rest of my story, so far as its
elements were suggested by real persons, those persons have been, to
use good Mr. Jones's phrase, "long in eternity."

I think I told you that a persecution of the kind I have described
did actually take place, and belongs as much to the common store of
our religious history as the Gorham Controversy, or as Bishop
Blomfield's decision about wax candles. But I only know the _outline_
of the real persecution. The details have been filled in from my
imagination. I should consider it a fault which would cause me lasting
regret if I had used reality in any other than the legitimate way
common to all artists, who draw their materials from their observation
and experience. It would be a melancholy result of my fictions if I
gave _just_ cause of annoyance to any good and sensible person. But I
suppose there is no perfect safeguard against erroneous impressions or
a mistaken susceptibility. We are all apt to forget how little there
is about us that is unique, and how very strongly we resemble many
other insignificant people who have lived before us. I shouldn't
wonder if several nieces of pedantic maiden ladies saw a portrait of
their aunt in Miss Pratt, but I hope they will not think it necessary,
on that ground, to increase the already troublesome number of your
correspondents.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 19th Aug. 1857.]

We went to see Rosa Bonheur's picture the other day. What power! That
is the way women should assert their rights. Writing is part of my
religion, and I can write no word that is not prompted from within. At
the same time I believe that almost all the best books in the world
have been written with the hope of getting money for them.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 1st Sept. 1857.]

Unless there be any strong reason to the contrary, I should like to
close the series with this story. According to my calculation, which,
however, may be an erroneous one, the three stories will make two good
volumes--_i.e._, good as to bulk.

I have a subject in my mind which will not come under the limitations
of the title "Clerical Life," and I am inclined to take a large canvas
for it and write a novel.

In case of my writing fiction for "Maga" again, I should like to be
considerably beforehand with my work, so that you can read a
thoroughly decisive portion before beginning to print.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 21st Sept. 1857.]

The days are very peaceful--peacefully busy. One always feels a deeper
calm as autumn comes on. I should be satisfied to look forward to a
heaven made up of long autumn afternoon walks, quite delivered from
any necessity of giving a judgment on the woman question, or of
reading newspapers about Indian mutinies. I am so glad there are
thousands of good people in the world who have very decided opinions,
and are fond of working hard to enforce them. I like to feel and think
everything and do nothing, a pool of the "deep contemplative" kind.

Some people _do_ prosper--that is a comfort. The rest of us must fall
back on the beatitudes--"Blessed are the poor"--that is Luke's
version, you know, and it is really, on the whole, more comforting
than Matthew's. I'm afraid there are few of us who can appropriate the
blessings of the "poor in spirit."

We are reading one of the most wonderful books in French or any other
literature--Monteil's "Histoire des Français des divers États"--a
history written on an original plan. If you see any account of it,
read that account.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, Saturday, 17th Oct. 1857.]

I am very much gratified that my Janet has won your heart and kept up
your interest in her to the end.

My new story haunts me a good deal, and I shall set about it without
delay. It will be a country story--full of the breath of cows and the
scent of hay. But I shall not ask you to look at it till I have
written a volume or more, and then you will be able to judge whether
you will prefer printing it in the Magazine, or publishing it as a
separate novel when it is completed.

By the way, the sheets of the "Clerical Scenes" are not come, but I
shall not want to make any other than verbal and literal corrections,
so that it will hardly be necessary for me to go through the sheets
_and_ the proofs, which I must, of course, see.

I enclose a titlepage with a motto. But if you don't like the motto, I
give it up. I've not set my heart on it.

I leave the number of copies to be published, and the style of getting
up, entirely to your discretion. As to the terms, I wish to retain the
copyright, according to the stipulation made for me by Lewes when he
sent "Amos Barton;" and whatever you can afford to give me for the
first edition I shall prefer having as a definite payment rather than
as half profits.

You stated, in a letter about "Amos Barton," your willingness to
accede to either plan, so I have no hesitation in expressing my
wishes.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 20th Oct. 1857.]

"Open to conviction," indeed! I should think so. I am open to
conviction on all points except dinner and debts. I hold that the one
must be eaten and the other paid. These are my only prejudices.

I _was_ pleased with Mr. Call.[56] He is a man one really cares to
talk to--has thoughts, says what he means, and listens to what others
say. We should quite like to see him often. And I cannot tell you how
much I have felt Mrs. Call's graceful as well as kind behavior to me.
Some months ago, before the new edition of the "Biographical History
of Philosophy" came out, Mr. Lewes had a letter from a working-man at
Leicester, I think, who said that he and some fellow-students met
together, on a Sunday, to read the book aloud and discuss it. He had
marked some errors of the press and sent them to Mr. Lewes for his new
edition. Wasn't that pretty?

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 30th Oct. 1857.]

"Conscience goes to the hammering in of nails" is my gospel. There can
be no harm in preaching _that_ to women at any rate. But I should be
sorry to undertake any more specific enunciation of doctrine on a
question so entangled as the "woman question." The part of the
Epicurean gods is always an easy one; but because I prefer it so
strongly myself, I the more highly venerate those who are struggling
in the thick of the contest. "La carrière ouverte aux taléns," whether
the talents be feminine or masculine, I am quite confident is a right
maxim. Whether "La carrière ouverte à la Sottise" be equally just when
made equally universal, it would be too much like "taking sides" for
me to say.

     There are only three entries in the journal for October.

[Sidenote: Journal, Oct. 1857.]

_Oct. 9._--Finished "Janet's Repentance." I had meant to carry on the
series, and especially I longed to tell the story of the "Clerical
Tutor," but my annoyance at Blackwood's want of sympathy in the first
part (although he came round to admiration at the third part)
determined me to close the series and republish them in two volumes.

_Oct. 22._--Began my new novel, "Adam Bede."

_Oct. 29._--Received a letter from Blackwood offering me £120 for the
first edition of "Scenes of Clerical Life."

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 30th Oct. 1857.]

I am quite contented with the sum (£120) you offer me for the edition,
being thoroughly confident of your disposition to do the best you can
for me. I perceive your hope of success for the "Scenes" is not
strong, and you certainly have excellent means of knowing the
probabilities in such a case.

I am not aware that the motto has been used before, but if you suspect
it, we had better leave it out altogether. A stale motto would hardly
be an ornament to the titlepage.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 1st Nov. 1857.]

How I wish I could get to you by some magic, and have one walk over
the hill with you again. Letters are poor things compared with five
minutes of looking and speaking, and one kiss. Nevertheless, I do like
to have a little letter now and then, though I don't for a moment ask
it if you have no spontaneous impulse to give it. I can't help losing
belief that people love me--the unbelief is in my nature, and no sort
of fork will drive it finally out. I can't help wondering that you can
think of _me_ in the past with much pleasure. It all seems so painful
to me--made up of blunders and selfishness--and it only comes back
upon me as a thing to be forgiven. That is honest, painful truth, and
not sentimentality. But I am thankful if others found more good than I
am able to remember.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 7th Nov. 1857.]

It is pleasant to have the first sheet of one's proof--to see one's
paragraphs released from the tight-lacing of double columns, and
expanding themselves at their ease.

I perceive clearly the desirableness of the short number--for my
observation of literary affairs has gone far enough to convince me
that neither critical judgment nor practical experience can guarantee
any opinion as to rapidity of sale in the case of an unknown author;
and I shudder at the prospect of encumbering my publisher's
bookshelves.

My new story is in progress--slow progress at present. A little
sunshine of success would stimulate its growth, I dare say. Unhappily,
I am as impressionable as I am obstinate, and as much in need of
sympathy from my readers as I am incapable of bending myself to their
tastes. But if I can only find a public as cordial and agreeable in
its treatment of me as my editor, I shall have nothing to wish. Even
my thin skin will be comfortable then. The page is not a shabby one,
after all; but I fear the fact of two volumes instead of three is a
fatal feature in my style in the eyes of librarians.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 9th Nov. 1857.]

One is glad to have one's book (_à propos_ of review of Lewes's
"History of Philosophy") spoken well of by papers of good circulation,
because it is possible, though not certain, that such praise may help
the sale; but otherwise it is hardly worth while to trouble one's self
about newspaper reviews, unless they point out some error, or present
that very rare phenomenon, a true appreciation, which is the most
delicious form in which sympathy can reach one. So much sectarian
feeling usually arises in discussions on the subject of phrenology
that I confess the associations of the word are not agreeable to me.
The last refuge of intolerance is in not tolerating the intolerant;
and I am often in danger of secreting that sort of venom.

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, 15th Nov. 1857.]

It is pleasant to have a kind word now and then, when one is not near
enough to have a kind glance or a hearty shake by the hand. It is an
old weakness of mine to have no faith in affection that does not
express itself; and when friends take no notice of me for a long while
I generally settle down into the belief that they have become
indifferent or have begun to dislike me. That is not the best mental
constitution; but it might be worse--for I don't feel obliged to
dislike _them_ in consequence. I, for one, ought not to complain if
people think worse of me than I deserve, for I have very often reason
to be ashamed of my thoughts about others. They almost always turn out
to be better than I expected--fuller of kindness towards me at least.
In the fundamental doctrine of your book (the philosophy of
necessity)--that mind presents itself under the same conditions of
invariableness of antecedent and consequent as all other phenomena
(the only difference being that the true antecedent and consequent are
proportionately difficult to discover as the phenomena are more
complex)--I think you know that I agree. And every one who knows what
science means must also agree with you that there can be no social
science without the admission of that doctrine. I dislike extremely a
passage in which you appear to consider the disregard of individuals
as a lofty condition of mind. My own experience and development deepen
every day my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the
degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual
joy. The fact that in the scheme of things we see a constant and
tremendous sacrifice of individuals, is, it seems to me, only one of
the many proofs that urge upon us our total inability to find in our
own natures a key to the Divine mystery. I could more readily turn
Christian, and worship Jesus again, than embrace a Theism which
professes to explain the proceedings of God. But I don't feel at all
wise in these matters. I have a few strong impressions which serve me
for my own support and guidance, but do not in the least qualify me to
speak as a theorist.

Mr. Lewes sends you his kind remembrances, and will not like you any
the worse for cutting him up. He has had to perform that office for
his own friends sometimes. I suppose phrenology is an open question,
on which everybody has a right to speak his mind. Mr. Lewes, feeling
the importance of the subject, desired to give it its due place in his
"History of Philosophy," and, doing so, he must, of course, say what
_he_ believes to be the truth, not what other people believe to be the
truth. If you will show where he is mistaken, you will be doing him a
service as well as phrenology. His arguments may be bad; but I will
answer for him that he has not been guilty of any intentional
unfairness. With regard to their system, phrenologists seem to me to
be animated by the same sort of spirit as that of religious
dogmatists, and especially in this--that in proportion as a man
approximates to their opinions without identifying himself with them,
they think him offensive and contemptible. It is amusing to read from
the opposite side complaints against Mr. Lewes for giving too high a
position to phrenology, and a confident opinion that "phrenologists,
by their ridiculous pretensions, merit all the contempt that has been
thrown on them." Thus doctors differ! But I am much less interested in
crusades for or against phrenology than in your happiness at Ivy
Cottage.[57] Happiness means all sorts of love and good feeling; and
that is the best result that can ever come out of science. Do you
know Buckle's "History of Civilization"? I think you would find it a
suggestive book.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 24th Nov. 1857.]

Anniversaries are sad things--to one who has lived long and done
little. Herbert Spencer dined with us the other day--looks well, and
is brimful of clever talk as usual. His volume of "Essays" is to come
out soon. He is just now on a crusade against the notion of "species."
We are reading Harriet Martineau's history with edification, and
otherwise feeding our souls, which flourish very well, notwithstanding
November weather.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1857.]

_Nov. 28._--A glorious day, still autumnal and not wintry. We have had
a delicious walk in the Park, and I think the coloring of the scenery
is more beautiful than ever. Many of the oaks are still thickly
covered with leaves of a rich yellow-brown; the elms, golden
sometimes, still with lingering patches of green. On our way to the
Park the view from Richmond hill had a delicate blue mist over it,
that seemed to hang like a veil before the sober brownish-yellow of
the distant elms. As we came home, the sun was setting on a fog-bank,
and we saw him sink into that purple ocean--the orange and gold
passing into green above the fog-bank, the gold and orange reflected
in the river in more sombre tints. The other day, as we were coming
home through the Park, after having walked under a sombre, heavily
clouded sky, the western sun shone out from under the curtain, and lit
up the trees and grass, thrown into relief on a background of dark
purple cloud. Then, as we advanced towards the Richmond end of the
Park, the level, reddening rays shone on the dry fern and the distant
oaks, and threw a crimson light on them. I have especially enjoyed
this autumn, the delicious greenness of the turf, in contrast with
the red and yellow of the dying leaves.

_Dec. 6_ (_Sunday_).--Finished the "Agamemnon" to-day. In the evenings
of late we have been reading Harriet Martineau's "Sketch of the
British Empire in India," and are now following it up with Macaulay's
articles on Clive and Hastings. We have lately read Harriet
Martineau's Introduction to the "History of the Peace."

_Dec. 8._--I am reading "Die Familie," by Riehl, forming the third
volume of the series, the two first of which, "Land und Volk" and "Die
Bürgerliche Gesellschaft," I reviewed for the _Westminster_.

A letter from Blackwood to-day tells us that Major Blackwood, during
his brother's absence in England, having some reasons, not specified,
for being more hopeful about the "Clerical Scenes," resolved to
publish 1000 instead of 750; and in consequence of this Blackwood
promises to pay me an additional £60 when 750 shall have been sold
off. He reports that an elderly clergyman has written to him to say
that "Janet's Repentance" is exquisite--another vote to register along
with that of Mrs. Nutt's rector, who "cried over the story like a
child."

_Dec. 10._--Major Blackwood called--an unaffected, agreeable man. It
was evident to us, when he had only been in the room a few minutes,
that he knew I was George Eliot.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 11th Dec. 1857.]

Lewes has read to me your last kind letter, and I am not insensible to
the "practical cheerer" it contains. But I rejoice with trembling at
the additional 250, lest you should have to repent of them.

I have certainly had a good deal of encouragement to believe that
there are many minds, both of the more cultured sort and of the
common novel-reading class, likely to be touched by my stories; but
the word "many" is very elastic, and often shrinks frightfully when
measured by a financial standard.

When one remembers how long it was before Charles Lamb's Essays were
known familiarly to any but the elect few, the very strongest
assurance of merit or originality--supposing one so happy as to have
that assurance--could hardly do more than give the hope of _ultimate_
recognition.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 13th Dec. 1857.]

Our affairs are very prosperous just now, making sunshine in a shady,
or, rather, in a foggy place. It is a great happiness to me that Mr.
Lewes gets more and more of the recognition he deserves; pleasant
letters and speeches have been very numerous lately, especially about
his "Sea-side Studies," which have appeared in _Blackwood_, and are
soon to appear--very much improved and enlarged--in a separate volume.
Dear Carlyle writes, _à propos_ of his "Friedrich:" "I have had such a
fourteen months as was never appointed me before in this
world--sorrow, darkness, and disgust my daily companions; and no
outlook visible, except getting a detestable business turned off, or
else being driven mad by it." That is his exaggerated way of speaking;
and writing is always painful to him. Do you know he is sixty-two! I
fear this will be his last book. Tell Mr. Bray I am reading a book of
Riehl's, "The Family," forming the sequel to his other volumes. He
will be pleased to hear that so good a writer agrees with him on
several points about the occupations of women. The book is a good one;
and if I were in the way of writing articles, I should write one on
it. There is so much to read, and the days are so short! I get more
hungry for knowledge every day, and less able to satisfy my hunger.
Time is like the Sibylline leaves, getting more precious the less
there remains of it. That, I believe, is the correct allusion for a
fine writer to make on the occasion.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 15th Dec. 1857.]

I give up the motto, because it struck you as having been used before;
and though I copied it into my note-book when I was re-reading
"Amelia" a few months ago, it is one of those obvious quotations which
never _appear_ fresh, though they may actually be made for the first
time.

I shall be curious to know the result of the subscription.

There are a few persons to whom I should like a copy of the volume to
be sent, and I enclose a list of them.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1857.]

_Dec. 17._--Read my new story to G. this evening as far as the end of
the third chapter. He praised it highly. I have finished "Die
Familie," by Riehl--a delightful book. I am in the "Choephoræ" now. In
the evenings we are reading "History of the Thirty Years' Peace" and
Béranger. Thoroughly disappointed in Béranger.

_Dec. 19_ (_Saturday_).--Alone this evening with very thankful, solemn
thoughts--feeling the great and unhoped-for blessings that have been
given me in life. This last year, especially, has been marked by
inward progress and outward advantages. In the spring George's
"History of Philosophy" appeared in the new edition; his "Sea-side
Studies" have been written with much enjoyment, and met with much
admiration, and now they are on the verge of being published with
bright prospects. Blackwood has also accepted his "Physiology of
Common Life;" the "Goethe" has passed into its third German edition;
and, best of all, G.'s head is well. I have written the "Scenes of
Clerical Life"--my first book; and though we are uncertain still
whether it will be a success as a separate publication, I have had
much sympathy from my readers in _Blackwood_, and feel a deep
satisfaction in having done a bit of faithful work that will perhaps
remain, like a primrose root in the hedgerow, and gladden and chasten
human hearts in years to come.

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 23d Dec. 1857.]

Buckle's is a book full of suggestive material, though there are some
strangely unphilosophic opinions mixed with its hardy philosophy. For
example, he holds that there is no such thing as _race_ or _hereditary
transmission_ of qualities! (I should tell you, at the same time, that
he is a necessitarian and a physiological-psychologist.) It is only by
such negations as these that he can find his way to the position which
he maintains at great length--that the progress of mankind is
dependent entirely on the progress of knowledge, and that there has
been no intrinsically moral advance. However, he presents that side of
the subject which has, perhaps, been least adequately dwelt on.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1857.]

_Dec. 25_ (_Christmas Day_).--George and I spent this lovely day
together--lovely as a clear spring day. We could see Hampstead from
the Park so distinctly that it seemed to have suddenly come nearer to
us. We ate our turkey together in a happy _solitude à deux_.

_Dec. 31_ (_the last night of 1857_).--The dear old year is gone with
all its _Weben_ and _Streben_. Yet not gone either; for what I have
suffered and enjoyed in it remains to me an everlasting possession
while my soul's life remains. This time last year I was alone, as I am
now, and dear George was at Vernon Hill. I was writing the
introduction to "Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story." What a world of thoughts
and feelings since then! My life has deepened unspeakably during the
last year: I feel a greater capacity for moral and intellectual
enjoyment, a more acute sense of my deficiencies in the past, a more
solemn desire to be faithful to coming duties, than I remember at any
former period of my life. And my happiness has deepened too; the
blessedness of a perfect love and union grows daily. I have had some
severe suffering this year from anxiety about my sister, and what will
probably be a final separation from her--there has been no other real
trouble. Few women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think
the long, sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle
age. Our prospects are very bright too. I am writing my new novel. G.
is full of his "Physiology of Common Life." He has just finished
editing Johnston, for which he is to have 100 guineas, and we have
both encouragement to think that our books just coming out, "Sea-side
Studies" and "Scenes of Clerical Life," will be well received. So
good-bye, dear 1857! May I be able to look back on 1858 with an equal
consciousness of advancement in work and in heart.


_SUMMARY._

MARCH, 1855, TO DECEMBER, 1857.

     Return to England--Dover--Bayswater--East Sheen--Books
     read--Articles written--Letters to Miss Hennell--"Life of
     Goethe"--Froude's article on
     Spinoza--Article-writing--"Cumming"--8 Park Shot,
     Richmond--Letter to Charles Bray--Effect of article on
     Cumming--Letter to Miss Hennell--Reading on
     Physiology--Article on Heine--Review for _Leader_,
     etc.--Books read--Visit to Mrs. Clarke at Attleboro--Sale of
     "Life of Goethe"--"Shaving of Shagpat"--Spinoza's "Ethics,"
     translation finished--The _Saturday
     Review_--Ruskin--Alison--Harriet Martineau--Women's
     earnings--Articles and reviews--Wishes not to be known as
     translator of the "Ethics"--Article on Young begun--Visit to
     Ilfracombe--Description--Zoophyte hunting--Finished articles
     on Young and Riehl--Naturalistic experience--Delightful
     walks--Rev. Mr. Tugwell--Devonshire lanes and
     springs--Tendency to scientific
     accuracy--Sunsets--Cocklewomen at Swansea--Letters to Miss
     Hennell and Mrs. Peter Taylor--Tenby--Zoology--Thoreau's
     "Walden"--Feeling strong in mind and body--Barbara Leigh
     Smith comes to Tenby--George Eliot anxious to begin her
     fiction-writing--Mr. E. F. S. Pigott--Return to Richmond--Mr.
     Lewes takes his boys to Hofwyl--George Eliot writes article
     on "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists"--"How I came to write
     fiction"--Correspondence between Mr. Lewes and Mr. John
     Blackwood about MS. of "Amos Barton"--"Mr. Gilfil's
     Love-Story" begun--Books read--Letter from John Blackwood to
     the author of "Amos Barton," sending copy of the January,
     1857, number of the Magazine and fifty
     guineas--Reply--Blackwood's admiration--Albert Smith's
     appreciation--Letters to Blackwood--Name of George Eliot
     assumed--Dutch school in art--Artistic bent--Letter to Miss
     Hennell--Intolerance--Letter to John Blackwood on Mr. Swayne
     comparing writing to Goldsmith's--Letter to Miss Hennell on
     essay "Christianity and Infidelity"--Letter to
     Blackwood--Caterina and the dagger scene--Trip to Penzance
     and the Scilly Isles--Description of St. Mary's--Mr. Moyle,
     the surgeon--Social Life--Letter to Mrs. Bray, anxiety about
     sister--Letter to Miss Sara Hennell--"Life of Charlotte
     Brontë"--Letter to Isaac P. Evans--Mrs. Clarke's
     illness--Letter to Blackwood--Conclusions of
     stories--Jersey--Description of Gorey--Delightful
     walks--Reading Draper's "Physiology"--Miss Catlow and Dr.
     Thomson on wild-flowers--"Life of George Stephenson"--Letter
     to Miss Hennell--Life in Jersey--Liggins appears on the
     scene--"Janet's Repentance"--Series attributed to
     Bulwer--Thackeray thinks highly of it--Letter from Herbert
     Spencer about "Mr. Gilfil"--Letter from Archer Gurney--Lord
     Stanley thinks highly of the "Scenes"--Letter to Blackwood,
     with First Part of "Janet's Repentance"--Letter to Mrs.
     Bray--Richmond--Expression of face--Letter to Mrs. John
     Cash--Happiness in her life and hope in her work--Chilled by
     Blackwood's want of enthusiasm about "Janet"--Letter to John
     Blackwood on "Janet"--Letter to Miss Sarah Hennell--"Aurora
     Leigh"--Return to Richmond--Letter to John Blackwood on
     "Janet"--Letters to Miss Hennell--Rosa Bonheur--Thought not
     action--Mr. and Mrs. Call--Letter to John Blackwood--Haunted
     by new story--Letter to Charles Bray--"The Woman
     Question"--Close of "Clerical Scenes" series--"Adam Bede"
     begun--Receives £120 for first edition of "Scenes of Clerical
     Life"--Letter to Mrs. Bray--Unbelief in people's love--Letter
     to John Blackwood--Sheets of "Clerical Scenes"--Letter to
     Miss Hennell--Newspaper criticism--Letter to Charles
     Bray--"The Philosophy of Necessity"--Sympathy with
     individuals--Objection to Theism--Phrenology--Happiness the
     best result that can ever come out of science--Letters to
     Miss Hennell--Reading Riehl's "The Family"--Hunger for
     Knowledge--Buckle's "History of Civilization"--Autumn days at
     Richmond--Reading the "Agamemnon"--Harriett Martineau's
     "Sketch of the British Empire in India"--Macaulay's essays on
     Clive and Hastings--Major Blackwood calls and suspects
     identity of George Eliot--Reading the "Choephoræ"--"History
     of the Thirty Years' Peace," and Béranger--Thankfulness in
     reviewing experience of 1857.

FOOTNOTES:

[49] G. writes that this sonnet is Barnwell's.--[Note written later.]

[50] "Land und Volk."

[51] Mr. Edward Smyth Pigott, who remained to the end of their lives a
very close and much valued friend of Mr. Lewes and George Eliot.

[52] By Thoreau.

[53] About the article on Riehl's book, "The Natural History of German
Life."

[54] "Baillie Prize Essay on Christianity and Infidelity: an
Exposition of the Arguments on both Sides." By Miss Sara Hennell.

[55] "Mill on the Floss," chap. iii. book iv. Bob Jakin.

[56] Mr. W. M. W. Call, author of "Reverberations and other Poems,"
who married Mr. Charles Hennell's widow--formerly Miss Brabant. As
will be seen from the subsequent correspondence, Mr. and Mrs. Call
remained among the Lewes's warm friends to the end, and Mr. Call is
the author of an interesting paper on George Eliot in the _Westminster
Review_ of July, 1881.

[57] The Brays' new house at Coventry.




APPENDIX.


As this volume is going through the press, I have to thank Mrs. John
Cash of Coventry for the following valuable additional information in
regard to the important subject of Miss Evans's change of religious
belief in 1841-42, and for her further general recollections of the
Coventry period of George Eliot's life:


I was sixteen years of age in 1841; and, as I have already stated, my
first remembrance of Miss Evans is of her call on my father and
mother, with their friend and neighbor Mrs. Pears, when in
conversation she gave expression to her great appreciation of the
writings of Isaac Taylor. The controversy raised by the "Tracts for
the Times," which gave occasion for the publication of Mr. Taylor's
"Ancient Christianity," being now remote, I give the following extract
from a footnote in Trench's "Notes on the Parables," to show the
influence such a work as Mr. Taylor's would be likely to exercise on
the mind of one who esteemed its author; and also the feeling it
excited against an eminently religious man, by revelations which he
desired and believed would serve the cause of New Testament
Christianity. The note is on the "Tares." The quotation, containing
the reference, is from Menken:

"Many so-called Church historians (_authors of 'Ancient Christianity'
and the like_), ignorant of the purpose and of the hidden glory of the
Church, have their pleasure in the Tares, and imagine themselves
wonderfully wise and useful when out of Church history (which ought to
be the history of the Light and the Truth) they have made a shameful
history of error and wickedness."

It was upon her first or second interview with my mother that Miss
Evans told her how shocked she had been by the apparent union of
religious feeling with a low sense of morality among the people in the
district she visited, who were mostly Methodists. She gave as an
instance the case of a woman who, when a falsehood was clearly brought
home to her by her visitors, said, "She did not feel that she had
grieved the Spirit much." Now those readers of the letters to Miss
Lewis who are acquainted with modern Evangelicalism, even in its
"after-glow," especially as it was presented to the world by Church of
England teaching and practice, will recognize its characteristics in
the moral scrupulousness, the sense of obligation on the part of
Christians to avoid the very appearance of evil, the practical piety,
which those letters reveal.

Mrs. Evans (Miss Lewis tells me) was a very serious, earnest-minded
woman, anxiously concerned for the moral and religious training of her
children: glad to place them under the care of such persons as the
Misses Franklin, to whose school a mother of a different order
objected, on the ground that "it was where that saint Mary Ann Evans
had been."

It is natural then that, early awed by and attracted towards beliefs
cherished by the best persons she had known, and advocated in the best
books she had read, the mind of Miss Evans should have been stirred by
exhibitions of a _theoretic_ severance of religion from morality,
whether presented among the disciples of "Ancient Christianity" or by
the subjects of its modern revivals: it is probable that she may
thereby have been led, as others have been, to a reconsideration of
the creeds of Christendom, and to further inquiry concerning their
origin.

On the same grounds it is likely that the presentation of social
virtues, apart from evangelical motives, would impress her; and I have
authority for stating that to the inquiry of a friend in after-years,
as to what influence she attributed the first unsettlement of her
orthodox views, she quickly made answer: "Oh, Walter Scott's." Now I
well remember her speaking to me of Robert Hall's confession that he
had been made unhappy for a week by the reading of Miss Edgeworth's
Tales, in which useful, good, and pleasant lives are lived with no
reference to religious hopes and fears; and her drawing my attention
to the real greatness of mind and sincerity of faith which this candid
confession betokened. Such remarks, I think, throw light upon the
_way_ in which her own evangelical belief had been affected by works
in which its dogmas are not enforced as necessary springs of virtuous
action.

I give these scattered reminiscences, in evidence of the
half-unconscious preparation (of which Mr. Cross speaks) for a change
which was, in my judgment, more gradual in its development, as well as
deeper in its character, than might be inferred from the record of its
abrupt following upon Miss Evans's introduction to Mr. Hennell's
"Inquiry concerning the Origin of Christianity."

The evening's discussion with my father, to which I have referred in
my previous communication in the "Life," is now vividly present to my
mind. There was not only on her part a vehemence of tone, startling
in one so quiet, but a crudeness in her objections, an absence of
proposed solution of difficulties, which partly distressed and partly
pleased me (siding as I did mentally with my father), and which was in
strange contrast to the satisfied calm which marked her subsequent
treatment of religious differences.

Upon my father's using an argument (common enough in those days) drawn
from the present condition of the Jews as a fulfilment of prophecy,
and saying, "If I were tempted to doubt the truth of the Bible, I
should only have to look at a Jew to confirm my faith in it." "Don't
talk to me of the Jews!" Miss Evans retorted, in an irritated tone;
"to think that they were deluded into expectations of a temporal
deliverer, and then punished because they couldn't understand that it
was a spiritual deliverer that was intended!" To something that
followed from her, intimating the claim of creatures upon their
Creator, my father objected, "But we have no claim upon God." "No
claim upon God!" she reiterated indignantly; "we have the strongest
possible claim upon him."

I regret that I can recall nothing more of a conversation carried on
for more than two hours; but I vividly remember how deeply Miss Evans
was moved, and how, as she stood against the mantelpiece during the
last part of the time, her delicate fingers, in which she held a small
piece of muslin on which she was at work, trembled with her agitation.

The impression allowed to remain upon the minds of her friends, for
some time after she had made declaration of her heresies, was of her
being in a troubled, unsettled state. So great were her simplicity
and candor in acknowledging this, and so apparent was her earnest
desire for truth, that no hesitation was felt in asking her to receive
visits from persons of different persuasions, who were judged
competent to bring forward the best arguments in favor of orthodox
doctrines. One of these was a Baptist minister, introduced to her by
Miss Franklin; he was said to be well read in divinity, and I remember
him as an original and interesting preacher. After an interview with
Miss Evans, meeting my father, he said: "That young lady must have had
the devil at her elbow to suggest her doubts, for there was not a book
that I recommended to her in support of Christian evidences that she
had not read."

Mr. Watts, one of the professors at Spring Hill College (Independent),
Birmingham, a colleague of Mr. Henry Rogers, author of the "Eclipse of
Faith," and who had himself studied at the Hallé University, and
enjoyed the friendship of Dr. Tholück, was requested (I think by my
mother) to call on Miss Evans. His acquaintance with German
Rationalism (rare in England in those days) qualified him to enter
into, and it was hoped to meet, difficulties raised by a critical
study of the New Testament. After his first or second interview, my
brother remembers his observing with emphasis, "_She_ has gone into
the question;" and I can recall a reference made by him at a later
date in my hearing to Miss Evans's discontent with her own
solutions--or rather with her own standpoint at that time. This
discontent, he said, "was so far satisfactory." Doubtless it gave him
hope of the reconversion of one who had, as he told my mother,
awakened deep interest in his own mind, as much by the earnestness
which characterized her inquiries as by her exceptional attainments.

From letters that passed between my brother and myself during his
residence in Germany, I give the following extracts referring to this
period.

The first is from one of mine, dated September 2, 1842:

"In my father's absence we (my mother and I) called on Miss Evans. She
now takes up a different position. Her views are not altogether
altered, but she says it would be extreme arrogance in so young a
person to suppose she had obtained _yet_ any just ideas of truth. She
had been reading Dr. Tholück's reply to Strauss's 'Life of Jesus,' but
said Mr. Watts had advised her _not_ to read his 'Guido and Julius.'"

In answer to this my brother says, in a letter dated Hallé, September
26, 1842, "You have given, doubtless, a very accurate account of Miss
Evans's mode of stating her present sentiments. Mr. Watts's reason for
advising that Dr. Tholück's 'Guido and Julius' be not read is,
perhaps, that the reasoning is not satisfactory."

In another letter, addressed to my brother at Hallé, and dated October
28, 1842, I tell him: "Last week mother and I spent an evening with
Miss Evans. She seemed more settled in her views than ever, and rests
her objections to Christianity on this ground, that Calvinism is
Christianity, and, this granted, that it is a religion based on pure
selfishness. She occupied, however, a great part of the time in
pleading for works of imagination, maintaining that they perform an
office for the mind which nothing else can. On the mention of
Shakespeare, she praised him with her characteristic ardor, was
shocked at the idea that mother should disapprove the perusal of his
writings, and quite distressed lest, through her influence, I should
be prevented from reading them. She could be content were she allowed
no other book than Shakespeare; and in educating a child, this would
be the first book she would place in its hands.

"She seems to have read a great deal of Italian literature, and speaks
with rapture of Metastasio's novels. She has lent me 'Le mie Prigioni'
di Silvio Pellico, in his own tongue, as a book to begin with. She
says there is a prevailing but very mistaken idea that Italian is an
easy language, though she is exceedingly delighted with it. If at any
time I wish to begin German, she would very much like to give me some
instruction."

In addition to the above relating to Shakespeare, I recall the protest
that my mother's objection to his plays (my mother _had_ been an
ardent lover of "the play"), on the ground that there were things in
them that offended her, was as reasonable as the objection to walk in
a beautiful garden, "because toads and weeds are to be found in it."

In a letter dated March 6, 1843, I write to my brother: "Your request
that you may be informed as to the precise nature of Miss Evans's
philosophical views I shall find it very difficult to comply with,
inasmuch as on our last interview she did not express herself so fully
on this subject as formerly; indeed, I believe she is not now so
desirous of controversy. She however appeared, to me at least, to have
rather changed her ground on some points. For instance, she said she
considered Jesus Christ as the embodiment of perfect love, and seemed
to be leaning slightly to the doctrines of Carlyle and Emerson when
she remarked that she considered the Bible a revelation in a certain
sense, as she considered herself a revelation of the mind of Deity,
etc. She was very anxious to know if you had heard Schelling."

In a letter addressed to my brother at Spring Hill College, and dated
October 28, 1844, I find this reference to Dr. Harris, who had been
preaching a charity sermon in a chapel at Foleshill:

"Miss Evans has just been reproaching me for not informing her of Dr.
Harris's preaching, which she would have given anything to hear, as
she says his 'Great Teacher' left more delightful impressions on her
mind than anything she ever read, and is, she thinks, the best book
that could be written by a man holding his principles."

In the same letter I mention a second lesson in German given me by
Miss Evans. In one written some time before, I tell my brother of her
kind proposal, but add that my parents object "on account of her
dangerous sentiments." She had, however, since called at our house one
morning to renew it: and I well remember how eagerly I watched my
mother, looking so affectionately at Miss Evans, and saying quietly,
"You know, with your superior intellect, I cannot help fearing you
might influence Mary, though you might not intend to do so. But," she
went on to say, "her father does not agree with me: he does not see
any danger, and thinks we ought not to refuse, as it is so very kind
of you to be willing to take the trouble--and we know it would be a
great advantage to her to learn German; for she will probably have to
earn her living by teaching." Seeing at a glance how matters stood,
Miss Evans turned round quickly to me, and said, "Come on Saturday at
three o'clock, and bring what books you have."

So I went, and began "Don Carlos," continuing to go, with some
intervals occasioned by absence, pretty regularly on Saturday
afternoons, for nearly two years; but it was not until the end of the
second year, when I received Miss Evans's suggestion that the lessons
were no longer necessary, and should be discontinued, that I fully
realized what this companionship had been to me. The loss was like the
loss of sunshine.

No promise had been given that my religious belief should be
undisturbed, nor was any needed. Interest was turned aside from
Calvinism and Arminianism, which at an early age had engaged my
attention, towards manifestations of nobility of character, and
sympathy with human struggles and sufferings under varied conditions.
The character of the "Marquis von Posa" (in "Don Carlos") roused an
enthusiasm for heroism and virtue, which it was delightful to express
to one who so fully shared it. Placing together one day the works of
Schiller, which were in two or three volumes, Miss Evans said, "Oh, if
_I_ had given these to the world, how happy I should be!"

It must have been to confirm myself in my traditional faith by
confession of it, that I once took upon myself to say to her how sure
I was that there could be no true morality without evangelical belief.
"Oh, it is so, is it?" she said, with the kindest smile, and nothing
further passed. From time to time, however, her reverence and
affection for the character of Christ and the Apostle Paul, and her
sympathy with genuine religious feeling, were very clear to me.
Expressing one day her horror of a crowd, she said, "I never would
press through one, unless it were to see a second Jesus." The words
startled me--the conception of Jesus Christ in my mind being so little
associated with a human form; but they impressed me with a certain
reality of feeling which I contrasted, as I did Miss Evans's abiding
interest in great principles, with the somewhat factitious and
occasional as well as fitful affection and concern manifest in many
whom I looked up to as "converted" people.

Once only do I remember such contrast being made by herself. She
attended the service at the opening of a new church at Foleshill, with
her father, and remarked to me the next day that, looking at the gayly
dressed people, she could not help thinking how much easier life would
be to her, and how much better she should stand in the estimation of
her neighbors, if only she could take things as they did, be satisfied
with outside pleasures, and conform to the popular beliefs without any
reflection or examination. Once, too, after being in the company of
educated persons "professing and calling themselves Christians," she
commented to me on the _tone_ of conversation, often frivolous,
sometimes ill-natured, that seemed yet to excite in no one any sense
of impropriety.

It must have been in those early days that she spoke to me of a visit
from one of her uncles in Derbyshire, a Wesleyan, and how much she had
enjoyed talking with him, finding she could enter into his feelings so
much better than she had done in past times, when her views seemed
more in accordance with his own, but were really less so.

Among other books, I remember the "Life of Dr. Arnold" interested her
deeply. Speaking of it to me one morning, she referred to a
conversation she had had with a friend the evening before, and said
they had agreed that it was a great good for such men to remain within
the pale of orthodoxy, that so they might draw from the old doctrines
the best that was to be got from them.

Of criticisms on German books read with Miss Evans, I recall one or
two. In the "Robbers," she criticised the attempt to enhance the
horror of the situation of the abandoned father, by details of
physical wretchedness, as a mistake in Art. "Wallenstein" she ranked
higher from an intellectual point of view than any other work of
Schiller's. The talk of the soldiers in the "Lager" she pointed out to
me as "just what it would be." On my faint response, "I suppose it
is!" she returned, "No, you do not _suppose_--we _know_ these things;"
and then gave me a specimen of what might be a navvy's talk--"The sort
of thing such people say, is, 'I'll break off your arm, and bloody
your face with the stump.'"

Mrs. Bray tells the following incident, as showing her quick
perception of excellence from a new and unknown source. "We were
sitting," Mrs. Bray says, "one summer afternoon on the lawn at
Rosehill, July, 1850, when Marian came running to us from the house
with the _Leader_ newspaper in her hand. 'Here is a new poet come into
the world!' she exclaimed, and sitting down with us she read from the
_Leader_ the poem called 'Hymn,' signed M., and ending with the fine
stanza:

     "'When I have passed a nobler life in sorrow;
       Have seen rude masses grow to fulgent spheres;
     Seen how To-day is father of To-morrow,
       And how the Ages justify the Years,
                                 I praise Thee, God.'

"The 'Hymn' is now reprinted in Mr. W. M. W. Call's volume of
collected poems, called 'Golden Histories.'"

Kingsley's "Saint's Tragedy" was not so popular as his other works,
but Miss Evans was deeply moved by it. Putting it into my hands one
morning, she said, "There, read it--_you_ will care for it."

The "Life of Jean Paul Richter," published in the Catholic Series (in
which the head of Christ, by De la Roche, so dear to her, figures as a
vignette), was read and talked of with great interest, as was his
"Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces," translated by the late Mr. Edward
Noel of Hampstead. Choice little bits of humor from the latter she
greatly enjoyed.

Margaret Fuller's "Woman in the Nineteenth Century," I think Miss
Evans gave to me. I know it interested her, as did Emerson's "Essays."
On his visit to Coventry, we could not, unfortunately, accept Mr.
Bray's kind invitation to meet him at Rosehill; but after he had left,
Miss Evans soon came up kindly to give us her impressions of him while
they were fresh in her memory. She told us he had asked her what had
first awakened her to deep reflection, and when she answered,
"Rousseau's Confessions," he remarked that this was very interesting,
inasmuch as Carlyle had told him that very book had had the same
effect upon his mind. As _I_ heard Emerson's remark after his
interviews with Miss Evans, it was, "That young lady has a calm, clear
spirit." Intercourse, it will be seen, was kept up with my family,
otherwise than through the lessons, by calls, and in little gatherings
of friends in evenings, when we were favored to hear Miss Evans sing.
Her voice was not strong, and I think she preferred playing on the
piano; but her low notes were effective, and there was always an
elevation in the rendering.

As I knew Miss Evans, no one escaped her notice. In her treatment of
servants, for instance, she was most considerate. "They come to me,"
she used to say, "with all their troubles," as indeed did her friends
generally--sometimes, she would confess, to an extent that quite
oppressed her. When any object of charity came under her notice, and
power to help was within her reach, she was very prompt in rendering
it. Our servant's brother or sister, or both of them, died, leaving
children dependent on friends themselves poor. Miss Evans at once
offered to provide clothing and school-fees for one of these, a
chubby-faced little girl four or five years of age. Unexpectedly,
however, an aunt at a distance proposed to adopt the child. I
recollect taking her to say good-bye to her would-be benefactress, and
can see her now, standing still and subdued in her black frock and
cape, with Miss Evans kneeling down by her, and saying, after giving
her some money, "Then I suppose there is nothing else we can do for
her."

My husband's mother, who was a member of the Society of Friends,
established, with the help of her daughters and a few others
interested, an Industrial Home for girls about the age of fourteen. It
was in the year 1843, and was, therefore, one of the first
institutions of the kind in England. The model was taken from
something of the same order attempted by a young girl in France. The
girls were, as far as practicable, to maintain themselves, working
under conditions of comfort and protection more attainable than in
their own homes. The idea was new; the Home could not be started
without funds, and my mother undertook to collect for it in her own
neighborhood. In a letter to me, written at this time, she tells me
she is "not doing much to help dear Mrs. Cash," there being "a
prejudice against the scheme;" but adds, "This morning Miss Evans
called, and brought me two guineas from her father." I tell of this as
one among many indications of Miss Evans's ever-growing zeal to serve
humanity in a broader way, motived, as _she_ felt, by a higher aim
than what she termed "desire to save one's soul by making up coarse
flannel for the poor."

In these broad views--in this desire to bring her less advantaged
neighbors nearer to her own level, to meet them on common ground, to
raise them above the liability to eleemosynary charity--she had Mr.
Bray's full sympathy. To me she dwelt frequently upon his genuine
benevolence, upon his ways of advancing the interests of the working
men, as being, in her judgment, wise and good. She visited
periodically, in turn with Mrs. Bray, myself, and a few others, an
infant school which Mr. Bray had helped to start; and although this
sort of work was so little suited to her, yet so much did she feel the
duty of living for others, especially the less privileged, that one
morning she came to Mrs. Bray, expressing strongly her desire to help
in _any_ work that could be given her. The only thing that could be
thought of was the illustration of some lessons in Natural History, on
sheets of cardboard, needed then, when prints of the kind were not to
be procured for schools. The class of animals to be illustrated by
Mrs. Bray on the sheet taken by Miss Evans was the "Rodentiæ," and at
the top a squirrel was to figure, the which she undertook to draw.
This I have seen, half-finished--a witness to the willing mind; proof
that its proper work lay otherwhere. Lectures at the Mechanics'
Institute were matters of great interest to Miss Evans; and I remember
the pleasure given her by the performance of the music of "Comus,"
with lecture by Professor Taylor, at our old St. Mary's Hall. In that
hall, too, we heard the first lecture on total abstinence that I
remember to have heard in Coventry, though of "Temperance Societies"
we knew something. The lecturer was the Rev. Mr. Spencer, a clergyman
at Hinton Charterhouse, near Bath, and uncle of Mr. Herbert Spencer.
Miss Evans was present at the lecture, with Mr. Bray, who told me
afterwards he had some difficulty in restraining her from going up, as
soon as the lecture was over, to take the pledge, he thought, without
due consideration. "I felt," she said, speaking to me afterwards of
the lecturer, "that he had got hold of a power for good that was of
incalculable worth."

I need scarcely say that I received, along with lessons in German,
some "rules and lessons for life" from Miss Evans. One of the first
was an injunction to be accurate, enforced with the warning that the
tendency is to grow less and less so as we get older. The other was
tolerance. How well I can remember the remonstrance, "My dear child,
the great lesson of life is tolerance." In the proverb, "Live and let
live," she saw a principle involved, harder to act upon, she would
say, than the maxims of benevolence--I think, because bringing less
credit with it.

The reading of dramas and romances naturally gives rise to discussion
of their main theme. In treating of love and marriage, Miss Evans's
feeling was so fine as to satisfy a young girl in her teens, with her
impossible ideals. The conception of the union of two persons by so
close a tie as marriage, without a previous union of minds as well as
hearts, was to her dreadful. "How terrible it must be," she once said
to me, "to find one's self tied to a being whose limitations you could
see, and must know were such as to prevent your ever being
understood!" She thought that though in England marriages were not
professedly "arrangés," they were so too often practically: young
people being brought together, and receiving intimations that mutual
interest was desired and expected, were apt to drift into connections
on grounds not strong enough for the wear and tear of life; and this,
too, among the middle as well as in the higher classes. After speaking
of these and other facts, of how things were and would be, in spite of
likelihood to the contrary, she would end by saying, playfully, "Now,
remember I tell you this, and I am sixty!"

She thought the stringency of laws rendering the marriage-tie (at that
date) irrevocable, practically worked injuriously; the effect being
"that many wives took far less pains to please their husbands in
behavior and appearance, because they knew their own position to be
invulnerable." And at a later time she spoke of marriages on the
Continent, where separations did not necessarily involve discredit, as
being very frequently far happier.

One claim, as she regarded it, from equals to each other was this, the
right to hear from the aggrieved, "You have ill-treated me; do you not
see your conduct is not fair, looked at from my side?" Such frankness
would, she said, bring about good understanding better than reticent
endurance. Her own filial piety was sufficiently manifest; but of the
converse obligation, that of the claim of child upon parent, she was
wont to speak thus strongly. "There may be," she would say, "conduct
on the part of a parent which should exonerate his child from further
obligation to him; but there cannot be action conceivable which should
absolve the parent from obligation to serve his child, seeing that for
that child's existence he is himself responsible." I did not at the
time see the connection between this view and the change of a
fundamental nature marked by Miss Evans's earlier contention for our
"claim on God." The bearing of the above on orthodox religion I did
not see. Some time ago, however, I came across this reflection, made
by a clergyman of the Broad Church school--that since the _claims_ of
children had, in the plea for schools, been based on the
responsibility of parents towards them, a higher principle had been
maintained on the platform than was preached from the pulpit, as the
basis of the popular theology.

In my previous communication in the "Life" I have already made mention
of Miss Evans's sympathy with me in my own religious difficulties; and
my obligations to her were deepened by her seconding my resolve to
acknowledge how much of the traditional belief had fallen away from me
and left a simpler faith. In this I found her best help when, as time
passed on, my brother saw he could not conscientiously continue in the
calling he had chosen. As, however, his heresies were not considered
fatal, and he was esteemed by the professors and students of his
college, there was for some time hesitation. In this predicament I
wrote to him, a little favoring compromise. My mother also wrote. I
took the letters to Miss Evans before posting them. She read mine
first, with no remark, and then began my mother's, reading until she
came upon these words--"In the meantime, let me entreat you not to
utter any sentiments, either in the pulpit or in conversation, that
you do not believe to be strictly true;" on which she said, turning to
me, "Look, this is the important point, what your mother says here,"
and I immediately put my own letter into the fire. "What are you
doing?" she quickly said; and when I answered, "You are right--my
mother's letter is to the point, and that only need go," she nodded
assent, and, keeping it, sent it enclosed with a few lines from
herself.

I knew what I had done and so did she: the giving up of the ministry
to a young man without other resources was no light matter; and as I
rose to go she said, "These are the tragedies for which the world
cares so little, but which are so much to me."

More than twenty years elapsed before I had again the privilege of
seeing George Eliot, and that on one occasion only, after her final
settlement in London. It touched me deeply to find how much she had
retained of her kind interest in all that concerned me and mine, and I
remarked on this to Mr. Lewes, who came to the door with my daughter
and myself at parting. "Wonderful sympathy," I said. "Is it not?" said
he; and when I added, inquiringly, "The power lies there?"
"Unquestionably it does," was his answer; "she forgets nothing that
has ever come within the curl of her eyelash; above all, she forgets
no one who has ever spoken to her one kind word."


     END OF VOL. I.
     
     


GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE

VOL. II.--FAMOUS


"OUR FINEST HOPE IS FINEST MEMORY"


[Illustration: Portrait of George Eliot. Engraved by G. J. Stodart.]




            GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE
  _as related in her Letters and Journals_

     ARRANGED AND EDITED BY HER HUSBAND
                J. W. CROSS

             WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

        IN THREE VOLUMES.--VOLUME II


                 NEW YORK
     HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE




GEORGE ELIOT'S WORKS.

_LIBRARY EDITION._

     ADAM BEDE. Illustrated. 12mo, Cloth, $1.25.

     DANIEL DERONDA. 2 vols., 12mo, Cloth, $2.50.

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     MIDDLEMARCH. 2 vols., 12mo, Cloth, $2.50.

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     SCENES OF CLERICAL LIFE, and SILAS MARNER. Illustrated. 12mo,
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PUBLISHED BY HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK.

HARPER & BROTHERS _will send any of the above volumes by mail, postage
prepaid, to any part of the United States or Canada, on receipt of the
price. For other editions of George Eliot's works published by Harper
& Brothers see advertisement at end of third volume_.




CONTENTS OF VOL. II.


     CHAPTER VIII.
     JANUARY, 1858, TO DECEMBER, 1858.

       Success of "Scenes of Clerical Life"--"Adam Bede"   Page 1


     CHAPTER IX.
     JANUARY, 1859, TO MARCH, 1860.

       "The Mill on the Floss"                                 58


     CHAPTER X.
     MARCH TO JUNE, 1860.

       First Journey to Italy                                 120


     CHAPTER XI.
     JULY, 1860, TO DECEMBER, 1861.

       "Silas Marner"--"Romola" begun                         185


     CHAPTER XII.
     JANUARY, 1862, TO DECEMBER, 1865.

       "Romola"--"Felix Holt"                                 238


     CHAPTER XIII.
     JANUARY, 1866, TO DECEMBER, 1866.

       Tour in Holland and on the Rhine                       303




ILLUSTRATIONS TO VOL. II.


     PORTRAIT OF GEORGE ELIOT.
       Engraved by G. J. Stodart                  _Frontispiece._

     THE PRIORY--DRAWING-ROOM                    _To face p._ 266

     FAC-SIMILE OF GEORGE ELIOT'S HAND-WRITING         "      280




GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE.




CHAPTER VIII.


[Sidenote: Journal, 1858.]

_Jan. 2._--George has returned this evening from a week's visit to
Vernon Hill. On coming up-stairs he said, "I have some very pretty
news for you--something in my pocket." I was at a loss to conjecture,
and thought confusedly of possible opinions from admiring readers,
when he drew the _Times_ from his pocket--to-day's number, containing
a review of the "Scenes of Clerical Life." He had happened to ask a
gentleman in the railway carriage, coming up to London, to allow him
to look at the _Times_, and felt quite agitated and tremulous when his
eyes alighted on the review. Finding he had time to go into town
before the train started, he bought a copy there. It is a highly
favorable notice, and, as far as it goes, appreciatory.

When G. went into town he called at Nutt's, and Mrs. Nutt said to him,
"I think you don't know our curate. _He_ says the author of 'Clerical
Scenes' is a High Churchman; for though Mr. Tryan is said to be Low
Church, his feelings and _actions_ are those of a High Churchman."
(The curate himself being of course High Church.) There were some
pleasant scraps of admiration also gathered for me at Vernon Hill.
Doyle happening to mention the treatment of children in the stories,
Helps said, "Oh, he is a great writer!"

I wonder how I shall feel about these little details ten years hence,
if I am alive. At present I value them as grounds for hoping that my
writing may succeed, and so give value to my life; as indications that
I can touch the hearts of my fellow-men, and so sprinkle some precious
grain as the result of the long years in which I have been inert and
suffering. But at present fear and trembling still predominate over
hope.

_Jan. 5._--To-day the "Clerical Scenes" came in their two-volume
dress, looking very handsome.

_Jan. 8._--News of the subscription--580, with a probable addition of
25 for Longmans. Mudie has taken 350. When we used to talk of the
probable subscription, G. always said, "I dare say it will be 250!"
(The final number subscribed for was 650.)

I ordered copies to be sent to the following persons: Froude, Dickens,
Thackeray, Tennyson, Ruskin, Faraday, the author of "Companions of my
Solitude," Albert Smith, Mrs. Carlyle.

On the 20th of January I received the following letter from Dickens:

[Sidenote: Letter from Charles Dickens to George Eliot, 17th Jan.
1858.]

         "TAVISTOCK HOUSE, LONDON, _Monday, 17th Jan. 1858_.

     "MY DEAR SIR,--I have been so strongly affected by the two
     first tales in the book you have had the kindness to send me,
     through Messrs. Blackwood, that I hope you will excuse my
     writing to you to express my admiration of their
     extraordinary merit. The exquisite truth and delicacy, both
     of the humor and the pathos of these stories, I have never
     seen the like of; and they have impressed me in a manner that
     I should find it very difficult to describe to you, if I had
     the impertinence to try.

     "In addressing these few words of thankfulness to the creator
     of the Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton, and the sad
     love-story of Mr. Gilfil, I am (I presume) bound to adopt the
     name that it pleases that excellent writer to assume. I can
     suggest no better one: but I should have been strongly
     disposed, if I had been left to my own devices, to address
     the said writer as a woman. I have observed what seemed to me
     such womanly touches in those moving fictions, that the
     assurance on the title-page is insufficient to satisfy me
     even now. If they originated with no woman, I believe that no
     man ever before had the art of making himself mentally so
     like a woman since the world began.

     "You will not suppose that I have any vulgar wish to fathom
     your secret. I mention the point as one of great interest to
     me--not of mere curiosity. If it should ever suit your
     convenience and inclination to show me the face of the man,
     or woman, who has written so charmingly, it will be a very
     memorable occasion to me. If otherwise, I shall always hold
     that impalpable personage in loving attachment and respect,
     and shall yield myself up to all future utterances from the
     same source, with a perfect confidence in their making me
     wiser and better.--Your obliged and faithful servant and
     admirer,

                                           "CHARLES DICKENS.

     "GEORGE ELIOT, ESQ."

[Sidenote: Journal, 1858.]

_Jan. 21._--To-day came the following letter from Froude:

[Sidenote: Letter from J. A. Froude to George Eliot, 17th Jan. 1858.]

     "NORTHDOWN HOUSE, BIDEFORD, _17th Jan. 1858_.

     "DEAR SIR,--I do not know when I have experienced a more
     pleasant surprise than when, on opening a book parcel two
     mornings ago, I found it to contain 'Scenes of Clerical
     Life,' 'From the author.' I do not often see _Blackwood_; but
     in accidental glances I had made acquaintance with 'Janet's
     Repentance,' and had found there something extremely
     different from general magazine stories. When I read the
     advertisement of the republication, I intended fully, at my
     leisure, to look at the companions of the story which had so
     much struck me, and now I find myself sought out by the
     person whose workmanship I had admired, for the special
     present of it.

     "You would not, I imagine, care much for flattering speeches,
     and to go into detail about the book would carry me farther
     than at present there is occasion to go. I can only thank you
     most sincerely for the delight which it has given me; and
     both I myself, and my wife, trust that the acquaintance which
     we seem to have made with you through your writings may
     improve into something more tangible. I do not know whether I
     am addressing a young man or an old--a clergyman or a layman.
     Perhaps, if you answer this note, you may give us some
     information about yourself. But at any rate, should business
     or pleasure bring you into this part of the world, pray
     believe that you will find a warm welcome if you will accept
     our hospitality.--Once more, with my best thanks, believe me,
     faithfully yours,

                                              J. A. FROUDE."

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 17th Jan. 1858.]

I have long ceased to feel any sympathy with mere antagonism and
destruction; and all crudity of expression marks, I think, a
deficiency in subtlety of thought as well as in breadth of moral and
poetic feeling. Mr. William Smith, the author of "Thorndale," is an
old acquaintance of Mr. Lewes's. I should say an old _friend_, only I
don't like the too ready use of that word. Mr. Lewes admires and
esteems him very highly. He is a very accomplished man--a bachelor,
with a small independent income; used to write very effective articles
on miscellaneous subjects in _Blackwood_. I shall like to know what
you think of "Thorndale." I don't know whether you look out for
Ruskin's books whenever they appear. His little book on the "Political
Economy of Art" contains some magnificent passages, mixed up with
stupendous specimens of arrogant absurdity on some economical points.
But I venerate him as one of the great teachers of the day. The grand
doctrines of truth and sincerity in art, and the nobleness and
solemnity of our human life, which he teaches with the inspiration of
a Hebrew prophet, must be stirring up young minds in a promising way.
The two last volumes of "Modern Painters" contain, I think, some of
the finest writing of the age. He is strongly akin to the sublimest
part of Wordsworth--whom, by-the-bye, we are reading with fresh
admiration for his beauties and tolerance for his faults. Our present
plans are: to remain here till about the end of March, then to go to
Munich, which I long to see. We shall live there several months,
seeing the wonderful galleries in leisure moments. Our living here is
so much more expensive than living abroad that we save more than the
expenses of our journeying; and as our work can be as well done there
as here for some months, we lay in much more capital, in the shape of
knowledge and experience, by going abroad.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1858.]

_Jan. 18._--I have begun the "Eumenides," having finished the
"Choephoræ." We are reading Wordsworth in the evening. At least G. is
reading him to me. I am still reading aloud Miss Martineau's History.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 21st Jan. 1858.]

I am sure you will be interested in Dickens's letter, which I enclose,
begging you to return it as soon as you can, and not to allow any one
besides yourself and Major Blackwood to share in the knowledge of its
contents. There can be no harm, of course, in every one's knowing that
Dickens admires the "Scenes," but I should not like any more specific
allusion made to the words of a private letter. There can hardly be
any climax of approbation for me after this; and I am so deeply moved
by the finely felt and finely expressed sympathy of the letter, that
the iron mask of my _incognito_ seems quite painful in forbidding me
to tell Dickens how thoroughly his generous impulse has been
appreciated. If you should have an opportunity of conveying this
feeling of mine to him in any way, you would oblige me by doing so.
By-the-bye, you probably remember sending me, some months ago, a
letter from the Rev. Archer Gurney--a very warm, simple-spoken
letter--praising me for qualities which I most of all care to be
praised for. I should like to send him a copy of the "Scenes," since I
could make no acknowledgment of his letter in any other way. I don't
know his address, but perhaps Mr. Langford would be good enough to
look it out in the Clergy List.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1858.]

_Jan. 23._--There appeared a well-written and enthusiastic article on
"Clerical Scenes" in the _Statesman_. We hear there was a poor
article in the _Globe_--of feebly written praise--the previous week,
but beyond this we have not yet heard of any notices from the press.

_Jan. 26._--Came a very pleasant letter from Mrs. Carlyle, thanking
the author of "Clerical Scenes" for the present of his book, praising
it very highly, and saying that her husband had promised to read it
when released from his mountain of history.

[Sidenote: Letter from Mrs. Carlyle to George Eliot, 21st Jan. 1858.]

                   "5 CHEYNE ROW, CHELSEA, _21st Jan. 1858_.

     "DEAR SIR,--I have to thank you for a surprise, a pleasure,
     and a--consolation (!) all in one book! And I do thank you
     most sincerely. I cannot divine what inspired the good
     thought to send _me_ your book; since (if the name on the
     title-page be your real name) it could not have been personal
     regard; there has never been a George Eliot among my friends
     or acquaintance. But neither, I am sure, could _you_ divine
     the circumstances under which I should read the book, and the
     particular benefit it should confer on me! I read it--at
     least the first volume--during one of the most (physically)
     wretched nights of my life--sitting up in bed, unable to get
     a wink of sleep for fever and sore throat--and it helped me
     through that dreary night as well--better than the most
     sympathetic helpful friend watching by my bedside could have
     done!

     "You will believe that the book needed to be something more
     than a 'new novel' for me; that I _could_ at my years, and
     after so much reading, read it in positive torment, and be
     beguiled by it of the torment! that it needed to be the one
     sort of book, however named, that still takes hold of me,
     and that grows rarer every year--a _human_ book--written out
     of the heart of a live man, not merely out of the brain of an
     author--full of tenderness and pathos, without a scrap of
     sentimentality, of sense without dogmatism, of earnestness
     without twaddle--a book that makes one _feel friends_ at once
     and for always with the man or woman who wrote it!

     "In guessing at why you gave me this good gift, I have
     thought amongst other things, 'Oh, perhaps it was a delicate
     way of presenting the novel to my husband, he being over head
     and ears in _history_.' If that was it, I compliment you on
     your _tact_! for my husband is much likelier to read the
     'Scenes' on _my_ responsibility than on a venture of his
     own--though, as a general rule, never opening a novel, he has
     engaged to read this one whenever he has some leisure from
     his present task.

     "I hope to know some day if the person I am addressing bears
     any resemblance in external things to the idea I have
     conceived of him in my mind--a man of middle age, with a
     wife, from whom he has got those beautiful _feminine_ touches
     in his book--a good many children, and a dog that he has as
     much fondness for as I have for my little Nero! For the
     rest--not just a clergyman, but brother or first cousin to a
     clergyman! How ridiculous all this _may_ read beside the
     reality. Anyhow--I honestly confess I am very curious about
     you, and look forward with what Mr. Carlyle would call 'a
     good, healthy, genuine desire' to shaking hands with you some
     day.--In the meanwhile, I remain, your obliged

                                           JANE W. CARLYLE."

[Sidenote: Journal, 1858.]

_Jan. 30._--Received a letter from Faraday, thanking me very
gracefully for the present of the "Scenes." Blackwood mentions, in
enclosing this letter, that Simpkin & Marshall have sent for twelve
additional copies--the first sign of a move since the subscription.
The other night we looked into the life of Charlotte Brontë, to see
how long it was before "Jane Eyre" came into demand at the libraries,
and we found it was not until six weeks after publication. It is just
three weeks now since I heard news of the subscription for my book.

[Sidenote: Letter from M. Faraday to George Eliot, 28th Jan. 1858.]

                       "ROYAL INSTITUTION, _28th Jan. 1858_.

     "SIR,--I cannot resist the pleasure of thanking you for what
     I esteem a great kindness: the present of your thoughts
     embodied in the two volumes you have sent me. They have been,
     and will be again, a very pleasant relief from mental
     occupation among my own pursuits. Such rest I find at times
     not merely agreeable, but essential.--Again thanking you, I
     beg to remain, your very obliged servant,
                                                 M. FARADAY.

     "GEORGE ELIOT, Esq., &c., &c."

[Sidenote: Journal, 1858.]

_Feb. 3._--Gave up Miss Martineau's History last night, after reading
some hundred pages in the second volume. She has a sentimental,
rhetorical style in this history which is fatiguing and not
instructive. But her history of the Reform movement is very
interesting.

_Feb. 4._--Yesterday brought the discouraging news, that though the
book is much talked of, it moves very slowly. Finished the
"Eumenides." Bessie Parkes has written asking me to contribute to the
_Englishwoman's Journal_--a new monthly which, she says, "We are
beginning with £1000, and great social interest."

_Feb. 16._--To-day G. went into the City and saw Langford, for the
sake of getting the latest news about our two books--his "Sea-side
Studies" having been well launched about a fortnight or ten days ago,
with a subscription of 800. He brought home good news. The "Clerical
Scenes" are moving off at a moderate but steady pace. Langford
remarked, that while the press had been uniformly favorable, not one
_critical_ notice had appeared. G. went to Parker's in the evening,
and gathered a little gossip on the subject. Savage, author of the
"Falcon Family," and now editor of the _Examiner_, said he was reading
the "Scenes"--had read some of them already in _Blackwood_--but was
now reading the volume. "G. Eliot was a writer of great merit." A
barrister named Smythe said he had seen "the Bishop" reading them the
other day. As a set-off against this, Mrs. Schlesinger "Couldn't bear
the book." She is a regular novel reader; but hers is the first
unfavorable opinion we have had.

_Feb. 26._--We went into town for the sake of seeing Mr. and Mrs.
Call, and having our photographs taken by Mayall.

_Feb. 28._--Mr. John Blackwood called on us, having come to London for
a few days only. He talked a good deal about the "Clerical Scenes" and
George Eliot, and at last asked, "Well, am I to see George Eliot this
time?" G. said, "Do you wish to see him?" "As he likes--I wish it to
be quite spontaneous." I left the room, and G. following me a moment,
I told him he might reveal me. Blackwood was kind, came back when he
found he was too late for the train, and said he would come to
Richmond again. He came on the following Friday and chatted very
pleasantly--told us that Thackeray spoke highly of the "Scenes," and
said _they were not written by a woman_. Mrs. Blackwood is _sure_ they
are not written by a woman. Mrs. Oliphant, the novelist, too, is
confident on the same side. I gave Blackwood the MS. of my new novel,
to the end of the second scene in the wood. He opened it, read the
first page, and smiling, said, "This will do." We walked with him to
Kew, and had a good deal of talk. Found, among other things, that he
had lived two years in Italy when he was a youth, and that he admires
Miss Austen.

Since I wrote these last notes several encouraging fragments of news
about the "Scenes" have come to my ears--especially that Mrs. Owen
Jones and her husband--two very different people--are equally
enthusiastic about the book. But both have detected the woman.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 2d March, 1858.]

Perhaps we may go to Dresden, perhaps not: we leave room for the
_imprévu_, which Louis Blanc found so sadly wanting in Mr. Morgan's
millennial village. You are among the exceptional people who say
pleasant things to their friends, and don't feel a too exclusive
satisfaction in their misfortunes. We like to hear of your interest in
Mr. Lewes's books--at least, _I_ am very voracious of such details. I
keep the pretty letters that are written to him; and we have had some
really important ones from the scientific big-wigs about the "Sea-side
Studies." The reception of the book in that quarter has been quite
beyond our expectations. Eight hundred copies were sold at once. There
is a great deal of close hard work in the book, and every one who
knows what scientific work is necessarily perceives this; happily
many have been generous enough to express their recognition in a
hearty way.

I enter so deeply into everything you say about your mother. To me
that old, old popular truism, "We can never have but one mother," has
worlds of meaning in it, and I think with more sympathy of the
satisfaction you feel in at last being allowed to wait on her than I
should of anything else you could tell me. I wish we saw more of that
sweet human piety that feels tenderly and reverently towards the aged.
[_Apropos_ of some incapable woman's writing she adds.] There is
something more piteous almost than soapless poverty in this
application of feminine incapacity to literature. We spent a very
pleasant couple of hours with Mr. and Mrs. Call last Friday. It was
worth a journey on a cold dusty day to see two faces beaming kindness
and happiness.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 26th March, 1858.]

I enclose a letter which will interest you. It is affecting to see how
difficult a matter it often is for the men who would most profit by a
book to purchase it, or even get a reading of it, while stupid Jopling
of Reading or elsewhere thinks nothing of giving a guinea for a work
which he will simply put on his shelves.

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, March, 1858.]

When do you bring out your new poem? I presume you are already in the
sixth canto. It is true you never told me you intended to write a
poem, nor have I heard any one say so who was likely to know.
Nevertheless I have quite as active an imagination as you, and I don't
see why I shouldn't suppose you are writing a poem as well as you
suppose that I am writing a novel. Seriously, I wish you would not set
rumors afloat about me. They are injurious. Several people, who seem
to derive their notions from Ivy Cottage,[1] have spoken to me of a
supposed novel I was going to bring out. Such things are damaging to
me.

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, 31st March, 1858.]

Thanks for your disclaimer. It shows me that you take a right view of
the subject. There is no undertaking more fruitful of absurd mistakes
than that of "guessing" at authorship; and as I have never
communicated to any one so much as an _intention_ of a literary kind,
there can be none but imaginary data for such guesses. If I withhold
anything from my friends which it would gratify them to know, you will
believe, I hope, that I have good reasons for doing so, and I am sure
those friends will understand me when I ask them to further my
object--which is not a whim but a question of solid interest--by
complete silence. I can't afford to indulge either in vanity or
sentimentality about my work. I have only a trembling anxiety to do
what is in itself worth doing, and by that honest means to win very
necessary profit of a temporal kind. "There is nothing hidden that
shall not be revealed" in due time. But till that time comes--till I
tell you myself, "This is the work of my hand and brain"--don't
believe anything on the subject. There is no one who is in the least
likely to know what I can, could, should, or would write.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1858.]

_April 1, 1858._--Received a letter from Blackwood containing warm
praise of "Adam Bede," but wanting to know the rest of the story in
outline before deciding whether it should go in the Magazine. I wrote
in reply refusing to tell him the story.

On Wednesday evening, April 7th, we set off on our journey to Munich,
and now we are comfortably settled in our lodgings, where we hope to
remain three months at least. I sit down in my first leisure moments
to write a few recollections of our journey, or rather of our
twenty-four hours' stay at Nürnberg; for the rest of our journey was
mere endurance of railway and steamboat in cold and sombre weather,
often rainy. I ought to except our way from Frankfort to Nürnberg,
which lay for some distance--until we came to Bamberg--through a
beautifully varied country. Our view both of Würzburg and Bamberg, as
we hastily snatched it from our railway carriage, was very
striking--great old buildings, crowning heights that rise up boldly
from the plain in which stand the main part of the towns. From Bamberg
to Nürnberg the way lay through a wide rich plain sprinkled with
towns. We had left all the hills behind us. At Bamberg we were joined
in our carriage by a pleasant-looking elderly couple, who spoke to
each other and looked so affectionately that we said directly, "Shall
we be so when we are old?" It was very pretty to see them hold each
other's gloved hands for a minute like lovers. As soon as we had
settled ourselves in our inn at Nürnberg--the Baierische Hof--we went
out to get a general view of the town. Happily it was not raining,
though there was no sun to light up the roof and windows.

[Sidenote: Journal, April, 1858.]

How often I had thought I should like to see Nürnberg, and had
pictured to myself narrow streets with dark quaint gables! The reality
was not at all like my picture, but it was ten times better. No sombre
coloring, except the old churches: all was bright and varied, each
_façade_ having a different color--delicate green, or buff, or pink,
or lilac--every now and then set off by the neighborhood of a rich
reddish brown. And the roofs always gave warmth of color with their
bright red or rich purple tiles. Every house differed from its
neighbor, and had a physiognomy of its own, though a beautiful family
likeness ran through them all, as if the burghers of that old city
were of one heart and one soul, loving the same delightful outlines,
and cherishing the same daily habits of simple ease and enjoyment in
their balcony-windows when the day's work was done.

The balcony window is the secondary charm of the Nürnberg houses; it
would be the principal charm of any houses that had not the Nürnberg
roofs and gables. It is usually in the centre of the building, on the
first floor, and is ornamented with carved stone or wood, which
supports it after the fashion of a bracket. In several of these
windows we saw pretty family groups--young fair heads of girls or of
little children, with now and then an older head surmounting them. One
can fancy that these windows are the pet places for family joys--that
papa seats himself there when he comes home from the warehouse, and
the little ones cluster round him in no time. But the glory of the
Nürnberg houses is the roofs, which are no blank surface of mere
tiling, but are alive with lights and shadows, cast by varied and
beautiful lines of windows and pinnacles and arched openings. The
plainest roof in Nürnberg has its little windows lifting themselves up
like eyelids, and almost everywhere one sees the pretty hexagonal
tiles. But the better houses have a central, open sort of pavilion in
the roof, with a pinnacle surmounted by a weathercock. This pavilion
has usually a beautifully carved arched opening in front, set off by
the dark background which is left by the absence of glass. One
fancies the old Nürnbergers must have gone up to these pavilions to
smoke in the summer and autumn days. There is usually a brood of small
windows round this central ornament, often elegantly arched and
carved. A wonderful sight it makes to see a series of such roofs
surmounting the tall, delicate-colored houses. They are always
high-pitched, of course, and the color of the tiles was usually of a
bright red. I think one of the most charming vistas we saw was the
Adler-Gasse, on the St. Lorenz side of the town. Sometimes, instead of
the high-pitched roof, with its pavilion and windows, there is a
richly ornamented gable fronting the street; and still more frequently
we get the gables at right angles with the street at a break in the
line of houses.

Coming back from the Burg we met a detachment of soldiers, with their
band playing, followed by a stream of listening people; and then we
reached the market-place, just at the point where stands "The
Beautiful Fountain"--an exquisite bit of florid Gothic which has been
restored in perfect conformity with the original. Right before us
stood the Frauen-Kirche, with its fine and unusual _façade_, the chief
beauty being a central chapel used as the choir, and added by Adam
Krafft. It is something of the shape of a mitre, and forms a beautiful
gradation of ascent towards the summit of _façade_. We heard the organ
and were tempted to enter, for this is the one Catholic Church in
Nürnberg. The delicious sound of the organ and voices drew us farther
and farther in among the standing people, and we stayed there I don't
know how long, till the music ceased. How the music warmed one's
heart! I loved the good people about me, even to the soldier who stood
with his back to us, giving us a full view of his close-cropped head,
with its pale yellowish hair standing up in bristles on the crown, as
if his hat had acted like a forcing-pot. Then there was a little baby
in a close-fitting cap on its little round head, looking round with
bright black eyes as it sucked its bit of bread. Such a funny little
complete face--rich brown complexion and miniature Roman nose. And
then its mother lifted it up that it might see the rose-decked altar,
where the priests were standing. How music, that stirs all one's
devout emotions, blends everything into harmony--makes one feel part
of one whole which one loves all alike, losing the sense of a separate
self. Nothing could be more wretched as art than the painted St.
Veronica opposite me, holding out the sad face on her miraculous
handkerchief. Yet it touched me deeply; and the thought of the Man of
Sorrows seemed a very close thing--not a faint hearsay.

We saw Albert Dürer's statue by Rauch, and Albert Dürer's house--a
striking bit of old building, rich dark-brown, with a truncated gable
and two wooden galleries running along the gable end. My best wishes
and thanks to the artists who keep it in repair and use it for their
meetings. The vistas from the bridges across the muddy Pegnitz, which
runs through the town, are all quaint and picturesque; and it was here
that we saw some of the _shabbiest_-looking houses--almost the only
houses that carried any suggestion of poverty, and even here it was
doubtful. The town has an air of cleanliness and well-being, and one
longs to call one of those balconied apartments one's own home, with
their flower-pots, clean glass, clean curtains, and transparencies
turning their white backs to the street. It is pleasant to think there
is such a place in the world where many people pass peaceful lives.

On arriving at Munich, after much rambling, we found an advertisement
of "Zwei elegant möblirte Zimmer," No. 15 Luitpold Strasse; and to our
immense satisfaction found something that looked like cleanliness and
comfort. The bargain was soon made--twenty florins per month. So here
we came last Tuesday, the 13th April. We have been taking sips of the
Glyptothek and the two Pinacotheks in the morning, not having settled
to work yet. Last night we went to the opera--Fra Diavolo--at the
Hof-Theatre. The theatre ugly, the singing bad. Still, the orchestra
was good, and the charming music made itself felt in spite of German
throats. On Sunday, the 11th, we went to the Pinacothek, straight into
the glorious Rubens Saal. Delighted afresh in the picture of "Samson
and Delilah," both for the painting and character of the figures.
Delilah, a magnificent blonde, seated in a chair, with a transparent
white garment slightly covering her body, and a rich red piece of
drapery round her legs, leans forward, with one hand resting on her
thigh, the other, holding the cunning shears, resting on the chair--a
posture which shows to perfection the full, round, living arms. She
turns her head aside to look with sly triumph at Samson--a tawny
giant, his legs caught in the red drapery, shorn of his long locks,
furious with the consciousness that the Philistines are upon him, and
that this time he cannot shake them off. Above the group of malicious
faces and grappling arms a hand holds a flaming torch. Behind Delilah,
and grasping her arm, leans forward an old woman, with hard features
full of exultation.

This picture, comparatively small in size, hangs beside the "Last
Judgment," and in the corresponding space, on the other side of the
same picture, hangs the sublime "Crucifixion." Jesus alone, hanging
dead on the Cross, darkness over the whole earth. One can desire
nothing in this picture--the grand, sweet calm of the dead face, calm
and satisfied amidst all the traces of anguish, the real, livid flesh,
the thorough mastery with which the whole form is rendered, and the
isolation of the supreme sufferer, make a picture that haunts one like
a remembrance of a friend's death-bed.

_April 12 (Monday)._--After reading Anna Mary Howitt's book on Munich
and Overbeck on Greek art, we turned out into the delicious sunshine
to walk in the Theresien Wiese, and have our first look at the
colossal "Bavaria," the greatest work of Schwanthaler. Delightful it
was to get away from the houses into this breezy meadow, where we
heard the larks singing above us. The sun was still too high in the
west for us to look with comfort at the statue, except right in front
of it, where it eclipsed the sun; and this front view is the only
satisfactory one. The outline made by the head and arm on a side view
is almost painfully ugly. But in front, looking up to the beautiful,
calm face, the impression it produces is sublime. I have never seen
anything, even in ancient sculpture, of a more awful beauty than this
dark, colossal head, looking out from a background of pure, pale-blue
sky. We mounted the platform to have a view of her back, and then
walking forward, looked to our right hand and saw the snow-covered
Alps! Sight more to me than all the art in Munich, though I love the
_art_ nevertheless. The great, wide-stretching earth and the
all-embracing sky--the birthright of us all--are what I care most to
look at. And I feel intensely the new beauty of the sky here. The blue
is so exquisitely clear, and the wide streets give one such a broad
canopy of sky. I felt more inspirited by our walk to the Theresien
Platz than by any pleasure we have had in Munich.

_April 16._--On Wednesday we walked to the Theresien Wiese to look at
the "Bavaria" by sunset, but a shower came on and drove us to take
refuge in a pretty house built near the Ruhmeshalle, whereby we were
gainers, for we saw a charming family group: a mother with her three
children--the eldest a boy with his book, the second a three-year-old
maiden, the third a sweet baby-girl of a year and a half; two dogs,
one a mixture of the setter and pointer, the other a turn-spit; and a
relation or servant ironing. The baby cried at the sight of G. in
beard and spectacles, but kept her eyes turning towards him from her
mother's lap, every now and then seeming to have overcome her fears,
and then bursting out crying anew. At last she got down and lifted the
table-cloth to peep at his legs, as if to see the monster's nether
parts.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 17th April, 1858.]

We have been just to take a sip at the two Pinacotheks and at the
Glyptothek. At present the Rubens Saal is what I most long to return
to. Rubens gives me more pleasure than any other painter, whether that
is right or wrong. To be sure, I have not seen so many pictures, and
pictures of so high a rank, by any other great master. I feel sure
that when I have seen as much of Raphael I shall like him better; but
at present Rubens, more than any one else, makes me feel that painting
is a great art, and that he was a great artist. His are such real,
breathing men and women, moved by passions, not mincing and
grimacing, and posing in mere aping of passion! What a grand,
glowing, forceful thing life looks in his pictures--the men such
grand-bearded, grappling beings, fit to do the work of the world; the
women such real mothers. We stayed at Nürnberg only twenty-four hours,
and I felt sad to leave it so soon. A pity the place became
Protestant, so that there is only one Catholic church where one can go
in and out as one would. We turned into the famous St. Sebald's for a
minute, where a Protestant clergyman was reading in a cold, formal way
under the grand Gothic arches. Then we went to the Catholic church,
the Frauen-Kirche, where the organ and voices were giving forth a
glorious mass; and we stood with a feeling of brotherhood among the
standing congregation till the last note of the organ had died out.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1858.]

_April 23._--Not being well enough to write, we determined to spend
our morning at the Glyptothek and Pinacothek. A glorious morning--all
sunshine and blue sky. We went to the Glyptothek first, and delighted
ourselves anew with the "Sleeping Faun," the "Satyr and Bacchus," and
the "Laughing Faun" (Fauno colla Macchia). Looked at the two young
satyrs reposing with the pipe in their hands--one of them charming in
the boyish, good-humored beauty of the face, but both wanting finish
in the limbs, which look almost as if they could be produced by a
turning-machine. But the conception of this often-repeated figure is
charming: it would make a garden seem more peaceful in the sunshine.
Looked at the old Silenus too, which is excellent. I delight in these
figures, full of droll animation, flinging some nature, in its broad
freedom, in the eyes of small-mouthed, mincing narrowness.

We went into the modern Saal also, glancing on our way at the
Cornelius frescoes, which seem to me stiff and hideous. An Adonis, by
Thorwaldsen, is very beautiful.

Then to the Pinacothek, where we looked at Albert Dürer's portrait
again, and many other pictures, among which I admired a group by
Jordaens: "A satyr eating, while a peasant shows him that he can blow
hot and cold at the same time;" the old grandmother nursing the child,
the father with the key in his hand, with which he has been amusing
baby, looking curiously at the satyr, the handsome wife, still more
eager in her curiosity, the quiet cow, the little boy, the dog and
cat--all are charmingly conceived.

_April 24._--As we were reading this afternoon Herr Oldenbourg came
in, invited us to go to his house on Tuesday, and chatted pleasantly
for an hour. He talked of Kaulbach, whom he has known very intimately,
being the publisher of the "Reineke Fuchs." The picture of the "Hunnen
Schlacht" was the first of Kaulbach's on a great scale. It created a
sensation, and the critics began to call it a "Weltgeschichtliches
Bild." Since then Kaulbach has been seduced into the complex,
wearisome, symbolical style, which makes the frescoes at Berlin
enormous puzzles.

When we had just returned from our drive in the Englische Garten,
Bodenstedt pleasantly surprised us by presenting himself. He is a
charming man, and promises to be a delightful acquaintance for us in
this strange town. He chatted pleasantly with us for half an hour,
telling us that he is writing a work, in five volumes, on the
"Contemporaries of Shakspeare," and indicating the nature of his
treatment of the Shakspearian drama--which is historical and
analytical. Presently he proposed that we should adjourn to his house
and have tea with him; and so we turned out all together in the bright
moonlight, and enjoyed his pleasant chat until ten o'clock. His wife
was not at home, but we were admitted to see the three sleeping
children--one a baby about a year and a half old, a lovely waxen
thing. He gave the same account of Kaulbach as we had heard from
Oldenbourg; spoke of Genelli as superior in genius, though he has not
the fortune to be recognized; recited some of Hermann Lingg's poetry,
and spoke enthusiastically of its merits. There was not a word of
detraction about any one--nothing to jar on one's impression of him as
a refined, noble-hearted man.

_April 27._--This has been a red-letter day. In the morning Professor
Wagner took us over his "Petrifacten Sammlung," giving us interesting
explanations; and before we left him we were joined by Professor
Martius, an animated, clever man, who talked admirably, and invited us
to his house. Then we went to Kaulbach's studio, talked with him, and
saw with especial interest the picture he is preparing as a present to
the New Museum. In the evening, after walking in the Theresien Wiese,
we went to Herr Oldenbourg's, and met Liebig the chemist, Geibel and
Heyse the poets, and Carrière, the author of a work on the
Reformation. Liebig is charming, with well-cut features, a low, quiet
voice, and gentle manners. It was touching to see his hands, the nails
black from the roots, the skin all grimed.

Heyse is like a painter's poet, ideally beautiful; rather brilliant in
his talk, and altogether pleasing. Geibel is a man of rather coarse
texture, with a voice like a kettledrum, and a steady determination to
deliver his opinions on every subject that turned up. But there was a
good deal of ability in his remarks.

_April 30._--After calling on Frau Oldenbourg, and then at Professor
Bodenstedt's, where we played with his charming children for ten
minutes, we went to the theatre to hear Prince Radziwill's music to
the "Faust." I admired especially the earlier part, the Easter morning
song of the spirits, the Beggar's song, and other things, until after
the scene in Auerbach's cellar, which is set with much humor and
fancy. But the scene between Faust and Marguerite is bad--"Meine Ruh
ist hin" quite pitiable, and the "König im Thule" not good. Gretchen's
second song, in which she implores help of the Schmerzensreiche,
touched me a good deal.

_May 1._--In the afternoon Bodenstedt called, and we agreed to spend
the evening at his house--a delightful evening. Professor Löher,
author of "Die Deutschen in America," and another much younger
_Gelehrter_, whose name I did not seize, were there.

_May 2._--Still rainy and cold. We went to the Pinacothek, and looked
at the old pictures in the first and second Saal. There are some very
bad and some fine ones by Albert Dürer: of the latter, a full length
figure of the Apostle Paul, with the head of Mark beside him, in a
listening attitude, is the one that most remains with me. There is a
very striking "Adoration of the Magi," by Johannes van Eyck, with much
merit in the coloring, perspective, and figures. Also, "Christ
carrying his Cross," by Albert Dürer, is striking. "A woman raised
from the dead by the imposition of the Cross" is a very elaborate
composition, by Böhms, in which the faces are of first-rate
excellence.

In the evening we went to the opera and saw the "Nord Stern."

_May 10._--Since Wednesday I have had a wretched cold and cough, and
been otherwise ill, but I have had several pleasures nevertheless. On
Friday, Bodenstedt called with Baron Schack to take us to Genelli's,
the artist of whose powers Bodenstedt had spoken to us with
enthusiastic admiration. The result to us was nothing but
disappointment; the sketches he showed us seemed to us quite destitute
of any striking merit. On Sunday we dined with Liebig, and spent the
evening at Bodenstedt's, where we met Professor Bluntschli, the
jurist, a very intelligent and agreeable man, and Melchior Meyr, a
maker of novels and tragedies, otherwise an ineffectual personage.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 10th May, 1858.]

Our life here is very agreeable--full of pleasant novelty, although we
take things quietly and observe our working hours just as if we were
at Richmond. People are so kind to us that we feel already quite at
home, sip _baierisch Bier_ with great tolerance, and talk bad German
with more and more _aplomb_. The place, you know, swarms with
professors of all sorts--all _gründlich_, of course, and one or two of
them great. There is no one we are more charmed with than Liebig. Mr.
Lewes had no letter to him--we merely met him at an evening party; yet
he has been particularly kind to us, and seems to have taken a
benevolent liking to me. We dined with him and his family yesterday,
and saw how men of European celebrity may put up with greasy cooking
in private life. He lives in very good German style, however; has a
handsome suite of apartments, and makes a greater figure than most of
the professors. His manners are charming--easy, graceful, benignant,
and all the more conspicuous because he is so quiet and low spoken
among the loud talkers here. He looks best in his laboratory, with his
velvet cap on, holding little phials in his hand, and talking of
Kreatine and Kreatinine in the same easy way that well-bred ladies
talk scandal. He is one of the professors who has been called here by
the present king--Max--who seems to be a really sensible man among
kings; gets up at five o'clock in the morning to study, and every
Saturday evening has a gathering of the first men in science and
literature, that he may benefit by their opinions on important
subjects. At this _Tafel-rund_ every man is required to say honestly
what he thinks; every one may contradict every one else; and if the
king suspects any one of a polite insincerity, the too polished man is
invited no more. Liebig, the three poets--Geibel, Heyse, and
Bodenstedt--and Professor Löher, a writer of considerable mark, are
always at the _Tafel-rund_ as an understood part of their functions;
the rest are invited according to the king's direction. Bodenstedt is
one of our best friends here--enormously instructed, after the fashion
of Germans, but not at all stupid with it.

We were at the Siebolds' last night to meet a party of celebrities,
and, what was better, to see the prettiest little picture of married
life--the great comparative anatomist (Siebold) seated at the piano in
his spectacles playing the difficult accompaniments to Schubert's
songs, while his little round-faced wife sang them with much taste and
feeling. They are not young. Siebold is gray, and probably more than
fifty; his wife perhaps nearly forty; and it is all the prettier to
see their admiration of each other. She said to Mr. Lewes, when he
was speaking of her husband, "Ja, er ist ein netter Mann, nicht
wahr?"[2]

We take the art in very small draughts at present--the German hours
being difficult to adjust to our occupations. We are obliged to dine
at _one!_ and of course when we are well enough must work till then.
Two hours afterwards all the great public exhibitions are closed,
except the churches. I _cannot_ admire much of the modern German art.
It is for the most part elaborate lifelessness. Kaulbach's great
compositions are huge charades; and I have seen nothing of his equal
to his own "Reineke Fuchs." It is an unspeakable relief, after staring
at one of his pictures--the "Destruction of Jerusalem," for example,
which is a regular child's puzzle of symbolism--to sweep it all out of
one's mind--which is very easily done, for nothing grasps you in
it--and call up in your imagination a little Gerard Dow that you have
seen hanging in a corner of one of the cabinets. We have been to his
_atelier_, and he has given us a proof of his "Irrenhaus,"[3] a
strange sketch, which he made years ago--very terrible and powerful.
He is certainly a man of great faculty, but is, I imagine, carried out
of his true path by the ambition to produce "Weltgeschichtliche
Bilder," which the German critics may go into raptures about. His
"Battle of the Huns," which is the most impressive of all his great
pictures, was the first of the series. He painted it simply under the
inspiration of the grand myth about the spirits of the dead warriors
rising and carrying on the battle in the air. Straightway the German
critics began to smoke furiously that vile tobacco which they call
_æsthetik_, declared it a "Weltgeschichtliches Bild," and ever since
Kaulbach has been concocting these pictures in which, instead of
taking a single moment of reality and trusting to the infinite
symbolism that belongs to all nature, he attempts to give you at one
view a succession of events--each represented by some group which may
mean "Whichever you please, my little dear."

I must tell you something else which interested me greatly, as the
first example of the kind that has come under my observation. Among
the awful mysterious names, hitherto known only as marginal references
whom we have learned to clothe with ordinary flesh and blood, is
Professor Martius (Spix and Martius), now an old man, and rich after
the manner of being rich in Germany. He has a very sweet wife--one of
those women who remain pretty and graceful in old age--and a family of
three daughters and one son, all more than grown up. I learned that
she is Catholic, that her daughters are Catholic, and her husband and
son Protestant--the children having been so brought up according to
the German law in cases of mixed marriage. I can't tell you how
interesting it was to me to hear her tell of her experience in
bringing up her son conscientiously as a Protestant, and then to hear
her and her daughters speak of the exemplary priests who had shown
them such tender fatherly care when they were in trouble. They are the
most harmonious, affectionate family we have seen; and one delights in
such a triumph of human goodness over the formal logic of theorists.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1858.]

_May 13._--Geibel came and brought me the two volumes of his poems,
and stayed chatting for an hour. We spent the evening quietly at
home.

_May 14._--After writing, we went for an hour to the Pinacothek, and
looked at some of the Flemish pictures. In the afternoon we called at
Liebig's, and he went a long walk with us--the long chain of snowy
mountains in the hazy distance. After supper I read Geibel's "Junius
Lieder."

_May 15._--Read the 18th chapter of "Adam Bede" to G. He was much
pleased with it. Then we walked in the Englische Garten, and heard the
band, and saw the Germans drinking their beer. The park was lovely.

_May 16._--We were to have gone to Grosshesselohe with the Siebolds,
and went to Frühstück with them at 12, as a preliminary. Bodenstedt
was there to accompany us. But heavy rain came on, and we spent the
time till 5 o'clock in talking, hearing music, and listening to
Bodenstedt's "Epic on the destruction of Novgorod." About seven,
Liebig came to us and asked us to spend the evening at his house. We
went and found Voelderndorff, Bischoff and his wife, and Carrière and
Frau.

_May 20._--As I had a feeble head this morning, we gave up the time to
seeing pictures, and went to the _Neue Pinacothek_. A "Lady with
Fruit, followed by three Children," pleased us more than ever. It is
by Wichmann. The two interiors of Westminster Abbey by Ainmueller
admirable. Unable to admire Rothmann's Greek Landscapes, which have a
room to themselves. Ditto Kaulbach's "Zerstörung von Jerusalem."

We went for the first time to see the collection of porcelain
paintings, and had really a rich treat. Many of them are admirable
copies of great pictures. The sweet "Madonna and Child," in Raphael's
early manner; a "Holy Family," also in the early manner, with a
Madonna the exact type of the St. Catherine; and a "Holy Family" in
the later manner, something like the Madonna Delia Sedia, are all
admirably copied. So are two of Andrea del Sarto's--full of tenderness
and calm piety.

_May 23._--Through the cold wind and white dust we went to the
Jesuits' Church to hear the music. It is a fine church in the
Renaissance style, the vista terminating with the great altar very
fine, with all the crowd of human beings covering the floor. Numbers
of men!

In the evening we went to Bodenstedt's, and saw his wife for the first
time--a delicate creature who sang us some charming Bavarian
_Volkslieder_. On Monday we spent the evening at Löher's--Baumgarten,
_ein junger Historiker_, Oldenbourg, and the Bodenstedts meeting us.

Delicious _Mai-trank_, made by putting the fresh _Waldmeister_--a
cruciferous plant with a small white flower, something like Lady's
Bedstraw--into mild wine, together with sugar, and occasionally other
things.

_May 26._--This evening I have read aloud "Adam Bede," chapter xx. We
have begun Ludwig's "Zwischen Himmel und Erde."

_May 27._--We called on the Siebolds to-day, then walked in the
Theresien Wiese, and saw the mountains gloriously. Spent the evening
at Prof. Martius's, where Frau Erdl played Beethoven's Andante and the
Moonlight Sonata admirably.

_May 28._--We heard from Blackwood this morning. Good news in general,
but the sale of our books not progressing at present.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 28th May, 1858.]

It is invariably the case that when people discover certain points of
coincidence in a fiction with facts that happen to have come to their
knowledge, they believe themselves able to furnish a key to the whole.
That is amusing enough to the author, who knows from what widely
sundered portions of experience--from what a combination of subtle,
shadowy suggestions, with certain actual objects and events, his story
has been formed. It would be a very difficult thing for me to furnish
a key to my stories myself. But where there is no exact memory of the
past, any story with a few remembered points of character or of
incident may pass for a history.

We pay for our sight of the snowy mountains here by the most
capricious of climates. English weather is steadfast compared with
Munich weather. You go to dinner here in summer and come away from it
in winter. You are languid among trees and feathery grass at one end
of the town, and are shivering in a hurricane of dust at the other.
This inconvenience of climate, with the impossibility of dining (well)
at any other hour than one o'clock is not friendly to the
stomach--that great seat of the imagination. And I shall never advise
an author to come to Munich except _ad interim_. The great Saal, full
of Rubens's pictures, is worth studying; and two or three precious
bits of sculpture, and the sky on a fine day, always puts one in a
good temper--it is so deliciously clear and blue, making even the
ugliest buildings look beautiful by the light it casts on them.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1858.]

_May 30._--We heard "William Tell"--a great enjoyment to me.

_June 1._--To Grosshesselohe with a party. Siebold and his wife, Prof.
Löher, Fräulein von List, Fräulein Thiersch, Frau von Schaden and her
pretty daughter. It was very pretty to see Siebold's delight in
nature--the Libellulæ, the Blindworm, the crimson and black Cicadæ,
the Orchidæ. The strange whim of Schwanthaler's--the Burg von
Schwaneck--was our destination.

_June 10._--For the last week my work has been rather scanty owing to
bodily ailments. I am at the end of chapter xxi., and am this morning
going to begin chapter xxii. In the interim our chief pleasure had
been a trip to Starnberg by ourselves.

_June 13._--This morning at last free from headache, and able to
write. I am entering on my history of the birthday with some fear and
trembling. This evening we walked, between eight and half-past nine,
in the Wiese, looking towards Nymphenburg. The light delicious--the
west glowing; the faint crescent moon and Venus pale above it; the
larks filling the air with their songs, which seemed only a little way
above the ground.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 14th June, 1858.]

Words are very clumsy things. I like less and less to handle my
friends' sacred feelings with them. For even those who call themselves
intimate know very little about each other--hardly ever know just
_how_ a sorrow is felt, and hurt each other by their very attempts at
sympathy or consolation. We can bear no hand on our bruises. And so I
feel I have no right to say that I know _how_ the loss of your
mother--"the only person who ever leaned on you"--affects you. I only
know that it must make a deeply-felt crisis in your life, and I know
that the better from having felt a great deal about my own mother and
father, and from having the keenest remembrance of all that
experience. But for this very reason I know that I can't measure what
the event is to you; and if I were near you I should only kiss you and
say nothing. People talk of the feelings dying out as one gets older;
but at present my experience is just the contrary. All the serious
relations of life become so much more real to me--pleasure seems so
slight a thing, and sorrow and duty and endurance so great. I find the
least bit of real human life touch me in a way it never did when I was
younger.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1858.]

_June 17._--This evening G. left me to set out on his journey to
Hofwyl to see his boys.

_June 18._--Went with the Siebolds to Nymphenburg; called at Professor
Knapp's, and saw Liebig's sister, Frau Knapp--a charming,
gentle-mannered woman, with splendid dark eyes.

_June 22._--Tired of loneliness, I went to the Frau von Siebold,
chatted with her over tea, and then heard some music.

_June 23._--My kind little friend (Frau von Siebold) brought me a
lovely bouquet of roses this morning, and invited me to go with them
in the evening to the theatre to see the new comedy, the "Drei
Candidaten," which I did: a miserably poor affair.

_June 24._--G. came in the evening, at 10 o'clock--after I had
suffered a great deal in thinking of the possibilities that might
prevent him from coming.

_June 25._--This morning I have read to G. all I have written during
his absence, and he approves it more than I expected.

_July 7._--This morning we left Munich, setting out in the rain to
Rosenheim by railway. The previous day we dined, and sat a few hours
with the dear, charming Siebolds, and parted from them with
regret--glad to leave Munich, but not to leave the friends who had
been so kind to us. For a week before I had been ill--almost a luxury,
because of the love that tended me. But the general languor and sense
of depression produced by Munich air and way of life was no luxury,
and I was glad to say a last good-bye to the quaint pepper-boxes of
the Frauen-Kirche.

[Sidenote: Munich to Dresden, 1858.]

At the Rosenheim station we got into the longest of omnibuses, which
took us to the _Gasthof_, where we were to dine and lunch, and then
mount into the _Stell-wagen_, which would carry us to Prien, on the
borders of the Chiem See. Rosenheim is a considerable and rather
quaint-looking town, interrupted by orchards and characterized in a
passing glance by the piazzas that are seen everywhere fronting the
shops. It has a grand view of the mountains, still a long way off. The
afternoon was cloudy, with intermittent rain, and did not set off the
landscape. Nevertheless, I had much enjoyment in this four or five
hours' journey to Prien. The little villages, with picturesque, wide
gables, projecting roofs, and wooden galleries--with abundant
orchards--with felled trunks of trees and stacks of fir-wood, telling
of the near neighborhood of the forest--were what I liked best in this
ride.

We had no sooner entered the steamboat to cross the Chiem See than it
began to rain heavily, and I kept below, only peeping now and then at
the mountains and the green islands, with their monasteries. From the
opposite bank of the See we had a grand view of the mountains, all
dark purple under the clouded sky. Before us was a point where the
nearer mountains opened and allowed us a view of their more distant
brethren receding in a fainter and fainter blue--a marsh in the
foreground, where the wild-ducks were flying. Our drive from this end
of the lake to Traunstein was lovely--through fertile, cultivated
land, everywhere married to bits of forest. The green meadow or the
golden corn sloped upward towards pine woods, or the bushy greenness
seemed to run with wild freedom far out into long promontories among
the ripening crops. Here and there the country had the aspect of a
grand park from the beautiful intermingling of wood and field, without
any line of fence.

Then came the red sunset, and it was dark when we entered Traunstein,
where we had to pass the night. Among our companions in the day's
journey had been a long-faced, cloaked, slow and solemn man, whom
George called the author of "Eugene Aram," and I Don Quixote, he was
so given to serious remonstrance with the vices he met on the road. We
had been constantly deceived in the length of our stages--on the
principle, possibly, of keeping up our spirits. The next morning there
was the same tenderness shown about the starting of the _Stell-wagen_:
at first it was to start at seven, then at half-past, then when
another _Wagen_ came with its cargo of passengers. This was too much
for Don Quixote; and when the stout, red-faced _Wirth_ had given him
still another answer about the time of starting, he began, in slow and
monotonous indignation, "Warum lügen sie so? Sie werden machen dass
kein Mensch diesen Weg kommen wird,"[4] etc. Whereupon the _Wirth_
looked red-faced, stout, and unwashed as before, without any
perceptible expression of face supervening.

The next morning the weather looked doubtful, and so we gave up
going to the König See for that day, determining to ramble on the
Mönchsberg and enjoy the beauties of Salzburg instead. The morning
brightened as the sun ascended, and we had a delicious ramble on the
Mönchsberg--looking down on the lovely, peaceful plain, below the
grand old Untersberg, where the sleeping Kaiser awaits his
resurrection in that "good time coming;" watching the white mist
floating along the sides of the dark mountains, and wandering under
the shadow of the plantation, where the ground was green with
luxuriant hawkweed, as at Nymphenburg, near Munich. The outline of the
castle and its rock is remarkably fine, and reminded us of Gorey in
Jersey. But we had a still finer view of it when we drove out to
Aigen. On our way thither we had sight of the Watzmann, the highest
mountain in Bavarian Tyrol--emerging from behind the great shoulder of
the Untersberg. It was the only mountain within sight that had snow on
its summit. Once at Aigen, and descended from our carriage, we had a
delicious walk, up and up, along a road of continual steps, by the
course of the mountain-stream, which fell in a series of cascades over
great heaps of bowlders; then back again, by a round-about way, to our
vehicle and home, enjoying the sight of old Watzmann again, and the
grand mass of Salzburg Castle on its sloping rock.

We encountered a _table-d'hôte_ acquaintance who had been to
Berchtesgaden and the König See, driven through the salt-mine, and had
had altogether a perfect expedition on this day, when we had not had
the courage to set off. Never mind! we had enjoyed our day.

We thought it wisest the next morning to renounce the König See, and
pursue our way to Ischl by the _Stell-wagen_. We were fortunate enough
to secure two places in the _coupé_, and I enjoyed greatly the quiet
outlook, from my comfortable corner, on the changing landscape--green
valley and hill and mountain; here and there a picturesque Tyrolese
village, and once or twice a fine lake.

The greatest charm of charming Ischl is the crystal Traun, surely the
purest of streams. Away again early the next morning in the _coupé_ of
the _Stell-wagen_, through a country more and more beautiful--high,
woody mountains sloping steeply down to narrow, fertile, green
valleys, the road winding amongst them so as to show a perpetual
variety of graceful outlines where the sloping mountains met in the
distance before us. As we approached the Gmunden See the masses became
grander and more rocky, and the valley opened wider. It was Sunday,
and when we left the _Stell-wagen_ we found quite a crowd in Sunday
clothes standing round the place of embarkation for the steamboat that
was to take us along the lake. Gmunden is another pretty place at the
head of the lake, but apart from this one advantage inferior to Ischl.
We got on to the slowest of railways here, getting down at the station
near the falls of the Traun, where we dined at the pleasant inn, and
fed our eyes on the clear river again hurrying over the rocks. Behind
the great fall there is a sort of inner chamber, where the water
rushes perpetually over a stone altar. At the station, as we waited
for the train, it began to rain, and the good-natured looking woman
asked us to take shelter in her little station-house--a single room
not more than eight feet square, where she lived with her husband and
two little girls all the year round. The good couple looked more
contented than half the well-lodged people in the world. He used to be
a _drozchky_ driver; and after that life of uncertain gains, which had
many days quite penniless and therefore dinnerless, he found his
present position quite a pleasant lot.

On to Linz, when the train came, gradually losing sight of the
Tyrolean mountains and entering the great plain of the Danube. Our
voyage the next day in the steamboat was unfortunate: we had incessant
rain till we had passed all the finest parts of the banks. But when we
had landed, the sun shone out brilliantly, and so our entrance into
Vienna, through the long suburb, with perpetual shops and odd names
(Prschka, for example, which a German in our omnibus thought not at
all remarkable for consonants!) was quite cheerful. We made our way
through the city and across the bridge to the Weissen Ross, which was
full; so we went to the Drei Rosen, which received us. The sunshine
was transient; it began to rain again when we went out to look at St.
Stephen's, but the delight of seeing that glorious building could not
be marred by a little rain. The tower of this church is worth going to
Vienna to see.

The aspect of the city is that of an inferior Paris; the shops have an
elegance that one sees nowhere else in Germany; the streets are clean,
the houses tall and stately. The next morning we had a view of the
town from the Belvedere Terrace; St. Stephen's sending its exquisite
tower aloft from among an almost level forest of houses and
inconspicuous churches. It is a magnificent collection of pictures at
the Belvedere; but we were so unfortunate as only to be able to see
them once, the gallery being shut up on the Wednesday; and so, many
pictures have faded from my memory, even of those which I had time to
distinguish. Titian's Danae was one that delighted us; besides this I
remember Giorgione's Lucrezia Borgia, with the cruel, cruel eyes; the
remarkable head of Christ; a proud Italian face in a red garment, I
think by Correggio; and two heads by Denner, the most wonderful of all
his wonderful heads that I have seen. There is an Ecce Homo by Titian
which is thought highly of, and is splendid in composition and color,
but the Christ is abject, the Pontius Pilate vulgar: amazing that they
could have been painted by the same man who conceived and executed the
Christo della Moneta! There are huge Veroneses, too, splendid and
interesting.

The Liechtenstein collection we saw twice, and that remains with me
much more distinctly--the room full of Rubens's history of Decius,
more magnificent even than he usually is in color; then his glorious
Assumption of the Virgin, and opposite to it the portraits of his two
boys; the portrait of his lovely wife going to the bath with brown
drapery round her; and the fine portraits by Vandyke, especially the
pale, delicate face of Wallenstein, with blue eyes and pale auburn
locks.

Another great pleasure we had at Vienna--next after the sight of St.
Stephen's and the pictures--was a visit to Hyrtl, the anatomist, who
showed us some of his wonderful preparations, showing the vascular and
nervous systems in the lungs, liver, kidneys, and intestinal canal of
various animals. He told us the deeply interesting story of the loss
of his fortune in the Vienna revolution of '48. He was compelled by
the revolutionists to attend on the wounded for three days' running.
When at last he came to his house to change his clothes he found
nothing but four bare walls! His fortune in Government bonds was
burned along with the house, as well as all his precious collection
of anatomical preparations, etc. He told us that since that great
shock his nerves have been so susceptible that he sheds tears at the
most trifling events, and has a depression of spirits which often
keeps him silent for days. He only received a very slight sum from
Government in compensation for his loss.

One evening we strolled in the Volksgarten and saw the "Theseus
killing the Centaur," by Canova, which stands in a temple built for
its reception. But the garden to be best remembered by us was that at
Schönbrunn, a labyrinth of stately avenues with their terminal
fountains. We amused ourselves for some time with the menagerie here,
the lions especially, who lay in dignified sleepiness till the
approach of feeding-time made them open eager eyes and pace
impatiently about their dens.

We set off from Vienna in the evening with a family of Wallachians as
our companions, one of whom, an elderly man, could speak no German,
and began to address G. in Wallachian, as if that were the common
language of all the earth. We managed to sleep enough for a night's
rest, in spite of intense heat and our cramped positions, and arrived
in very good condition at Prague in the fine morning.

Out we went after breakfast, that we might see as much as possible of
the grand old city in one day; and our morning was occupied chiefly in
walking about and getting views of striking exteriors. The most
interesting things we saw were the Jewish burial-ground (the Alter
Friedhof) and the old synagogue. The Friedhof is unique--with a wild
growth of grass and shrubs and trees, and a multitude of quaint tombs
in all sorts of positions, looking like the fragments of a great
building, or as if they had been shaken by an earthquake. We saw a
lovely dark-eyed Jewish child here, which we were glad to kiss in all
its dirt. Then came the sombre old synagogue, with its smoked groins,
and lamp forever burning. An intelligent Jew was our _cicerone_, and
read us some Hebrew out of the precious old book of the law.

After dinner we took a carriage and went across the wonderful bridge
of St. Jean Nepomuck, with its avenue of statues, towards the
Radschin--an ugly, straight-lined building, but grand in effect from
its magnificent site, on the summit of an eminence crowded with old,
massive buildings. The view from this eminence is one of the most
impressive in the world--perhaps as much from one's associations with
Prague as from its visible grandeur and antiquity. The cathedral close
to the Radschin is a melancholy object on the outside--left with
unfinished sides like scars. The interior is rich, but sadly confused
in its ornamentation, like so many of the grand old churches--hideous
altars of bastard style disgracing exquisite Gothic columns--cruellest
of all in St. Stephen's at Vienna!

We got our view from a _Damen Stift_[5] (for ladies of family),
founded by Maria Theresa, whose blond beauty looked down on us from a
striking portrait. Close in front of us, sloping downwards, was a
pleasant orchard; then came the river, with its long, long bridge and
grand gateway; then the sober-colored city, with its surrounding plain
and distant hills. In the evening we went to the theatre--a shabby,
ugly building--and heard Spohr's Jessonda.

[Sidenote: Dresden, 1858.]

The next morning early by railway to Dresden--a charming journey, for
it took us right through the Saxon Switzerland, with its castellated
rocks and firs. At four o'clock we were dining comfortably at the
Hotel de Pologne, and the next morning (Sunday) we secured our
lodgings--a whole apartment of six rooms, all to ourselves, for 18_s._
per week! By nine o'clock we were established in our new home, where
we were to enjoy six weeks' quiet work, undisturbed by visits and
visitors. And so we did. We were as happy as princes--are not--George
writing at the far corner of the great _salon_, I at my _Schrank_ in
my own private room, with closed doors. Here I wrote the latter half
of the second volume of "Adam Bede" in the long mornings that our
early hours--rising at six o'clock--secured us. Three mornings in the
week we went to the Picture Gallery from twelve till one. The first
day we went was a Sunday, when there is always a crowd in the Madonna
Cabinet. I sat down on the sofa opposite the picture for an instant,
but a sort of awe, as if I were suddenly in the living presence of
some glorious being, made my heart swell too much for me to remain
comfortably, and we hurried out of the room. On subsequent mornings we
always came in, the last minutes of our stay, to look at this
sublimest picture, and while the others, except the Christo della
Moneta and Holbein's Madonna, lost much of their first interest, this
became harder and harder to leave. Holbein's Madonna is very
exquisite--a divinely gentle, golden haired blonde, with eyes cast
down, in an attitude of unconscious, easy grace--the loveliest of all
the Madonnas in the Dresden Gallery except the Sistine. By the side
of it is a wonderful portrait by Holbein, which I especially enjoyed
looking at. It represents nothing more lofty than a plain, weighty man
of business, a goldsmith; but the eminently fine painting brings out
all the weighty, calm, good sense that lies in a first-rate character
of that order.

We looked at the Zinsgroschen (Titian's), too, every day, and after
that at the great painter's Venus, fit for its purity and sacred
loveliness to hang in a temple with Madonnas. Palma's Venus, which
hangs near, was an excellent foil, because it is pretty and pure in
itself; but beside the Titian it is common and unmeaning.

Another interesting case of comparison was that between the original
Zinsgroschen and a copy by an Italian painter, which hangs on the
opposite wall of the cabinet. This is considered a fine copy, and
would be a fine picture if one had never seen the original; but all
the finest effects are gone in the copy.

The four large Correggios hanging together--the _Nacht_; the Madonna
with St. Sebastian, of the smiling graceful character, with the little
cherub riding astride a cloud; the Madonna with St. Hubert; and a
third Madonna, very grave and sweet--painted when he was
nineteen--remained with me very vividly. They are full of life, though
the life is not of a high order; and I should have surmised, without
any previous knowledge, that the painter was among the first masters
of _technique_. The Magdalen is sweet in conception, but seems to have
less than the usual merit of Correggio's pictures as to painting. A
picture we delighted in extremely was one of Murillo's--St. Rodriguez,
fatally wounded, receiving the Crown of Martyrdom. The attitude and
expression are sublime, and strikingly distinguished from all other
pictures of saints I have ever seen. He stands erect in his scarlet
and white robes, with face upturned, the arms held simply downward,
but the hands held open in a receptive attitude. The silly cupid-like
angel holding the martyr's crown in the corner spoils all.

I did not half satisfy my appetite for the rich collection of Flemish
and Dutch pictures here--for Teniers, Ryckart, Gerard Dow, Terburg,
Mieris, and the rest. Rembrandt looks great here in his portraits, but
I like none of the other pictures by him; the Ganymede is an offence.
Guido is superlatively odious in his Christs, in agonized or ecstatic
attitudes--much about the level of the accomplished London beggar.
Dear, grand old Rubens does not show to great advantage, except in the
charming half-length Diana returning from Hunting, the Love Garden,
and the sketch of his Judgment of Paris.

The most popular Murillo, and apparently one of the most popular
Madonnas in the gallery, is the simple, sad mother with her child,
without the least divinity in it, suggesting a dead or sick father,
and imperfect nourishment in a garret. In that light it is touching. A
fellow-traveller in the railway to Leipzig told us he had seen this
picture in 1848 with nine bullet holes in it! The firing from the
hotel of the Stadt Rom bore directly on the Picture Gallery.

Veronese is imposing in one of the large rooms--the Adoration of the
Magi, the Marriage at Cana, the Finding of Moses, etc., making grand
masses of color on the lower part of the walls; but to me he is
ignoble as a painter of human beings.

It was a charming life--our six weeks at Dresden. There were the
open-air concerts at the Grosser Garten and the Brühl'sche Terrace;
the Sommer Theater, where we saw our favorite comic actor Merbitz; the
walks into the open country, with the grand stretch of sky all round;
the Zouaves, with their wondrous make-ups as women; Räder, the
humorous comedian at the Sink'sche Bad Theater; our quiet afternoons
in our pleasant _salon_--all helping to make an agreeable fringe to
the quiet working time.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 28th July, 1858.]

Since I wrote to you last I have lived through a great deal of
exquisite pleasure. First an attack of illness during our last week at
Munich, which I reckon among my pleasures because I was nursed so
tenderly. Then a fortnight's unspeakable journey to Salzburg, Ischl,
Linz, Vienna, Prague, and finally Dresden, which is our last
resting-place before returning to Richmond, where we hope to be at the
beginning of September. Dresden is a proper climax; for all other art
seems only a preparation for feeling the superiority of the Madonna di
San Sisto the more. We go three days a week to the gallery, and every
day--after looking at other pictures--we go to take a parting draught
of delight at Titian's Zinsgroschen and the _Einzige_ Madonna. In
other respects I am particularly enjoying our residence here--we are
so quiet, having determined to know no one and give ourselves up to
work. We both feel a happy change in our health from leaving Munich,
though I am reconciled to our long stay there by the fact that Mr.
Lewes gained so much from his intercourse with the men of science
there, especially Bischoff, Siebold, and Harless. I remembered your
passion for autographs, and asked Liebig for his on your account. I
was not sure that you would care enough about the handwriting of
other luminaries; for there is such a thing as being European and yet
obscure--a fixed star visible only from observatories.

You will be interested to hear that I saw Strauss at Munich. He came
for a week's visit before we left. I had a quarter of an hour's chat
with him alone, and was very agreeably impressed by him. He looked
much more serene, and his face had a far sweeter expression, than when
I saw him in that dumb way at Cologne. He speaks with very choice
words, like a man strictly truthful in the use of language. Will you
undertake to tell Mrs. Call from me that he begged me to give his
kindest remembrances to her and to her father,[6] of whom he spoke
with much interest and regard as his earliest English friend? I dare
not begin to write about other things or people that I have seen in
these crowded weeks. They must wait till I have you by my side again,
which I hope will happen some day.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1858.]

From Dresden, one showery day at the end of August, we set off to
Leipzig, the first stage on our way home. Here we spent two nights; had
a glimpse of the old town with its fine market; dined at Brockhaus's;
saw the picture-gallery, carrying away a lasting delight in Calame's
great landscapes and De Dreux's dogs, which are far better worth seeing
than De la Roche's "Napoleon at Fontainebleau"--considered the glory of
the gallery; went with Victor Carus to his museum and saw an Amphioxus;
and finally spent the evening at an open-air concert in Carus's
company. Early in the morning we set off by railway, and travelled
night and day till we reached home on the 2d September.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 5th Sept. 1858.]

Will you not write to the author of "Thorndale" and express your
sympathy? He is a very diffident man, who would be susceptible to that
sort of fellowship; and one should give a gleam of happiness where it
is possible. I shall write you nothing worth reading for the next
three months, so here is an opportunity for you to satisfy a large
appetite for generous deeds. You can write to me a great many times
without getting anything worth having in return.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 6th Oct. 1858.]

Thanks for the verses on Buckle. I'm afraid I feel a malicious delight
in them, for he is a writer who inspires me with a personal dislike;
not to put too fine a point on it, he impresses me as an irreligious,
conceited man.

Long ago I had offered to write about Newman, but gave it up again.

     The second volume of "Adam Bede" had been sent to Blackwood
     on 7th September, the third had followed two months later,
     and there are the following entries in the Journal in
     November:

[Sidenote: Journal, 1858.]

_Nov. 1._--I have begun Carlyle's "Life of Frederic the Great," and
have also been thinking much of my own life to come. This is a moment
of suspense, for I am awaiting Blackwood's opinion and proposals
concerning "Adam Bede."

_Nov. 4._--Received a letter from Blackwood containing warm praise of
my third volume, and offering £800 for the copyright of "Adam Bede"
for four years. I wrote to accept.

_Nov. 10._--Wilkie Collins and Mr. Pigott came to dine with us after a
walk by the river. I was pleased with Wilkie Collins--there is a
sturdy uprightness about him that makes all opinion and all occupation
respectable.

_Nov. 16._--Wrote the last word of "Adam Bede" and sent it to Mr.
Langford. _Jubilate._

[Sidenote: History of "Adam Bede."]

The germ of "Adam Bede" was an anecdote told me by my Methodist Aunt
Samuel (the wife of my father's younger brother)--an anecdote from her
own experience. We were sitting together one afternoon during her
visit to me at Griff, probably in 1839 or 1840, when it occurred to
her to tell me how she had visited a condemned criminal--a very
ignorant girl, who had murdered her child and refused to confess; how
she had stayed with her praying through the night, and how the poor
creature at last broke out into tears and confessed her crime. My aunt
afterwards went with her in the cart to the place of execution; and
she described to me the great respect with which this ministry of hers
was regarded by the official people about the jail. The story, told by
my aunt with great feeling, affected me deeply, and I never lost the
impression of that afternoon and our talk together; but I believe I
never mentioned it, through all the intervening years, till something
prompted me to tell it to George in December, 1856, when I had begun
to write the "Scenes of Clerical Life." He remarked that the scene in
the prison would make a fine element in a story; and I afterwards
began to think of blending this and some other recollections of my
aunt in one story, with some points in my father's early life and
character. The problem of construction that remained was to make the
unhappy girl one of the chief _dramatis personæ_, and connect her with
the hero. At first I thought of making the story one of the series of
"Scenes," but afterwards, when several motives had induced me close
these with "Janet's Repentance," I determined on making what we always
called in our conversation "My Aunt's Story" the subject of a long
novel, which I accordingly began to write on the 22d October, 1857.

The character of Dinah grew out of my recollections of my aunt, but
Dinah is not at all like my aunt, who was a very small, black-eyed
woman, and (as I was told, for I never heard her preach) very vehement
in her style of preaching. She had left off preaching when I knew her,
being probably sixty years old, and in delicate health; and she had
become, as my father told me, much more gentle and subdued than she
had been in the days of her active ministry and bodily strength, when
she could not rest without exhorting and remonstrating in season and
out of season. I was very fond of her, and enjoyed the few weeks of
her stay with me greatly. She was loving and kind to me, and I could
talk to her about my inward life, which was closely shut up from those
usually round me. I saw her only twice again, for much shorter
periods--once at her own home at Wirksworth, in Derbyshire, and once
at my father's last residence, Foleshill.

The character of Adam and one or two incidents connected with him were
suggested by my father's early life; but Adam is not my father any
more than Dinah is my aunt. Indeed, there is not a single portrait in
Adam Bede--only the suggestions of experience wrought up into new
combinations. When I began to write it, the only elements I had
determined on, besides the character of Dinah, were the character of
Adam, his relation to Arthur Donnithorne, and their mutual relations
to Hetty--_i.e._, to the girl who commits child-murder--the scene in
the prison being, of course, the climax towards which I worked.
Everything else grew out of the characters and their mutual
relations. Dinah's ultimate relation to Adam was suggested by George,
when I had read to him the first part of the first volume: he was so
delighted with the presentation of Dinah, and so convinced that the
reader's interest would centre in her, that he wanted her to be the
principal figure at the last. I accepted the idea at once, and from
the end of the third chapter worked with it constantly in view.

The first volume was written at Richmond, and given to Blackwood in
March. He expressed great admiration of its freshness and vividness,
but seemed to hesitate about putting it in the Magazine, which was the
form of publication he as well as myself had previously contemplated.
He still _wished_ to have it for the Magazine, but desired to know the
course of the story. At _present_ he saw nothing to prevent its
reception in "Maga," but he would like to see more. I am uncertain
whether his doubts rested solely on Hetty's relation to Arthur, or
whether they were also directed towards the treatment of Methodism by
the Church. I refused to tell my story beforehand, on the ground that
I would not have it judged apart from my _treatment_, which alone
determines the moral quality of art; and ultimately I proposed that
the notion of publication in "Maga" should be given up, and that the
novel should be published in three volumes at Christmas, if possible.
He assented.

I began the second volume in the second week of my stay at Munich,
about the middle of April. While we were at Munich George expressed
his fear that Adam's part was too passive throughout the drama, and
that it was important for him to be brought into more direct collision
with Arthur. This doubt haunted me, and out of it grew the scene in
the wood between Arthur and Adam; the fight came to me as a
_necessity_ one night at the Munich opera, when I was listening to
"William Tell." Work was slow and interrupted at Munich, and when we
left I had only written to the beginning of the dance on the Birthday
Feast; but at Dresden I wrote uninterruptedly and with great enjoyment
in the long, quiet mornings, and there I nearly finished the second
volume--all, I think, but the last chapter, which I wrote here in the
old room at Richmond in the first week of September, and then sent the
MS. off to Blackwood. The opening of the third volume--Hetty's
journey--was, I think, written more rapidly than the rest of the book,
and was left without the slightest alteration of the first draught.
Throughout the book I have altered little; and the only cases I think
in which George suggested more than a verbal alteration, when I read
the MS. aloud to him, were the first scene at the Farm, and the scene
in the wood between Arthur and Adam, both of which he recommended me
to "space out" a little, which I did.

When, on October 29, I had written to the end of the love-scene at the
Farm between Adam and Dinah, I sent the MS. to Blackwood, since the
remainder of the third volume could not affect the judgment passed on
what had gone before. He wrote back in warm admiration, and offered
me, on the part of the firm, £800 for four years' copyright. I
accepted the offer. The last words of the third volume were written
and despatched on their way to Edinburgh, November the 16th, and now
on the last day of the same month I have written this slight history
of my book. I love it very much, and am deeply thankful to have
written it, whatever the public may say to it--a result which is
still in darkness, for I have at present had only four sheets of the
proof. The book would have been published at Christmas, or rather
early in December, but that Bulwer's "What will he do with it?" was to
be published by Blackwood at that time, and it was thought that this
novel might interfere with mine.

     The manuscript of "Adam Bede" bears the following
     inscription: "To my dear husband, George Henry Lewes, I give
     the MS. of a work which would never have been written but for
     the happiness which his love has conferred on my life."

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 25th Nov. 1858.]

I shall be much obliged if you will accept for me Tauchnitz's offer of
£30 for the English reprint of "Clerical Scenes." And will you also be
so good as to desire that Tauchnitz may register the book in Germany,
as I understand that is the only security against its being translated
without our knowledge; and I shudder at the idea of my books being
turned into hideous German by an incompetent translator.

I return the proofs by to-day's post. The dialect must be toned down
all through in correcting the proofs, for I found it impossible to
keep it subdued enough in writing. I am aware that the spelling which
represents a dialect perfectly well to those who know it by the ear,
is likely to be unintelligible to others. I hope the sheets will come
rapidly and regularly now, for I dislike lingering, hesitating
processes.

Your praise of my ending was very warming and cheering to me in the
foggy weather. I'm sure, if I have written well, your pleasant letters
have had something to do with it. Can anything be done in America for
"Adam Bede?" I suppose not--as my name is not known there.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1858.]

_Nov. 25._--We had a visit from Mr. Bray, who told us much that
interested us about Mr. Richard Congreve, and also his own affairs.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 26th Nov. 1858.]

I am very grateful to you for sending me a few authentic words from
your own self. They are unspeakably precious to me. I mean that quite
literally, for there is no putting into words any feeling that has
been of long growth within us. It is easy to say how we love _new_
friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all
the fibres that knit us to the old. I have been thinking of you
incessantly in the waking hours, and feel a growing hunger to know
more precise details about you. I am of a too sordid and anxious
disposition, prone to dwell almost exclusively on fears instead of
hopes, and to lay in a larger stock of resignation than of any other
form of confidence. But I try to extract some comfort this morning
from my consciousness of this disposition, by thinking that nothing is
ever so bad as my imagination paints it. And then I know there are
incommunicable feelings within us capable of creating our best
happiness at the very time others can see nothing but our troubles.
And so I go on arguing with myself, and trying to live inside _you_
and looking at things in all the lights I can fancy you seeing them
in, for the sake of getting cheerful about you in spite of Coventry.

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, Christmas Day, 1858.]

The well-flavored mollusks came this morning. It was very kind of you;
and if you remember how fond I am of oysters, your good-nature will
have the more pleasure in furnishing my _gourmandise_ with the treat.
I have a childish delight in any little act of genuine friendliness
towards us--and yet not childish, for how little we thought of
people's goodness towards us when we were children. It takes a good
deal of experience to tell one the rarity of a thoroughly
disinterested kindness.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 28th Dec. 1858.]

I see with you entirely about the preface: indeed I had myself
anticipated the very effects you predict. The deprecatory tone is not
one I can ever take willingly, but I am conscious of a shrinking sort
of pride which is likely to warp my judgment in many personal
questions, and on that ground I distrusted my own opinion.

Mr. Lewes went to Vernon Hill yesterday for a few days' change of air,
but before he went he said, "Ask Mr. Blackwood what he thinks of
putting a mere advertisement at the beginning of the book to this
effect: As the story of 'Adam Bede' will lose much of its effect if
the development is foreseen, the author requests those critics who may
honor him with a notice to abstain from telling the story." I write my
note of interrogation accordingly "?"

Pray do not begin to read the second volume until it is all in print.
There is necessarily a lull of interest in it to prepare for the
crescendo. I am delighted that you like my Mrs. Poyser. I'm very sorry
to part with her and some of my other characters--there seems to be so
much more to be done with them. Mr. Lewes says she gets better and
better as the book goes on; and I was certainly conscious of writing
her dialogue with heightening gusto. Even in our imaginary worlds
there is the sorrow of parting.

I hope the Christmas weather is as bright in your beautiful Edinburgh
as it is here, and that you are enjoying all other Christmas pleasures
too without disturbance.

I have not yet made up my mind what my next story is to be, but I
must not lie fallow any longer when the new year is come.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1858.]

_Dec. 25 (Christmas Day)._--George and I spent this wet day very
happily alone together. We are reading Scott's life in the evenings
with much enjoyment. I am reading through Horace in this pause.

_Dec. 31._--The last day of the dear old year, which has been full of
expected and unexpected happiness. "Adam Bede" has been written, and
the second volume is in type. The first number of George's "Physiology
of Common Life"--a work in which he has had much happy occupation--is
published to-day; and both his position as a scientific writer and his
inward satisfaction in that part of his studies have been much
heightened during the past year. Our double life is more and more
blessed--more and more complete.

     I think this chapter cannot more fitly conclude than with the
     following extract from Mr. G. H. Lewes's Journal, with which
     Mr. Charles Lewes has been good enough to furnish me:

     _Jan. 28, 1859._--Walked along the Thames towards Kew to meet
     Herbert Spencer, who was to spend the day with us, and we
     chatted with him on matters personal and philosophical. I owe
     him a debt of gratitude. My acquaintance with him was the
     brightest ray in a very dreary, _wasted_ period of my life. I
     have given up all ambition whatever, lived from hand to
     mouth, and thought the evil of each day sufficient. The
     stimulus of his intellect, especially during our long walks,
     roused my energy once more and revived my dormant love of
     science. His intense theorizing tendency was contagious, and
     it was only the stimulus of a _theory_ which could then have
     induced me to work. I owe Spencer another and a deeper debt.
     It was through him that I learned to know Marian--to know her
     was to love her--and since then my life has been a new birth.
     To her I owe all my prosperity and all my happiness. God
     bless her!


_SUMMARY._

JANUARY, 1858, TO DECEMBER, 1858.

     _Times_ reviews "Scenes of Clerical Life"--Helps's
     opinion--Subscription to the "Scenes"--Letter from Dickens,
     18th Jan. 1858--Letter from Froude, 17th Jan.--Letter to
     Miss Hennell--Mr. Wm. Smith, author of
     "Thorndale"--Ruskin--Reading the "Eumenides" and
     Wordsworth--Letter to John Blackwood on Dickens's
     Letter--Letter from Mrs. Carlyle--Letter from
     Faraday--"Clerical Scenes" moving--John Blackwood calls, and
     George Eliot reveals herself--Takes MS. of first part of
     "Adam Bede"--Letters to Charles Bray on reports of
     authorship--Visit to Germany--Description of Nürnberg--The
     Frauen-Kirche--Effect of the music--Albert Dürer's
     house--Munich--Lodgings--Pinacothek--Rubens--Crucifixion--Theresien
     Wiese--Schwanthaler's "Bavaria"--The Alps--Letter to Miss
     Hennell--Contrast between Catholic and Protestant
     worship--Glyptothek--Pictures--Statues--Cornelius
     frescoes--Herr Oldenburg--Kaulbach--Bodenstedt--Professor
     Wagner--Martius--Liebig--Geibel--Heyse--Carrière--Prince
     Radziwill's "Faust"--Professor Löher--Baron
     Schack--Genelli--Professor Bluntschli--Letter to Miss
     Hennell--Description of Munich life--Kaulbach's pictures--The
     Siebolds--The Neue Pinacothek--Pictures and porcelain
     painting--Mme. Bodenstedt--Letter to Blackwood--Combinations
     of artist in writing--Hears "William Tell"--Expedition to
     Grosshesselohe--Progress with "Adam Bede"--Letter to Miss
     Hennell on death of her mother--Mr. Lewes goes to
     Hofwyl--Frau Knapp--Mr. Lewes returns--Leave Munich for
     Traunstein--Salzburg--Ischl--Linz--By Danube to Vienna--St.
     Stephen's--Belvedere pictures--Liechtenstein
     collection--Hyrtl the anatomist--Prague--Jewish burial-ground
     and the old synagogue--To Dresden--Latter half of second
     volume of "Adam Bede" written--First impression of Sistine
     Madonna--The Tribute money--Holbein's Madonna--The
     Correggios--Dutch school--Murillo--Letter to Miss
     Hennell--Description of life at Dresden--Health
     improved--Mention of Strauss at Munich--Dresden to
     Leipzig--Home to Richmond--Letter to Miss Hennell--Opinion of
     Buckle--Blackwood offers £800 for "Adam Bede"--Wilkie Collins
     and Mr. Pigott--History of "Adam Bede"--Letter to Charles
     Bray--Disinterested kindness--Letter to Blackwood suggesting
     preface to "Adam Bede"--Reading Scott's Life and
     Horace--Review of year--Extract from G. H. Lewes's Journal.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The Brays' new house.

[2] He is really a charming man, is he not?

[3] Picture of interior of a Lunatic Asylum.

[4] "Why do you tell such lies? The result of it will be that no one
will travel this way."

[5] Charitable Institution for Ladies.

[6] Dr. Brabant.




CHAPTER IX.


[Sidenote: Journal, 1859.]

_Jan. 12._--We went into town to-day and looked in the "Annual
Register" for cases of _inundation_. Letter from Blackwood to-day,
speaking of renewed delight in "Adam Bede," and proposing 1st Feb. as
the day of publication. Read the article in yesterday's _Times_ on
George's "Sea-side Studies"--highly gratifying. We are still reading
Scott's life with great interest; and G. is reading to me Michelet's
book "De l'Amour."

_Jan. 15._--I corrected the last sheets of "Adam Bede," and we
afterwards walked to Wimbledon to see our new house, which we have
taken for seven years. I hired the servant--another bit of business
done: and then we had a delightful walk across Wimbledon Common and
through Richmond Park homeward. The air was clear and cold--the sky
magnificent.

_Jan. 31._--Received a check for £400 from Blackwood, being the first
instalment of the payment for four years' copyright of "Adam Bede."
To-morrow the book is to be subscribed, and Blackwood writes very
pleasantly--confident of its "great success." Afterwards we went into
town, paid money into the bank, and ordered part of our china and
glass towards house-keeping.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 31st Jan. 1859.]

Enclosed is the formal acknowledgment, bearing my signature, and with
it let me beg you to accept my thanks--_not_ formal but heartfelt--for
the generous way in which you have all along helped me with words and
with deeds.

The impression "Adam Bede" has made on you and Major Blackwood--of
whom I have always been pleased to think as concurring with your
views--is my best encouragement, and counterbalances, in some degree,
the depressing influences to which I am peculiarly sensitive. I
perceive that I have not the characteristics of the "popular author,"
and yet I am much in need of the warmly expressed sympathy which only
popularity can win.

A good subscription would be cheering, but I can understand that it is
not decisive of success or non-success. Thank you for promising to let
me know about it as soon as possible.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1859.]

_Feb. 6._--Yesterday we went to take possession of Holly Lodge,
Wandsworth, which is to be our dwelling, we expect, for years to come.
It was a deliciously fresh bright day--I will accept the omen. A
letter came from Blackwood telling me the result of the subscription
to "Adam Bede," which was published on the 1st: 730 copies, Mudie
having taken 500 on the publisher's terms--_i.e._, ten per cent. on
the sale price. At first he had stood out for a larger reduction, and
would only take 50, but at last he came round. In this letter
Blackwood told me the first _ab extra_ opinion of the book, which
happened to be precisely what I most desired. A cabinet-maker (brother
to Blackwood's managing clerk) had read the sheets, and declared that
the writer must have been brought up to the business, or at least had
listened to the workmen in their workshop.

_Feb. 12._--Received a cheering letter from Blackwood, saying that he
finds "Adam Bede" making just the impression he had anticipated among
his own friends and connections, and enclosing a parcel from Dr. John
Brown "to the author of 'Adam Bede.'" The parcel contained "Rab and
his Friends," with an inscription.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 13th Feb. 1859.]

Will you tell Dr. John Brown that when I read an account of "Rab and
his Friends" in a newspaper, I wished I had the story to read at full
length; and I thought to myself the writer of "Rab" would perhaps like
"Adam Bede."

When you have told him this, he will understand the peculiar pleasure
I had on opening the little parcel with "Rab" inside, and a kind word
from Rab's friend. I have read the story twice--once aloud, and once
to myself, very slowly, that I might dwell on the pictures of Rab and
Ailie, and carry them about with me more distinctly. I will not say
any commonplace words of admiration about what has touched me so
deeply; there is no adjective of that sort left undefiled by the
newspapers. The writer of "Rab" _knows_ that I must love the grim old
mastiff with the short tail and the long dewlaps--that I must have
felt present at the scenes of Ailie's last trial.

Thanks for your cheering letter. I will be hopeful--if I can.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 19th Feb. 1859.]

You have the art of writing just the sort of letters I care
for--sincere letters, like your own talk. We are tolerably settled
now, except that we have only a temporary servant; and I shall not be
quite at ease until I have a trustworthy woman who will manage without
incessant dogging. Our home is very comfortable, with far more of
vulgar indulgences in it than I ever expected to have again; but you
must not imagine it a snug place, just peeping above the holly
bushes. Imagine it rather as a tall cake, with a low garnish of holly
and laurel. As it is, we are very well off, with glorious breezy
walks, and wide horizons, well ventilated rooms, and abundant water.
If I allowed myself to have any longings beyond what is given, they
would be for a nook quite in the country, far away from
palaces--Crystal or otherwise--with an orchard behind me full of old
trees, and rough grass and hedge-row paths among the endless fields
where you meet nobody. We talk of such things sometimes, along with
old age and dim faculties, and a small independence to save us from
writing drivel for dishonest money. In the mean time the business of
life shuts us up within the environs of London and within sight of
human advancements, which I should be so very glad to believe in
without seeing.

Pretty Arabella Goddard we heard play at Berlin--play the very things
you heard as a _bonne bouche_ at the last--none the less delightful
from being so unlike the piano playing of Liszt and Clara Schumann,
whom we had heard at Weimar--both great, and one the greatest.

Thank you for sending me that authentic word about Miss Nightingale. I
wonder if she would rather rest from her blessed labors, or live to go
on working? Sometimes, when I read of the death of some great,
sensitive human being, I have a triumph in the sense that they are at
rest; and yet, along with that, such deep sadness at the thought that
the rare nature is gone forever into darkness, and we can never know
that our love and reverence can reach him, that I seem to have gone
through a personal sorrow when I shut the book and go to bed. I felt
in that way the other night when I finished the life of Scott aloud
to Mr. Lewes. He had never read the book before, and has been deeply
stirred by the picture of Scott's character, his energy and steady
work, his grand fortitude under calamity, and the spirit of strict
honor to which he sacrificed his declining life. He loves Scott as
well as I do.

We have met a pleasant-faced, bright-glancing man, whom we set down to
be worthy of the name, Richard Congreve. I am curious to see if our
_Ahnung_ will be verified.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 24th Feb. 1859.]

One word of gratitude to _you_ first before I write any other letters.
Heaven and earth bless you for trying to help me. I have been
blasphemous enough sometimes to think that I had never been good and
attractive enough to win any little share of the honest, disinterested
friendship there is in the world: one or two examples of late had
given that impression, and I am prone to rest in the least agreeable
conviction the premisses will allow. I need hardly tell you what I
want, you know it so well: a servant who will cause me the least
possible expenditure of time on household matters. I wish I were not
an anxious, fidgety wretch, and could sit down content with dirt and
disorder. But anything in the shape of an _anxiety_ soon grows into a
monstrous vulture with me, and makes itself more present to me than my
rich sources of happiness--such as too few mortals are blessed with.
You know me. Since I wrote this, I have just had a letter from my
sister Chrissey--ill in bed, consumptive--regretting that she ever
ceased to write to me. It has ploughed up my heart.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 24th Feb. 1859.]

Mrs. Carlyle's ardent letter will interest and amuse you. I reckon it
among my best triumphs that she found herself "in charity with the
whole human race" when she laid the book down. I want the philosopher
himself to read it, because the _pre_-philosophic period--the
childhood and poetry of his life--lay among the furrowed fields and
pious peasantry. If he _could_ be urged to read a novel! I should
like, if possible, to give him the same sort of pleasure he has given
me in the early chapters of "Sartor," where he describes little
Diogenes eating his porridge on the wall in sight of the sunset, and
gaining deep wisdom from the contemplation of the pigs and other
"higher animals" of _Entepfuhl_.

Your critic was _not_ unjustly severe on the "Mirage Philosophy"--and
I confess the "Life of Frederic" was a painful book to me in many
respects; and yet I shrink, perhaps superstitiously, from any written
or spoken word which is as strong as my inward criticism.

I needed your letter very much--for when one lives apart from the
world, with no opportunity of observing the effect of books except
through the newspapers, one is in danger of sinking into the foolish
belief that the day is past for the recognition of genuine, truthful
writing, in spite of recent experience that the newspapers are no
criterion at all. One such opinion as Mr. Caird's outweighs a great
deal of damnatory praise from ignorant journalists.

It is a wretched weakness of my nature to be so strongly affected by
these things; and yet how is it possible to put one's best heart and
soul into a book and be hardened to the result--be indifferent to the
proof whether or not one has really a vocation to speak to one's
fellow-men in that way? Of course one's vanity is at work; but the
main anxiety is something entirely distinct from vanity.

You see I mean you to understand that my feelings are very
respectable, and such as it will be virtuous in you to gratify with
the same zeal as you have always shown. The packet of newspaper
notices is not come yet. I will take care to return it when it _has_
come.

The best news from London hitherto is that Mr. Dallas is an
enthusiastic admirer of Adam. I ought to except Mr. Langford's
reported opinion, which is that of a person who has a voice of his
own, and is not a mere echo.

Otherwise, Edinburgh has sent me much more encouraging breezes than
any that have come from the sweet South. I wonder if all your other
authors are as greedy and exacting as I am. If so, I hope they
appreciate your attention as much. Will you oblige me by writing a
line to Mrs. Carlyle for me. I don't like to leave her second letter
(she wrote a very kind one about the "Clerical Scenes") without any
sort of notice. Will you tell her that the sort of effect she declares
herself to have felt from "Adam Bede" is just what I desire to
produce--gentle thoughts and happy remembrances; and I thank her
heartily for telling me, so warmly and generously, what she has felt.
That is not a pretty message: revise it for me, pray, for I am weary
and ailing, and thinking of a sister who is slowly dying.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 25th Feb. 1859.]

The folio of notices duly came, and are returned by to-day's post. The
friend at my elbow ran through them for me, and read aloud some
specimens to me, some of them ludicrous enough. The _Edinburgh
Courant_ has the ring of sincere enjoyment in its tone; and the writer
there makes himself so amiable to me that I am sorry he has fallen
into the mistake of supposing that Mrs. Poyser's original sayings are
remembered proverbs! I have no stock of proverbs in my memory; and
there is not one thing put into Mrs. Poyser's mouth that is not fresh
from my own mint. Please to correct that mistake if any one makes it
in your hearing.

I have not ventured to look into the folio myself; but I learn that
there are certain threatening marks, in ink, by the side of such stock
sentences as "best novel of the season," or "best novel we have read
for a long time," from such authorities as the _Sun_, or _Morning
Star_, or other orb of the newspaper firmament--as if these sentences
were to be selected for reprint in the form of advertisement. I
shudder at the suggestion. Am I taking a liberty in entreating you to
keep a sharp watch over the advertisements, that no hackneyed puffing
phrase of this kind may be tacked to my book? One sees them garnishing
every other advertisement of trash: surely no being "above the rank of
an idiot" can have his inclination coerced by them? and it would gall
me, as much as any trifle could, to see my book recommended by an
authority who doesn't know how to write decent English. I believe that
your taste and judgment will concur with mine in the conviction that
no quotations of this vulgar kind can do credit to a book; and that
unless something looking like the real opinion of a tolerably educated
writer, in a respectable journal, can be given, it would be better to
abstain from "opinions of the press" altogether. I shall be grateful
to you if you will save me from the results of any agency but your
own--or at least of any agency that is not under your rigid criticism
in this matter.

Pardon me if I am overstepping the author's limits in this expression
of my feelings. I confide in your ready comprehension of the
irritable class you have to deal with.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1859.]

_Feb. 26._--Laudatory reviews of "Adam Bede" in the _Athenæum_,
_Saturday_, and _Literary Gazette_. The _Saturday_ criticism is
characteristic: Dinah is not mentioned!

The other day I received the following letter, which I copy, because I
have sent the original away:

[Sidenote: Letter from E. Hall to George Eliot.]

     "To the Author of 'Adam Bede,'

                                  "CHESTER ROAD, SUNDERLAND.

     "DEAR SIR,--I got the other day a hasty read of your 'Scenes
     of Clerical Life,' and since that a glance at your 'Adam
     Bede,' and was delighted more than I can express; but being a
     poor man, and having enough to do to make 'ends meet,' I am
     unable to get a read of your inimitable books.

     "Forgive, dear sir, my boldness in asking you to give us a
     cheap edition. You would confer on us a great boon. I can get
     plenty of trash for a few pence, but I am sick of it. I felt
     so different when I shut your books, even though it was but a
     kind of 'hop-skip-and-jump' read.

     "I feel so strongly in this matter that I am determined to
     risk being thought rude and officious, and write to you.

     "Many of my working brethren feel as I do, and I express
     their wish as well as my own. Again asking your forgiveness
     for intruding myself upon you, I remain, with profoundest
     respect, yours, etc.,
                                                  "E. HALL."

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 26th Feb. 1859.]

I have written to Chrissey, and shall hear from her again. I think her
writing was the result of long, quiet thought--the slow return of a
naturally just and affectionate mind to the position from which it had
been thrust by external influence. She says: "My object in writing to
you is to tell you how very sorry I have been that I ceased to write,
and neglected one who, under all circumstances, was kind to me and
mine. _Pray believe_ me when I say it will be the greatest comfort I
can receive to know that you are _well_ and _happy_. Will you write
once more?" etc. I wrote immediately, and I desire to avoid any word
of reference to anything with which she associates the idea of
alienation. The past is abolished from my mind. I only want her to
feel that I love her and care for her. The servant trouble seems less
mountainous to me than it did the other day. I was suffering
physically from unusual worrit and muscular exertion in arranging the
house, and so was in a ridiculously desponding state. I have written
no end of letters in answer to servants' advertisements, and we have
put our own advertisement in the _Times_--all which amount of force,
if we were not philosophers and therefore believers in the
conservation of force, we should declare to be lost. It is so pleasant
to know these high doctrines--they help one so much. Mr. and Mrs.
Richard Congreve have called on us. We shall return the call as soon
as we can.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1859.]

_March 8._--Letter from Blackwood this morning saying that "'Bedesman'
has turned the corner and is coming in a winner." Mudie has sent for
200 additional copies (making 700), and Mr. Langford says the West End
libraries keep sending for more.

_March 14._--My dear sister wrote to me about three weeks ago, saying
she regretted that she had ever ceased writing to me, and that she has
been in a consumption for the last eighteen months. To-day I have a
letter from my niece Emily, telling me her mother had been taken
worse, and cannot live many days.

_March 14._--Major Blackwood writes to say "Mudie has just made up his
number of 'Adam Bede' to 1000. Simpkins have sold their subscribed
number, and have had 12 to-day. Every one is talking of the book."

_March 15._--Chrissey died this morning at a quarter to 5.

_March 16._--Blackwood writes to say I am "a popular author as well as
a great author." They printed 2090 of "Adam Bede," and have disposed
of more than 1800, so that they are thinking about a second edition. A
very feeling letter from Froude this morning. I happened this morning
to be reading the 30th Ode, B. III. of Horace--"Non omnis moriar."

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 17th March, 1859.]

The news you have sent me is worth paying a great deal of pain for,
past and future. It comes rather strangely to me, who live in such
unconsciousness of what is going on in the world. I am like a deaf
person, to whom some one has just shouted that the company round him
have been paying him compliments for the last half hour. Let the best
come, you will still be the person outside my own home who _first_
gladdened me about "Adam Bede;" and my success will always please me
the better because you will share the pleasure.

Don't think I mean to worry you with many such requests--but will you
copy for me the enclosed short note to Froude? I know you will, so I
say "thank you."

[Sidenote: Letter to J. A. Froude from George Eliot.]

     DEAR SIR,--My excellent friend and publisher, Mr. Blackwood,
     lends me his pen to thank you for your letter, and for his
     sake I shall be brief.

     Your letter has done me real good--the same sort of good as
     one has sometimes felt from a silent pressure of the hand and
     a grave look in the midst of smiling congratulations.

     I have nothing else I care to tell you that you will not have
     found out through my books, except this one thing: that, so
     far as I am aware, you are only the _second_ person who has
     shared my own satisfaction in Janet. I think she is the least
     popular of my characters. You will judge from that, that it
     was worth your while to tell me what you felt about her.

     I wish I could help you with words of equal value; but, after
     all, am I not helping you by saying that it was well and
     generously done of you to write to me?--Ever faithfully
     yours,

                                               GEORGE ELIOT.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 21st March, 1859.]

It was worth your while to write me those feeling words, for they are
the sort of things that I keep in my memory and feel the influence of
a long, long while. Chrissey's death has taken from the possibility of
many things towards which I looked with some hope and yearning in the
future. I had a very special feeling towards her--stronger than any
third person would think likely.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1859.]

_March 24._--Mr. Herbert Spencer brought us word that "Adam Bede" had
been quoted by Mr. Charles Buxton in the House of Commons: "As the
farmer's wife says in 'Adam Bede,' 'It wants to be hatched over again
and hatched different.'"

_March 26._--George went into town to-day and brought me home a budget
of good news that compensated for the pain I had felt in the coldness
of an old friend. Mr. Langford says that Mudie "thinks he must have
another hundred or two of 'Adam'--has read the book himself, and is
delighted with it." Charles Reade says it is "the finest thing since
Shakespeare"--placed his finger on Lisbeth's account of her coming
home with her husband from their marriage--praises enthusiastically
the style--the way in which the author handles the Saxon language.
Shirley Brooks also delighted. John Murray says there has never been
such a book. Mr. Langford says there must be a second edition, in 3
vols., and they will print 500: whether Mudie takes more or not, they
will have sold all by the end of a month. Lucas delighted with the
book, and will review it in the _Times_ the first opportunity.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 30th March, 1859.]

I should like you to convey my gratitude to your reviewer. I see well
he is a man whose experience and study enable him to relish parts of
my book, which I should despair of seeing recognized by critics in
London back drawing-rooms. He has gratified me keenly by laying his
finger on passages which I wrote either with strong feeling or from
intimate knowledge, but which I had prepared myself to find entirely
passed over by reviewers. Surely I am not wrong in supposing him to be
a clergyman? There was one exemplary lady Mr. Langford spoke of, who,
after reading "Adam," came the next day and bought a copy both of that
and the "Clerical Scenes." I wish there may be three hundred matrons
as good as she! It is a disappointment to me to find that "Adam" has
given no impulse to the "Scenes," for I had sordid desires for money
from a second edition, and had dreamed of its coming speedily.

About my new story, which will be a novel as long as "Adam Bede," and
a sort of companion picture of provincial life, we must talk when I
have the pleasure of seeing you. It will be a work which will require
time and labor.

Do write me good news as often as you can. I owe thanks to Major
Blackwood for a very charming letter.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 10th April, 1859.]

The other day I received a letter from an old friend in Warwickshire,
containing some striking information about the author of "Adam Bede."
I extract the passage for your amusement:

"I want to ask you if you have read 'Adam Bede,' or the 'Scenes of
Clerical Life,' and whether you know that the author is Mr.
Liggins?... A deputation of dissenting parsons went over _to ask him
to write for the 'Eclectic,'_ and they found him washing his
slop-basin at a pump. He has no servant, and does everything for
himself; but one of the said parsons said that he inspired them with a
reverence that would have made any impertinent question impossible.
The son of a baker, of no mark at all in his town, so that it is
possible you may not have heard of him. You know he calls himself
'George Eliot.' It sounds strange to hear the _Westminster_ doubting
whether he is a woman, when _here he is so well known_. But I am glad
it has mentioned him. _They say he gets no profit out of 'Adam Bede,'
and gives it freely to Blackwood, which is a shame._ We have not read
him yet, but the extracts are irresistible."

Conceive the real George Eliot's feelings, conscious of being a base
worldling--not washing his own slop-basin, and _not_ giving away his
MS.! not even intending to do so, in spite of the reverence such a
course might inspire. I hope you and Major Blackwood will enjoy the
myth.

Mr. Langford sent me a letter the other day from Miss Winkworth, a
grave lady, who says she never reads novels, except a few of the most
famous, but that she has read "Adam" three times running. One likes to
know such things--they show that the book tells on people's hearts,
and may be a real instrument of culture. I sing my Magnificat in a
quiet way, and have a great deal of deep, silent joy; but few authors,
I suppose, who have had a real success, have known less of the flush
and the sensations of triumph that are talked of as the accompaniments
of success. I think I should soon begin to believe that _Liggins_
wrote my books--it is so difficult to believe what the world does
_not_ believe, so easy to believe what the world keeps repeating.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 11th April, 1859.]

The very day you wrote we were driving in an open carriage from Ryde
to the Sandrock Hotel, taking in a month's delight in the space of
five hours. Such skies--such songs of larks--such beds of primroses!
_I_ am quite well now--set up by iron and quinine, and polished off by
the sea-breezes. I have lost my _young_ dislike to the spring, and am
as glad of it as the birds and plants are. Mr. Lewes has read "Adam
Bede," and is as dithyrambic about it as others appear to be, so _I_
must refresh my soul with it now as well as with the spring-tide. Mr.
Liggins I remember as a vision of my childhood--a tall, black-coated,
genteel young clergyman-in-embryo.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 15th April, 1859.]

Mr. Lewes is "making himself into four" in writing answers to
advertisements and other exertions which he generously takes on
himself to save me. A model husband!

We both like your literal title, "Thoughts in Aid of Faith," very
much, and hope to see a little book under that title before the year
is out--a book as thorough and effective in its way as "Christianity
and Infidelity."

_Re_writing is an excellent process, frequently both for the book and
its author; and to prevent you from grudging the toil, I will tell you
that so old a writer as Mr. Lewes now _re_writes everything of
_importance_, though in all the earlier years of his authorship he
would never take that trouble.

We are so happy in the neighborhood of Mr. and Mrs. Richard Congreve.
She is a sweet, intelligent, gentle woman. I already love her: and his
fine, beaming face does me good, like a glimpse of an Olympian.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1859.]

_April 17._--I have left off recording the history of "Adam Bede" and
the pleasant letters and words that came to me--the success has been
so triumphantly beyond anything I had dreamed of that it would be
tiresome to put down particulars. Four hundred of the second edition
(of 750) sold in the first week, and twenty besides ordered when there
was not a copy left in the London house. This morning Hachette has
sent to ask my terms for the liberty of translation into French. There
was a review in the _Times_ last week, which will naturally give a new
stimulus to the sale; and yesterday I sent a letter to the _Times_
denying that Mr. Liggins is the author, as the world and Mr. Anders
had settled it. But I must trust to the letters I have received and
preserved for giving me the history of the book if I should live long
enough to forget details.

Shall I ever write another book as true as "Adam Bede?" The weight of
the future presses on me, and makes itself felt even more than the
deep satisfaction of the past and present.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 20th April, 1859.]

This myth about Liggins is getting serious, and must be put a stop to.
We are bound not to allow sums of money to be raised on a false
supposition of this kind. Don't you think it would be well for _you_
to write a letter to the _Times_, to the effect that, as you find in
some stupid quarters my letter has not been received as a _bonâ-fide_
denial, you declare Mr. Liggins not to be the author of "Clerical
Scenes" and "Adam Bede;" further, that any future applications to you
concerning George Eliot will not be answered, since that writer is not
in need of public benevolence. Such a letter might save us from future
annoyance and trouble, for I am rather doubtful about Mr. Liggins's
character. The last report I heard of him was that he spent his time
in smoking and drinking. I don't know whether that is one of the data
for the Warwickshire logicians who have decided him to be the author
of my books.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1859.]

_April 29._--To-day Blackwood sent me a letter from Bulwer, which I
copy because I have to send back the original, and I like to keep in
mind the generous praise of one author for another.

[Sidenote: Letter from E. B. Lytton to John Blackwood.]

                                 "MALVERN, _April 24, 1859_.

     "MY DEAR SIR,--I ought long since to have thanked you for
     'Adam Bede.' But I never had a moment to look at it till
     arriving here, and ordered by the doctors to abstain from all
     'work.'

     "I owe the author much gratitude for some very pleasing
     hours. The book indeed is worthy of great admiration. There
     are touches of beauty in the conception of human character
     that are exquisite, and much wit and much poetry embedded in
     the 'dialect,' which nevertheless the author over-uses.

     "The style is remarkably good whenever it is English and not
     provincial--racy, original, and nervous.

     "I congratulate you on having found an author of such
     promise, and published one of the very ablest works of
     fiction I have read for years.--

     Yours truly,
                                                    E. B. L.

     "I am better than I was, but thoroughly done up."

[Sidenote: Journal, 1859.]

_April 29._--Finished a story--"The Lifted Veil"--which I began one
morning at Richmond as a resource when my head was too stupid for more
important work.

Resumed my new novel, of which I am going to rewrite the two first
chapters. I shall call it provisionally "The Tullivers," for the sake
of a title _quelconque_, or perhaps "St. Ogg's on the Floss."

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 29th April, 1859.]

Thank you for sending me Sir Edward Lytton's letter, which has given
me real pleasure. The praise is doubly valuable to me for the sake of
the generous feeling that prompted it. I think you judged rightly
about writing to the _Times_. I would abstain from the remotest
appearance of a "dodge." I am anxious to know of any _positive_ rumors
that may get abroad; for while I would willingly, if it were
possible--which it clearly is not--retain my _incognito_ as long as I
live, I can suffer no one to bear my arms on his shield.

There is _one_ alteration, or rather an addition--merely of a
sentence--that I wish to make in the 12_s._ edition of "Adam Bede."
It is a sentence in the chapter where Adam is making the coffin at
night, and hears the willow wand. Some readers seem not to have
understood what I meant--namely, that it was in Adam's peasant blood
and nurture to believe in this, and that he narrated it with awed
belief to his dying day. That is not a fancy of my own brain, but a
matter of observation, and is, in my mind, an important feature in
Adam's character. There is nothing else I wish to touch. I will send
you the sentence some day soon, with the page where it is to be
inserted.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1859.]

_May 3._--I had a letter from Mrs. Richard Congreve, telling me of her
safe arrival, with her husband and sister,[7] at Dieppe. This new
friend, whom I have gained by coming to Wandsworth, is the chief charm
of the place to me. Her friendship has the same date as the success of
"Adam Bede"--two good things in my lot that ought to have made me less
sad than I have been in this house.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 4th May, 1859.]

Your letter came yesterday at tea-time, and made the evening happier
than usual. We had thought of you not a little as we listened to the
howling winds, especially as the terrible wrecks off the Irish coast
had filled our imaginations disagreeably. _Now_ I can make a charming
picture of you all on the beach, except that I am obliged to fancy
_your_ face looking still too languid after all your exertion and
sleeplessness. I remember the said face with peculiar vividness, which
is very pleasant to me. "Rough" has been the daily companion of our
walks, and wins on our affections, as other fellow mortals do, by a
mixture of weaknesses and virtues--the weaknesses consisting chiefly
in a tendency to become invisible every ten minutes, and in a
forgetfulness of reproof, which, I fear, is the usual accompaniment of
meekness under it. All this is good discipline for us selfish
solitaries, who have been used to stroll along, thinking of nothing
but ourselves.

We walked through your garden to-day, and I gathered a bit of your
sweetbrier, of which I am at this moment enjoying the scent as it
stands on my desk. I am enjoying, too, another sort of sweetness,
which I also owe to you--of that subtle, haunting kind which is most
like the scent of my favorite plants--the belief that you do really
care for me across the seas there, and will associate me continually
with your home. Faith is not easy to me, nevertheless I believe
everything you say and write.

Write to me as often as you can--that is, as often as you feel any
prompting to do so. You were a dear presence to me, and will be a
precious thought to me all through your absence.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1859.]

_May 4._--To-day came a letter from Barbara Bodichon, full of joy in
my success, in the certainty that "Adam Bede" was mine, though she had
not read more than extracts in reviews. This is the first delight in
the book as _mine_, over and above the fact that the book is good.

[Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 5th May, 1859.]

God bless you, dearest Barbara, for your love and sympathy. You are
the first friend who has given any symptom of knowing me--the first
heart that has recognized me in a book which has come from my heart of
hearts. But keep the secret solemnly till I give you leave to tell it;
and give way to no impulses of triumphant affection. You have sense
enough to know how important the _incognito_ has been, and we are
anxious to keep it up a few months longer. Curiously enough my old
Coventry friends, who have certainly read the _Westminster_ and the
_Times_, and have probably by this time read the book itself, have
given no sign of recognition. But a certain Mr. Liggins, whom rumor
has fixed on as the author of my books, and whom _they_ have believed
in, has probably screened me from their vision. I am a very blessed
woman, am I not, to have all this reason for being glad that I have
lived? I have had no time of exultation; on the contrary, these last
months have been sadder than usual to me, and I have thought more of
the future and the much work that remains to be done in life than of
anything that has been achieved. But I think your letter to-day gave
me more joy--more heart-glow--than all the letters or reviews or other
testimonies of success that have come to me since the evenings when I
read aloud my manuscript to my dear, dear husband, and he laughed and
cried alternately, and then rushed to me to kiss me. He is the prime
blessing that has made all the rest possible to me, giving me a
response to everything I have written--a response that I could confide
in, as a proof that I had not mistaken my work.

[Sidenote: Letter to Major Blackwood, 6th May, 1859.]

You must not think me too soft-hearted when I tell you that it would
make me uneasy to leave Mr. Anders without an assurance that his
apology is accepted. "Who with repentance is not satisfied," etc.;
that doctrine is bad for the sinning, but good for those sinned
against. Will you oblige me by allowing a clerk to write something to
this effect in the name of the firm?--"We are requested by George
Eliot to state, in reply to your letter of the 16th, that he accepts
your assurance that the publication of your letter to the reviewer of
'Adam Bede' in the _Times_ was unintentional on your part."

Yes, I _am_ assured now that "Adam Bede" was worth writing--worth
living through long years to write. But now it seems impossible to me
that I shall ever write anything so good and true again. I have
arrived at faith in the past, but not at faith in the future.

A friend in Algiers[8] has found me out--"will go to the stake on the
assertion that I wrote 'Adam Bede'"--simply on the evidence of a few
extracts. So far as I know, this is the first case of detection on
purely internal evidence. But the secret is safe in that quarter.

I hope I shall have the pleasure of seeing you again during some visit
that you will pay to town before very long. It would do me good to
have you shake me by the hand as the ascertained George Eliot.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1859.]

_May 9._--We had a delicious drive to Dulwich, and back by Sydenham.
We stayed an hour in the gallery at Dulwich, and I satisfied myself
that the St. Sebastian is no exception to the usual "petty prettiness"
of Guido's conceptions. The Cuyp glowing in the evening sun, the
Spanish beggar boys of Murillo, and Gainsborough's portrait of Mrs.
Sheridan and her sister, are the gems of the gallery. But better than
the pictures was the fresh greenth of the spring--the chestnuts just
on the verge of their flowering beauty, the bright leaves of the
limes, the rich yellow-brown of the oaks, the meadows full of
buttercups. We saw for the first time Clapham Common, Streatham
Common, and Tooting Common--the two last like parks rather than
commons.

_May 19._--A letter from Blackwood, in which he proposes to give me
another £400 at the end of the year, making in all £1200, as an
acknowledgment of "Adam Bede's" success.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 19th May, 1859.]

Mrs. Congreve is a sweet woman, and I feel that I have acquired a
friend in her--after recently declaring that we would never have any
_friends_ again, only _acquaintances_.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 21st May, 1859.]

Thank you: first, for acting with that fine integrity which makes part
of my faith in you; secondly, for the material sign of that integrity.
I don't know which of those two things I care for most--that people
should act nobly towards me, or that I should get honest money. I
certainly care a great deal for the money, as I suppose all anxious
minds do that love independence and have been brought up to think debt
and begging the two deepest dishonors short of crime.

I look forward with quite eager expectation to seeing you--we have so
much to say. Pray give us the first day at your command. The
excursion, as you may imagine, is not ardently longed for in this
weather, but when "merry May" is quite gone, we may surely hope for
some sunshine; and then I have a pet project of rambling along by the
banks of a river, not without artistic as well as hygienic purposes.

Pray bring me all the Liggins Correspondence. I have an amusing letter
or two to show you--one from a gentleman who has sent me his works;
happily the only instance of the kind. For, as Charles Lamb complains,
it is always the people whose books _don't_ sell who are anxious to
send them to one, with their "foolish autographs" inside.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 21st May, 1859.]

We don't think of going to the festival, not for want of power to
enjoy Handel--there are few things that I care for more in the way of
music than his choruses, performed by a grand orchestra--but because
we are neither of us fit to encounter the physical exertion and
inconveniences. It is a cruel thing the difficulty and dearness of
getting any music in England--concerted music, which is the only music
I care for much now. At Dresden we could have thoroughly enjoyable
instrumental music every evening for two-pence; and I owed so many
thoughts and inspirations of feeling to that stimulus.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1859.]

_May 27._--Blackwood came to dine with us on his arrival in London,
and we had much talk. A day or two before he had sent me a letter from
Professor Aytoun, saying that he had neglected his work to read the
first volume of "Adam Bede;" and he actually sent the other two
volumes out of the house to save himself from temptation. Blackwood
brought with him a correspondence he has had with various people about
Liggins, beginning with Mr. Bracebridge, who will have it that Liggins
is the author of "Adam Bede" in spite of all denials.

_June 5._--Blackwood came, and we concocted two letters to send to the
_Times_, in order to put a stop to the Liggins affair.

[Sidenote: Letter to Major Blackwood, 6th June, 1859.]

The "Liggins business" _does_ annoy me, because it subjects you and
Mr. John Blackwood to the reception of insulting letters, and the
trouble of writing contradictions. Otherwise, the whole affair is
really a subject for a Molière comedy--"The Wise Men of Warwickshire,"
who might supersede "The Wise Men of Gotham."

The letter you sent me was a very pleasant one from Mrs. Gaskell,
saying that since she came up to town she has had the compliment paid
her of being suspected to have written "Adam Bede." "I have hitherto
denied it; but really, I think, that as you want to keep your real
name a secret, it would be very pleasant for me to blush acquiescence.
Will you give me leave?"

I hope the inaccuracy with which she writes my name is not
characteristic of a genius for fiction, though I once heard a German
account for the bad spelling in Goethe's early letters by saying that
it was "genial"--their word for whatever is characteristic of genius.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 8th June, 1859.]

I was glad you wrote to me from Avignon of all the places you have
visited, because Avignon is one of my most vivid remembrances from out
the dimness of ten years ago. Lucerne would be a strange region to me
but for Calame's pictures. Through them I have a vision of it, but of
course when I see it 'twill be another Luzern. Mr. Lewes obstinately
nurses the project of carrying me thither with him, and depositing me
within reach of you while he goes to Hofwyl. But at present I say
"No." We have been waiting and waiting for the skies to let us take a
few days' ramble by the river, but now I fear we must give it up till
all the freshness of young summer is gone. July and August are the two
months I care least about for leafy scenery.

However, we are kept at home this month partly by pleasures: the
Handel Festival, for which we have indulged ourselves with tickets,
and the sight of old friends--Mrs. Bodichon among the rest, and for
her we hope to use your kind loan of a bedroom. We are both of us in
much better condition than when you said good-bye to us, and I have
many other sources of gladness just now--so I mean to make myself
disagreeable no longer by caring about petty troubles. If one could
but order cheerfulness from the druggist's! or even a few doses of
coldness and distrust, to prevent one from foolish confidence in one's
fellow-mortals!

I want to get rid of this house--cut cables and drift about. I dislike
Wandsworth, and should think with unmitigated regret of our coming
here if it were not for you. But you are worth paying a price for.

There! I have written about nothing but ourselves this time! _You_ do
the same, and then I think I will promise ... not to write again, but
to ask you to go on writing to me without an answer.

How cool and idle you are this morning! I am warm and busy, but
always, at all temperatures, yours affectionately.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1859.]

_June 20._--We went to the Crystal Palace to hear the "Messiah," and
dined afterwards with the Brays and Sara Hennell. I told them I was
the author of "Adam Bede" and "Clerical Scenes," and they seemed
overwhelmed with surprise. This experience has enlightened me a good
deal as to the ignorance in which we all live of each other.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 24th June, 1859.]

There is always an after sadness belonging to brief and interrupted
intercourse between friends--the sadness of feeling that the
blundering efforts we have made towards mutual understanding have only
made a new veil between us--still more, the sadness of feeling that
some pain may have been given which separation makes a permanent
memory. We are quite unable to represent ourselves truly. Why should
we complain that our friends see a false image? I say this because I
am feeling painfully this morning that, instead of helping you when
you brought before me a matter so deeply interesting to you, I have
only blundered, and that I have blundered, as most of us do, from too
much egoism and too little sympathy. If my mind had been more open to
receive impressions, instead of being in over-haste to give them, I
should more readily have seen what your object was in giving me that
portion of your MS., and we might have gone through the necessary part
of it on Tuesday. It seems no use to write this now, and yet I can't
help wanting to assure you that if I am too imperfect to do and feel
the right thing at the right moment, I am not without the slower
sympathy that becomes all the stronger from a sense of previous
mistake.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 27th June, 1859.]

I am told peremptorily that I am to go to Switzerland next month, but
now I have read your letter, I can't help thinking more of your
illness than of the pleasure in prospect--according to my foolish
nature, which is always prone to live in past pain.

We shall not arrive at Lucerne till the 12th, at the earliest, I
imagine, so I hope we are secured from the danger of alighting
precisely on the days of your absence. That would be cruel, for I
shall only be left at Lucerne for three days. You must positively have
nothing more interesting to do than to talk to me and let me look at
you. Tell your sister I shall be all ears and eyes and no tongue, so
she will find me the most _amiable_ of conversers.

I think it must be that the sunshine makes your absence more
conspicuous, for this place certainly becomes drearier to me as the
summer advances. The dusty roads are all longer, and the shade is
farther off. No more now about anything--except that Mr. Lewes
commands me to say he has just read the "Roman Empire of the West"
with much interest, and is going now to flesh his teeth in the
"Politique" (Auguste Comte's).

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, Monday evening, end of June, 1859.]

     "DEAR FRIENDS,--All three of you--thanks for your packet of
     heartfelt kindness. That is the best of your kindness--there
     is no sham in it. It was inevitable to me to have that
     outburst when I saw you for a little while after the long
     silence, and felt that I must tell you then or be
     forestalled, and leave you to gather the truth amidst an
     inextricable mixture of falsehood. But I feel that the
     influence of talking about my books, even to you and Mrs.
     Bodichon, has been so bad to me that I should like to be able
     to keep silence concerning them for evermore. If people were
     to buzz round me with their remarks, or compliments, I should
     lose the repose of mind and truthfulness of production
     without which no good, healthy books can be written. Talking
     about my books, I find, has much the same malign effect on me
     as talking of my feelings or my religion.

     "I should think Sara's version of my brother's words
     concerning 'Adam Bede' is the correct one--_'that there are
     things in it about my father'_ (_i.e._, being interpreted,
     things my father told us about his early life), not
     'portrait' of my father. There is not a single portrait in
     the book, nor will there be in any future book of mine. There
     are portraits in the 'Clerical Scenes;' but that was my first
     bit of art, and my hand was not well in. I did not know so
     well how to manipulate my materials. As soon as the Liggins
     falsehood is annihilated, of course there will be twenty new
     ones in its place; and one of the first will be that I was
     not the sole author. The only safe thing for my mind's
     health is to shut my ears and go on with my work.

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, 5th July, 1859.]

     "Thanks for your letters. They have given me one
     pleasure--that of knowing that Mr. Liggins has not been
     _greatly_ culpable--though Mr. Bracebridge's statement, that
     only 'some small sums' have been collected, does not accord
     with what has been written to Mr. Blackwood from other
     counties. But 'O, I am sick!' Take no more trouble about
     me--and let every one believe--as they will, in spite of your
     kind efforts--_what they like to believe_. I can't tell you
     how much melancholy it causes me that people are, for the
     most part, so incapable of comprehending the state of mind
     which cares for that which is essentially human in all forms
     of belief, and desires to exhibit it under all forms with
     loving truthfulness. Freethinkers are scarcely wider than the
     orthodox in this matter--they all want to see themselves and
     their own opinions held up as the true and the lovely. On the
     same ground that an idle woman, with flirtations and
     flounces, likes to read a French novel, because she can
     imagine herself the heroine, grave people, with opinions,
     like the most admirable character in a novel to be their
     mouth-piece. If art does not enlarge men's sympathies, it
     does nothing morally. I have had heart-cutting experience
     that _opinions_ are a poor cement between human souls: and
     the only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings is,
     that those who read them should be better able to _imagine_
     and to _feel_ the pains and the joys of those who differ from
     themselves in everything but the broad fact of being
     struggling, erring, human creatures.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 6th July, 1859.]

     "We shall not start till Saturday, and shall not reach
     Lucerne till the _evening_ of the 11th. There is a project of
     our returning through Holland, but the attractions of Lucerne
     are sure to keep us there as long as possible. We have given
     up Zurich in spite of Moleschott and science. The other day I
     said to Mr. Lewes, 'Every now and then it comes across me,
     like the recollection of some precious little store laid by,
     that there is Mrs. Congreve in the world.' That is how people
     talk of you in your absence."

[Sidenote: Journal, 1859.]

_July 9._--We started for Switzerland. Spent a delightful day in
Paris. To the Louvre first, where we looked chiefly at the Marriage at
Cana, by Paul Veronese. This picture, the greatest I have seen of his,
converted me to high admiration of him.

_July 12._--Arrived at Lucerne in the evening. Glad to make a home at
the charming Schweizerhof on the banks of the Lake. G. went to call on
the Congreves, and in the afternoon Mrs. Congreve came to chat with
us. In the evening we had a boat on the Lake.

_July 13._--G. set off for Hofwyl at five o'clock, and the three next
days were passed by me in quiet chat with the Congreves and quiet
resting on my own sofa.

_July 19._--Spent the morning in Bâle, chiefly under the
chestnut-trees, near the Cathedral, I reading aloud Flourens's sketch
of Cuvier's labors. In the afternoon to Paris.

_July 21._--Holly Lodge, Wandsworth. Found a charming letter from
Dickens, and pleasant letters from Blackwood; nothing to annoy us.
Before we set off we had heard the excellent news that the fourth
edition of "Adam Bede" (5000) had all been sold in a fortnight. The
fifth edition appeared last week.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 23d July, 1859.]

We reached here last evening, and though I was a good deal overdone in
getting to Lucerne, I have borne the equally rapid journey back
without headache--a proof that I am strengthened. I had three quiet
days of talk with the Congreves at Lucerne, while Mr. Lewes went to
Hofwyl. Mrs. Congreve is one of those women of whom there are
few--rich in intelligence, without pretension, and quivering with
sensibility, yet calm and quiet in her manners.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 23d July, 1859.]

I thank you for your offer about the money for "Adam," but I have
intentions of stern thrift, and mean to want as little as possible.
When "Maggie" is done, and I have a month or two of leisure, I should
like to transfer our present house, into which we were driven by haste
and economy, to some one who likes houses full of eyes all round him.
I long for a house with some shade and grass close round it--I don't
care how rough--and the sight of Swiss houses has heightened my
longing. But at present I say Avaunt to all desires.

While I think of it, let me beg of you to mention to the
superintendent of your printing-office, that in case of another
reprint of "Adam," I beg the word "sperrit" (for "spirit") may be
particularly attended to. Adam never said "speerit," as he is made to
do in the cheaper edition, at least in one place--his speech at the
birthday dinner. This is a small matter, but it is a point I care
about.

Words fail me about the not impossible Pug, for some compunction at
having mentioned my unreasonable wish will mingle itself paradoxically
with the hope that it may be fulfilled.

I hope we shall have other interviews to remember this time next year,
and that you will find me without aggravated symptoms of the "author's
malady"--a determination of talk to my own books, which I was
alarmingly conscious of when you and the Major were here. After all, I
fear authors must submit to be something of monsters--not quite
simple, healthy human beings; but I will keep my monstrosity within
bounds if possible.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 26th July, 1859.]

The things you tell me are just such as I need to know--I mean about
the help my book is to the people who read it. The weight of my future
life--the self-questioning whether my nature will be able to meet the
heavy demands upon it, both of personal duty and intellectual
production, presses upon me almost continually in a way that prevents
me even from tasting the quiet joy I might have in the _work done_.
Buoyancy and exultation, I fancy, are out of the question when one has
lived so long as I have. But I am the better for every word of
encouragement, and am helped over many days by such a note as yours. I
often think of my dreams when I was four or five and twenty. I thought
then how happy fame would make me! I feel no regret that the fame, as
such, brings no pleasure; but it _is_ a grief to me that I do not
constantly feel strong in thankfulness that my past life has
vindicated its uses and given me reason for gladness that such an
unpromising woman-child was born into the world. I ought not to care
about small annoyances, and it is chiefly egoism that makes them
annoyances. I had quite an _enthusiastic_ letter from Herbert Spencer
the other day about "Adam Bede." He says he feels the better for
reading it--really words to be treasured up. I can't bear the idea of
appearing further in the papers. And there is no one now except
people who would not be convinced, though one rose from the dead, to
whom any statement _apropos_ of Liggins would be otherwise than
superfluous. I dare say some "investigator" of the Bracebridge order
will arise after I am dead and revive the story--and perhaps posterity
will believe in Liggins. Why not? A man a little while ago wrote a
pamphlet to prove that the Waverley novels were chiefly written, not
by Walter Scott, but by Thomas Scott and his wife Elizabeth. The main
evidence being that several people thought Thomas cleverer than
Walter, and that in the list of the Canadian regiment of Scots to
which Thomas belonged many of the _names_ of the Waverley novels
occurred--among the rest _Monk_--and in "Woodstock" there is a
_General Monk_! The writer expected to get a great reputation by his
pamphlet, and I think it might have suggested to Mr. B. his style of
critical and historical inference. I must tell you, _in confidence_,
that Dickens has written to me the noblest, most touching words about
"Adam"--not hyperbolical compliments, but expressions of deep feeling.
He says the reading made an epoch in his life.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 30th July, 1859.]

Pug is come! come to fill up the void left by false and narrow-hearted
friends. I see already that he is without envy, hatred, or
malice--that he will betray no secrets, and feel neither pain at my
success nor pleasure in my chagrin. I hope the photograph does justice
to his physiognomy. It is expressive: full of gentleness and
affection, and radiant with intelligence when there is a savory morsel
in question--a hopeful indication of his mental capacity. I distrust
all intellectual pretension that announces itself by obtuseness of
palate!

I wish you could see him in his best _pose_--when I have arrested him
in a violent career of carpet-scratching, and he looks at me with
fore-legs very wide apart, trying to penetrate the deep mystery of
this arbitrary, not to say capricious, prohibition. He is snoring by
my side at this moment, with a serene promise of remaining quiet for
any length of time; he couldn't behave better if he had been expressly
educated for me. I am too lazy a lover of dogs and all earthly things
to like them when they give me much trouble, preferring to describe
the pleasure other people have in taking trouble.

Alas! the shadow that tracks all earthly good--the possibility of
loss. One may lose one's faculties, which will not always fetch a high
price; how much more a _Pug_ worth unmentionable sums--a PUG which
some generous-hearted personage in some other corner of Great Britain
than Edinburgh may even now be sending emissaries after, being bent on
paying the kindest, most delicate attention to a sensitive mortal not
sufficiently reticent of wishes.

All I can say of that generous-hearted personage No. 2 is, that I wish
he may get--somebody else's Pug, not mine. And all I will say of the
sensitive, insufficiently reticent mortal No. 2 is, that I hope he may
be as pleased and as grateful as George Eliot.

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles L. Lewes, 30th July, 1859.]

I look forward to playing duets with you as one of my future
pleasures; and if I am able to go on working, I hope we shall afford
to have a fine grand-piano. I have none of Mozart's Symphonies, so
that you can be guided in your choice of them entirely by your own
taste. I know Beethoven's Sonata in E flat well; it is a very charming
one, and I shall like to hear you play it. That is one of my
luxuries--to sit still and hear some one playing my favorite music;
so that you may able sure you will find willing ears to listen to the
fruits of your industrious practising.

There are ladies in the world, not a few, who play the violin, and I
wish I were one of them, for then we could play together sonatas for
the piano and violin, which make a charming combination. The violin
gives that _keen edge_ of tone which the piano wants.

I like to know that you were gratified by getting a watch so much
sooner than you expected; and it was the greater satisfaction to me to
send it you, because you had earned it by making good use of these
precious years at Hofwyl. It is a great comfort to your father and me
to think of that, for we, with our old grave heads, can't help talking
very often of the need our boys will have for all sorts of good
qualities and habits in making their way through this difficult life.
It is a world, you perceive, in which cross-bows _will_ be _launisch_
sometimes, and frustrate the skill of excellent marksmen--how much
more of lazy bunglers?

The first volume of the "Physiology of Common Life" is just published,
and it is a great pleasure to see so much of your father's hard work
successfully finished. He has been giving a great deal of labor to the
numbers on the physiology of the nervous system, which are to appear
in the course of two or three months, and he has enjoyed the labor in
spite of the drawback of imperfect health, which obliges him very
often to leave the desk with a hot and aching head. It is quite my
worst trouble that he has so much of this discomfort to bear; and we
must all try and make everything else as pleasant to him as we can, to
make up for it.

Tell Thornton he shall have the book he asks for, if possible--I mean
the book of moths and butterflies; and tell Bertie I expect to hear
about the wonderful things he has done with his pocket-knife. Tell him
he is equipped well enough to become king of a desert island with that
pocket-knife of his; and if, as I think I remember, it has a corkscrew
attached, he would certainly have more implements than he would need
in that romantic position.

We shall hope to hear a great deal of your journey, with all its haps
and mishaps. The mishaps are just as pleasant as the haps when they
are past--that is one comfort for tormented travellers.

You are an excellent correspondent, so I do not fear you will flag in
writing to me; and remember, you are always giving a pleasure when you
write to me.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1859.]

_Aug. 11._--Received a letter from an American--Mr. J. C.
Evans--asking me to write a story for an American periodical. Answered
that I could not write one for less than £1000, since, in order to do
it, I must suspend my actual work.

[Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 11th Aug. 1859.]

I do wish much to see more of human life: how can one see enough in
the short years one has to stay in the world? But I meant that at
present my mind works with the most freedom and the keenest sense of
poetry in my remotest past, and there are many strata to be worked
through before I can begin to use, _artistically_, any material I may
gather in the present. Curiously enough, _apropos_ of your remark
about "Adam Bede," there is much less "out of my own life" in that
book--_i.e._, the materials are much more a combination from
imperfectly known and widely sundered elements than the "Clerical
Scenes." I'm so glad you have enjoyed these--so thankful for the words
you write me.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1859.]

_Aug. 12._--Mr. J. C. Evans wrote again, declaring his willingness to
pay the £1000, and asking for an interview to arrange preliminaries.

_Aug. 15._--Declined the American proposition, which was to write a
story of twelve parts (weekly parts) in the _New York Century_ for
£1200.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 15th Aug. 1859.]

I have re-read your whole proof, and feel that every serious reader
will be impressed with the indications of real truth-seeking and
heart-experience in the tone. Beginnings are always troublesome. Even
Macaulay's few pages of introduction to his Introduction in the
English History are the worst bit of writing in the book. It was no
trouble to me to read your proof, so don't talk as if it had been.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1859.]

_Aug. 17._--Received a letter from Blackwood, with check for £200 for
second edition of "Clerical Scenes."

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 17th Aug. 1859.]

I'm glad my story cleaves to you. At present I have no hope that it
will affect people as strongly as "Adam" has done. The characters are
on a lower level generally, and the environment less romantic. But my
stories grow in me like plants, and this is only in the leaf-bud. I
have faith that the flower will come. Not enough faith, though, to
make me like the idea of beginning to print till the flower is fairly
out--till I know the end as well as the beginning.

Pug develops new charms every day. I think, in the prehistoric period
of his existence, before he came to me, he had led a sort of Caspar
Hauser life, shut up in a kennel in Bethnal Green; and he has had to
get over much astonishment at the sight of cows and other rural
objects on a large scale, which he marches up to and surveys with the
gravity of an "Own Correspondent," whose business it is to observe.
He has absolutely no bark; but, _en revanche_, he sneezes powerfully,
and has speaking eyes, so the _media_ of communication are abundant.
He sneezes at the world in general, and he looks affectionately at me.

I envy you the acquaintance of a genuine non-bookish man like Captain
Speke. I wonder when men of that sort will take their place as heroes
in our literature, instead of the inevitable "genius?"

[Sidenote: Journal, 1859.]

_Aug. 20._--Letter from the troublesome Mr. Quirk of Attleboro, still
wanting satisfaction about Liggins. I did not leave it unanswered,
because he is a friend of Chrissey's, but G. wrote for me.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 20th Aug. 1859.]

Our great difficulty is _Time_. I am little better than a sick nigger
with the lash behind him at present. If we go to Penmaenmawr we shall
travel all through by night, in order not to lose more than one day;
and we shall pause at Lichfield on our way back. To pause at Coventry
would be a real pleasure to me; but I think, even if we could do it on
our way home, it would be better economy to wait until the sense of
hurry is past, and make it a little reward for work done. The going to
the coast seems to be a wise measure, quite apart from indulgence. We
are both so feeble; but otherwise I should have kept my resolution and
remained quiet here for the next six months.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1859.]

_Aug. 25._--In the evening of this day we set off on our journey to
Penmaenmawr. We reached Conway at half-past three in the morning; and
finding that it was hopeless to get a bed anywhere, we walked about
the town till the morning began to dawn, and we could see the outline
of the fine old castle's battlemented walls. In the morning we went to
Llandudno, thinking that might suit us better than Penmaenmawr. We
found it ugly and fashionable. Then we went off to Penmaenmawr, which
was beautiful to our hearts' content--or rather discontent--for it
would not receive us, being already filled with visitors. Back again
in despair to Conway, where we got temporary lodgings at one of the
numerous Joneses. This particular Jones happened to be honest and
obliging, and we did well enough for a few days in our in-door life,
but out-of-doors there were cold winds and rain. One day we went to
Abergele and found a solitary house called Beach House, which it
seemed possible we might have at the end of a few days. But no! And
the winds were so cold on this northerly coast that George was not
sorry, preferring rather to take flight southward. So we set out again
on 31st, and reached Lichfield about half-past five. Here we meant to
pass the night, that I might see my nieces--dear Chrissey's orphan
children--Emily and Kate. I was much comforted by the sight of them,
looking happy, and apparently under excellent care in Miss Eborall's
school. We slept at the "Swan," where I remember being with my father
and mother when I was a little child, and afterwards with my father
alone, in our last journey into Derbyshire. The next morning we set
off again, and completed our journey to Weymouth. Many delicious walks
and happy hours we had in our fortnight there. A letter from Mr.
Langford informed us that the subscription for the sixth edition of
"Adam Bede" was 1000. Another pleasant incident was a letter from my
old friend and school-fellow, Martha Jackson, asking if the author of
"Adam Bede" was _her_ Marian Evans.

_Sept. 16._--We reached home, and found letters awaiting us--one from
Mr. Quirk, finally renouncing Liggins!--with tracts of an
ultra-evangelical kind for me, and the Parish Mag., etc., from the
Rev. Erskine Clark of St. Michael's, Derby, who had written to me to
ask me to help him in this sort of work.

[Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 17th Sept. 1859.]

I have just been reading, with deep interest and heart-stirring, the
article on the Infant Seamstresses in the _Englishwoman's Journal_. I
am one among the grateful readers of that moving description--moving
because the writer's own soul was moved by love and pity in the
writing of it. These are the papers that will make the "Journal" a
true organ with a _function_. I am writing at the end of the day, on
the brink of sleep, too tired to think of anything but that picture of
the little sleeping slop-worker who had pricked her tiny finger so.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1859.]

_Sept. 18._--A volume of devotional poetry from the authoress of
"Visiting my Relations," with an inscription admonishing me not to be
beguiled by the love of money. _In much anxiety and doubt about my new
novel._

_Oct. 7._--Since the last entry in my Journal various matters of
interest have occurred. Certain "new" ideas have occurred to me in
relation to my novel, and I am in better hope of it. At Weymouth I had
written to Blackwood to ask him about terms, supposing I published in
"Maga." His answer determined me to decline. On Monday, the 26th, we
set out on a three days' journey to Lincolnshire and back--very
pleasant and successful both as to weather and the object I was in
search of. A less pleasant business has been a correspondence with a
_crétin_--a Warwickshire magistrate, who undertakes to declare the
process by which I wrote my books--and who is the chief propagator and
maintainer of the story that Liggins is at the bottom of the
"Clerical Scenes" and "Adam Bede." It is poor George who has had to
conduct the correspondence, making his head hot by it, to the
exclusion of more fructifying work. To-day, in answer to a letter from
Sara, I have written her an account of my interviews with my Aunt
Samuel. This evening comes a letter from Miss Brewster, full of
well-meant exhortation.

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles L. Lewes, 7th Oct. 1859.]

The very best bit of news I can tell you to begin with is that your
father's "Physiology of Common Life" is selling remarkably well, being
much in request among medical students. You are not to be a medical
student, but I hope, nevertheless, you will by-and-by read the work
with interest. There is to be a new edition of the "Sea-side Studies"
at Christmas, or soon after--a proof that this book also meets with a
good number of readers. I wish you could have seen to-day, as I did,
the delicate spinal cord of a dragon-fly--like a tiny thread with tiny
beads on it--which your father had just dissected! He is so
wonderfully clever now at the dissection of these delicate things, and
has attained this cleverness entirely by devoted practice during the
last three years. I hope _you_ have some of his resolution and
persistent regularity in work. I think you have, if I may judge from
your application to music, which I am always glad to read of in your
letters. I was a very idle practiser, and I often regret now that when
I had abundant time and opportunity for hours of piano playing I used
them so little. I have about eighteen Sonatas and Symphonies of
Beethoven, I think, but I shall be delighted to find that you can play
them better than I can. I am very sensitive to blunders and wrong
notes, and instruments out of tune; but I have never played much from
ear, though I used to play from memory a great deal. The other evening
Mr. Pigott, whom you remember, Mr. Redford, another friend of your
father's, and Mr. Wilkie Collins dined with us, and we had a charming
musical evening. Mr. Pigott has a delicious tenor voice, and Mr.
Redford a fine barytone. The latter sings "Adelaide," that exquisite
song of Beethoven's, which I should like you to learn. Schubert's
songs, too, I especially delight in; but, as you say, they are
difficult.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 10th Oct. 1859.]

It is pleasant to have to tell you that Mr. Bracebridge has been at
last awakened to do the right thing. This morning came a letter
enclosing the following to me:

"Madame, I have much pleasure on receiving your declaration that
'etc., etc.,' in replying that I frankly accept your declaration as
the truth, and I shall repeat it if the contrary is again asserted to
me."

This is the first symptom we have had from him of common-sense. I am
very thankful--for it ends transactions with him.

Mr. Lewes is of so sensitive a temperament, and so used to feeling
more angry and more glad on my behalf than his own, that he has been
made, several mornings, quite unable to go on with his work by this
irritating correspondence. It is all my fault, for if he didn't see in
the first instance that I am completely upset by anything that arouses
unloving emotions, he would never feel as he does about outer sayings
and doings. No one is more indifferent than he is to what is said
about himself. No more about my business, let us hope, for a long
while to come!

The Congreves are settled at home again now--blessing us with the
sight of kind faces--Mr. Congreve beginning his medical course.

Delicious confusion of ideas! Mr. Lewes, walking in Wandsworth, saw a
good woman cross over the street to speak to a blind man. She accosted
him with, "Well, _I_ knew you, _though you are dark_!"

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 16th Oct. 1859.]

I wish you had read the letter you enclosed to me; it is really
curious. The writer, an educated person, asks me to perfect and extend
the benefit "Adam Bede" has "conferred on society" by writing a
_sequel_ to it, in which I am to tell all about Hetty after her
reprieve, "Arthur's efforts to obtain the reprieve, and his desperate
ride after obtaining it--Dinah on board the convict ship--Dinah's
letters to Hetty--and whatever the author might choose to reveal
concerning Hetty's years of banishment. Minor instances of the
incompleteness which induces an unsatisfactory feeling may be alleged
in the disposal of the _locket and earrings_--which everybody expects
to re-appear--and in the incident of the pink silk neckerchief, of
which all would like to hear a little more!!"

I do feel more than I ought about outside sayings and doings, and I
constantly rebuke myself for all that part of my susceptibility, which
I know to be weak and egoistic; still what is said about one's art is
not merely a personal matter--it touches the very highest things one
lives for. _Truth_ in art is so startling that no one can believe in
it as art, and the specific forms of religious life which have made
some of the grandest elements in human history are looked down upon as
if they were not within the artist's sympathy and veneration and
intensely dramatic reproduction. "I do well to be angry" on that
ground, don't I? The simple fact is, that I never saw anything of my
aunt's writing, and Dinah's words came from me "as the tears come
because our heart is full, and we can't help them."

If you were living in London instead of at Edinburgh, I should ask you
to read the first volume of "Sister Maggie" at once, for the sake of
having your impression, but it is inconvenient to me to part with the
MS. The great success of "Adam" makes my writing a matter of more
anxiety than ever. I suppose there is a little sense of responsibility
mixed up with a great deal of pride. And I think I should worry myself
still more if I began to print before the thing is essentially
complete. So on all grounds it is better to wait. How clever and
picturesque the "Horsedealer in Syria" is! I read him with keen
interest, only wishing that he saw the seamy side of things rather
less habitually. Excellent Captain Speke can't write so well, but one
follows him out of grave sympathy. That a man should live through such
things as that beetle in his ear! Such papers as that make the
_specialité_ of _Blackwood_--one sees them nowhere else.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1859.]

_Oct. 16._--Yesterday came a pleasant packet of letters: one from
Blackwood, saying that they are printing a seventh edition of "Adam
Bede" (of 2000), and that "Clerical Scenes" will soon be exhausted. I
have finished the first volume of my new novel, "Sister Maggie;" have
got my legal questions answered satisfactorily, and when my headache
has cleared off must go at it full speed.

_Oct. 25._--The day before yesterday Herbert Spencer dined with us. We
have just finished reading aloud "Père Goriot"--a hateful book. I have
been reading lately and have nearly finished Comte's "Catechism."

_Oct. 28._--Received from Blackwood a check for £400, the last payment
for "Adam Bede" in the terms of the agreement. But in consequence of
the great success, he proposes to pay me £800 more at the beginning of
next year. Yesterday Smith, the publisher, called to make propositions
to G. about writing in the _Cornhill Magazine_.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 28th Oct. 1859.]

I beg that you and Major Blackwood will accept my thanks for your
proposal to give me a further share in the success of "Adam Bede,"
beyond the terms of our agreement, which are fulfilled by the second
check for £400, received this morning. Neither you nor I ever
calculated on half such a success, thinking that the book was too
quiet, and too unflattering to dominant fashion, ever to be very
popular. I hope that opinion of ours is a guarantee that there is
nothing hollow or transient in the reception "Adam" has met with.
Sometimes when I read a book which has had a great success, and am
unable to see any valid merits of an artistic kind to account for it,
I am visited with a horrible alarm lest "Adam," too, should ultimately
sink into the same class of outworn admirations. But I always fall
back on the fact that no shibboleth and no vanity is flattered by it,
and that there is no novelty of mere form in it which can have
delighted simply by startling.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1859.]

_Nov. 10._--Dickens dined with us to-day, for the first time, and
after he left I went to the Congreves, where George joined me, and we
had much chat--about George Stephenson, religion, etc.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 11th Nov. 1859.]

A very beautiful letter--beautiful in feeling--that I have received
from Mrs. Gaskell to-day, prompts me to write to you and let you know
how entirely she has freed herself from any imputation of being
unwilling to accept the truth when it has once clearly presented
itself as truth. Since she has known "on authority" that the two books
are mine, she has re-read them, and has written to me, apparently on
the prompting they gave in that second reading: very sweet and noble
words they are that she has written to me. Yesterday Dickens dined
with us, on _his_ return from the country. That was a great pleasure
to me: he is a man one can thoroughly enjoy talking to--there is a
strain of real seriousness along with his keenness and humor.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 14th Nov. 1859.]

The Liggins affair is concluded so far as any _action_ of ours is
concerned, since Mr. Quirk (the inmost citadel, I presume) has
surrendered by writing an apology to Blackwood, saying he now believes
he was imposed on by Mr. Liggins. As to Miss Martineau, I respect her
so much as an authoress, and have so pleasant a recollection of her as
a hostess for three days, that I wish that distant impression from
herself and her writings to be disturbed as little as possible by mere
personal details. Anything she may do or say or feel concerning me
personally is a matter of entire indifference: I share her bitterness
with a large number of far more blameless people than myself. It can
be of no possible benefit to me, or any one else, that I should know
more of those things, either past, present, or to come. "I do owe no
man anything" except to write honestly and religiously what comes from
my inward promptings; and the freer I am kept of all knowledge of that
comparatively small circle who mingle personal regards or hatred with
their judgment or reception of my writings, the easier it will be to
keep my motives free from all indirectness and write truly.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1859.]

_Nov. 18._--On Monday Dickens wrote, asking me to give him, after I
have finished my present novel, a story to be printed in _All the Year
Round_--to begin four months after next Easter, and assuring me of my
own terms. The next day G. had an interview by appointment with Evans
(of Bradbury & Evans), and Lucas, the editor of _Once a Week_, who,
after preliminary pressing of G. himself to contribute, put forward
their wish that I should give them a novel for their Magazine. They
were to write and make an offer, but have not yet done so. We have
written to Dickens, saying that _time_ is an insurmountable obstacle
to his proposition, as he puts it.

I am reading Thomas à Kempis.

_Nov. 19._--Mr. Lockhart Clarke and Mr. Herbert Spencer dined with us.

_Nov. 22._--We have been much annoyed lately by Newby's advertisement
of a book called "Adam Bede, Junior," a sequel; and to-day Dickens has
written to mention a story of the tricks which are being used to push
the book under the pretence of its being mine. One librarian has been
forced to order the book against his will, because the public have
demanded it. Dickens is going to put an article on the subject in
_Household Words_, in order to scarify the rascally bookseller.

_Nov. 23._--We began Darwin's book on "The Origin of Species"
to-night. Though full of interesting matter, it is not impressive,
from want of luminous and orderly presentation.

_Nov. 24._--This morning I wrote the scene between Mrs. Tulliver and
Wakem. G. went into town and saw young Evans (of Bradbury & Evans),
who agreed that it would be well to have an article in _Punch_ on this
scoundrelly business of "Adam Bede, Junior." A divine day. I walked
out, and Mrs. Congreve joined me. Then music, "Arabian Nights," and
Darwin.

_Nov. 25._--I am reading old Bunyan again, after the long lapse of
years, and am profoundly struck with the true genius manifested in the
simple, vigorous, rhythmic style.

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 25th Nov. 1859.]

Thanks for _Bentley_. Some one said the writer of the article on "Adam
Bede" was a Mr. Mozeley, a clergyman, and a writer in the _Times_; but
these reports about authorship are as often false as true. I think it
is, on the whole, the best review we have seen, unless we must except
the one in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, by Emile Montégut. I don't
mean to read _any_ reviews of my next book; so far as they would
produce any effect, they would be confusing. Everybody admires
something that somebody else finds fault with; and the miller with his
donkey was in a clear and decided state of mind compared with the
unfortunate writer who should set himself to please all the world of
review writers. I am compelled, in spite of myself, to be annoyed with
this business of "Adam Bede, Junior." You see I am well provided with
thorns in the flesh, lest I should be exalted beyond measure. To part
with the copyright of a book which sells 16,000 in one year--to have a
Liggins and an unknown writer of one's "Sequel" all to one's self--is
excellent discipline.

We are reading Darwin's book on Species, just come out after long
expectation. It is an elaborate exposition of the evidence in favor of
the Development Theory, and so makes an epoch. Do you see how the
publishing world is going mad on periodicals? If I could be seduced by
such offers, I might have written three poor novels, and made my
fortune in one year. Happily, I have no need to exert myself when I
say "Avaunt thee, Satan!" Satan, in the form of bad writing and good
pay, is not seductive to me.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1859.]

_Nov. 26._--Letter from Lucas, editor of _Once a Week_, anxious to
come to terms about my writing for said periodical.

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles L. Lewes, 26th Nov. 1859.]

It was very pretty and generous of you to send me a nice long letter
out of your turn, and I think I shall give you, as a reward, other
opportunities of being generous in the same way for the next few
months, for I am likely to be a poor correspondent, having my head and
hands full.

We have the whole of Vilmar's "Literatur Geschichte," but not the
remainder of the "Deutsche Humoristik." I agree with you in liking the
history of German literature, especially the earlier ages--the
birth-time of the legendary poetry. Have you read the "Nibelungenlied"
yet?

Whereabouts are you in algebra? It would be very pleasant to study it
with you, if I could possibly find time to rub up my knowledge. It is
now a good while since I looked into algebra, but I was very fond of
it in old days, though I dare say I never went so far as you have now
gone. Tell me your latitude and longitude.

I have no memory of an autumn so disappointing as this. It is my
favorite season. I delight especially in the golden and red tints
under the purple clouds. But this year the trees were almost stripped
of their leaves before they had changed color--dashed off by the winds
and rain. We have had _no_ autumnal beauty.

I am writing at night--very tired--so you must not wonder if I have
left out words, or been otherwise incoherent.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1859.]

_Nov. 29._--Wrote a letter to the _Times_, and to Delane about Newby.

[Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 5th Dec. 1859.]

I took no notice of the extract you sent me from a letter of Mrs.
Gaskell's, being determined not to engage in any writing on the topic
of my authorship, except such as was absolutely demanded of us. But
since then I have had a very beautiful letter from Mrs. Gaskell, and I
will quote some of her words, because they do her honor, and will
incline you to think more highly of her. She begins in this way:
"Since I heard, on authority, that you were the author of 'Scenes of
Clerical Life' and 'Adam Bede,' I have read them again, and I must
once more tell you how earnestly, fully, and _humbly_ I admire them. I
never read anything so complete and beautiful in fiction in my life
before." Very sweet and noble of her, was it not? She went on to speak
of her having held to the notion of Liggins, but she adds, "I was
never such a goose as to believe that books like yours were a mosaic
of real and ideal." The "Seth Bede" and "Adam Bede, Junior," are
speculations of those who are always ready to fasten themselves like
leeches on a popular fame. Such things must be endured: they are the
shadow to the bright fact of selling 16,000 in one year. As to the
silly falsehoods and empty opinions afloat in some petty circles, I
have quite conquered my temporary irritation about them--indeed, I
feel all the more serene now for that very irritation; it has
impressed on me more deeply how entirely the rewards of the artist lie
apart from everything that is narrow and personal: there is no peace
until that lesson is thoroughly learned. I shall go on writing from
my inward promptings--writing what I love and believe, what I feel to
be true and good, if I can only render it worthily--and then leave all
the rest to take its chance: "As it was in the beginning, is now, and
ever shall be" with those who are to produce any art that will
lastingly touch the generations of men. We have been reading Darwin's
book on the "Origin of Species" just now: it makes an epoch, as the
expression of his thorough adhesion, after long years of study, to the
Doctrine of Development--and not the adhesion of an anonym like the
author of the "Vestiges," but of a long-celebrated naturalist. The
book is sadly wanting in illustrative facts--of which he has collected
a vast number, but reserves them for a future book, of which this
smaller one is the _avant-coureur_. This will prevent the work from
becoming popular as the "Vestiges" did, but it will have a great
effect in the scientific world, causing a thorough and open discussion
of a question about which people have hitherto felt timid. So the
world gets on step by step towards brave clearness and honesty! But to
me the Development Theory, and all other explanations of processes by
which things came to be, produce a feeble impression compared with the
mystery that lies under the processes. It is nice to think of you
reading our great, great favorite Molière, while, for the present, we
are not taking him down from the shelves--only talking about him, as
we do very often. I get a good deal of pleasure out of the sense that
some one I love is reading and enjoying my best-loved writers. I think
the "Misanthrope" the finest, most complete production _of its kind_
in the world. I know you enjoy the "sonnet" scene, and the one between
Arsinoé and Célimène.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Monday evening, 5th Dec.
1859.]

In opposition to most people who love to _read_ Shakspeare, I like to
see his plays acted better than any others; his great tragedies thrill
me, let them be acted how they may. I think it is something like what
I used to experience in old days in listening to uncultured
preachers--the emotions lay hold of one too strongly for one to care
about the medium. Before all other plays I find myself cold and
critical, seeing nothing but actors and "properties." I like going to
those little provincial theatres. One's heart streams out to the poor
devils of actors who get so little clapping, and will go home to so
poor a supper. One of my pleasures lately has been hearing repeatedly
from my Genevese friends M. and Mme. d'Albert, who were so good to me
during my residence with them. M. d'Albert had read the "Scenes of
Clerical Life" before he knew they were mine, and had been so much
struck with them that he had wanted to translate them. One likes to
feel old ties strengthened by fresh sympathies. The _Cornhill
Magazine_ is going to lead off with great spirit, and promises to
eclipse all the other new-born periodicals. Mr. Lewes is writing a
series of papers for it--"Studies in Animal Life"--which are to be
subsequently published in a book. It is quite as well that your book
should not be ready for publication just yet. February is a much
better time than Christmas. I shall be one of your most eager
readers--for every book that comes from the heart of hearts does me
good, and I quite share your faith that what you yourself feel so
deeply and find so precious will find a home in some other minds. Do
not suspect that I impose on you the task of writing letters to answer
my _dilettante_ questions. "Am I on a bed of roses?" I have four
children to correspond with--the three boys in Switzerland, and Emily
at Lichfield.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1859.]

_Dec. 15._--Blackwood proposes to give me for "The Mill on the Floss"
£2000 for 4000 copies of an edition at 31_s._ 6_d._, and after the
same rate for any more that may be printed at the same price: £150 for
1000 at 12_s._, and £60 for 1000 at 6_s._ I have accepted.

_Dec. 25._--Christmas-day. We all, including Pug, dined with Mr. and
Mrs. Congreve, and had a delightful day. Mr. Bridges was there too.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 30th Dec. 1859.]

I don't like Christmas to go by without sending you a greeting, though
I have really nothing to say beyond that. We spent our Christmas-day
with the Congreves, shutting up our house and taking our servant and
Pug with us. And so we ate our turkey and plum-pudding in very social,
joyous fashion with those charming friends. Mr. Bridges was there too.

We are meditating flight to Italy when my present work is done, as our
last bit of vagrancy for a long, long while. We shall only stay two
months, doing nothing but absorb.

I don't think I have anything else to tell, except that we, being very
happy, wish all mortals to be in like condition, and especially the
mortals we know in the flesh. Human happiness is a web with many
threads of pain in it--that is always _sub auditum_--Twist ye, twine
ye, even so, etc., etc.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 3d Jan. 1860.]

I never before had so pleasant a New Year's greeting as your letter
containing a check for £800, for which I have to thank you to-day. On
every ground--including considerations that are not at all of a
monetary kind--I am deeply obliged to you and to Major Blackwood for
your liberal conduct in relation to "Adam Bede."

As, owing to your generous concession of the copyright of "Adam Bede,"
the three books will be henceforth on the same footing, we shall be
delivered from further discussion as to terms.

We are demurring about the title. Mr. Lewes is beginning to prefer
"The House of Tulliver; or, Life on the Floss," to our old notion of
"Sister Maggie." "The Tullivers; or, Life on the Floss," has the
advantage of slipping easily off the lazy English tongue, but it is
after too common a fashion ("The Newcomes," "The Bertrams," etc.,
etc.). Then there is "The Tulliver Family; or, Life on the Floss."
Pray meditate, and give us your opinion.

I am very anxious that the "Scenes of Clerical Life" should have every
chance of impressing the public with its existence: first, because I
think it of importance to the estimate of me as a writer that "Adam
Bede" should not be counted as my only book; and secondly, because
there are ideas presented in these stories about which I care a good
deal, and am not sure that I can ever embody again. This latter reason
is my private affair, but the other reason, if valid, is yours also. I
must tell you that I had another cheering letter to-day besides yours:
one from a person of mark in your Edinburgh University,[9] full of the
very strongest words of sympathy and encouragement, hoping that my
life may long be spared "to give pictures of the deeper life of this
age." So I sat down to my desk with a delicious confidence that my
audience is not made up of reviewers and literary clubs. If there is
any truth in me that the world wants, nothing will hinder the world
from drinking what it is athirst for. And if there is no needful truth
in me, let me, howl as I may in the process, be hurled into the Dom
Daniel, where I wish all other futile writers to sink.

Your description of the "curling" made me envy you the sight.

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles L. Lewes, 4th Jan. 1860.]

The sun is shining with us too, and your pleasant letter made it seem
to shine more brightly. I am not going to be expansive in this
appendix to your father's chapter of love and news, for my head is
tired with writing this morning--it is not so young as yours, you
know, and, besides, is a feminine head, supported by weaker muscles
and a weaker digestive apparatus than that of a young gentleman with a
broad chest and hopeful whiskers. I don't wonder at your being more
conscious of your attachment to Hofwyl now the time of leaving is so
near. I fear you will miss a great many things in exchanging Hofwyl,
with its snowy mountains and glorious spaces, for a very moderate home
in the neighborhood of London. You will have a less various, more
arduous life: but the time of _Entbehrung_ or _Entsagung_ must begin,
you know, for every mortal of us. And let us hope that we shall
all--father and mother and sons--help one another with love.

What jolly times you have had lately! It did us good to read of your
merrymaking.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 6th Jan. 1860.]

"The Mill on the Floss" be it then! The only objections are, that the
mill is not _strictly_ on the Floss, being on its small tributary, and
that the title is of rather laborious utterance. But I think these
objections do not deprive it of its advantage over "The Tullivers;
or, Life on the Floss"--the only alternative, so far as we can see.
Pray give the casting-vote.

Easter Monday, I see, is on the 8th April, and I wish to be out by the
middle or end of March. Illness apart, I intend to have finished Vol.
III. by the beginning of that month, and I hope no obstacle will
impede the rapidity of the printing.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1860.]

_Jan. 11._--I have had a very delightful letter of sympathy from
Professor Blackie of Edinburgh, which came to me on New Year's
morning, and a proposal from Blackwood to publish a third edition of
"Clerical Scenes" at 12_s._ George's article in the _Cornhill
Magazine_--the first of a series of "Studies in Animal Life"--is much
admired, and in other ways our New Year opens with happy omens.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 12th Jan. 1860.]

Thank you for letting me see the specimen advertisements; they have
helped us to come to a decision--namely, for "The Mill on the Floss."

I agree with you that it will be well not to promise the book in
March--not because I do not desire and hope to be ready, but because I
set my face against all pledges that I am not _sure_ of being able to
fulfil. The third volume is, I fancy, always more rapidly written than
the rest. The third volume of "Adam Bede" was written in six weeks,
even with headaching interruptions, because it was written under a
stress of emotion, which first volumes cannot be. I will send you the
first volume of "The Mill" at once. The second is ready, but I would
rather keep it as long as I can. Besides the advantage to the book of
being out by Easter, I have another reason for wishing to have done in
time for that. We want to get away for two months to Italy, if
possible, to feed my mind with fresh thoughts, and to assure ourselves
of that fructifying holiday before the boys are about us, making it
difficult for us to leave home. But you may rely on it that no amount
of horse-power would make me _hurry_ over my book, so as not to do my
best. If it is written fast, it will be because I can't help writing
it fast.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1860.]

_Jan. 16._--Finished my second volume this morning, and am going to
send off the MS. of the first volume to-morrow. We have decided that
the title shall be "The Mill on the Floss." We have been reading
"Humphrey Clinker" in the evenings, and have been much disappointed in
it, after the praise of Thackeray and Dickens.

_Jan. 26._--Mr. Pigott, Mr. Redford, and Mr. F. Chapman dined with us,
and we had a musical evening. Mrs. Congreve and Miss Bury[10] joining
us after dinner.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 28th Jan. 1860.]

Thanks for your letter of yesterday, with the Genevese enclosure. No
promise, alas! of smallest watch expressing largest admiration, but a
desire for "permission to translate."

I have been invalided for the last week, and, of course, am a prisoner
in the castle of Giant Despair, who growls in my ear that "The Mill on
the Floss" is detestable, and that the last volume will be the climax
of that general detestableness. Such is the elation attendant on what
a self-elected lady correspondent of mine from Scotland calls my
"exciting career!"

I have had a great pleasure this week. Dr. Inman of Liverpool has
dedicated a new book ("Foundation for a New Theory and Practice of
Medicine") "to G. H. Lewes, as an acknowledgment of benefit received
from noticing his close observation and clear inductive reasoning in
'Sea-side Studies' and the 'Physiology of Common Life.'"

That is really gratifying, coming from a _physician_ of some
scientific mark, who is _not_ a personal friend.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1860.]

_Feb. 4._--Came this morning a letter from Blackwood announcing the
despatch of the first eight sheets of proof of "The Mill on the
Floss," and expressing his delight in it. To-night G. has read them,
and says, "_Ganz famos!_" Ebenezer!

_Feb. 23._--Sir Edward Lytton called on us. Guy Darrell in _propriâ
personâ_.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 23d Feb. 1860.]

Sir Edward Lytton called on us yesterday. The conversation lapsed
chiefly into monologue, from the difficulty I found in making him
hear, but under all disadvantages I had an agreeable impression of his
kindness and sincerity. He thinks the two defects of "Adam Bede" are
the dialect and Adam's marriage with Dinah; but, of course, I would
have my teeth drawn rather than give up either.

Jacobi told Jean Paul that unless he altered the _dénouement_ of his
Titan he would withdraw his friendship from him; and I am preparing
myself for your lasting enmity on the ground of the tragedy in my
third volume. But an unfortunate duck can only lay blue eggs, however
much white ones may be in demand.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1860.]

_Feb. 29._--G. has been in the town to-day, and has agreed for £300
for "The Mill on the Floss" from Harpers of New York. This evening,
too, has come a letter from Williams & Norgate, saying that Tauchnitz
will give £100 for the German reprint; also, that "Bede Adam" is
translated into Hungarian.

_March 5._--Yesterday Mr. Lawrence, the portrait-painter, lunched with
us, and expressed to G. his wish to take my portrait.

_March 9._--Yesterday a letter from Blackwood, expressing his strong
delight in my third volume, which he had read to the beginning of
"Borne on the tide." To-day young Blackwood called, and told us, among
other things, that the last copies of "Clerical Scenes" had gone
to-day--twelve for export. Letter came from Germany, announcing a
translation of G.'s "Biographical History of Philosophy."

_March 11._--To-day the first volume of the German translation of
"Adam Bede" came. It is done by Dr. Frese, the same man who translated
the "Life of Goethe."

_March 20._--Professor Owen sent me his "Palæontology" to-day. Have
missed two days of work from headache, and so have not yet finished my
book.

_March 21._--Finished this morning "The Mill on the Floss," writing
from the moment when Maggie, carried out on the water, thinks of her
mother and brother. We hope to start for Rome on Saturday, 24th.

                _Magnificat anima mea!_

     The manuscript of "The Mill on the Floss" bears the following
     inscription:

     "To my beloved husband, George Henry Lewes, I give this MS.
     of my third book, written in the sixth year of our life
     together, at Holly Lodge, South Field, Wandsworth, and
     finished 21st March, 1860."

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 22d March, 1860.]

Your letter yesterday morning helped to inspire me for the last eleven
pages, if they have any inspiration in them. They were written in a
_furor_, but I dare say there is not a word different from what it
would have been if I had written them at the slowest pace.

We expect to start on Saturday morning, and to be in Rome by Palm
Sunday, or else by the following Tuesday. Of course we shall write to
you when we know what will be our address in Rome. In the meantime
news will gather.

I don't mean to send "The Mill on the Floss" to any one except to
Dickens, who has behaved with a delicate kindness in a recent matter,
which I wish to acknowledge.

I am grateful and yet rather sad to have finished--sad that I shall
live with my people on the banks of the Floss no longer. But it is
time that I should go and absorb some new life and gather fresh ideas.


_SUMMARY._

JANUARY, 1859, TO MARCH, 1860.

     Looking for cases of _inundation_ in _Annual Register_--New
     House--Holly Lodge, Wandsworth--Letter to John
     Blackwood--George Eliot fears she has not characteristics of
     "the popular author"--Subscription to "Adam Bede" 730
     copies--Appreciation by a cabinet-maker--Dr. John Brown sends
     "Rab and his Friends" with an inscription--Letter to
     Blackwood thereon--Tries to be hopeful--Letters to Miss
     Hennell--Description of Holly Lodge--Miss
     Nightingale--Thoughts on death--Scott--Mrs. Clarke
     writes--Mr. and Mrs. Congreve--Letter to Mrs. Bray on effects
     of anxiety--Mrs. Clarke dying--Letter to John
     Blackwood--Wishes Carlyle to read "Adam Bede"--"Life of
     Frederic" painful--Susceptibility to newspaper
     criticism--Edinburgh more encouraging than London--Letter to
     Blackwood to stop puffing notices--Letter from E. Hall,
     working-man, asking for cheap editions--Sale of "Adam
     Bede"--Death of Mrs. Clarke--1800 copies of "Adam Bede"
     sold--Letter to Blackwood--Awakening to fame--Letter to
     Froude--Mrs. Poyser quoted in House of Commons by Mr. Charles
     Buxton--Opinions of Charles Reade, Shirley Brooks, and John
     Murray--Letter to John Blackwood--Warwickshire correspondent
     insists that Liggins is author of "Adam Bede"--Not flushed
     with success--Visit to Isle of Wight--Letter to Miss Hennell
     on rewriting, and pleasure in Mr. and Mrs. Congreve--Letter
     to _Times_, denying that Liggins is the author--Letter to
     Blackwood--The Liggins myth--Letter from Bulwer--Finished
     "The Lifted Veil"--Writing "The Tullivers"--Mrs.
     Congreve--Letter to Mrs. Congreve--Faith in her--Letter from
     Madame Bodichon--Reply breathing joy in sympathy--Letter to
     Major Blackwood--Mr. Anders's apology for the Liggins
     business--"Adam Bede" worth writing--Dulwich
     gallery--Blackwood gives £400 more in acknowledgment of "Adam
     Bede's" success--Letter to Miss Hennell on Mrs. Congreve--On
     difficulty of getting cheap music in England--Professor
     Aytoun on "Adam Bede"--Letter to Major
     Blackwood--Liggins--Mrs. Gaskell--Letter to Mrs.
     Congreve--Dislike of Wandsworth--To Crystal Palace to hear
     "Messiah," and reveals herself to Brays as author of "Adam
     Bede"--Letter to Brays--Bad effect of talking of her
     books--Letter to Charles Bray--Melancholy that her writing
     does not produce effect intended--Letter to Mrs. Congreve--To
     Switzerland by Paris--At Schweizerhof, Lucerne, with
     Congreves--Mr. Lewes goes to Hofwyl--Return to Richmond by
     Bâle and Paris--Fourth edition of "Adam Bede" (5000) sold in
     a fortnight--Letter to Mrs. Bray on Mrs. Congreve--On the
     effect of her books and fame--Herbert Spencer on "Adam
     Bede"--Pamphlet to prove that Scott's novels were written by
     Thomas Scott--Letter from Dickens on "Adam Bede" referred
     to--Letter to John Blackwood on "Pug"--Letter to Charles
     Lewes--"The Physiology of Common Life"--American proposition
     for a story for £1200--Letter to Madame Bodichon--Distance
     from experience artistically necessary--Letter to John
     Blackwood--Development of stories--Visit to
     Penmaenmawr--Return by Lichfield to Weymouth--Sixth edition
     of "Adam Bede"--Back to Richmond--Anxiety about new
     novel--Journey to Gainsboro', Lincolnshire--Letter to Miss
     Hennell--End of Liggins business--Letter to John Blackwood--A
     correspondent suggests a sequel to "Adam
     Bede"--Susceptibility to outside opinion--Seventh edition of
     "Adam Bede"--Blackwood proposes to pay £800 beyond the
     bargain for success of "Adam Bede"--Dickens dines at Holly
     Lodge--Letter to Miss Hennell--Quotes letter from Mrs.
     Gaskell--Miss Martineau--Dickens asks for story for _All the
     Year Round_--"Adam Bede, Junior"--Reading Darwin on "Origin
     of Species"--Bunyan--Letter to Mr. Bray--Article on "Adam
     Bede" in _Bentley_--In _Revue des Deux Mondes_, by Emile
     Montégut--Reviews generally--16,000 of "Adam Bede" sold in
     year--Darwin's book--Letter to Charles Lewes--Mentions
     fondness of algebra--Letter to Madame Bodichon quoting Mrs.
     Gaskell's letter--Rewards of the artist lie apart from
     everything personal--Darwin's book--Molière--Letter to Miss
     Hennell--Likes to see Shakspeare acted--Hears from M. and
     Mme. d'Albert--_Cornhill Magazine_--Blackwood's terms for
     "Mill on the Floss"--Christmas-day with Congreves--Letter of
     sympathy from Professor Blackie--Third edition of "Clerical
     Scenes"--Letters to Blackwood--Thanks for concession of
     copyright of "Adam Bede"--Title of new novel
     considered--Suggestion of the "Mill on the Floss"
     accepted--The third volume of "Adam Bede" written in six
     weeks--Depression with the "Mill"--Sir Edward Lytton--"Adam
     Bede" translated into Hungarian and German--"Mill on the
     Floss" finished--Letter to Blackwood--Sad at finishing--Start
     for Italy.

FOOTNOTES:

[7] Miss Emily Bury, now Mrs. Geddes.

[8] Madame Bodichon.

[9] Professor Blackie.

[10] Mrs. Congreve's sister.




CHAPTER X.


[Sidenote: Italy, 1860.]

We have finished our journey to Italy--the journey I had looked
forward to for years, rather with the hope of the new elements it
would bring to my culture than with the hope of immediate pleasure.
Travelling can hardly be without a continual current of
disappointment, if the main object is not the enlargement of one's
general life, so as to make even weariness and annoyances enter into
the sum of benefit. One great deduction to me from the delight of
seeing world-famous objects is the frequent double consciousness which
tells me that I am not enjoying the actual vision enough, and that,
when higher enjoyment comes with the reproduction of the scenes in my
imagination, I shall have lost some of the details, which impress me
too feebly in the present, because the faculties are not wrought up
into energetic action.

I have no other journal than the briefest record of what we did each
day, so I shall put down my recollections whenever I happen to have
leisure and inclination--just for the sake of making clear to myself
the impressions I have brought away from our three months' travel.

The first striking moment in our journey was when we arrived, I think
about eleven o'clock at night, at the point in the ascent of the Mont
Cenis where we were to quit the diligences and take to the sledges.
After a hasty drink of hot coffee in the roadside inn, our large
party--the inmates of three diligences--turned out into the starlight
to await the signal for getting into the sledges. That signal seemed
to be considerably on in the future--to be arrived at through much
confusion of luggage-lifting, voices, and leading about of mules. The
human bustle and confusion made a poetic contrast with the sublime
stillness of the starlit heavens spread over the snowy table-land and
surrounding heights. The keenness of the air contributed strongly to
the sense of novelty; we had left our every-day, conventional world
quite behind us, and were on a visit to Nature in her private home.

Once closely packed in our sledge, congratulating ourselves that,
after all, we were no more squeezed than in our diligence, I gave
myself up to as many naps as chose to take possession of me, and
actually slept without very considerable interruption till we were
near the summit of the mighty pass. Already there was a faint hint of
the morning in the starlight, which showed us the vast, sloping
snow-fields as we commenced the descent. I got a few glimpses of the
pure, far-stretching whiteness before the sharpening edge of cold
forced us to close the window. Then there was no more to be seen till
it was time to get out of the sledge and ascend the diligence once
more; not, however, without a preliminary struggle with the wind,
which fairly blew me down on my slippery standing-ground. The rest of
our descent showed us fine, varied scenes of mountain and ravine till
we got down at Susa, where breakfast and the railway came as a
desirable variety after our long mountain journey and long fast. One
of our companions had been a gigantic French soldier, who had in
charge a bag of government money. He was my _vis-à-vis_ for some time,
and cramped my poor legs not a little with his precious bag, which he
would by no means part from.

The approach to Turin by the railway gave us a grand view of snowy
mountains surrounding the city on three sides. A few hours of rest
spent there could leave no very vivid impression. A handsome street,
well broken by architectural details, with a glimpse of snowy
mountains at the end of the vista, colonnades on each side, and flags
waving their bright colors in sign of political joy, is the image that
usually rises before me at the mention of Turin. I fancy the said
street is the principal one, but in our walk about the town we saw
everywhere a similar character of prosperous, well-lodged town
existence--only without the colonnades and without the balconies and
other details, which make the principal street picturesque. This is
the place that Alfieri lived in through many of his young follies,
getting tired of it at last for the Piedmontese pettiness of which it
was the centre. And now, eighty years later, it is the centre of a
widening life which may at last become the life of resuscitated Italy.
At the railway station, as we waited to take our departure for Genoa,
we had a sight of the man whose name will always be connected with the
story of that widening life--Count Cavour--"imitant son portrait,"
which we had seen in the shops, with unusual closeness. A man pleasant
to look upon, with a smile half kind, half caustic; giving you
altogether the impression that he thinks of "many matters," but thanks
Heaven and makes no boast of them. He was there to meet the Prince de
Carignan, who was going to Genoa on his way towards Florence by the
same train as ourselves. The prince is a notability with a thick
waist, bound in by a gold belt, and with a fat face, predominated over
by a large mustache--"Non ragionam di lui." The railway journey from
Turin was chiefly distinguished by dust; but I slept through the
latter half, without prejudice, however, to the satisfaction with
which I lay down in a comfortable bedroom in the Hotel Feder.

In Genoa again on a bright, warm spring morning! I was here eleven
years ago, and the image that visit had left in my mind was
surprisingly faithful, though fragmentary. The outlook from our hotel
was nearly the same as before--over a low building with a colonnade,
at the masts of the abundant shipping. But there was a striking change
in the interior of the hotel. It was like the other, a palace adapted
to the purposes of an inn; but be-carpeted and be-furnished with an
exaggeration of English fashion.

We lost no time in turning out, after breakfast, into the morning
sunshine. George was enchanted with the aspect of the place, as we
drove or walked along the streets. It was his first vision of anything
corresponding to his preconception of Italy. After the Adlergasse, in
Nürnberg, surely no streets can be more impressive than the Strada
Nuova and Strada Nuovissima, at Genoa. In street architecture I can
rise to the highest point of the admiration given to the Palladian
style. And here in these chief streets of Genoa the palaces have two
advantages over those of Florence: they form a series, creating a
general impression of grandeur of which each particular palace gets
the benefit; and they have the open gateway, showing the _cortile_
within--sometimes containing grand stone staircases. And all this
architectural splendor is accompanied with the signs of actual
prosperity. Genova la Superba is not a name of the past merely.

We ascended the tower of Santa Maria di Carignano to get a panoramic
view of the city, with its embosoming hills and bay--saw the
cathedral, with its banded black-and-white marble--the churches of the
Annunziata and San Ambrogio, with their wealth of gilding and rich
pink-brown marbles--the Palazzo Rosso, with its collection of
eminently forgettable pictures--and the pretty gardens of the Palazzo
Doria, with their flourishing green close against the sea.

A drive in the direction of the Campo Santo, along the dry, pebbly bed
of the river, showed us the terraced hills planted with olives, and
many picturesque groups of the common people with mules or on carts;
not to mention what gives beauty to every corner of the inhabited
world--the groups of children squatting against walls or trotting
about by the side of their elders or grinning together over their
play.

One of the personages we were pleased to encounter in the streets here
was a quack--a Dulcamara--mounted on his carriage and holding forth
with much _brio_ before proceeding to take out the tooth of a negro,
already seated in preparation.

We left Genoa on the second evening--unhappily, a little too long
after sundown, so that we did not get a perfect view of the grand city
from the sea. The pale starlight could bring out no color. We had a
prosperous passage to Leghorn.

Leghorn on a brilliant, warm morning, with five or six hours before us
to fill as agreeably as possible! Of course, the first thought was to
go to Pisa, but the train would not start till eleven; so, in the
meantime, we took a drive about the prosperous-looking town, and saw
the great reservoir which receives the water brought from the distant
mountains; a beautiful and interesting sight--to look into the glassy
depth and see columns and grand arches reflected as if in mockery and
frustration of one's desire to see the bottom. But in one corner the
light fell so as to reveal that reality instead of the beautiful
illusion. On our way back we passed the Hebrew synagogue, and were
glad of our coachman's suggestion that we should enter, seeing it was
the Jews' Sabbath.

At Pisa we took a carriage and drove at once to the cathedral, seeing
as we went the well-looking lines of building on each side of the
Arno.

A wonderful sight is that first glimpse of the cathedral, with the
leaning campanile on one side and the baptistery on the other, green
turf below, and a clear, blue sky above! The structure of the
campanile is exquisitely light and graceful--tier above tier of small
circular arches, supported by delicate, round pillars narrowing
gradually in circumference, but very slightly, so that there is no
striking difference of size between the base and summit. The campanile
is all of white marble, but the cathedral has the bands of black and
white, softened in effect by the yellowing which time has given to the
white. There is a family likeness among all these structures: they all
have the delicate little colonnades and circular arches. But the
baptistery has stronger traits of the Gothic style in the pinnacles
that crown the encircling colonnade.

After some dusty delay outside the railway station we set off back
again to Livorno, and forthwith got on board our steamboat again--to
awake next morning (being Palm-Sunday) at Civita Vecchia. Much waiting
before we were allowed to land; and again much waiting for the clumsy
process of "visiting" our luggage. I was amused while sitting at the
_Dogana_, where almost every one was cross and busy, to see a dog
making his way quietly out with a bone in his mouth.

Getting into our railway carriage, our _vis-à-vis_--a stout, amiable,
intelligent Livornian, with his wife and son, named Dubreux--exclaimed,
"C'en est fini d'un peuple qui n'est pas capable de changer une bêtise
comme ça!" George got into pleasant talk with him, and his son, about
Edinburgh and the scientific men there--the son having been there for
some time in order to go through a course of practical science. The
father was a naturalist--an entomologist, I think.

It was an interesting journey from Civita Vecchia to Rome: at first, a
scene of rough, hilly character, then a vast plain, frequently marshy,
crowded with asphodels, inhabited by buffaloes; here and there a
falcon or other slow, large-winged bird floating and alighting.

At last we came in sight of Rome, but there was nothing imposing to be
seen. The chief object was what I afterwards knew to be one of the
aqueducts, but which I then, in the vagueness of my conceptions,
guessed to be the ruins of baths. The railway station where we
alighted looked remote and countrified; only the omnibuses and one
family carriage were waiting, so that we were obliged to take our
chance in one of the omnibuses--that is, the chance of finding no
place left for us in the hotels. And so it was. Every one wanted to go
to the Hotel d'Angleterre, and every one was disappointed. We, at
last, by help of some fellow-travellers, got a small room _au
troisième_ at the Hotel d'Amérique; and as soon as that business was
settled we walked out to look at Rome--not without a rather heavy load
of disappointment on our minds from the vision we had of it from the
omnibus windows. A weary length of dirty, uninteresting streets had
brought us within sight of the dome of St. Peter's, which was not
impressive, seen in a peeping, makeshift manner, just rising above the
houses; and the Castle of St. Angelo seemed but a shabby likeness of
the engravings. Not one iota had I seen that corresponded with my
preconceptions.

Our hotel was in the Strada Babuino, which leads directly from the
Piazza del Popolo to the Piazza di Spagna. We went to the latter for
our first walk, and arriving opposite the high, broad flights of stone
steps which lead up to the Trinità di Monte, stopped for the first
time with a sense that here was something not quite common and ugly.
But I think we got hardly any farther, that evening, than the tall
column at the end of the piazza, which celebrates the final settlement
by Pius IX. of the Virgin's Immaculate Conception. Oh, yes; I think we
wandered farther among narrow and ugly streets, and came into our
hotel again still with some dejection at the probable relation our
"Rome visited" was to bear to our "Rome unvisited."

Discontented with our little room at an extravagant height of stairs
and price, we found and took lodgings the next day in the Corso
opposite St. Carlo, with a well-mannered Frenchman named Peureux and
his little, dark, Italian wife--and so felt ourselves settled for a
month. By this time we were in better spirits; for in the morning we
had been to the Capitol (Campidoglio, the modern variant for
Capitolium), had ascended the tower, and had driven to the Coliseum.
The scene, looking along the Forum to the Arch of Titus, resembled
strongly that mixture of ruined grandeur with modern life which I had
always had in my imagination at the mention of Rome. The approach to
the Capitol from the opposite side is also impressive: on the right
hand the broad, steep flight of steps leading up to the Church and
Monastery of Ara Coeli, placed, some say, on the site of the Arx; in
the front a less steep flight of steps _à cordon_ leading to that
lower, flatter portion of the hill which was called the
_Intermontium_, and which now forms a sort of piazza, with the
equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius in the centre, and on three sides
buildings designed, or rather modified, by Michael Angelo--on the left
the Museum, on the right the Museo dei Conservatori, and, on the side
opposite the steps, the building devoted to public offices (Palazzo
dei Senatori), in the centre of which stands the tower. On each hand,
at the summit of the steps, are the two Colossi, less celebrated but
hardly less imposing in their calm grandeur than the Colossi of the
Quirinal. They are strangely streaked and disfigured by the blackening
weather; but their large-eyed, mild might gives one a thrill of awe,
half like what might have been felt by the men of old who saw the
divine twins watering their steeds when they brought the news of
victory.

Perhaps the world can hardly offer a more interesting outlook than
that from the tower of the Capitol. The eye leaps first to the
mountains that bound the Campagna--the Sabine and Alban Hills and the
solitary Soracte farther on to the left. Then, wandering back across
the Campagna, it searches for the Sister Hills, hardly distinguishable
now as hills. The Palatine is conspicuous enough, marked by the ruins
of the Palace of the Cæsars, and rising up beyond the extremity of the
Forum. And now, once resting on the Forum, the eye will not readily
quit the long area that begins with the Clivus Capitolinus and extends
to the Coliseum--an area that was once the very focus of the world.
The Campo Vaccino, the site probably of the Comitium, was this first
morning covered with carts and animals, mingling a simple form of
actual life with those signs of the highly artificial life that had
been crowded here in ages gone by: the three Corinthian pillars at the
extremity of the Forum, said to have belonged to the Temple of Jupiter
Stator; the grand temple of Antoninus and Faustina; the white arch of
Titus; the Basilica of Constantine; the temple built by Adrian, with
its great, broken granite columns scattered around on the green,
rising ground; the huge arc of the Coliseum and the arch of
Constantine.

The scenes of these great relics remained our favorite haunt during
our stay at Rome; and one day, near the end of it, we entered the
enclosure of the Clivus Capitolinus and the excavated space of the
Forum. The ruins on the Clivus--the façade of massive columns on the
right, called the temple of Vespasian; the two Corinthian columns,
called the temple of Saturn, in the centre; and the arch of Septimius
Severus on the left--have their rich color set off by the luxuriant
green, clothing the lower masonry, which formed the foundations of the
crowded buildings on this narrow space, and, as a background to them
all, the rough solidity of the ancient wall forming the back of the
central building on the Intermontium, and regarded as one of the few
remains of Republican constructions. On either hand, at another angle
from the arch, the ancient road forming the double ascent of the
Clivus is seen, firm and level, with its great blocks of pavement. The
arch of Septimius Severus is particularly rich in color; and the
poorly executed bas-reliefs of military groups still look out in the
grotesque completeness of attitude and expression, even on the sides
exposed to the weather. From the Clivus a passage, underneath the
present road, leads into the Forum, whose immense pinkish granite
columns lie on the weather-worn white marble pavement. The column of
Phocas, with its base no longer "buried," stands at the extreme corner
nearest the Clivus; and the three elegant columns of the temple (say
some) of Jupiter Stator, mark the opposite extremity; between lie
traces, utterly confused to all but erudite eyes, of marble steps and
of pedestals stripped of their marble.

Let me see what I most delighted in, in Rome. Certainly this drive
from the Clivus to the Coliseum was, from first to last, one of the
chief things; but there are many objects and many impressions of
various kinds which I can reckon up as of almost equal interest: the
Coliseum itself, with the view from it; the drive along the Appian Way
to the tomb of Cecilia Metella, and the view from thence of the
Campagna bridged by the aqueduct; the baths of Titus, with the
remnants of their arabesques, seen by the light of torches, in the now
damp and gloomy spaces; the glimpse of the Tarpeian rock, with its
growth of cactus and rough herbage; the grand, bare arch brickwork of
the Palace of the Cæsars rising in huge masses on the Palatine; the
theatre of Marcellus bursting suddenly into view from among the
crowded mean houses of the modern city, and still more the Temple of
Minerva and Temple of Nerva, also set in the crowded city of the
present; and the exterior of the Pantheon, if it were not marred by
the Papal belfries--these are the traces of ancient Rome that have
left the strongest image of themselves in my mind. I ought not to
leave out Trajan's column, and the forum in which it stands; though
the severe cold tint of the gray granite columns, or fragments of
columns, gave this forum rather a dreary effect to me. For vastness
there is perhaps nothing more impressive in Rome than the Baths of
Caracalla, except the Coliseum; and I remember that it was among them
that I first noticed the lovely effect of the giant fennel, luxuriant
among the crumbling brickwork.

Among the ancient sculptures I think I must place on a level the
Apollo, the Dying Gladiator, and the Lateran Antinous: they affected
me equally in different ways. After these I delighted in the Venus of
the Capitol, and the Kissing Children in the same room; the Sophocles
at the Lateran Museum; the Nile; the black, laughing Centaur at the
Capitol; the Laughing Faun in the Vatican; and the _Sauroktonos_, or
Boy with the Lizard, and the sitting statue called Menander. The Faun
of Praxiteles, and the old Faun with the infant Bacchus, I had already
seen at Munich, else I should have mentioned them among my first
favorites. Perhaps the greatest treat we had at the Vatican was the
sight of a few statues, including the Apollo, by torchlight--all the
more impressive because it was our first sight of the Vatican. Even
the mere hurrying along the vast halls, with the fitful torchlight
falling on the innumerable statues and busts and bas-reliefs and
sarcophagi, would have left a sense of awe at these crowded, silent
forms which have the solemnity of suddenly arrested life. Wonderfully
grand these halls of the Vatican are; and there is but one complaint
to be made against the home provided for this richest collection of
antiquities--it is that there is no historical arrangement of them,
and no catalogue. The system of classification is based on the history
of their collection by the different popes, so that for every other
purpose but that of securing to each pope his share of glory, it is a
system of helter-skelter.

Of Christian Rome, St. Peter's is, of course, the supreme wonder. The
piazza, with Bernini's colonnades, and the gradual slope upward to the
mighty temple, gave me always a sense of having entered some
millennial new Jerusalem, where all small and shabby things were
unknown. But the exterior of the cathedral itself is even ugly; it
causes a constant irritation by its partial concealment of the dome.
The first impression from the interior was, perhaps, at a higher pitch
than any subsequent impression, either of its beauty or vastness; but
then, on later visits, the lovely marble, which has a tone at once
subdued and warm, was half-covered with hideous red drapery. There is
hardly any detail one cares to dwell on in St. Peter's. It is
interesting, for once, to look at the mosaic altar-pieces, some of
which render with marvellous success such famous pictures as the
Transfiguration, the Communion of St. Jerome, and the Entombment or
Disentombment of St. Petronilla. And some of the monuments are worth
looking at more than once, the chief glory of that kind being Canova's
Lions. I was pleased one day to watch a group of poor people looking
with an admiration that had a half-childish terror in it at the
sleeping lion, and with a sort of daring air thrusting their fingers
against the teeth of the waking "mane-bearer."

We ascended the dome near the end of our stay, but the cloudy horizon
was not friendly to our distant view, and Rome itself is ugly to a
bird's-eye contemplation. The chief interest of the ascent was the
vivid realization it gave of the building's enormous size, and after
that the sight of the inner courts and garden of the Vatican.

Our most beautiful view of Rome and the Campagna was one we had much
earlier in our stay, before the snow had vanished from the mountains;
it was from the terrace of the Villa Pamfili Doria.

Of smaller churches I remember especially Santa Maria degli Angeli, a
church formed by Michael Angelo by additions to the grand hall in the
Baths of Diocletian--the only remaining hall of ancient Rome; and the
Church of San Clemente, where there is a chapel painted by Masaccio,
as well as a perfect specimen of the ancient enclosure near the
tribune, called the presbytery, with the _ambones_ or pulpits from
which the lessons and gospel were read. Santa Maria Maggiore is an
exquisitely beautiful basilica, rich in marbles from a pagan temple;
and the reconstructed San Paolo fuori le Mura is a wonder of wealth
and beauty, with its lines of white-marble columns--if one could
possibly look with pleasure at such a perverted appliance of money and
labor as a church built in an unhealthy solitude. After St. Peter's,
however, the next great monument of Christian art is the Sistine
Chapel; but since I care for the chapel solely for the sake of its
ceiling, I ought rather to number it among my favorite paintings than
among the most memorable buildings. Certainly this ceiling of Michael
Angelo's is the most wonderful fresco in the world. After it come
Raphael's School of Athens and Triumph of Galatea, so far as Rome is
concerned. Among oil-paintings there I like best the Madonna di
Foligno, for the sake of the cherub who is standing and looking
upward; the Perugino also, in the Vatican, and the pretty
Sassoferrato, with the clouds budding angels; at the Barberini Palace,
Beatrice Cenci, and Una Schiava, by Titian; at the Sciarra Palace, the
Joueurs de Violon, by Raphael, another of Titian's golden-haired
women, and a sweet Madonna and Child with a bird, by Fra Bartolomeo;
at the Borghese Palace, Domenichino's Chase, the Entombment, by
Raphael, and the Three Ages--a copy of Titian, by Sassoferrato.

We should have regretted entirely our efforts to get to Rome during
the Holy Week, instead of making Florence our first resting-place, if
we had not had the compensation for wearisome, empty ceremonies and
closed museums in the wonderful spectacle of the illumination of St.
Peter's. That, really, is a thing so wondrous, so magically beautiful,
that one can't find in one's heart to say it is not worth doing. I
remember well the first glimpse we had as we drove out towards it, of
the outline of the dome like a new constellation on the black sky. I
thought _that_ was the final illumination, and was regretting our
tardy arrival, from the _détour_ we had to make, when, as our carriage
stopped in front of the cathedral, the great bell sounded, and in an
instant the grand illumination flashed out and turned the outline of
stars into a palace of gold. Venus looked out palely.

One of the finest positions in Rome is the Monte Cavallo (the
Quirinal), the site of the pope's palace, and of the fountain against
which are placed the two Colossi--the Castor and Pollux, ascribed,
after a lax method of affiliation, to Phidias and Praxiteles. Standing
near this fountain one has a real sense of being on a hill; city and
distant ridge stretching below. Close by is the Palazzo Rospigliosi,
where we went to see Guido's Aurora.

Another spot where I was struck with the view of modern Rome (and
_that_ happened rarely) was at San Pietro in Vincoli, on the
Esquiline, where we went to see Michael Angelo's Moses. Turning round
before one enters the church, a palm-tree in the high foreground
relieves very picturesquely the view of the lower distance. The Moses
did not affect me agreeably; both the attitude and the expression of
the face seemed to me, in that one visit, to have an exaggeration that
strained after effect without reaching it. The failure seemed to me of
this kind: Moses was an angry man trying to frighten the people by his
mien, instead of being rapt by his anger, and terrible without
self-consciousness. To look at the statue of Christ, after the other
works of Michael Angelo at Rome, was a surprise; in this the fault
seems to incline slightly to the namby-pamby. The Pietà in St. Peter's
has real tenderness in it.

The visit to the Farnesina was one of the most interesting among our
visits to Roman palaces. It is here that Raphael painted the Triumph
of Galatea, and here this wonderful fresco is still bright upon the
wall. In the same room is a colossal head, drawn by Michael Angelo
with a bit of charcoal, by way of _carte-de-visite_, one day that he
called on Daniele di Volterra, who was painting detestably in this
room, and happened to be absent. In the entrance-hall, preceding the
Galatea room, are the frescoes by Raphael representing the story of
Cupid and Psyche; but we did not linger long to look at them, as they
disappointed us.

We visited only four artists' studios in Rome: Gibson's, the sculptor;
Frey's, the landscape painter; Riedel's, genre painter, and
Overbeck's. Gibson's was entirely disappointing to me, so far as his
own sculptures are concerned; except the Cacciatore, which he sent to
the Great Exhibition, I could see nothing but feeble imitations of the
antique--no spontaneity and no vigor. Miss Hosmer's Beatrice Cenci is
a pleasing and new conception; and her little Puck a bit of humor that
one would like to have if one were a grand seigneur.

Frey is a very meritorious landscape painter--finished in execution
and poetic in feeling. His Egyptian scenes--the Simoon, the Pair in
the Light of Sunset, and the Island of Philæ--are memorable pictures;
so is the View of Athens, with its blue, island-studded sea. Riedel
interested us greatly with his account of the coincidence between the
views of light and colors at which he had arrived through his artistic
experience, and Goethe's theory of colors, with which he became
acquainted only after he had thought of putting his own ideas into
shape for publication. He says the majority of painters continue their
work when the sun shines from the north--they paint with _blue_ light.

But it was our visit to Overbeck that we were most pleased not to have
missed. The man himself is more interesting than his pictures: a
benevolent calm and quiet conviction breathes from his person and
manners. He has a thin, rather high-nosed face, with long gray hair,
set off by a maroon velvet cap, and a gray scarf over his shoulders.
Some of his cartoons pleased me: one large one of our Saviour passing
from the midst of the throng who were going to cast him from the brow
of the hill at Capernaum--one foot resting on a cloud borne up by
cherubs; and some smaller round cartoons representing the Parable of
the Ten Virgins, and applying it to the function of the artist.

We drove about a great deal in Rome, but were rather afflicted in our
drives by the unending walls that enclose everything like a garden,
even outside the city gates. First among our charming drives was that
to the Villa Pamfili Doria--a place which has the beauties of an
English park and gardens, with views such as no English park can show;
not to speak of the columbarium or ancient Roman burying-place, which
has been disinterred in the grounds. The compactest of all
burying-places must these columbaria be: little pigeon-holes, tier
above tier, for the small urns containing the ashes of the dead. In
this one traces of peacocks and other figures in fresco, ornamenting
the divisions between the rows, are still visible. We sat down in the
sunshine by the side of the water, which is made to fall in a cascade
in the grounds fronting the house, and then spreads out into a
considerable breadth of mirror for the plantation on the slope which
runs along one side of it. On the opposite side is a broad, grassy
walk, and here we sat on some blocks of stone, watching the little
green lizards. Then we walked on up the slope on the other side, and
through a grove of weird ilexes, and across a plantation of tall
pines, where we saw the mountains in the far distance. A beautiful
spot! We ought to have gone there again.

Another drive was to the Villa Albani, where, again, the view is
grand. The precious sculptures once there are all at Munich now; and
the most remarkable remnants of the collection are the bas-relief of
Antinous, and the Æsop. The Antinous is the least beautiful of all the
representations of that sad loveliness that I have seen--be it said in
spite of Winckelmann; attitude and face are strongly Egyptian. In an
outside pavilion in the garden were some interesting examples of Greek
masks.

Our journey to Frascati by railway was fortunate. The day was fine,
except, indeed, for the half hour that we were on the heights of
Tusculum, and longed for a clear horizon. But the weather was so
generally gloomy during our stay in Rome that we were "thankful for
small mercies" in the way of sunshine. I enjoyed greatly our excursion
up the hill on donkey-back to the ruins of Tusculum--in spite of our
loquacious guide, who exasperated George. The sight of the Campagna on
one side, and of Mount Algidus, with its snow-capped fellows, and
Mount Albano, with Rocca di Papa on its side, and Castel Gandolfo
below on the other side, was worth the trouble--to say nothing of the
little theatre, which was the most perfect example of an ancient
theatre I had then seen in that pre-Pompeian period of my travels.
After lunching at Frascati we strolled out to the Villa Aldobrandini,
and enjoyed a brighter view of the Campagna in the afternoon sunlight.
Then we lingered in a little croft enclosed by plantations, and
enjoyed this familiar-looking bit of grass with wild-flowers perhaps
more, even, than the greatest novelties. There are fine plantations on
the hill behind the villa, and there we wandered till it was time to
go back to the railway. A literally grotesque thing in these
plantations is the opening of a grotto in the hillside, cut in the
form of a huge Greek comic mask. It was a lovely walk from the town
downward to the railway station--between the olive-clad slopes looking
towards the illimitable plain. Our best view of the aqueducts was on
this journey, but it was the tantalizing sort of view one gets from a
railway carriage.

Our excursion to Tivoli, reserved till nearly the end of our stay,
happened on one of those cruel, seductive days that smile upon you at
five o'clock in the morning, to become cold and cloudy at eight, and
resolutely rainy at ten. And so we ascended the hill through the
vast, venerable olive grove, thinking what would be the effect of
sunshine among those gray, fantastically twisted trunks and boughs;
and paddled along the wet streets under umbrellas to look at the
Temple of the Sibyl, and to descend the ravine of the waterfalls. Yet
it was enjoyable; for the rain was not dense enough to shroud the near
view of rock and foliage. We looked for the first time at a rock of
Travertine, with its curious petrified vegetable forms, and lower down
at a mighty cavern, under which the smaller cascade rushes--an awful
hollow in the midst of huge, rocky masses. But--rain, rain, rain! No
possibility of seeing the Villa of Hadrian, chief wonder of Tivoli:
and so we had our carriage covered up and turned homeward in despair.

The last week of our stay we went for the first time to the
picture-gallery of the Capitol, where we saw the famous Guercino--the
Entombment of Petronilla--which we had already seen in mosaic at St.
Peter's. It is a stupendous piece of painting, about which one's only
feeling is that it might as well have been left undone. More
interesting is the portrait of Michael Angelo, by himself--a deeply
melancholy face. And there is also a picture of a bishop, by Giovanni
Bellini, which arrested us a long while. After these, I remember most
distinctly Veronese's Europa, superior to that we afterwards saw at
Venice; a delicious mythological Poussin, all light and joy; and a
Sebastian, by Guido, exceptionally beautiful among the many detestable
things of his in this gallery.

The Lateran Museum, also, was a sight we had neglected till this last
week, though it turned out to be one of the most memorable. In the
classical museum are the great Antinous, a Bacchus, and the
Sophocles; besides a number of other remains of high interest,
especially in the department of architectural decoration. In the
museum of Christian antiquities there are, besides sculptures, copies
of the frescoes in the Catacombs--invaluable as a record of those
perishable remains. If we ever go to Rome again the Lateran Museum
will be one of the first places I shall wish to revisit.

We saw the Catacombs of St. Calixtus, on the Appian Way--the long,
dark passages, with great oblong hollows in the rock for the bodies
long since crumbled, and the one or two openings out of the passages
into a rather wider space, called chapels, but no indications of
paintings or other detail--our monkish guide being an old man, who
spoke with an indistinct grunt that would not have enlightened us if
we had asked any questions. In the church through which we entered
there is a strangely barbarous reclining statue of St. Sebastian, with
arrows sticking all over it.

A spot that touched me deeply was Shelley's grave. The English
cemetery in which he lies is the most attractive burying-place I have
seen. It lies against the old city walls, close to the Porta San Paolo
and the pyramid of Caius Cestius--one of the quietest spots of old
Rome. And there, under the shadow of the old walls on one side, and
cypresses on the other, lies the _Cor cordium_, forever at rest from
the unloving cavillers of this world, whether or not he may have
entered on other purifying struggles in some world unseen by us. The
grave of Keats lies far off from Shelley's, unshaded by wall or trees.
It is painful to look upon, because of the inscription on the stone,
which seems to make him still speak in bitterness from his grave.[11]

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 4th April, 1860.]

A wet day for the first time since we left Paris! That assists our
consciences considerably in urging us to write our letters on this
fourth day at Rome, for I will not pretend that writing a letter, even
to you, can be anything more alluring than a duty when there is a blue
sky over the Coliseum and the Arch of Constantine, and all the other
marvels of this marvellous place. Since our arrival, in the middle of
Sunday, I have been gradually rising from the depth of disappointment
to an intoxication of delight; and that makes me wish to do for you
what no one ever did for me--warn you that you must expect no grand
impression on your first entrance into Rome, at least, if you enter it
from Civita Vecchia. My heart sank, as it would if you behaved
shabbily to me, when I looked through the windows of the omnibus as it
passed through street after street of ugly modern Rome, and in that
mood the dome of St. Peter's and the Castle of St. Angelo--the only
grand objects on our way--could only look disappointing to me. I
believe the impression on entering from the Naples side is quite
different; there one must get a glimpse of the broken grandeur and
Renaissance splendor that one associates with the word "Rome." So keep
up your spirits in the omnibus when your turn comes, and believe that
you will mount the Capitol the next morning, as we did, and look out
on the Forum and the Coliseum, far on to the Alban mountains, with
snowy Apennines behind them, and feel--what I leave you to imagine,
because the rain has left off, and my husband commands me to put on my
bonnet. (Two hours later.) Can you believe that I have not had a
headache since we set out? But I would willingly have endured more
than one to be less anxious than I am about Mr. Lewes's health. Now
that we are just come in from our walk to the Pantheon he is obliged
to lie down with terrible oppression of the head; and since we have
been in Rome he has been nearly deaf on one side. That is the dark
"crow that flies in heaven's sweetest air" just now; everything else
in our circumstances here is perfect. We are glad to have been driven
into apartments, instead of remaining at the hotel, as we had
intended; for we enjoy the abundance of room and the quiet that belong
to this mode of life, and we get our cooking and all other comforts in
perfection at little more than a third of the hotel prices. Most of
the visitors to Rome this season seem to come only for a short stay;
and, as apartments can't be taken for less than a month, the hotels
are full and the lodgings are empty. Extremely unpleasant for the
people who have lodgings to let, but very convenient for us, since we
get excellent rooms in a good situation for a moderate price. We have
a good little landlady, who can speak nothing but Italian, so that she
serves as a _parlatrice_ for us, and awakens our memory of Italian
dialogue--a memory which consists chiefly of recollecting Italian
words without knowing their meaning, and English words without knowing
the Italian for them.

I shall tell you nothing of what we have seen. Have you not a husband
who has seen it all, and can tell you much better? Except, perhaps,
one sight which might have had some interest for him, namely, Count
Cavour, who was waiting with other eminences at the Turin station to
receive the Prince de Carignan, the new Viceroy of Tuscany. A really
pleasant sight--not the prince, who is a large, stout "mustache,"
squeezed in at the waist with a gold belt, looking like one of those
dressed-up personages who are among the chessmen that the Cavours of
the world play their game with. The pleasant sight was Count Cavour,
in plainest dress, with a head full of power, mingled with _bonhomie_.
We had several fellow-travellers who belonged to Savoy, and were full
of chagrin at the prospect of the French annexation. Our most
agreeable companion was a Baron de Magliano, a Neapolitan who has
married a French wife with a large fortune, and has been living in
France for years, but has now left his wife and children behind for
the sake of entering the Sardinian army, and, if possible, helping to
turn out the Neapolitan Bourbons. I feel some stirrings of the
insurrectionary spirit myself when I see the red pantaloons at every
turn in the streets of Rome. I suppose Mrs. Browning could explain to
me that this is part of the great idea nourished in the soul of the
modern saviour, Louis Napoleon, and that for the French to impose a
hateful government on the Romans is the only proper sequence to the
story of the French Revolution.

Oh, the beautiful men and women and children here! Such wonderful
babies with wise eyes! such grand-featured mothers nursing them! As
one drives along the streets sometimes, one sees a madonna and child
at every third or fourth upper window; and on Monday a little crippled
girl, seated at the door of a church, looked up at us with a face full
of such pathetic sweetness and beauty that I think it can hardly leave
me again. Yesterday we went to see dear Shelley's tomb, and it was
like a personal consolation to me to see that simple outward sign that
he is at rest, where no hatred can ever reach him again. Poor Keats's
tombstone, with that despairing, bitter inscription, is almost as
painful to think of as Swift's.

And what have you been doing, being, or suffering in these long twelve
days? While we were standing with weary impatience in the custom-house
at Civita Vecchia, Mr. Congreve was delivering his third lecture, and
you were listening. And what else? _Friday._--Since I wrote my letter
we have not been able to get near the post-office. Yesterday was taken
up with seeing ceremonies, or, rather, with waiting for them. I knelt
down to receive the pope's blessing, remembering what Pius VII. said
to the soldier--that he would never be the worse for the blessing of
an old man. But, altogether, these ceremonies are a melancholy, hollow
business, and we regret bitterly that the Holy Week has taken up our
time from better things. I have a cold and headache this morning, and
in other ways am not conscious of improvement from the pope's
blessing. I may comfort myself with thinking that the King of Sardinia
is none the worse for the pope's curse. It is farcical enough that the
excommunication is posted up at the Church of St. John Lateran, out of
everybody's way, and yet there are police to guard it.

[Sidenote: Italy, 1860.]

How much more I have to write about Rome! How I should like to linger
over every particular object that has left an image in my memory! But
here I am only to give a hasty sketch of what we saw and did at each
place at which we paused in our three months' life in Italy.

It was on the 29th of April that we left Rome, and on the morning of
the 30th we arrived at Naples--under a rainy sky, alas! but not so
rainy as to prevent our feeling the beauty of the city and bay, and
declaring it to surpass all places we had seen before. The weather
cleared up soon after our arrival at the Hotel des Étrangers, and
after a few days it became brilliant, showing us the blue sea, the
purple mountains, and bright city, in which we had almost disbelieved
as we saw them in the pictures. Hardly anything can be more lovely
than Naples seen from Posilippo under a blue sky: the irregular
outline with which the town meets the sea, jutting out in picturesque
masses, then lifted up high on a basis of rock, with the grand Castle
of St. Elmo and the monastery on the central height crowning all the
rest; the graceful outline of purple Vesuvius rising beyond the Molo,
and the line of deeply indented mountains carrying the eye along to
the Cape of Sorrento; and, last of all, Capri sleeping between sea and
sky in the distance. Crossing the promontory of Posilippo, another
wonderful scene presents itself: white Nisida on its island rock; the
sweep of bay towards Pozzuoli; beyond that, in fainter colors of
farther distance, the Cape of Miseno and the peaks of Ischia.

Our first expedition was to Pozzuoli and Miseno, on a bright, warm
day, with a slipshod Neapolitan driver, whom I christened Baboon, and
who acted as our charioteer throughout our stay at Naples. Beyond
picturesque Pozzuoli, jutting out with precipitous piles of building
into the sea, lies Baiæ. Here we halted to look at a great circular
temple, where there was a wonderful echo that made whispers circulate
and become loud on the opposite side to that on which they were
uttered. Here, for our amusement, a young maiden and a little old man
danced to the sound of a tambourine and fife. On our way to Baiæ we
had stopped to see the Lake Avernus, no longer terrible to behold, and
the amphitheatre of Cumæ, now grown over with greensward, and fringed
with garden stuff.

From Baiæ we went to Miseno--the Misenum where Pliny was stationed
with the fleet--and looked out from the promontory on the lovely isles
of Ischia and Procida. On the approach to this promontory lies the
Piscina Mirabilis, one of the most striking remains of Roman building.
It is a great reservoir, into which one may now descend dryshod and
look up at the lofty arches festooned with delicate plants, while the
sunlight shoots aslant through the openings above. It was on this
drive, coming back towards Pozzuoli, that we saw the Mesembryanthemum
in its greatest luxuriance--a star of amethyst with its golden tassel
in the centre. The amphitheatre at Pozzuoli is the most interesting in
Italy after the Coliseum. The seats are in excellent preservation, and
the subterranean structures for water and for the introduction of wild
beasts are unique. The temple of Jupiter Serapis is another remarkable
ruin, made more peculiar by the intrusion of the water, which makes
the central structure, with its great columns, an island to be
approached by a plank bridge.

In the views from Capo di Monte--the king's summer residence--and from
St. Elmo one enjoys not only the view towards the sea, but the wide,
green plain sprinkled with houses and studded with small towns or
villages, bounded on the one hand by Vesuvius, and shut in, in every
other direction, by the nearer heights close upon Naples, or by the
sublimer heights of the distant Apennines. We had the view from St.
Elmo on a clear, breezy afternoon, in company with a Frenchman and his
wife, come from Rome with his family after a two years' residence
there--worth remembering for the pretty bondage the brusque, stern,
thin father was under to the tiny, sickly looking boy.

It was a grand drive up to Capo di Monte--between rich plantations,
with glimpses, as we went up, of the city lying in picturesque
irregularity below; and as we went down, in the other direction, views
of distant mountain rising above some pretty accident of roof or
groups of trees in the foreground.

One day we went, from this drive, along the Poggio Reale to the
cemetery--the most ambitious burying-place I ever saw, with building
after building of elaborate architecture, serving as tombs to various
_Arci-confraternità_ as well as to private families, all set in the
midst of well-kept gardens. The humblest kind of tombs there were long
niches for coffins, in a wall bordering the carriage-road, which are
simply built up when the coffin is once in--the inscription being
added on this final bit of masonry. The lines of lofty sepulchres
suggested to one very vividly the probable appearance of the Appian
Way when the old Roman tombs were in all their glory.

Our first visit to the Museo Borbonico was devoted to the sculpture,
of which there is a precious collection. Of the famous Balbi family,
found at Herculaneum, the mother, in grand drapery, wound round her
head and body, is the most unforgetable--a really grand woman of
fifty, with firm mouth and knitted brow, yet not unbenignant. Farther
on in this transverse hall is a Young Faun with the Infant Bacchus--a
different conception altogether from the fine Munich statue, but
delicious for humor and geniality. Then there is the Aristides--more
real and speaking and easy in attitude even than the Sophocles at
Rome. Opposite is a lovely Antinous, in no mythological character, but
in simple, melancholy beauty. In the centre of the deep recess, in
front of which these statues are placed, is the colossal Flora, who
holds up her thin dress in too finicking a style for a colossal
goddess; and on the floor--to be seen by ascending a platform--is the
precious, great mosaic representing the Battle of the Issus, found at
Pompeii. It is full of spirit, the _ordonnance_ of the figures is very
much after the same style as in the ancient bas-reliefs, and the
colors are still vivid enough for us to have a just idea of the
effect. In the halls on each side of this central one there are
various Bacchuses and Apollos, Atlas groaning under the weight of the
Globe, the Farnese Hercules, the Toro Farnese, and, among other things
less memorable, a glorious Head of Jupiter.

The bronzes here are even more interesting than the marbles. Among
them there is Mercury Resting, the Sleeping Faun, the little Dancing
Faun, and the Drunken Faun snapping his fingers, of which there is a
marble copy at Munich, with the two remarkable Heads of Plato and
Seneca.

But our greatest treat at the Museo Borbonico could only be enjoyed
after our visit to Pompeii, where we went, unhappily, in the company
of some Russians whose acquaintance G. had made at the _table d'hôte_.
I hope I shall never forget the solemnity of our first entrance into
that silent city, and the walk along the street of tombs. After seeing
the principal houses we went, as a proper climax, to the Forum, where,
among the lines of pedestals and the ruins of temples and tribunal, we
could see Vesuvius overlooking us; then to the two theatres, and
finally to the amphitheatre.

This visit prepared us to enjoy the collection of _piccoli bronzi_, of
paintings and mosaics at the Museo. Several of the paintings have
considerable positive merit. I remember particularly a large one of
Orestes and Pylades, which in composition and general conception
might have been a picture of yesterday. But the most impressive
collection of remains found at Pompeii and Herculaneum is that of the
ornaments, articles of food and domestic utensils, pieces of bread,
loaves with the bakers' names on them, fruits, corn, various seeds,
paste in the vessel, imperfectly mixed, linen just wrung in washing,
eggs, oil consolidated in a glass bottle, wine mixed with the lava,
and a piece of asbestos; gold lace, a lens, a lantern with sides of
talc, gold ornaments of Etruscan character, patty-pans (!), moulds for
cakes; ingenious portable cooking apparatus, urn for hot water,
portable candelabrum, to be raised or lowered at will, bells, dice,
theatre-checks, and endless objects that tell of our close kinship
with those old Pompeians. In one of the rooms of this collection there
are the Farnese cameos and engraved gems, some of them--especially of
the latter--marvellously beautiful, complicated, and exquisitely
minute in workmanship. I remember particularly one splendid yellow
stone engraved with an elaborate composition of Apollo and his chariot
and horses--a masterpiece of delicate form.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 5th May, 1860.]

We left Rome a week ago, almost longing, at last, to come southward in
search of sunshine. Every one likes to boast of peculiar experience,
and we can boast of having gone to Rome in the very worst spring that
has been known for the last twenty years. Here, at Naples, we have had
some brilliant days, though the wind is still cold, and rain has often
fallen heavily in the night. It is the very best change for us after
Rome; there is comparatively little art to see, and there is nature in
transcendent beauty. We both think it the most beautiful place in the
world, and are sceptical about Constantinople, which has not had the
advantage of having been seen by us. That is the fashion of
travellers, as you know: for you must have been bored many times in
your life by people who have insisted on it that you _must_ go and see
the thing _they_ have seen--there is nothing like it. We shall bore
you in that way, I dare say--so prepare yourself. Our plan at present
is to spend the next week in seeing Pæstum, Amalfi, Castellamare, and
Sorrento, and drinking in as much of this Southern beauty, in a quiet
way, as our souls are capable of absorbing.

The calm blue sea, and the mountains sleeping in the afternoon light,
as we have seen them to-day from the height of St. Elmo, make one feel
very passive and contemplative, and disinclined to bustle about in
search of meaner sights. Yet I confess Pompeii, and the remains of
Pompeian art and life in the Museum, have been impressive enough to
rival the sea and sky. It is a thing never to be forgotten--that walk
through the silent city of the past, and then the sight of utensils
and eatables and ornaments and half-washed linen and hundreds of other
traces of life so startlingly like our own in its minutest details,
suddenly arrested by the fiery deluge. All that you will see some day,
and with the advantage of younger eyes than mine.

We expect to reach Florence (by steamboat, alas!) on the 17th, so that
if you have the charity to write to me again, address to me there.

We thought the advance to eighteen in the number of hearers was very
satisfactory, and rejoiced over it. The most solid comfort one can
fall back upon is the thought that the business of one's life--the
work at home after the holiday is done--is to help in some small,
nibbling way to reduce the sum of ignorance, degradation, and misery
on the face of this beautiful earth. I am writing at night--Mr. Lewes
is already asleep, else he would say, "Send my kind regards to them
all." We have often talked of you, and the thought of seeing you again
makes the South Fields look brighter in our imagination than they
could have looked from the dreariest part of the world if you had not
been living in them.

[Sidenote: Italy, 1860.]

The pictures at Naples are worth little: the Marriage of St.
Catherine, a small picture by Correggio; a Holy Family, by Raphael,
with a singularly fine St. Ann, and Titian's Paul the Third, are the
only paintings I have registered very distinctly in all the large
collection. The much-praised frescoes of the dome in a chapel of the
cathedral, and the oil-paintings over the altars, by Domenichino and
Spagnoletto, produced no effect on me. Worth more than all these are
Giotto's frescoes in the choir of the little old Church of
l'Incoronata, though these are not, I think, in Giotto's ripest
manner, for they are inferior to his frescoes in the Santa Croce at
Florence--more uniform in the type of face.

We went to a Sunday-morning service at the cathedral, and saw a
detachment of silver busts of saints ranged around the tribune, Naples
being famous for gold and silver sanctities.

When we had been a week at Naples we set off in our carriage with
Baboon on an expedition to Pæstum, arriving the first evening at
Salerno--beautiful Salerno, with a bay as lovely, though in a
different way, as the bay of Naples. It has a larger sweep; grander
piles of rocky mountain on the north and northeast; then a stretch of
low plain, the mountains receding; and, finally, on the south, another
line of mountain coast extending to the promontory of Sicosa.

From Salerno we started early in the morning for Pæstum, with no
alloy to the pleasure of the journey but the dust, which was capable
of making a simoon under a high wind. For a long way we passed through
a well-cultivated plain, the mountains on our left and the sea on our
right; but farther on came a swampy, unenclosed space of great extent,
inhabited by buffaloes, who lay in groups, comfortably wallowing in
the muddy water, with their grand, stupid heads protruding
horizontally.

On approaching Pæstum, the first thing one catches sight of is the
Temple of Vesta, which is not beautiful either for form or color, so
that we began to tremble lest disappointment were to be the harvest of
our dusty journey. But the fear was soon displaced by almost rapturous
admiration at the sight of the great Temple of Neptune--the finest
thing, I verily believe, that we had yet seen in Italy. It has all the
requisites to make a building impressive: First, _form_. What perfect
satisfaction and repose for the eye in the calm repetition of those
columns; in the proportions of height and length, of front and sides;
the right thing is _found_--it is not being sought after in uneasy
labor of detail or exaggeration. Next, _color_. It is built of
Travertine, like the other two temples; but while they have remained,
for the most part, a cold gray, this Temple of Neptune has a rich,
warm, pinkish brown, that seems to glow and deepen under one's eyes.
Lastly, _position_. It stands on the rich plain, covered with long
grass and flowers, in sight of the sea on one hand, and the sublime
blue mountains on the other. Many plants caress the ruins; the
acanthus is there, and I saw it in green life for the first time; but
the majority of the plants on the floor, or bossing the architrave,
are familiar to me as home flowers--purple mallows, snapdragons, pink
hawksweed, etc. On our way back we saw a herd of buffaloes clustered
near a pond, and one of them was rolling himself in the water like a
gentleman enjoying his bath.

The next day we went in the morning from Salerno to Amalfi. It is an
unspeakably grand drive round the mighty rocks with the sea below; and
Amalfi itself surpasses all imagination of a romantic site for a city
that once made itself famous in the world. We stupidly neglected
seeing the cathedral, but we saw a macaroni-mill and a paper-mill from
among the many that are turned by the rushing stream, which, with its
precipitous course down the ravine, creates an immense water-power;
and we climbed up endless steps to the Capuchin Monastery, to see
nothing but a cavern where there are barbarous images and a small
cloister with double Gothic arches.

Our way back to La Cava gave us a repetition of the grand drive we had
had in the morning by the coast, and beyond that an inland drive of
much loveliness, through Claude-like scenes of mountain, trees, and
meadows, with picturesque accidents of building, such as single round
towers, on the heights. The valley beyond La Cava, in which our hotel
lay, is of quite paradisaic beauty; a rich, cultivated spot, with
mountains behind and before--those in front varied by ancient
buildings that a painter would have chosen to place there; and one of
pyramidal shape, steep as an obelisk, is crowned by a monastery,
famous for its library of precious MSS. and its archives. We arrived
too late for everything except to see the shroud of mist gather and
gradually envelop the mountains.

In the morning we set off, again in brightest weather, to Sorrento,
coasting the opposite side of the promontory to that which we had
passed along the day before, and having on our right hand Naples and
the distant Posilippo. The coast on this side is less grand than on
the Amalfi side, but it is more friendly as a place for residence. The
most charming spot on the way to Sorrento, to my thinking, is Vico,
which I should even prefer to Sorrento, because there is no town to be
traversed before entering the ravine and climbing the mountain in the
background. But I will not undervalue Sorrento, with its orange-groves
embalming the air, its glorious sunsets over the sea, setting the gray
olives aglow on the hills above us, its walks among the groves and
vineyards out to the solitary coast. One day of our stay there we took
donkeys and crossed the mountains to the opposite side of the
promontory, and saw the Siren Isles--very palpable, unmysterious bits
of barren rock now. A great delight to me, in all the excursions round
about Naples, was the high cultivation of the soil and the sight of
the vines, trained from elm to elm, above some other precious crop
carpeting the ground below. On our way back to Naples we visited the
silent Pompeii again. That place had such a peculiar influence over me
that I could not even look towards the point where it lay on the plain
below Vesuvius without a certain thrill.

Amid much dust we arrived at Naples again on Sunday morning, to start
by the steamboat for Leghorn on the following Tuesday. But before I
quit Naples I must remember the Grotto of Posilippo, a wonderful
monument of ancient labor; Virgil's tomb, which repaid us for a steep
ascent only by the view of the city and bay; and a villa on the way to
Posilippo, with gardens gradually descending to the margin of the sea,
where there is a collection of animals, both stuffed and alive. It
was there we saw the flying-fish, with their lovely blue fins.

One day and night voyage to Civita Vecchia, and another day and night
to Leghorn--wearisome to the flesh that suffers from nausea even on
the summer sea! We had another look at dear Pisa under the blue sky,
and then on to Florence, which, unlike Rome, looks inviting as one
catches sight from the railway of its cupolas and towers and its
embosoming hills--the greenest of hills, sprinkled everywhere with
white villas. We took up our quarters at the Pension Suisse, and on
the first evening we took the most agreeable drive to be had round
Florence--the drive to Fiesole. It is in this view that the eye takes
in the greatest extent of green, billowy hills, besprinkled with white
houses, looking almost like flocks of sheep; the great, silent,
uninhabited mountains lie chiefly behind; the plain of the Arno
stretches far to the right. I think the view from Fiesole the most
beautiful of all; but that from San Miniato, where we went the next
evening, has an interest of another kind, because here Florence lies
much nearer below, and one can distinguish the various buildings more
completely. It is the same with Bellosguardo, in a still more marked
degree. What a relief to the eye and the thought, among the huddled
roofs of a distant town, to see towers and cupolas rising in abundant
variety, as they do at Florence! There is Brunelleschi's mighty dome,
and close by it, with its lovely colors not entirely absorbed by
distance, Giotto's incomparable Campanile, beautiful as a jewel.
Farther on, to the right, is the majestic tower of the Palazzo
Vecchio, with the flag waving above it; then the elegant Badia and the
Bargello close by; nearer to us the grand Campanile of Santo Spirito
and that of Santa Croce; far away, on the left, the cupola of San
Lorenzo and the tower of Santa Maria Novella; and, scattered far and
near, other cupolas and campaniles of more insignificant shape and
history.

Even apart from its venerable historical glory, the exterior of the
Duomo is pleasant to behold when the wretched, unfinished _façade_ is
quite hidden. The soaring pinnacles over the doors are exquisite; so
are the forms of the windows in the great semicircle of the apsis; and
on the side where Giotto's Campanile is placed, especially, the white
marble has taken on so rich and deep a yellow that the black bands
cease to be felt as a fault. The entire view on this side, closed in
by Giotto's tower, with its delicate pinkish marble, its delicate
Gothic windows with twisted columns, and its tall lightness carrying
the eye upward, in contrast with the mighty breadth of the dome, is a
thing not easily to be forgotten. The Baptistery, with its paradisaic
gates, is close by; but, except in those gates, it has no exterior
beauty. The interior is almost awful, with its great dome covered with
gigantic early mosaics--the pale, large-eyed Christ surrounded by
images of paradise and perdition. The interior of the cathedral is
comparatively poor and bare; but it has one great beauty--its colored
lanceolate windows. Behind the high-altar is a piece of sculpture--the
last under Michael Angelo's hand, intended for his own tomb, and left
unfinished. It represents Joseph of Arimathea holding the body of
Jesus, with Mary, his mother, on one side, and an apparently angelic
form on the other. Joseph is a striking and real figure, with a hood
over the head.

For external architecture it is the palaces, the old palaces of the
fifteenth century, that one must look at in the streets of Florence.
One of the finest was just opposite our hotel, the Palazzo Strozzi,
built by Cronaca; perfect in its massiveness, with its iron cressets
and rings, as if it had been built only last year. This is the palace
that the Pitti was built to outvie (so tradition falsely pretends),
and to have an inner court that would contain it. A wonderful union is
that Pitti Palace of cyclopean massiveness with stately regularity.
Next to the Pitti, I think, comes the Palazzo Riccardi--the house of
the Medici--for size and splendor. Then that unique Laurentian
library, designed by Michael Angelo; the books ranged on desks in
front of seats, so that the appearance of the library resembles that
of a chapel with open pews of dark wood. The precious books are all
chained to the desk; and here we saw old manuscripts of exquisite
neatness, culminating in the Virgil of the fourth century, and the
Pandects, said to have been recovered from oblivion at Amalfi, but
falsely so said, according to those who are more learned than
tradition. Here, too, is a little chapel covered with remarkable
frescoes by Benozzo Gozzoli.

Grander still, in another style, is the Palazzo Vecchio, with its
unique _cortile_, where the pillars are embossed with arabesque and
floral tracery, making a contrast in elaborate ornament with the large
simplicity of the exterior building. Here there are precious little
works in ivory by Benvenuto Cellini, and other small treasures of art
and jewelry, preserved in cabinets in one of the great upper chambers,
which are painted all over with frescoes, and have curious inlaid
doors showing buildings or figures in wooden mosaic, such as is often
seen in great beauty in the stalls of the churches. The great
council-chamber is ugly in its ornaments--frescoes and statues in bad
taste all round it.

Orcagna's Loggia de' Lanzi is disappointing at the first glance, from
its sombre, dirty color; but its beauty grew upon me with longer
contemplation. The pillars and groins are very graceful and chaste in
ornamentation. Among the statues that are placed under it there is not
one I could admire, unless it were the dead body of Ajax with the
Greek soldier supporting it. Cellini's Perseus is fantastic. The
Bargello, where we went to see Giotto's frescoes (in lamentable
condition) was under repair, but I got glimpses of a wonderful inner
court, with heraldic carvings and stone stairs and gallery.

Most of the churches in Florence are hideous on the outside--piles of
ribbed brickwork awaiting a coat of stone or stucco--looking like
skinned animals. The most remarkable exception is Santa Maria Novella,
which has an elaborate facing of black and white marble. Both this
church and San Lorenzo were under repair in the interior,
unfortunately for us; but we could enter Santa Maria so far as to see
Orcagna's frescoes of Paradise and Hell. The Hell has been repainted,
but the Paradise has not been maltreated in this way; and it is a
splendid example of Orcagna's powers--far superior to his frescoes in
the Campo Santo at Pisa. Some of the female forms on the lowest range
are of exquisite grace. The splendid chapel in San Lorenzo, containing
the tombs of the Medici, is ugly and heavy, with all its precious
marbles; and the world-famous statues of Michael Angelo on the tombs
in another smaller chapel--the Notte, the Giorno, and the
Crepuscolo--remained to us as affected and exaggerated in the
original as in copies and casts.

The two churches we frequented most in Florence were Santa Croce and
the Carmine. In this last are the great frescoes of Masaccio--chief
among them the Raising of the Dead Youth. In the other are Giotto's
frescoes revealed from under the whitewash by which they were long
covered, like those in the Bargello. Of these the best are the
Challenge to Pass through the Fire, in the series representing the
history of St. Francis, and the rising of some saint (unknown to me)
from his tomb, while Christ extends his arms to receive him above, and
wondering venerators look on, on each side. There are large frescoes
here of Taddeo Gaddi's also, but they are not good; one sees in him a
pupil of Giotto, and nothing more. Besides the frescoes, Santa Croce
has its tombs to attract a repeated visit; the tombs of Michael
Angelo, Dante, Alfieri, and Machiavelli. Even those tombs of the
unknown dead under our feet, with their effigies quite worn down to a
mere outline, were not without their interest. I used to feel my heart
swell a little at the sight of the inscription on Dante's
tomb--"Onorate l'altissimo poeta."

In the Church of the Trinità also there are valuable frescoes by the
excellent Domenico Ghirlandajo, the master of Michael Angelo. They
represent the history of St. Francis, and happily the best of them is
in the best light; it is the death of St. Francis, and is full of
natural feeling, with well-marked gradations from deepest sorrow to
indifferent spectatorship.

The frescoes I cared for most in all Florence were the few of Fra
Angelico's that a _donna_ was allowed to see, in the Convent of San
Marco. In the chapter-house, now used as a guard-room, is a large
Crucifixion, with the inimitable group of the fainting mother, upheld
by St. John and the younger Mary, and clasped round by the kneeling
Magdalene. The group of adoring, sorrowing saints on the right hand
are admirable for earnest truthfulness of representation. The Christ
in this fresco is not good, but there is a deeply impressive original
crucified Christ outside in the cloisters; St. Dominic is clasping the
cross and looking upward at the agonized Saviour, whose real, pale,
calmly enduring face is quite unlike any other Christ I have seen.

I forgot to mention, at Santa Maria Novella, the chapel which is
painted with very remarkable frescoes by Simone Memmi and Taddeo
Gaddi. The best of these frescoes is the one in which the Dominicans
are represented by black and white dogs--_Domini Canes_. The human
groups have high merit for conception and lifelikeness; and they are
admirable studies of costume. At this church, too, in the sacristy, is
the Madonna della Stella,[12] with an altar-step by Fra
Angelico--specimens of his minuter painting in oil. The inner part of
the frame is surrounded with his lovely angels, with their seraphic
joy and flower-garden coloring.

Last of all the churches we visited San Michele, which had been one of
the most familiar to us on the outside, with its statues in niches,
and its elaborate Gothic windows, designed by the genius of Orcagna.
The great wonder of the interior is the shrine of white marble made to
receive the miracle-working image which first caused the consecration
of this mundane building, originally a corn-market. Surely this shrine
is the most wonderful of all Orcagna's productions; for the beauty of
the reliefs he deserves to be placed along with Nicolo Pisano, and for
the exquisite Gothic design of the whole he is a compeer of Giotto.

For variety of treasures the Uffizi Gallery is pre-eminent among all
public sights in Florence; but the variety is in some degree a cause
of comparative unimpressiveness, pictures and statues being crowded
together and destroying each other's effect. In statuary it has the
great Niobe group; the Venus de Medici; the Wrestlers; the admirable
statue of the Knife-Sharpener, supposed to represent the flayer of
Marsyas; the Apollino; and the Boy taking a Thorn out of his Foot;
with numerous less remarkable antiques. And besides these it has what
the Vatican has not--a collection of early Italian sculpture, supreme
among which is Giovanni di Bologna's Mercury.[13] Then there is a
collection of precious drawings; and there is the cabinet of gems,
quite alone in its fantastic, elaborate minuteness of workmanship in
rarest materials; and there is another cabinet containing ivory
sculptures, cameos, intaglios, and a superlatively fine Niello, as
well as Raffaelle porcelain. The pictures here are multitudinous, and
among them there is a generous proportion of utterly bad ones. In the
entrance gallery, where the early paintings are, is a great Fra
Angelico--a Madonna and Child--a triptych, the two side compartments
containing very fine figures of saints, and the inner part of the
central frame a series of unspeakably lovely angels.[14] Here I always
paused with longing, trying to believe that a copyist there could make
an imitation angel good enough to be worth buying. Among the other
paintings that remain with me, after my visit to the Uffizi, are the
portrait of Leonardo da Vinci, by himself; the portrait of Dante, by
Filippino Lippi;[15] the Herodias of Luini; Titian's Venus, in the
Tribune; Raphael's Madonna and Child with the Bird; and the portrait
falsely called the Fornarina; the two remarkable pictures by Ridolfo
Ghirlandajo; and the Salutation, by Albertinelli, which hangs
opposite; the little prince in pink dress, with two recent teeth, in
the next room, by Angelo Bronzino (No. 1155); the small picture of
Christ in the Garden, by Lorenzo Credi; Titian's Woman with the Golden
Hair, in the Venetian room; Leonardo's Medusa head; and Michael
Angelo's ugly Holy Family--these, at least, rise up on a rapid
retrospect. Others are in the background; for example, Correggio's
Madonna adoring the Infant Christ, in the Tribune.

For pictures, however, the Pitti Palace surpasses the Uffizi. Here the
paintings are more choice and not less numerous. The Madonna della
Sedia leaves me, with all its beauty, impressed only by the grave gaze
of the Infant; but besides this there is another Madonna of
Raphael--perhaps the most beautiful of all his earlier ones--the
Madonna del Gran Duca, which has the sweet grace and gentleness of its
sisters without their sheeplike look. Andrea del Sarto is seen here in
his highest glory of oil-painting. There are numerous large pictures
of his--Assumptions and the like--of great technical merit; but better
than all these I remember a Holy Family, with a very fine St. Ann,
and the portraits of himself and his fatal, auburn-haired wife. Of
Fra Bartolomeo there is a Pietà of memorable expression,[16] a Madonna
enthroned with saints, and his great St. Mark. Of Titian, a Marriage
of St. Catherine, of supreme beauty; a Magdalen, failing in
expression; and an exquisite portrait of the same woman, who is
represented as Venus at the Uffizi. There is a remarkable group of
portraits by Rubens--himself, his brother, Lipsius, and Grotius--and a
large landscape by him. The only picture of Veronese's that I remember
here is a portrait of his wife when her beauty was gone. There is a
remarkably fine sea-piece by Salvator Rosa; a striking portrait of
Aretino, and a portrait of Vesalius, by Titian; one of Inghirami, by
Raphael; a delicious, rosy baby--future cardinal--lying in a silken
bed;[17] a placid, contemplative young woman, with her finger between
the leaves of a book, by Leonardo da Vinci;[18] a memorable portrait
of Philip II., by Titian; a splendid Judith, by Bronzino; a portrait
of Rembrandt, by himself, etc., etc.

Andrea del Sarto is seen to advantage at the Pitti Palace; but his
_chef-d'oeuvre_ is a fresco, unhappily much worn--the Madonna del
Sacco--in the cloister of the Annunziata.

For early Florentine paintings the most interesting collection is that
of the Accademia. Here we saw a Cimabue, which gave us the best idea
of his superiority over the painters who went before him: it is a
colossal Madonna enthroned. And on the same wall there is a colossal
Madonna by Giotto, which is not only a demonstration that he surpassed
his master, but that he had a clear vision of the noble in art. A
delightful picture--very much restored, I fear--of the Adoration of
the Magi made me acquainted with Gentile da Fabriano. The head of
Joseph in this picture is masterly in the delicate rendering of the
expression; the three kings are very beautiful in conception; and the
attendant group, or rather crowd, shows a remarkable combination of
realism with love of the beautiful and splendid.

There is a fine Domenico Ghirlandajo--the Adoration of the Shepherds;
a fine Lippo Lippi; and an Assumption, by Perugino, which I like well
for its cherubs and angels, and for some of the adoring figures below.
In the smaller room there is a lovely Pietà by Fra Angelico; and there
is a portrait of Fra Angelico himself by another artist.

One of our drives at Florence, which I have not mentioned, was that to
Galileo's Tower, which stands conspicuous on one of the hills close
about the town. We ascended it for the sake of looking out over the
plain from the same spot as the great man looked from, more than two
centuries ago. His portrait is in the Pitti Palace--a grave man with
an abbreviated nose, not unlike Mr. Thomas Adolphus Trollope.

One fine day near the end of our stay we made an expedition to
Siena--that fine old town built on an abrupt height overlooking a
wide, wide plain. We drove about a couple of hours or more, and saw
well the exterior of the place--the peculiar piazza or campo in the
shape of a scallop-shell, with its large old Palazzo _publico_, the
Porta Ovile and Porta Romana, the archbishop's palace, and the
cemetery. Of the churches we saw only the cathedral, the Chapel of St.
John the Baptist, and San Domenico. The cathedral has a highly
elaborate Gothic façade, but the details of the upper part are
unsatisfactory--a square window in the centre shocks the eye, and the
gables are not slim and aspiring enough. The interior is full of
interest: there is the unique pavement in a sort of marble Niello,
presenting Raffaellesque designs by Boccafumi, carrying out the
example of the older portions, which are very quaint in their drawing;
there is a picture of high interest in the history of early art--a
picture by Guido of Siena, who was rather earlier than Cimabue; fine
carved stalls and screens in dark wood; and in an adjoining chapel a
series of frescoes by Pinturicchio, to which Raphael is said to have
contributed designs and workmanship, and wonderfully illuminated old
choir-books. The Chapel of St. John the Baptist has a remarkable
Gothic façade, and a baptismal font inside, with reliefs wrought by
Ghiberti and another Florentine artist. To San Domenico we went for
the sake of seeing the famous Madonna by Guido da Siena; I think we
held it superior to any Cimabue we had seen. There is a considerable
collection of the Siennese artists at the Accademia, but the school
had no great genius equal to Giotto to lead it. The Three Graces--an
antique to which Canova's modern triad bears a strong resemblance in
attitude and style--are also at the Accademia.

An interesting visit we made at Florence was to Michael Angelo's
house--Casa Buonarotti--in the Via Ghibellina. This street is striking
and characteristic: the houses are all old, with broad eaves, and in
some cases with an open upper story, so that the roof forms a sort of
pavilion supported on pillars. This is a feature one sees in many
parts of Florence. Michael Angelo's house is preserved with great
care by his descendants--only one could wish their care had not been
shown in giving it entirely new furniture. However, the rooms are the
same as those he occupied, and there are many relics of his presence
there--his stick, his sword, and many of his drawings. In one room
there is a very fine Titian of small size--the principal figure a
woman fainting.

The Last Supper--a fresco believed to be by Raphael--is in a room at
the Egyptian Museum.[19] The figure of Peter--of which, apparently,
there exists various sketches by Raphael's hand--is memorable.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 18th May, 1860.]

Things really look so threatening in the Neapolitan kingdom that we
begin to think ourselves fortunate in having got our visit done.
Tuscany is in the highest political spirits for the moment, and of
course Victor Emanuel stares at us at every turn here, with the most
loyal exaggeration of mustache and intelligent meaning. But we are
selfishly careless about dynasties just now, caring more for the
doings of Giotto and Brunelleschi than for those of Count Cavour. On a
first journey to the greatest centres of art one must be excused for
letting one's public spirit go to sleep a little. As for me, I am
thrown into a state of humiliating passivity by the sight of the great
things done in the far past--it seems as if life were not long enough
to learn, and as if my own activity were so completely dwarfed by
comparison that I should never have courage for more creation of my
own. There is only one thing that has an opposite and stimulating
effect: it is the comparative rarity, even here, of great and truthful
art, and the abundance of wretched imitation and falsity. Every hand
is wanted in the world that can do a little genuine, sincere work.

We are at the quietest hotel in Florence, having sought it out for the
sake of getting clear of the stream of English and Americans, in which
one finds one's self in all the main tracks of travel, so that one
seems at last to be in a perpetual, noisy picnic, obliged to be civil,
though with a strong inclination to be sullen. My philanthropy rises
several degrees as soon as we are alone.

[Sidenote: Letter to Major Blackwood, 27th May, 1860.]

I am much obliged to you for writing at once, and so scattering some
clouds which had gathered over my mind in consequence of an indication
or two in Mr. John Blackwood's previous letter. The _Times_ article
arrived on Sunday. It is written in a generous spirit, and with so
high a degree of intelligence that I am rather alarmed lest the
misapprehensions it exhibits should be due to my defective
presentation, rather than to any failure on the part of the critic. I
have certainly fulfilled my intention very badly if I have made the
Dodson honesty appear "mean and uninteresting," or made the payment of
one's debts appear a contemptible virtue in comparison with any sort
of "Bohemian" qualities. So far as my own feeling and intention are
concerned, no one class of persons or form of character is held up to
reprobation or to exclusive admiration. Tom is painted with as much
love and pity as Maggie; and I am so far from hating the Dodsons
myself that I am rather aghast to find them ticketed with such very
ugly adjectives. We intend to leave this place on Friday (3d), and in
four days after that we shall be at Venice, in a few days from that
time at Milan, and then, by a route at present uncertain, at Berne,
where we take up Mr. Lewes's eldest boy, to bring him home with us.

We are particularly happy in our weather, which is unvaryingly fine
without excessive heat. There has been a crescendo of enjoyment in our
travels; for Florence, from its relation to the history of modern art,
has roused a keener interest in us even than Rome, and has stimulated
me to entertain rather an ambitious project, which I mean to be a
secret from every one but you and Mr. John Blackwood.

Any news of "Clerical Scenes" in its third edition? Or has its
appearance been deferred? The smallest details are acceptable to
ignorant travellers. We are wondering what was the last good article
in _Blackwood_, and whether Thackeray has gathered up his slack reins
in the _Cornhill_. Literature travels slowly even to this Italian
Athens. Hawthorne's book is not to be found here yet in the Tauchnitz
edition.

[Sidenote: Italy, 1860.]

We left Florence on the evening of the 1st of June, by diligence,
travelling all night and until eleven the next morning to get to
Bologna. I wish we could have made that journey across the Apennines
by daylight, though in that case I should have missed certain grand,
startling effects that came to me in my occasional wakings. Wonderful
heights and depths I saw on each side of us by the fading light of the
evening. Then, in the middle of the night, while the lightning was
flashing and the sky was heavy with threatening storm-clouds, I waked
to find the six horses resolutely refusing or unable to move the
diligence--till, at last, two meek oxen were tied to the axle, and
their added strength dragged us up the hill. But one of the strangest
effects I ever saw was just before dawn, when we seemed to be high up
on mighty mountains, which fell precipitously, and showed us the
awful, pale horizon far, far below.

The first thing we did at Bologna was to go to the Accademia, where I
confirmed myself in my utter dislike of the Bolognese school--the
Caraccis and Domenichino _et id genus omne_--and felt some
disappointment in Raphael's St. Cecilia. The pictures of Francia here,
to which I had looked forward as likely to give me a fuller and higher
idea of him, were less pleasing to me than the smaller specimens of
him that I had seen in the Dresden and other galleries. He seems to me
to be more limited even than Perugino; but he is a faithful,
painstaking painter, with a religious spirit. Agostino Caracci's
Communion of St. Jerome is a remarkable picture, with real feeling in
it--an exception among all the great pieces of canvas that hang beside
it. Domenichino's figure of St. Jerome is a direct plagiarism from
that of Agostino; but in other points the two pictures are quite
diverse.

The following morning we took a carriage and were diligent in visiting
the churches. San Petronio has the melancholy distinction of an
exquisite Gothic façade, which is carried up only a little way above the
arches of the doorways; the sculptures on these arches are of wonderful
beauty. The interior is of lofty, airy, simple Gothic, and it contains
some curious old paintings in the various side-chapels--pre-eminent
among which are the great frescoes by the so-called Buffalmacco. The
Paradise is distinguished in my memory by the fact that the blessed are
ranged in seats like the benches of a church or chapel. At Santa
Cecilia--now used as a barrack or guard-room--there are two frescoes by
Francia, the Marriage and Burial of St. Cecilia, characteristic, but
miserably injured. At the great Church of San Domenico the object of
chief interest is the tomb of the said saint, by the ever-to-be-honored
Nicolo Pisano. I believe this tomb was his first great work, and very
remarkable it is; but there is nothing on it equal to the Nativity on
the pulpit at Pisa. On this tomb stands a lovely angel, by Michael
Angelo. It is small in size, holding a small candle-stick, and is a work
of his youth; it shows clearly enough how the feeling for grace and
beauty were strong in him, only not strong enough to wrestle with his
love of the grandiose and powerful.

The ugly, painful leaning towers of Bologna made me desire not to look
at them a second time; but there are fine bits of massive palatial
building here and there in the colonnaded streets. We trod the court
of the once famous university, where the arms of the various scholars
ornament the walls above and below an interior gallery. This building
is now, as far as I could understand, a communal school, and the
university is transported to another part of the town.

We left Bologna in the afternoon, rested at Ferrara for the night, and
passed the Euganean Mountains on our left hand as we approached Padua
in the middle of the next day.

After dinner and rest from our dusty journeying we took a carriage and
went out to see the town, desiring most of all to see Giotto's Chapel.
We paused first, however, at the great Church of San Antonio, which is
remarkable both externally and internally. There are two side chapels
opposite each other, which are quite unique for contrasted effect. On
the one hand is a chapel of oblong form, covered entirely with white
marble _relievi_, golden lamps hanging from the roof; while opposite
is a chapel of the same form, covered with frescoes by Avanzi, the
artist who seems to have been the link of genius between Giotto and
Masaccio. Close by, in a separate building, is the Capella di San
Giorgio, also covered with Avanzi's frescoes; and here one may study
him more completely, because the light is better than in the church.
He has quite a Veronese power of combining his human groups with
splendid architecture.

The Arena Chapel stands apart, and is approached, at present, through
a pretty garden. Here one is uninterruptedly with Giotto. The whole
chapel was designed and painted by himself alone; and it is said that,
while he was at work on it, Dante lodged with him at Padua. The nave
of the chapel is in tolerably good preservation, but the apsis has
suffered severely from damp. It is in this apsis that the lovely
Madonna, with the Infant at her breast, is painted in a niche, now
quite hidden by some altar-piece or woodwork, which one has to push by
in order to see the tenderest bit of Giotto's painting. This chapel
must have been a blessed vision when it was fresh from Giotto's
hand--the blue, vaulted roof; the exquisite bands of which he was so
fond, representing inlaid marble, uniting roof and walls, and forming
the divisions between the various frescoes which cover the upper part
of the wall. The glory of Paradise at one end, and the histories of
Mary and Jesus on the two sides; and the subdued effect of the series
of monochromes representing the Virtues and Vices below.

There is a piazza with a plantation and circular public walk, with
wildly affected statues of small and great notorieties, which remains
with one as a peculiarity of Padua; in general the town is merely old
and shabbily Italian, without anything very specific in its aspect.

From Padua to Venice!

It was about ten o'clock on a moonlight night--the 4th of June--that
we found ourselves apparently on a railway in the midst of the sea; we
were on the bridge across the Lagoon. Soon we were in a gondola on the
Grand Canal, looking out at the moonlit buildings and water. What
stillness! What beauty! Looking out from the high window of our hotel
on the Grand Canal I felt that it was a pity to go to bed. Venice was
more beautiful than romances had feigned.

And that was the impression that remained, and even deepened, during
our stay of eight days. That quiet which seems the deeper because one
hears the delicious dip of the oar (when not disturbed by clamorous
church bells) leaves the eye in full liberty and strength to take in
the exhaustless loveliness of color and form.

We were in our gondola by nine o'clock the next morning, and, of
course, the first point we sought was the Piazza di San Marco. I am
glad to find Ruskin calling the Palace of the Doges one of the two
most perfect buildings in the world; its only defects, to my feeling,
are the feebleness or triviality of the frieze or cornice, and the
want of length in the Gothic windows with which the upper wall is
pierced. This spot is a focus of architectural wonders; but the palace
is the crown of them all. The double tier of columns and arches, with
the rich sombreness of their finely outlined shadows, contrast
satisfactorily with the warmth and light and more continuous surface
of the upper part. Even landing on the Piazzetta, one has a sense, not
only of being in an entirely novel scene, but one where the ideas of a
foreign race have poured themselves in without yet mingling
indistinguishably with the pre-existent Italian life. But this is felt
yet more strongly when one has passed along the Piazzetta and arrived
in front of San Marco, with its low arches and domes and minarets. But
perhaps the most striking point to take one's stand on is just in
front of the white marble guard-house flanking the great tower--the
guard-house with Sansovino's iron gates before it. On the left is San
Marco, with the two square pillars from St. Jean d'Acre standing as
isolated trophies; on the right the Piazzetta extends between the
Doge's Palace and the Palazzo Reale to the tall columns from
Constantinople; and in front is the elaborate gateway leading to the
white marble Scala di Giganti, in the courtyard of the Doge's Palace.
Passing through this gateway and up this staircase, we entered the
gallery which surrounds the court on three sides, and looked down at
the fine sculptured vase-like wells below. Then into the great Sala,
surrounded with the portraits of the doges; the largest oil-painting
here--or perhaps anywhere else--is the Gloria del Paradiso, by
Tintoretto, now dark and unlovely. But on the ceiling is a great Paul
Veronese--the Apotheosis of Venice--which looks as fresh as if it were
painted yesterday, and is a miracle of color and composition--a
picture full of glory and joy of an earthly, fleshly kind, but without
any touch of coarseness or vulgarity. Below the radiant Venice on her
clouds is a balcony filled with upward-looking spectators; and below
this gallery is a group of human figures with horses. Next to this
Apotheosis, I admire another Coronation of Venice on the ceiling of
another Sala, where Venice is sitting enthroned above the globe with
her lovely face in half shadow--a creature born with an imperial
attitude. There are other Tintorettos, Veroneses, and Palmas in the
great halls of this palace; but they left me quite indifferent, and
have become vague in my memory. From the splendors of the palace we
crossed the Bridge of Sighs to the prisons, and saw the horrible,
dark, damp cells that would make the saddest life in the free light
and air seem bright and desirable.

The interior of St. Mark's is full of interest, but not of beauty; it
is dark and heavy, and ill-suited to the Catholic worship, from the
massive piers that obstruct the view everywhere, shut out the sight of
ceremony and procession, as we witnessed at our leisure on the day of
the great procession of Corpus Christi. But everywhere there are
relics of gone-by art to be studied, from mosaics of the Greeks to
mosaics of later artists than the Zuccati; old marble statues,
embrowned like a meerschaum pipe; amazing sculptures in wood;
Sansovino doors, ambitious to rival Ghiberti's; transparent alabaster
columns; an ancient Madonna, hung with jewels, transported from St.
Sophia, in Constantinople; and everywhere the venerable pavement, once
beautiful with its starry patterns in rich marble, now deadened and
sunk to unevenness, like the mud floor of a cabin.

Then outside, on the archway of the principal door, there are
sculptures of a variety that makes one renounce the study of them in
despair at the shortness of one's time--blended fruits and foliage,
and human groups and animal forms of all kinds. On our first morning
we ascended the great tower, and looked around on the island city and
the distant mountains and the distant Adriatic. And on the same day we
went to see the Pisani palace--one of the grand old palaces that are
going to decay. An Italian artist who resides in one part of this
palace interested us by his frank manner, and the glimpse we had of
his domesticity with his pretty wife and children. After this we saw
the Church of San Sebastiano, where Paul Veronese is buried, with his
own paintings around, mingling their color with the light that falls
on his tombstone. There is one remarkably fine painting of his here:
it represents, I think, some saints going to martyrdom, but, apart
from that explanation, is a composition full of vigorous, spirited
figures, in which the central ones are two young men leaving some
splendid dwelling, on the steps of which stands the mother, pleading
and remonstrating--a marvellous figure of an old woman with a bare
neck.

But supreme among the pictures at Venice is the Death of Peter the
Martyr,[20] now happily removed from its original position as an
altar-piece, and placed in a good light in the sacristy of San
Giovanni and Paolo (or San Zani Polo, as the Venetians conveniently
abbreviate it). In this picture, as in that of the Tribute-money at
Dresden, Titian seems to have surpassed himself, and to have reached
as high a point in expression as in color. In the same sacristy there
was a Crucifixion, by Tintoretto, and a remarkable Madonna with
Saints, by Giovanni Bellini; but we were unable to look long away from
the Titian to these, although we paid it five visits during our stay.
It is near this church that the famous equestrian statue stands, by
Verocchio.

Santa Maria della Salute, built as an _ex voto_ by the Republic on the
cessation of the plague, is one of the most conspicuous churches in
Venice, lifting its white cupolas close on the Grand Canal, where it
widens out towards the Giudecca.

Here there are various Tintorettos, but the only one which is not
blackened so as to be unintelligible is the _Cena_, which is
represented as a bustling supper party, with attendants and sideboard
accessories, in thoroughly Dutch fashion! The great scene of
Tintoretto's greatness is held to be the Scuola di San Rocco, of which
he had the painting entirely to himself, with his pupils; and here one
must admire the vigor and freshness of his conceptions, though I saw
nothing that delighted me in expression, and much that was
preposterous and ugly. The Crucifixion here is certainly a grand work,
to which he seems to have given his best powers; and among the smaller
designs, in the two larger halls, there were several of thorough
originality--for example, the Annunciation, where Mary is seated in a
poor house, with a carpenter's shop adjoining; the Nativity, in the
upper story of a stable, of which a section is made so as to show the
beasts below; and the Flight into Egypt, with a very charming
(European) landscape. In this same building of San Rocco there are
some exquisite iron gates, a present from Florence, and some
singularly painstaking wood-carving, representing, in one compartment
of wainscot, above the seats that surrounded the upper hall, a
bookcase filled with old books, an inkstand and pen set in front of
one shelf _à s'y méprendre_.

But of all Tintoretto's paintings the best preserved, and perhaps the
most complete in execution, is the Miracle of St. Mark, at the
Accademia. We saw it the oftener because we were attracted to the
Accademia again and again by Titian's Assumption, which we placed next
to Peter the Martyr among the pictures at Venice.

For a thoroughly rapt expression I never saw anything equal to the
Virgin in this picture; and the expression is the more remarkable
because it is not assisted by the usual devices to express spiritual
ecstasy, such as delicacy of feature and temperament, or pale
meagreness. Then what cherubs and angelic heads bathed in light! The
lower part of the picture has no interest; the attitudes are
theatrical; and the Almighty above is as unbeseeming as painted
Almighties usually are; but the middle group falls short only of the
Sistine Madonna.

Among the Venetian painters Giovanni Bellini shines with a mild,
serious light that gives one an affectionate respect towards him. In
the Church of the Scalzi there is an exquisite Madonna by
him--probably his _chef-d'oeuvre_--comparable to Raphael's for
sweetness.

And Palmo Vecchio, too, must be held in grateful reverence for his
Santa Barbara, standing in calm, grand beauty above an altar in the
Church of Santa Maria Formosa. It is an almost unique presentation of
a hero-woman, standing in calm preparation for martyrdom, without the
slightest air of pietism, yet with the expression of a mind filled
with serious conviction.

We made the journey to Chioggia, but with small pleasure, on account
of my illness, which continued all day. Otherwise that long floating
over the water, with the forts and mountains looking as if they were
suspended in the air, would have been very enjoyable. Of all dreamy
delights that of floating in a gondola along the canals and out on the
Lagoon is surely the greatest. We were out one night on the Lagoon
when the sun was setting, and the wide waters were flushed with the
reddened light. I should have liked it to last for hours; it is the
sort of scene in which I could most readily forget my own existence
and feel melted into the general life.

Another charm of evening-time was to walk up and down the Piazza of
San Marco as the stars were brightening and look at the grand, dim
buildings, and the flocks of pigeons flitting about them; or to walk
on to the Bridge of La Paglia and look along the dark canal that runs
under the Bridge of Sighs--its blackness lit up by a gaslight here and
there, and the plash of the oar of blackest gondola slowly advancing.

One of our latest visits was to the Palazzo Mamfrini, where there are
still the remains of a magnificent collection of pictures--remains
still on sale.

The young proprietor was walking about transacting business in the
rooms as we passed through them--a handsome, refined-looking man. The
chief treasure left--the Entombment, by Titian--is perhaps a superior
duplicate of the one in the Louvre. After this we went to a private
house (once the house of Bianca Capello) to see a picture which the
joint proprietors are anxious to prove to be a Leonardo da Vinci. It
is a remarkable--an unforgetable--picture. The subject is the Supper
at Emmaus; and the Christ, with open, almost tearful eyes, with loving
sadness spread over the regular beauty of his features, is a
masterpiece. This head is _not_ like the Leonardo sketch at Milan; and
the rest of the picture impressed me strongly with the idea that it is
of German, not Italian, origin. Again, the head is not like that of
Leonardo's Christ in the National Gallery--it is far finer, to my
thinking.

Farewell, lovely Venice! and away to Verona, across the green plains
of Lombardy, which can hardly look tempting to an eye still filled
with the dreamy beauty it has left behind. Yet I liked our short stay
at Verona extremely. The Amphitheatre had the disadvantage of coming
after the Coliseum and the Pozzuoli Amphitheatre, and would bear
comparison with neither; but the Church of San Zenone was equal in
interest to almost any of the churches we had seen in Italy. It is a
beautiful specimen of Lombard architecture, undisguised by any modern
barbarisms in the interior; and on the walls--now that they have been
freed from their coat of whitewash--there are early frescoes of high
historical value, some of them--apparently of the Giotto
school--showing a remarkable striving after human expression. More
than this, there is in one case an under layer of yet older frescoes,
partly laid bare, and showing the lower part of figures in mummy-like
degradation of drawing; while above these are the upper portion of the
later figures in striking juxtaposition with the dead art from which
they had sprung with the vitality of a hidden germ. There is a very
fine crypt to the church, where the fragments of some ancient
sculptures are built in wrong way upwards.

This was the only church we entered at Verona; for we contented
ourselves with a general view of the town, driving about to get _coups
d'oeil_ of the fine old walls, the river, the bridges, and surrounding
hills, and mounting up to a high terrace for the sake of a bird's-eye
view; this, with a passing sight of the famous tombs of the Scaligers,
was all gathered in our four or five hours at Verona.

Heavy rain came on our way to Milan, putting an end to the brilliant
weather we had enjoyed ever since our arrival at Naples. The line of
road lies through a luxuriant country, and I remember the picturesque
appearance of Bergamo--half of it on the level, half of it lifted up
on the green hill.

In this second visit of mine to Milan my greatest pleasures were the
Brera Gallery and the Ambrosian Library, neither of which I had seen
before. The cathedral no longer satisfied my eye in its exterior; and
though the interior has very grand effects, there are still disturbing
elements.

At the Ambrosian Library we saw MSS. surpassing in interest any even of
those we had seen in the Laurentian Library at Florence--illuminated
books, sacred and secular, a little Koran, rolled up something after the
fashion of a measuring-tape, private letters of Tasso, Galileo, Lucrezia
Borgia, etc., and a book full of Leonardo da Vinci's engineering
designs. Then, up-stairs, in the picture-gallery, we saw a delicious
Holy Family by Luini, of marvellous perfection in its execution, the
Cartoon for Raphael's School of Athens, and a precious collection of
drawings by Leonardo da Vinci and Michael Angelo. Among Leonardo's are
amazingly grotesque faces, full of humor; among Michael Angelo's is the
sketch of the unfortunate Biagio, who figures with ass's ears, in the
lower corner of the Last Judgment.

At the Brera, among a host of pictures to which I was indifferent,
there were several things that delighted me. Some of Luini's
frescoes--especially the burial or transportation of the body of St.
Catherine by angels--some single figures of young cherubs, and Joseph
and Mary going to their Marriage; the drawing in pastel by Leonardo of
the Christ's head, supposed to be a study for the _Cena_; the Luini
Madonna among trellises--an exquisite oil-painting; Gentile Bellini's
picture of St. Mark preaching at Alexandria; and the Sposalizio by
Raphael.

At the Church of San Maurizio Maggiore we saw Luini's power tested by
an abundant opportunity. The walls are almost covered with frescoes by
him; but the only remarkable felicity he has is his female figures,
which are eminently graceful. He has not power enough for a
composition of any high character.

We visited, too, the interesting old Church of San Ambrogio, with its
court surrounded by cloisters, its old sculptured pulpit, chair of St.
Ambrose, and illuminated choir-books; and we drove to look at the line
of old Roman columns, which are almost the solitary remnant of
antiquity left in this ancient city--ancient, at least, in its name
and site.

We left Milan for Como on a fine Sunday morning, and arrived at
beautiful Bellagio by steamer in the evening. Here we spent a
delicious day--going to the Villa Somma Riva in the morning, and in
the evening to the Serbellone Gardens, from the heights of which we
saw the mountain-peaks reddened with the last rays of the sun. The
next day we reached lovely Chiavenna, at the foot of the Splügen Pass,
and spent the evening in company with a glorious mountain torrent,
mountain peaks, huge bowlders, with rippling miniature torrents and
lovely young flowers among them, and grassy heights with rich Spanish
chestnuts shadowing them. Then, the next morning, we set off by post
and climbed the almost perpendicular heights of the Pass--chiefly in
heavy rain that would hardly let us discern the patches of snow when
we reached the table-land of the summit. About five o'clock we reached
grassy Splügen and felt that we had left Italy behind us. Already our
driver had been German for the last long post, and now we had come to
a hotel where host and waiters were German. Swiss houses of dark wood,
outside staircases and broad eaves, stood on the steep, green, and
flowery slope that led up to the waterfall; and the hotel and other
buildings of masonry were thoroughly German in their aspect. In the
evening we enjoyed a walk between the mountains, whose lower sides
down to the torrent bed were set with tall, dark pines. But the climax
of grand--nay, terrible--scenery came the next day as we traversed the
Via Mala.

After this came open green valleys, dotted with white churches and
homesteads. We were in Switzerland, and the mighty wall of the
Valtelline Alps shut us out from Italy on the 21st of June.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 23d June, 1860, from Berne.]

Your letter to Florence reached me duly, and I feel as if I had been
rather unconscionable in asking for another before our return; but to
us, who have been seeing new things every day, a month seems so long a
space of time that we can't help fancying there must be a great
accumulation of news for us at the end of it.

We had hoped to be at home by the 25th; but we were so enchanted with
Venice that we were seduced into staying there a whole week instead of
three or four days, and now we must not rob the boys of their two
days' holiday with us.

We have had a wonderful journey. From Florence we went to Bologna,
Ferrara, and Padua, on our way to Venice; and from Venice we have come
by Verona, Milan, and Como, and across the Splügen to Zurich, where we
spent yesterday, chiefly in the company of Moleschott the
physiologist--an interview that has helped to sharpen Mr. Lewes's
appetite for a return to his microscope and dissecting-table. We ought
to be forever ashamed of ourselves if we don't work the better for
this great holiday. We both feel immensely enriched with new ideas and
new veins of interest.

I don't think I can venture to tell you what my great project is by
letter, for I am anxious to keep it secret. It will require a great
deal of study and labor, and I am athirst to begin.

As for "The Mill," I am in repose about it now I know it has found its
way to the great public. Its comparative rank can only be decided
after some years have passed, when the judgment upon it is no longer
influenced by the recent enthusiasm about "Adam," and by the fact that
it has the misfortune to be written by me instead of by Mr. Liggins. I
shall like to see Bulwer's criticism, if you will be kind enough to
send it me; but I particularly wish _not_ to see any of the newspaper
articles.


_SUMMARY._

MARCH TO JUNE, 1860.--FIRST JOURNEY TO ITALY.

     Crossing Mont Cenis by night in diligence--Turin--Sees Count
     Cavour--Genoa--Leghorn--Pisa--Civita Vecchia--Disappointment
     with first sight of Rome--Better spirits after visit to
     Capitol--View from Capitol--Points most struck with in
     Rome--Sculpture at Capitol--Sculpture at Vatican first seen
     by torchlight--St. Peter's--Other churches--Sistine
     Chapel--Paintings--Illumination of St.
     Peter's--Disappointment with Michael Angelo's Moses--Visits
     to artists' studios--Riedel and Overbeck--Pamfili Doria
     Gardens--Frascati--Tivoli--Pictures at Capitol--Lateran
     Museum--Shelley's and Keats's graves--Letter to Mrs.
     Congreve--Pope's blessing--Easter ceremonies--From Rome to
     Naples--Description--Museo Borbonico--Visit to
     Pompeii--Solemnity of street of tombs--Letter to Mrs.
     Congreve--From Naples to Salerno and Pæstum--Temple of
     Vesta--Temple of Neptune fulfils expectations--Amalfi--Drive
     to Sorrento--Back to Naples--By steamer to Leghorn--To
     Florence--Views from Fiesole and Bellosguardo--The
     Duomo--Baptistery--Palaces--Churches--Dante's
     tomb--Frescoes--Pictures at the Uffizi--Pictures at the
     Pitti--Pictures at the Accademia--Expedition to Siena--Back
     to Florence--Michael Angelo's house--Letter to
     Blackwood--Dwarfing effect of the past--Letter to Major
     Blackwood on _Times'_ criticism of "The Mill on the Floss,"
     and first mention of an Italian novel--Leave Florence for
     Bologna--Churches and pictures--To Padua by Ferrara--The
     Arena Chapel--Venice by moonlight--Doge's Palace--St.
     Mark's--Pictures--Scuola di San Rocco--Accademia--Gondola to
     Chioggia--From Venice to Verona--Milan--Brera Gallery and
     Ambrosian Library--Disappointment with
     cathedral--Bellagio--Over Splügen to Switzerland--Letter to
     Blackwood--Saw Moleschott at Zurich--Home by Berne and
     Geneva.

FOOTNOTES:

[11] "Here lies one whose name was writ in water."

[12] Now in cell No. 33 in the Museo di San Marco.

[13] Now in the Museo Nazionale.

[14] Now in Sala Lorenzo Monaco, Uffizi.

[15] The only portraits of Dante in the Uffizi are No. 1207 in the
room opening out of the Tribune, by an unknown painter (Scuola
Toscana); and No. 553, in the passage to the Pitti--also by an unknown
painter.

[16] No. 81. Pitti Gallery.

[17] No. 49, by Tiberio Titti. Pitti Gallery.

[18] No. 140. Pitti Gallery.

[19] No. 56 Via de Faenza, Capella di Foligno.

[20] Since burned.




CHAPTER XI.


[Sidenote: Journal, 1860.]

_July 1._--We found ourselves at home again, after three months of
delightful travel. From Berne we brought our eldest boy Charles, to
begin a new period in his life, after four years at Hofwyl. During our
absence "The Mill on the Floss" came out (April 4), and achieved a
greater success than I had ever hoped for it. The subscription was
3600 (the number originally printed was 4000); and shortly after its
appearance, Mudie having demanded a second thousand, Blackwood
commenced striking off 2000 more, making 6000. While we were at
Florence I had the news that these 6000 were all sold, and that 500
more were being prepared. From all we can gather, the votes are rather
on the side of "The Mill" as a better book than "Adam."

[Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 1st July, 1860.]

We reached home by starlight at one o'clock this morning; and I write
in haste, fear, and trembling lest you should already be gone to
Surrey. You know what I should like--that you and your husband should
come to us the first day possible, naming any hour and conditions. We
would arrange meals and everything else as would best suit you. Of
course I would willingly go to London to see _you_, if you could not
come to me. But I fear lest neither plan should be practicable, and
lest this letter should have to be sent after you. It is from your
note only that I have learned your loss.[21] It has made me think of
you with the sense that there is more than ever a common fund of
experience between us. But I will write nothing more now. I am almost
ill with fatigue, and have only courage to write at all because of my
anxiety not to miss you.

Affectionate regards from both of _us_ to both of _you_.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 2d July, 1860.]

I opened your letters and parcel a little after one o'clock on Sunday
morning, for that was the unseasonable hour of our return from our
long, long journey. Yesterday was almost entirely employed in feeling
very weary indeed, but this morning we are attacking the heap of small
duties that always lie before one after a long absence.

It is pleasant to see your book[22] fairly finished after all delays
and anxieties; but I will say nothing to you about _that_ until I have
read it. I shall read it the first thing before plunging into a course
of study which will take me into a different region of thought.

We have had an unspeakably delightful journey--one of those journeys
that seem to divide one's life in two, by the new ideas they suggest
and the new veins of interest they open. We went to Geneva, and spent
two days with my old, kind friends, the d'Alberts--a real pleasure to
me, especially as Mr. Lewes was delighted with "Maman," as I used to
call Madame d'Albert. She is as bright and upright as ever; the ten
years have only whitened her hair--a change which makes her face all
the softer in coloring.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 3d July, 1860.]

We did not reach home till past midnight on Saturday, when you, I
suppose, had already become used to the comfort of having fairly got
through your London season. Self-interest, rightly understood of
course, prompts us to a few virtuous actions in the way of
letter-writing to let the few people we care to hear from know at once
of our whereabouts; and you are one of the first among the few.

At Berne Mr. Lewes supped with Professors Valentin and Schiff, two
highly distinguished physiologists, and I was much delighted to find
how much attention and interest they had given to his views in the
"Physiology of Common Life."

A French translation of "Adam Bede," by a Genevese gentleman[23] well
known to me, is now in the press; and the same translator has
undertaken "The Mill on the Floss." He appears to have rendered "Adam"
with the most scrupulous care. I think these are all the incidents we
gathered on our homeward journey that are likely to interest you.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 7th July, 1860.]

I have finished my first rather rapid reading of your book, and now I
thank you for it: not merely for the special gift of the volume and
inscription, but for that of which many others will share the benefit
with me--the "thoughts" themselves.

So far as my reading in English books of similar character extends,
yours seems to me quite unparalleled in the largeness and insight with
which it estimates Christianity as an "organized experience"--a grand
advance in the moral development of the race.

I especially delight in the passage, p. 105, beginning, "And how can
it be otherwise," and ending with, "formal rejection of it."[24] On
this and other supremely interesting matters of thought--perhaps I
should rather say of experience--your book has shown me that we are
much nearer to each other than I had supposed. At p. 174, again, there
is a passage beginning, "These sentiments," and ending with
"heroes,"[25] which, for me, expresses the one-half of true human
piety. That thought is one of my favorite altars where I oftenest go
to contemplate, and to seek for invigorating motive.

Of the work as a whole I am quite incompetent to judge on a single
cursory reading. I admire--I respect--the breadth and industry of mind
it exhibits; and I should be obliged to give it a more thorough study
than I can afford at present before I should feel warranted to urge,
in the light of a criticism, my failure to perceive the logical
consistency of your language in some parts with the position you have
adopted in others. In many instances your meaning is obscure to me, or
at least lies wrapped up in more folds of abstract phraseology than I
have the courage or the industry to open for myself. I think you told
me that some one had found your treatment of great questions
"cold-blooded." I am all the more delighted to find, for my own part,
an unusual fulness of sympathy and heart experience breathing
throughout your book. The ground for that epithet perhaps lay in a
certain professorial tone which could hardly be avoided, in a work
filled with criticism of other people's theories, except by the
adoption of a simply personal style of presentation, in which you
would have seemed to be looking up at the oracles, and trying to
reconcile their doctrines for your own behoof, instead of appearing to
be seated in a chair above them. But you considered your own plan more
thoroughly than any one else can have considered it for you; and I
have no doubt you had good reasons for preferring the more impersonal
style.

Mr. Lewes sends his kind regards, and when Du Bois Reymond's book on
Johannes Müller, with other preoccupations of a like thrilling kind,
no longer stand in the way, he will open _his_ copy of the "Thoughts
in Aid of Faith." He has felt a new interest aroused towards it since
he has learned something about it from me and the reviewer in the
_Westminster_.

Madame Bodichon, who was here the other day, told me that Miss
Nightingale and Miss Julia Smith had mentioned their pleasure in your
book; but you will hear further news of all that from themselves.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 9th July, 1860.]

I return Sir Edward Lytton's critical letter, which I have read with
much interest. On two points I recognize the justice of his criticism.
First, that Maggie is made to appear too passive in the scene of
quarrel in the Red Deeps. If my book were still in MS. I should--now
that the defect is suggested to me--alter, or rather expand, that
scene. Secondly, that the tragedy is not adequately prepared. This is
a defect which I felt even while writing the third volume, and have
felt ever since the MS. left me. The _Epische Breite_ into which I was
beguiled by love of my subject in the two first volumes, caused a want
of proportionate fulness in the treatment of the third, which I shall
always regret.

The other chief point of criticism--Maggie's position towards
Stephen--is too vital a part of my whole conception and purpose for me
to be converted to the condemnation of it. If I am wrong there--if I
did not really know what my heroine would feel and do under the
circumstances in which I deliberately placed her, I ought not to have
written this book at all, but quite a different book, if any. If the
ethics of art do not admit the truthful presentation of a character
essentially noble, but liable to great error--error that is anguish to
its own nobleness--then, it seems to me, the ethics of art are too
narrow, and must be widened to correspond with a widening psychology.

But it is good for me to know how my tendencies as a writer clash with
the conclusions of a highly accomplished mind, that I may be warned
into examining well whether my discordance with those conclusions may
not arise rather from an idiosyncrasy of mine than from a conviction
which is argumentatively justifiable.

I hope you will thank Sir Edward on my behalf for the trouble he has
taken to put his criticism into a form specific enough to be useful. I
feel his taking such trouble to be at once a tribute and a kindness.
If printed criticisms were usually written with only half the same
warrant of knowledge, and with an equal sincerity of intention, I
should read them without fear of fruitless annoyance.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 10th July, 1860.]

The little envelope with its address of "Marian" was very welcome, and
as Mr. Lewes is sending what a Malaproprian friend once called a
"missile" to Sara, I feel inclined to slip in a word of
gratitude--less for the present than for the past goodness, which came
back to me with keener remembrance than ever when we were at Genoa and
at Como--the places I first saw with you. How wretched I was then--how
peevish, how utterly morbid! And how kind and forbearing you were
under the oppression of my company. I should like you now and then to
feel happy in the thought that you were always perfectly good to me.
That I was not good to you is my own disagreeable affair; the bitter
taste of that fact is mine, not yours.

Don't you remember Bellagio? It is hardly altered much except in the
hotels, which the eleven years have wondrously multiplied and
bedizened for the accommodation of the English. But if I begin to
recall the things we saw in Italy, I shall write as long a letter as
Mr. Lewes's, which, by-the-bye, now I have read it, seems to be
something of a "missile" in another sense than the Malaproprian. But
Sara is one of the few people to whom candor is acceptable as the
highest tribute. And private criticism has more chance of being
faithful than public. We must have mercy on critics who are obliged to
make a figure in printed pages. They must by all means say striking
things. Either we should not read printed criticisms at all (_I
don't_), or we should read them with the constant remembrance that
they are a fugitive kind of work which, in the present stage of human
nature, can rarely engage a very high grade of conscience or ability.
The fate of a book, which is not entirely ephemeral, is never decided
by journalists or reviewers of any but an exceptional kind. Tell Sara
her damnation--if it ever comes to pass--will be quite independent of
Nationals and Westminsters. Let half a dozen competent people read her
book, and an opinion of it will spread quite apart from either praise
or blame in reviews and newspapers.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, Tuesday evening, July, 1860.]

Our big boy is a great delight to us, and makes our home doubly
cheery. It is very sweet as one gets old to have some young life about
one. He is quite a passionate musician, and we play Beethoven duets
with increasing appetite every evening. The opportunity of hearing
some inspiring music is one of the chief benefits we hope for to
counterbalance our loss of the wide common and the fields.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 14th July, 1860.]

We shall certainly read the parts you suggest in the "Education of the
Feelings,"[26] and I dare say I shall read a good deal more of it,
liking to turn over the leaves of a book which I read first in our old
drawing-room at Foleshill, and then lent to my sister, who, with a
little air of maternal experience, pronounced it "very sensible."

There is so much that I want to do every day--I had need cut myself
into four women. We have a great extra interest and occupation just
now in our big boy Charlie, who is looking forward to a Government
examination, and wants much help and sympathy in music and graver
things. I think we are quite peculiarly blest in the fact that this
eldest lad seems the most entirely lovable human animal of seventeen
and a half that I ever met with or heard of: he has a sweetness of
disposition which is saved from weakness by a remarkable sense of
duty.

We are going to let our present house, if possible--that is, get rid
of it altogether on account of its inconvenient situation--other
projects are still in a floating, unfixed condition. The water did not
look quite so green at Como--perhaps, as your remark suggests, because
there was a less vivid green to be reflected from my personality as I
looked down on it. I am eleven years nearer to the sere and yellow
leaf, and my feelings are even more autumnal than my years. I have
read no reviews of the "Mill on the Floss" except that in the _Times_
which Blackwood sent me to Florence. I abstain not from
superciliousness, but on a calm consideration of the probable
proportion of benefit on the one hand, and waste of thought on the
other. It was certain that in the notices of my first book, after the
removal of my _incognito_, there would be much _ex post facto_ wisdom,
which could hardly profit me since _I_ certainly knew who I was
beforehand, and knew also that no one else knew who had not been
told.

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, 18th July, 1860.]

We are quite uncertain about our plans at present. Our second boy,
Thornie, is going to leave Hofwyl, and to be placed in some more
expensive position, in order to the carrying on of his education in a
more complete way, so that we are thinking of avoiding for the present
any final establishment of ourselves, which would necessarily be
attended with additional outlay. Besides, these material cares draw
rather too severely on my strength and spirits. But until Charlie's
career has taken shape we frame no definite projects.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 6th Aug. 1860.]

If Cara values the article on Strikes in the _Westminster Review_, she
will be interested to know--if she has not heard it already--that the
writer is _blind_. I dined with him the other week, and could hardly
keep the tears back as I sat at table with him. Yet he is cheerful and
animated, accepting with graceful quietness all the minute attentions
to his wants that his blindness calls forth. His name is Fawcett, and
he is a Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge. I am sitting for my
portrait--for the last time, I hope--to Lawrence, the artist who drew
that chalk-head of Thackeray, which is familiar to you.

[Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, Friday, Aug. 1860.]

I know you will rejoice with us that Charlie has won his place at the
Post-office, having been at the head of the list in the examination.
The dear lad is fairly launched in life now.

[Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, Saturday evening, Aug. 1860.]

I am thoroughly vexed that we didn't go to Lawrence's to-day. We made
an effort, but it was raining too hard at the only time that would
serve us to reach the train. That comes of our inconvenient situation,
so far off the railway; and alas! no one comes to take our house off
our hands. We may be forced to stay here after all.

One of the things I shall count upon, if we are able to get nearer
London, is to see more of your schools and other good works. That
would help me to do without the fields for many months of the year.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 27th Aug. 1860.]

I am very sorry that anything I have written should have pained you.
_That_, certainly, is the result I should seek most to avoid in the
very slight communication which we are able to keep up--necessarily
under extremely imperfect acquaintance with each other's present self.

My first letter to you about your book, after having read it through,
was as simple and sincere a statement of the main impressions it had
produced on me as I knew how to write in few words. My second letter,
in which I unhappily used a formula in order to express to you, in
briefest phrase, my difficulty in discerning the justice of your
_analogical_ argument, _as I understood it_, was written from no other
impulse than the desire to show you that I did not neglect your
abstract just sent to me. The said formula was entirely deprived of
its application by the statement in your next letter that you used the
word "essence" in another sense than the one hitherto received in
philosophical writing, on the question as to the nature of our
knowledge; and the explanation given of your meaning in your last
letter shows me--unless I am plunging into further mistake--that you
mean nothing but what I fully believe. My offensive formula was
written under the supposition that your conclusion meant something
which it apparently did _not_ mean. It is probable enough that I was
stupid; but I should be distressed to think that the discipline of
life had been of so little use to me as to leave me with a tendency
to leap at once to the attitude of a critic, instead of trying first
to be a learner from every book written with sincere labor.

Will you tell Mr. Bray that we are quitting our present house in order
to be _nearer_ town for Charlie's sake, who has an appointment in the
Post-office, and our time will be arduously occupied during the next
few weeks in arrangements to that end, so that our acceptance of the
pleasant proposition to visit Sydenham for a while is impossible. We
have advertised for a house near Regent's Park, having just found a
gentleman and lady ready to take our present one off our hands. They
want to come in on quarter-day, so that we have no time to spare.

I have been reading this morning for my spiritual good Emerson's "Man
the Reformer," which comes to me with fresh beauty and meaning. My
heart goes out with venerating gratitude to that mild face, which I
dare say is smiling on some one as beneficently as it one day did on
me years and years ago.

Do not write again about opinions on large questions, dear Sara.
The liability to mutual misconception which attends such
correspondence--especially in my case, who can only write with
brevity and haste--makes me dread it greatly; and I think there is
no benefit derivable to you to compensate for the presence of that
dread in me. You do not know me well enough as I _am_ (according to
the doctrine of development which you have yourself expounded) to
have the materials for interpreting my imperfect expressions.

I think you would spare yourself some pain if you would attribute to
your friends a larger comprehension of ideas, and a larger
acquaintance with them, than you appear to do. I should imagine that
many of them, or at least _some_ of them, share with you, much more
fully than you seem to suppose, in the interest and hope you derive
from the doctrine of development, with its geometrical progression
towards fuller and fuller being. Surely it is a part of human piety we
should all cultivate, not to form conclusions, on slight and dubious
evidence, as to other people's "tone of mind," or to regard particular
mistakes as a proof of general moral incapacity to understand us. I
suppose such a tendency (to large conclusions about others) is part of
the original sin we are all born with, for I have continually to check
it in myself.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 28th Aug. 1860.]

I think I must tell you the secret, though I am distrusting my power
to make it grow into a published fact. When we were in Florence I was
rather fired with the idea of writing an historical romance--scene,
Florence; period, the close of the fifteenth century, which was marked
by Savonarola's career and martyrdom. Mr. Lewes has encouraged me to
persevere in the project, saying that I should probably do something
in historical romance rather different in character from what has been
done before. But I want first to write another English story, and the
plan I should like to carry out is this: to publish my next English
novel when my Italian one is advanced enough for us to begin its
publication a few months afterwards in "Maga." It would appear without
a name in the Magazine, and be subsequently reprinted with the name of
George Eliot. I need not tell you the wherefore of this plan. You know
well enough the received phrases with which a writer is greeted when
he does something else than what was expected of him. But just now I
am quite without confidence in my future doings, and almost repent of
having formed conceptions which will go on lashing me now until I have
at least tried to fulfil them.

I am going to-day to give my last sitting to Lawrence, and we were
counting on the Major's coming to look at the portrait and judge of
it. I hope it will be satisfactory, for I am quite set against going
through the same process a second time.

We are a little distracted just now with the prospect of removal from
our present house, which some obliging people have at last come to
take off our hands.

[Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 5th Sept. 1860.]

My fingers have been itching to write to you for the last week or
more, but I have waited and waited, hoping to be able to tell you that
we had decided on our future house. This evening, however, I have been
reading your description of Algiers, and the desire to thank you for
it moves me too strongly to be resisted. It is admirably written, and
makes me _see_ the country. I am so glad to think of the deep draughts
of life you get from being able to spend half your life in that fresh,
grand scenery. It must make London and English green fields all the
more enjoyable in their turn.

As for us, we are preparing to renounce the delights of roving, and to
settle down quietly, as old folks should do, for the benefit of the
young ones. We have let our present house.

Is it not cheering to have the sunshine on the corn, and the prospect
that the poor people will not have to endure the suffering that comes
on them from a bad harvest? The fields that were so sadly beaten down
a little while ago on the way to town are now standing in fine yellow
shocks.

I wish you could know how much we felt your kindness to Charley. He is
such a dear good fellow that nothing is thrown away upon him.

Write me a scrap of news about yourself, and tell me how you and the
doctor are enjoying the country. I shall get a breath of it in that
way. I think I love the fields and shudder at the streets more and
more every month.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1860.]

_Sept. 27._--To-day is the third day we have spent in our new home
here at 10 Harewood Square. It is a furnished house, in which we do
not expect to stay longer than six months at the utmost. Since our
return from Italy I have written a slight tale, "Mr. David Faux,
Confectioner" ("Brother Jacob"), which G. thinks worth printing.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 27th Sept. 1860.]

The precious check arrived safely to-day. I am much obliged to you for
it, and also for the offer to hasten further payments. I have no
present need of that accommodation, as we have given up the idea of
buying the house which attracted us, dreading a step that might fetter
us to town, or to a more expensive mode of living than might
ultimately be desirable. I hope Mr. Lewes will bring us back a good
report of Major Blackwood's progress towards re-established health. In
default of a visit from him, it was very agreeable to have him
represented by his son,[27] who has the happy talent of making a
morning call one of the easiest, pleasantest things in the world.

I wonder if you know who is the writer of the article in the _North
British_, in which I am reviewed along with Hawthorne. Mr. Lewes
brought it for me to read this morning, and it is so unmixed in its
praise that if I had any friends I should be uneasy lest a friend
should have written it.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 16th Oct. 1860.]

Since there is no possibility of my turning in to see you on my walk,
as in the old days, I cannot feel easy without writing to tell you my
regret that I missed you when you came. In changing a clearer sky for
a foggy one we have not changed our habits, and we walk after lunch,
as usual; but I should like very much to stay indoors any day with the
expectation of seeing you, if I could know beforehand of your coming.
It is rather sad not to see your face at all from week to week, and I
hope you know that I feel it so. But I am always afraid of falling
into a disagreeable urgency of invitation, since we have nothing to
offer beyond the familiar, well-worn entertainment of our own society.
I hope you and Mr. Congreve are quite well now and free from cares.
Emily, I suppose, is gone with the sunshine of her face to Coventry.
There is sadly little sunshine except that of young faces just now.
Still we are flourishing, in spite of damp and dismalness. We were
glad to hear that the well-written article in the _Westminster_ on the
"Essays and Reviews" was by your friend Mr. Harrison.[28] Though I
don't quite agree with his view of the case, I admired the tone and
style of the writing greatly.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 19th Oct. 1860.]

There is no objection to Wednesday but this--that it is our day for
hearing a course of lectures, and the lecture begins at eight. Now,
since you can't come often, we want to keep you as long as we can, and
we have a faint hope that Mr. Congreve might be able to come from his
work and dine with us and take you home. But if that were impossible,
could you not stay all night? There is a bed ready for you. Think of
all that, and if you can manage to give us the longer visit, choose
another day when our evening will be unbroken. I will understand by
your silence that you can only come for a shorter time, and that you
abide by your plan of coming on Wednesday. I am really quite hungry
for the sight of you.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 2d Nov. 1860.]

I agree with you in preferring to put simply "New Edition;" and I see,
too, that the practice of advertising numbers is made vulgar and
worthless by the doubtful veracity of some publishers, and the low
character of the books to which they affix this supposed guarantee of
popularity. _Magna est veritas_, etc. I can't tell you how much
comfort I feel in having publishers who believe that.

You have read the hostile article in the _Quarterly_, I dare say. I
have not seen it; but Mr. Lewes's report of it made me more cheerful
than any review I have heard of since "The Mill" came out. You remember
Lord John Russell was once laughed at immensely for saying that he felt
confident he was right, because all parties found fault with him. I
really find myself taking nearly the same view of my position, with the
Freethinkers angry with me on one side and the writer in the
_Quarterly_ on the other--_not_ because my representations are
untruthful, but because they are impartial--because I don't _load_ my
dice so as to make their side win. The parenthetical hint that the
classical quotations in my books might be "more correctly printed," is
an amusing sample of the grievance that belongs to review-writing in
general, since there happens to be only _one_ classical quotation in
them all--the Greek one from the Philoctetes in "Amos Barton."
By-the-bye, will you see that the readers have not allowed some error
to creep into that solitary bit of pedantry?

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 13th Nov. 1860.]

I understand your paradox of "expecting disappointments," for that is
the only form of hope with which I am familiar. I should like, for
your sake, that you should rather see us in our _own_ house than in
this; for I fear your carrying away a general sense of _yellow_ in
connection with us--and I am sure that is enough to set you against
the thought of us. There are some staring yellow curtains which you
will hardly help blending with your impression of our moral
sentiments. In our own drawing-room I mean to have a paradise of
greenness. I have lately re-read your "Thoughts," from the beginning
of the "Psychical Essence of Christianity" to the end of the "History
of Philosophy," and I feel my original impression confirmed--that the
"Psychical Essence" and "General Review of the Christian System" are
the most valuable portions. I think you once expressed your regret
that I did not understand the analogy you traced between Feuerbach's
theory and Spencer's. I don't know what gave you that impression, for
_I_ never said so. I see your meaning distinctly in that parallel. If
you referred to something in Mr. Lewes's letter, let me say, once for
all, that you must not impute _my_ opinions to _him_ nor _vice versâ_.
The intense happiness of our union is derived in a high degree from
the perfect freedom with which we each follow and declare our own
impressions. In this respect I know _no_ man so great as he--that
difference of opinion rouses no egoistic irritation in him, and that
he is ready to admit that another argument is the stronger the moment
his intellect recognizes it. I am glad to see Mr. Bray contributing
his quota to the exposure of that odious trickery--spirit-rapping. It
was not headache that I was suffering from when Mr. Bray called, but
extreme languor and unbroken fatigue from morning to night--a state
which is always accompanied in me, psychically, by utter
self-distrust and despair of ever being equal to the demands of life.
We should be very pleased to hear some news of Mr. and Mrs. Call. I
feel their removal from town quite a loss to us.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1860.]

_Nov. 28._--Since I last wrote in this Journal I have suffered much
from physical weakness, accompanied with mental depression. The loss
of the country has seemed very bitter to me, and my want of health and
strength has prevented me from working much--still worse, has made me
despair of ever working well again. I am getting better now by the
help of tonics, and shall be better still if I could gather more
bravery, resignation, and simplicity of striving. In the meantime my
cup is full of blessings: my home is bright and warm with love and
tenderness, and in more material, vulgar matters we are very
fortunate.

Last Tuesday--the 20th--we had a pleasant evening. Anthony Trollope
dined with us, and made me like him very much by his straightforward,
wholesome _Wesen_. Afterwards Mr. Helps came in, and the talk was
extremely agreeable. He told me the queen had been speaking to him in
great admiration of my books--especially "The Mill on the Floss." It
is interesting to know that royalty can be touched by that sort of
writing, and I was grateful to Mr. Helps for his wish to tell me of
the sympathy given to me in that quarter.

To-day I have had a letter from M. d'Albert, saying that at last the
French edition of "Adam Bede" is published. He pleases me very much by
saying that he finds not a sentence that he can retrench in the first
volume of "The Mill."

I am engaged now in writing a story--the idea of which came to me
after our arrival in this house, and which has thrust itself between
me and the other book I was meditating. It is "Silas Marner, the
Weaver of Raveloe." I am still only at about the 62d page, for I have
written slowly and interruptedly.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 7th Dec. 1860.]

The sight of sunshine usually brings you to my mind, because you are
my latest association with the country; but I think of you much
oftener than I see the sunshine, for the weather in London has been
more uninterruptedly dismal than ever for the last fortnight.
Nevertheless _I_ am brighter; and since I believe your goodness will
make that agreeable news to you, I write on purpose to tell it.
Quinine and steel have at last made me brave and cheerful, and I
really don't mind a journey up-stairs. If you had not repressed our
hope of seeing you again until your sister's return, I should have
asked you to join us for the Exeter Hall performance of the "Messiah"
this evening, which I am looking forward to with delight. The Monday
Popular Concerts at St. James's Hall are our easiest and cheapest
pleasures. I go in my bonnet; we sit in the shilling places in the
body of the hall, and hear to perfection for a shilling! That is
agreeable when one hears Beethoven's quartets and sonatas. Pray bear
in mind that these things are to be had when you are more at liberty.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1860.]

_Dec. 17._--We entered to-day our new home--16 Blandford Square--which
we have taken for three years, hoping by the end of that time to have
so far done our duty by the boys as to be free to live where we list.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 20th Dec. 1860.]

Your vision of me as "settled" was painfully in contrast with the
fact. The last virtue human beings will attain, I am inclined to
think, is scrupulosity in promising and faithfulness in fulfilment. We
are still far off our last stadium of development, and so it has come
to pass that, though we were in the house on Monday last, our
curtains are not up and our oilcloth is not down. Such is life, seen
from the furnishing point of view! I can't tell you how hateful this
sort of time-frittering work is to me, who every year care less for
houses and detest shops more. To crown my sorrows, I have lost my
pen--my old, favorite pen, with which I have written for eight
years--at least, it is not forth-coming. We have been reading the
proof of Mr. Spencer's second part, and I am supremely gratified by
it, because he brings his argument to a point which I did not
anticipate from him. It is, as he says, a result of his riper thought.
After all the bustle of Monday I went to hear Sims Reeves sing
"Adelaide"--that _ne plus ultra_ of passionate song--and I wish you
had been there for one quarter of an hour, that you might have heard
it too.

[Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 26th Dec. 1860.]

The bright point in your letter is that you are in a happy state of
mind yourself. For the rest, we must wait, and not be impatient with
those who have their inward trials, though everything outward seems to
smile on them. It seems to those who are differently placed that the
time of freedom from strong ties and urgent claims must be very
precious for the ends of self-culture and good, helpful work towards
the world at large. But it hardly ever is so. As for the forms and
ceremonies, I feel no regret that any should turn to them for comfort
if they can find comfort in them; sympathetically I enjoy them myself.
But I have faith in the working-out of higher possibilities than the
Catholic or any other Church has presented; and those who have
strength to wait and endure are bound to accept no formula which their
whole souls--their intellect as well as their emotions--do not embrace
with entire reverence. The "highest calling and election" is to _do
without opium_, and live through all our pain with conscious,
clear-eyed endurance.

We have no sorrow just now, except my constant inward "worrit" of
unbelief in any future of good work on my part. Everything I do seems
poor and trivial in the doing; and when it is quite gone from me, and
seems no longer my own, then I rejoice in it and think it fine. That
is the history of my life.

I have been wanting to go to your school again, to refresh myself with
the young voices there, but I have not been able to do it. My walks
have all been taken up with shopping errands of late; but I hope to
get more leisure soon.

We both beg to offer our affectionate remembrances to the doctor. Get
Herbert Spencer's new work--the two first quarterly parts. It is the
best thing he has done.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1860.]

_Dec. 31._--This year has been marked by many blessings, and, above
all, by the comfort we have found in having Charles with us. Since we
set out on our journey to Italy on 25th March, the time has not been
fruitful in work: distractions about our change of residence have run
away with many days; and since I have been in London my state of
health has been depressing to all effort.

May the next year be more fruitful!

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 12th Jan. 1861.]

I am writing a story which came _across_ my other plans by a sudden
inspiration. I don't know at present whether it will resolve itself
into a book short enough for me to complete before Easter, or whether
it will expand beyond that possibility. It seems to me that nobody
will take any interest in it but myself, for it is extremely unlike
the popular stories going; but Mr. Lewes declares that I am wrong, and
says it is as good as anything I have done. It is a story of
old-fashioned village life, which has unfolded itself from the merest
millet-seed of thought. I think I get slower and more timid in my
writing, but perhaps worry about houses and servants and boys, with
want of bodily strength, may have had something to do with that. I
hope to be quiet now.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1861.]

_Feb. 1._--The first month of the New Year has been passed in much
bodily discomfort, making both work and leisure heavy. I have reached
page 209 of my story, which is to be in one volume, and I want to get
it ready for Easter, but I dare promise myself nothing with this
feeble body.

The other day I had charming letters from M. and Mme. d'Albert, saying
that the French "Adam" goes on very well, and showing an appreciation
of "The Mill" which pleases me.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 6th Feb. 1861.]

I was feeling so ill on Friday and Saturday that I had not spirit to
write and thank you for the basket of eggs--an invaluable present. I
was particularly grateful this morning at breakfast, when a fine large
one fell to my share.

On Saturday afternoon we were both so utterly incapable that Mr. Lewes
insisted on our setting off forthwith into the country. But we only
got as far as Dorking, and came back yesterday. I felt a new creature
as soon as I was in the country; and we had two brilliant days for
rambling and driving about that lovely Surrey. I suppose we must keep
soul and body together by occasional flights of this sort; and don't
you think an occasional flight to town will be good for you?

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 8th Feb. 1861.]

I have destroyed almost all my friends' letters to me, because they
were only intended for my eyes, and could only fall into the hands of
persons who knew little of the writers, if I allowed them to remain
till after my death. In proportion as I love every form of
piety--which is venerating love--I hate hard curiosity; and,
unhappily, my experience has impressed me with the sense that hard
curiosity is the more common temper of mind. But enough of that. The
reminders I am getting from time to time of Coventry distress have
made me think very often yearningly and painfully of the friends who
are more immediately affected by it, and I often wonder if more
definite information would increase or lessen my anxiety for them.
Send me what word you can from time to time, that there may be some
reality in my image of things round your hearth.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 15th Feb. 1861.]

I send you by post to-day about two hundred and thirty pages of MS. I
send it because, in my experience, printing and its preliminaries have
always been rather a slow business; and as the story--if published at
Easter at all--should be ready by Easter week, there is no time to
lose. We are reading "Carlyle's Memoirs" with much interest; but, so
far as we have gone, he certainly does seem to me something of a
"Sadducee"--a very handsome one, judging from the portrait. What a
memory and what an experience for a novelist! But, somehow, experience
and finished faculty rarely go together. Dearly beloved Scott had the
greatest combination of experience and faculty, yet even he never made
the most of his treasures, at least in his _mode_ of presentation.
Send us better news of Major Blackwood, if you can. We feel so old and
rickety ourselves that we have a peculiar interest in invalids. Mr.
Lewes is going to lecture for the Post-office this evening, by Mr.
Trollope's request. I am rather uneasy about it, and wish he were well
through the unusual excitement.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 16th Feb. 1861.]

I have been much relieved by Mr. Lewes having got through his lecture
at the Post-office[29] with perfect ease and success, for I had feared
the unusual excitement for him. _I_ am better. I have not been working
much lately; indeed, this year has been a comparatively idle one. I
think my _malaise_ is chiefly owing to the depressing influence of
town air and town scenes. The Zoological Gardens are my one outdoor
pleasure now, and we can take it several times a week, for Mr. Lewes
has become a fellow.

My love is often visiting you. Entertain it well.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 20th Feb. 1861.]

I am glad to hear that Mr. Maurice impressed you agreeably. If I had
strength to be adventurous on Sunday I should go to hear him preach as
well as others. But I am unequal to the least exertion or
irregularity. My only pleasure away from our own hearth is going to
the Zoological Gardens. Mr. Lewes is a fellow, so we turn in there
several times a week; and I find the birds and beasts there most
congenial to my spirit. There is a Shoebill, a great bird of grotesque
ugliness, whose topknot looks brushed up to a point with an exemplary
deference to the demands of society, but who, I am sure, has no idea
that he looks the handsomer for it. I cherish an unrequited attachment
to him.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 23d Feb. 1861.]

If you are in London this morning, in this fine, dun-colored fog, you
know how to pity me. But I feel myself wicked for implying that I have
any grievances. Only last week we had a circular from the clergyman at
Attleboro, where there is a considerable population entirely dependent
on the ribbon-trade, telling us how the poor weavers are suffering
from the effects of the Coventry strike. And these less-known,
undramatic tales of want win no wide help, such as has been given in
the case of the Hartley colliery accident.

Your letter was a contribution towards a more cheerful view of things,
for whatever may be the minor evils you hint at, I know that Mr.
Congreve's better health, and the satisfaction you have in his doing
effective work, will outweigh them. We have had a Dr. Wyatt here
lately, an Oxford physician, who was much interested in hearing of Mr.
Congreve again, not only on the ground of Oxford remembrances, but
from having read his writings.

I was much pleased with the affectionate respect that was expressed in
all the notices of Mr. Clough[30] that I happened to see in the
newspapers. They were an indication that there must be a great deal of
private sympathy to soothe poor Mrs. Clough, if any soothing is
possible in such cases. That little poem of his which was quoted in
the _Spectator_ about parted friendships touched me deeply.

You may be sure we are ailing, but I am ashamed of dwelling on a
subject that offers so little variety.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 24th Feb. 1861.]

I don't wonder at your finding my story, as far as you have read it,
rather sombre; indeed, I should not have believed that any one would
have been interested in it but myself (since Wordsworth is dead) if
Mr. Lewes had not been strongly arrested by it. But I hope you will
not find it at all a sad story, as a whole, since it sets--or is
intended to set--in a strong light the remedial influences of pure,
natural human relations. The Nemesis is a very mild one. I have felt
all through as if the story would have lent itself best to metrical
rather than to prose fiction, especially in all that relates to the
psychology of Silas; except that, under that treatment, there could
not be an equal play of humor. It came to me first of all quite
suddenly, as a sort of legendary tale, suggested by my recollection of
having once, in early childhood, seen a linen-weaver with a bag on his
back; but, as my mind dwelt on the subject, I became inclined to a
more realistic treatment.

My chief reason for wishing to publish the story now is that I like my
writings to appear in the order in which they are written, because
they belong to successive mental phases, and when they are a year
behind me I can no longer feel that thorough identification with them
which gives zest to the sense of authorship. I generally like them
better at that distance, but then I feel as if they might just as well
have been written by somebody else. It would have been a great
pleasure to me if Major Blackwood could have read my story. I am very
glad to have the first part tested by the reading of your nephew and
Mr. Simpson, and to find that it can interest them at all.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1861.]

_March 10._--Finished "Silas Marner," and sent off the last thirty
pages to Edinburgh.

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 19th Mch. 1861, from Hastings.]

Your letter came to me just as we were preparing to start in search of
fresh air and the fresh thoughts that come with it. I hope you never
doubt that I feel a deep interest in knowing all facts that touch you
nearly. I should like to think that it was some small comfort to Cara
and you to know that, wherever I am, there is one among that number of
your friends--necessarily decreasing with increasing years--who enter
into your present experience with the light of memories; for kind
feeling can never replace fully the sympathy that comes from memory.
My disposition is so faultily anxious and foreboding that I am not
likely to forget anything of a saddening sort.

Tell Sara we saw Mr. William Smith, author of "Thorndale," a short
time ago, and he spoke of her and her book with interest; he thought
her book "suggestive." He called on us during a visit to London, made
for the sake of getting married. The lady is, or rather was, a Miss
Cumming, daughter of a blind physician of Edinburgh. He said they had
talked to each other for some time of the "impossibility" of marrying,
because they were both too poor. "But," he said, "it is dangerous,
Lewes, to talk even of the impossibility." The difficulties gradually
dwindled, and the advantages magnified themselves. She is a nice
person, we hear; and I was particularly pleased with _him_--he is
modest to diffidence, yet bright and keenly awake.

I am just come in from our first good blow on the beach, and have that
delicious sort of numbness in arms and legs that comes from walking
hard in a fresh wind.

"Silas Marner" is in one volume. It was quite a sudden inspiration
that came across me in the midst of altogether different meditations.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 30th Mch. 1861.]

The latest number I had heard of was three thousand three hundred, so
that your letter brought me agreeable information. I am particularly
gratified, because this spirited subscription must rest on my
character as a writer generally, and not simply on the popularity of
"Adam Bede." There is an article on "The Mill" in _Macmillan's
Magazine_ which is worth reading. I cannot, of course, agree with the
writer in all his regrets; if I could have done so I should not have
written the book I did write, but quite another. Still, it is a
comfort to me to read any criticism which recognizes the high
responsibilities of literature that undertakes to represent life. The
ordinary tone about art is that the artist may do what he will,
provided he pleases the public.

I am very glad to be told--whenever you can tell me--that the major is
not suffering heavily. I know so well the preciousness of those smiles
that tell one the mind is not held out of all reach of soothing.

We are wavering whether we shall go to Florence this spring or wait
till the year and other things are more advanced.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 1st April, 1861.]

It gave me pleasure to have your letter, not only because of the kind
expressions of sympathy it contains, but also because it gives me an
opportunity of telling you, after the lapse of years, that I remember
gratefully how you wrote to me with generous consideration and belief
at a time when most persons who knew anything of me were disposed
(naturally enough) to judge me rather severely. Only a woman of rare
qualities would have written to me as you did on the strength of the
brief intercourse that had passed between us.

It was never a trial to me to have been cut off from what is called
the world, and I think I love none of my fellow-creatures the less for
it; still, I must always retain a peculiar regard for those who showed
me any kindness in word or deed at that time, when there was the least
evidence in my favor. The list of those who did so is a short one, so
that I can often and easily recall it.

For the last six years I have ceased to be "Miss Evans" for any one
who has personal relations with me--having held myself under all the
responsibilities of a married woman. I wish this to be distinctly
understood; and when I tell you that we have a great boy of eighteen
at home, who calls me "mother," as well as two other boys, almost as
tall, who write to me under the same name, you will understand that
the point is not one of mere egoism or personal dignity, when I
request that any one who has a regard for me will cease to speak of me
by my maiden name.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 4th April, 1861.]

I am much obliged to you for your punctuality in sending me my
precious check. I prize the money fruit of my labor very highly as the
means of saving us dependence, or the degradation of writing when we
are no longer able to write well, or to write what we have not written
before.

Mr. Langford brought us word that he thought the total subscription
(including Scotland and Ireland) would mount to five thousand five
hundred. That is really very great. And letters drop in from time to
time, giving me words of strong encouragement, especially about "The
Mill;" so that I have reason to be cheerful, and to believe that where
one has a large public, one's words must hit their mark. If it were
not for that, special cases of misinterpretation might paralyze me.
For example, pray notice how one critic attributes to me a disdain for
Tom; as if it were not _my_ respect for Tom which infused itself into
my reader; as if he could have respected Tom if I had not painted him
with respect; the exhibition of the right on both sides being the very
soul of my intention in the story. However, I ought to be satisfied if
I have roused the feeling that does justice to both sides.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 6th April, 1861.]

I feel more at ease in omitting formalities with you than I should
with most persons, because I know you are yourself accustomed to have
other reasons for your conduct than mere fashion, and I believe you
will understand me without many words when I tell you what Mr. Lewes
felt unable to explain on the instant when you kindly expressed the
wish to see us at your house; namely, that I have found it a necessity
of my London life to make the rule of _never_ paying visits. Without a
carriage, and with my easily perturbed health, London distances would
make any other rule quite irreconcilable for me with any efficient use
of my days; and I am obliged to give up the _few_ visits which would
be really attractive and fruitful in order to avoid the _many_ visits
which would be the reverse. It is only by saying, "I never pay
visits," that I can escape being ungracious or unkind--only by
renouncing all social intercourse but such as comes to our own
fireside, that I can escape sacrificing the chief objects of my life.

I think it very good of those with whom I have much fellow-feeling, if
they will let me have the pleasure of seeing them without their
expecting the usual reciprocity of visits; and I hope I need hardly
say that you are among the visitors who would be giving me pleasure in
this way. I think your imagination will supply all I have left unsaid,
all the details that run away with our hours when our life extends at
all beyond our own homes; and I am not afraid of your misinterpreting
my stay-at-home rule into churlishness.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 18th April, 1861.]

We went to hear Beethoven's "Mass in D" last night, and on Wednesday
to hear Mendelssohn's "Walpurgis Nacht" and Beethoven's "Symphony in
B," so that we have had two musical treats this week; but the
enjoyment of such things is much diminished by the gas and bad air.
Indeed, our long addiction to a quiet life, in which our daily walk
among the still grass and trees was a _fête_ to us, has unfitted us
for the sacrifices that London demands. Don't think about reading
"Silas Marner" just because it is come out. I hate _obligato_ reading
and _obligato_ talk about my books. _I never send them to any one_,
and never wish to be spoken to about them, except by an
unpremeditated, spontaneous prompting. They are written out of my
deepest belief, and, as well as I can, for the great public, and every
sincere, strong word will find its mark in that public. Perhaps the
annoyance I suffered (referring to the Liggins' affair) has made me
rather morbid on such points; but, apart from my own weaknesses, I
think the less an author hears about himself the better. Don't mistake
me: I am writing a general explanation, _not_ anything applicable to
you.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1861.]

_April 19._--We set off on our second journey to Florence, through
France and by the Cornice Road. Our weather was delicious, a little
rain, and we suffered neither from heat nor from dust.

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles L. Lewes, 25th April, 1861.]

We have had a paradisaic journey hitherto. It does one good to look at
the Provençals--men and women. They are quite a different race from
the Northern French--large, round-featured, full-eyed, with an
expression of _bonhomie_, calm and suave. They are very much like the
pleasantest Italians. The women at Arles and Toulon are remarkably
handsome. On Tuesday morning we set out about ten on our way to Nice,
hiring a carriage and taking post-horses. The sky was gray, and after
an hour or so we had rain; nevertheless our journey to Vidauban, about
half-way to Nice, was enchanting. Everywhere a delicious plain,
covered with bright green corn, sprouting vines, mulberry-trees,
olives, and here and there meadows sprinkled with buttercups, made the
nearer landscapes, and, in the distance, mountains of varying outline.
_Mutter_ felt herself in a state of perfect bliss from only looking
at this peaceful, generous nature; and you often came across the green
blades of corn, and made her love it all the better. We had meant to
go on to Fréjus that night, but no horses were to be had; so we made
up our minds to rest at Vidauban, and went out to have a stroll before
our six-o'clock dinner. Such a stroll! The sun had kindly come out for
us, and we enjoyed it all the more for the grayness of the morning.
There is a crystally clear river flowing by Vidauban, called the
Argent: it rushes along between a fringe of aspens and willows; and
the sunlight lay under the boughs, and fell on the eddying water,
making Pater and me very happy as we wandered. The next morning we set
off early, to be sure of horses before they had been used up by other
travellers. The country was not quite so lovely, but we had the
sunlight to compensate until we got past Fréjus, where we had our
first view of the sea since Toulon, and where the scenery changes to
the entirely mountainous, the road winding above gorges of pine-clad
masses for a long way. To heighten the contrast, a heavy storm came,
which thoroughly laid the dust for us, if it had no other advantage.
The sun came out gloriously again before we reached Cannes, and lit up
the yellow broom, which is now in all its splendor, and clothes vast
slopes by which our road wound. We had still a four-hours' journey to
Nice, where we arrived at six o'clock, with headaches that made us
glad of the luxuries to be found in a great hotel.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1861.]

_May 5._--Dear Florence was lovelier than ever on this second view,
and ill-health was the only deduction from perfect enjoyment. We had
comfortable quarters in the Albergo della Vittoria, on the Arno; we
had the best news from England about the success of "Silas Marner;"
and we had long letters from our dear boy to make us feel easy about
home.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 5th May, 1861.]

Your pleasant news had been ripening at the post-office several days
before we enjoyed the receipt of it; for our journey lasted us longer
than we expected, and we didn't reach this place till yesterday
evening. We have come with _vetturino_ from Toulon--the most
delightful (and the most expensive) journey we have ever had. I dare
say you know the Cornice; if not, _do_ know it some time, and bring
Mrs. Blackwood that way into Italy. Meanwhile I am glad to think that
you are having a less fatiguing change to places where you can "carry
the comforts o' the Saut Market" with you, which is not quite the case
with travellers along the Mediterranean coast. I hope I shall soon
hear that you are thoroughly set up by fresh air and fresh
circumstances, along with pleasant companionship.

Except a thunderstorm, which gave a grand variety to the mountains,
and a little gentle rain, the first day from Toulon, which made the
green corn all the fresher, we have had unbroken sunshine, without
heat and without dust. I suppose this season and late autumn must be
the perfect moments for taking this supremely beautiful journey. We
must be forever ashamed of ourselves if we don't work the better for
it.

It was very good of you to write to me in the midst of your hurry,
that I might have good news to greet me. It really did lighten our
weariness, and make the noisy streets that prevented sleep more
endurable. I was amused with your detail about Professor Aytoun's
sovereigns. There can be no great paintings of misers under the
present system of paper money--checks, bills, scrip, and the
like--nobody can handle that dull property as men handled the
glittering gold.

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles L. Lewes, 17th May, 1861.]

The Florentine winds, being of a grave and earnest disposition, have
naturally a disgust for trivial _dilettanti_ foreigners, and seize on
the peculiarly feeble and worthless with much virulence. In
consequence we had a sad history for nearly a week--Pater doing little
else than nurse me, and I doing little else but feel eminently
uncomfortable, for which, as you know, I have a faculty "second to
none." I feel very full of thankfulness for all the creatures I have
got to love--all the beautiful and great things that are given me to
know; and I feel, too, much younger and more hopeful, as if a great
deal of life and work were still before me. Pater and I have had great
satisfaction in finding our impressions of admiration more than
renewed in returning to Florence; the things we cared about when we
were here before seem even more worthy than they did in our memories.
We have had delightful weather since the cold winds abated; and the
evening lights on the Arno, the bridges, and the quaint houses, are a
treat that we think of beforehand.

Your letters, too, are thought of beforehand. We long for them, and
when they come they don't disappoint us: they tell us everything, and
make us feel at home with you after a fashion. I confess to some dread
of Blandford Square in the abstract. I fear London will seem more
odious to me than ever; but I think I shall bear it with more
fortitude. After all, that is the best place to live in where one has
a strong reason for living.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 19th May, 1861.]

We have been industriously foraging in old streets and old books. I
feel very brave just now, and enjoy the thought of work--but don't set
your mind on my doing just what I have dreamed. It may turn out that I
can't work freely and fully enough in the medium I have chosen, and
in that case I must give it up; for I will never write anything to
which my whole heart, mind, and conscience don't consent, so that I
may feel that it was something--however small--which wanted to be done
in this world, and that I am just the organ for that small bit of
work.

I am very much cheered by the way in which "Silas" is received. I hope
it has made some slight pleasure for you too, in the midst of
incomparably deeper feelings of sadness.[31] Your quiet tour among the
lakes was the best possible thing for you. What place is not better
"out of the season"?--although I feel I am almost wicked in my hatred
of being where there are many other people enjoying themselves. I am
very far behind Mr. Buckle's millennial prospect, which is, that men
will be more and more congregated in cities and occupied with human
affairs, so as to be less and less under the influence of
Nature--_i.e._, the sky, the hills, and the plains; whereby
superstition will vanish and statistics will reign for ever and ever.

Mr. Lewes is kept in continual distraction by having to attend to my
wants--going with me to the Magliabecchian Library, and poking about
everywhere on my behalf--I having very little self-help about me of
the pushing and inquiring kind.

I look forward with keen anxiety to the next outbreak of war--longing
for some turn of affairs that will save poor Venice from being
bombarded by those terrible Austrian forts.

Thanks for your letters: we both say, "More--give us more."

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles L. Lewes, 27th May, 1861.]

Florence is getting hot, and I am the less sorry to leave it because
it has agreed very ill with the dear Paterculus. This evening we have
been mounting to the top of Giotto's tower--a very sublime getting
up-stairs, indeed--and our muscles are much astonished at the unusual
exercise; so you must not be shocked if my letter seems to be written
with dim faculties as well as with a dim light.

We have seen no one but Mrs. Trollope and her pretty little girl
Beatrice, who is a musical genius. She is a delicate fairy, about ten
years old, but sings with a grace and expression that make it a
thrilling delight to hear her.

We have had glorious sunsets, shedding crimson and golden lights under
the dark bridges across the Arno. All Florence turns out at eventide,
but we avoid the slow crowds on the Lung' Arno, and take our way "up
all manner of streets."

[Sidenote: Journal, 1861.]

_May_ and _June_.--At the end of May Mr. T. Trollope came back and
persuaded us to stay long enough to make the expedition to Camaldoli
and La Vernia in his company. We arrived at Florence on the 4th May,
and left it on the 7th June--thirty-four days of precious time spent
there. Will it be all in vain? Our morning hours were spent in looking
at streets, buildings, and pictures, in hunting up old books at shops
or stalls, or in reading at the Magliabecchian Library. Alas! I could
have done much more if I had been well; but that regret applies to
most years of my life. Returned by Lago Maggiore and the St. Gothard;
reached home June 14. Blackwood having waited in town to see us, came
to lunch with us, and asked me if I would go to dine at Greenwich on
the following Monday, to which I said "Yes," by way of exception to my
resolve that I will go nowhere for the rest of this year. He drove us
there with Colonel Stewart, and we had a pleasant evening--the sight
of a game at golf in the park, and a hazy view of the distant
shipping, with the Hospital finely broken by trees in the foreground.
At dinner Colonel Hamley and Mr. Skene joined us; Delane, who had been
invited, was unable to come. The chat was agreeable enough, but the
sight of the gliding ships darkening against the dying sunlight made
me feel chat rather importunate.

_June 16._--This morning, for the first time, I feel myself quietly
settled at home. I am in excellent health, and long to work steadily
and effectively. If it were possible that I should produce _better_
work than I have yet done! At least there is a possibility that I may
make greater efforts against indolence and the despondency that comes
from too egoistic a dread of failure.

_June 19._--This is the last entry I mean to make in my old book, in
which I wrote for the first time at Geneva in 1849. What moments of
despair I passed through after that--despair that life would ever be
made precious to me by the consciousness that I lived to some good
purpose! It was that sort of despair that sucked away the sap of half
the hours which might have been filled by energetic youthful activity;
and the same demon tries to get hold of me again whenever an old work
is dismissed and a new one is being meditated.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 19th June, 1861.]

Some of one's first thoughts on coming home after an absence of much
length are about the friends one had left behind--what has happened to
them in the meantime, and how are they now? And yet, though we came
home last Friday evening, I have not had the quiet moment for writing
these thoughts until this morning. I know I need put no questions to
you, who always divine what I want to be told. We have had a perfect
journey except as regards health--a large, large exception. The cold
winds alternating with the hot sun, or some other cause, laid very
unkind hold on Mr. Lewes early after our arrival at Florence, and he
was ailing with sore throat and cough continually, so that he has come
back looking thin and delicate, though the ailments seem to be nearly
passed away.

I wish you could have shared the pleasures of our last expedition from
Florence--to the Monasteries of Camaldoli and La Vernia; I think it
was just the sort of thing you would have entered into with thorough
zest. Imagine the Franciscans of La Vernia, which is perched upon an
abrupt rock rising sheer on the summit of a mountain, turning out at
midnight (and when there is deep snow for their feet to plunge in),
and chanting their slow way up to the little chapel perched at a lofty
distance above their already lofty monastery! This they do every night
throughout the year, in all weathers.

Give my loving greeting to Cara and Mr. Bray, and then sit down and
write me one of your charming letters, making a little picture of
everybody and everything about you. God bless you! is the
old-fashioned summing up of sincere affection, without the least smirk
of studied civility.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 12th July, 1861.]

Your letter gave me a pleasant vision of Sunday sunshine on the
flowers, and you among them, with your eyes brightened by busy and
enjoyable thoughts.

Yes, I hope we are well out of that phase in which the most
philosophic view of the past was held to be a smiling survey of human
folly, and when the wisest man was supposed to be one who could
sympathize with no age but the age to come.

When I received your Monday packet I was fresh from six quarto volumes
on the history of the monastic orders, and had just begun a less
formidable modern book on the same subject--Montalembert's "Monks of
the West." Our reading, you see, lay in very different quarters, but I
fancy our thoughts sometimes touched the same ground. I am rather
puzzled and shocked, however, by your high admiration of the articles
on the "Study of History," in the _Cornhill_. I should speak with the
reserve due to the fact that I have only read the second article; and
this, I confess, did not impress me as exhibiting any mastery of the
question, while its tone towards much abler thinkers than the writer
himself is to me extremely repulsive. Such writing as, "We should not
be called upon to believe that every crotchet which tickled the insane
vanity of a conceited Frenchman was an eternal and self-evident
truth," is to me simply disgusting, though it were directed against
the father of lies. It represents no fact except the writer's own
desire to be bitter, and is worthily finished by the dull and
irreverent antithesis of "the eternal truth and infernal lie."

I quite agree with you--so far as I am able to form a judgment--in
regarding Positivism as one-sided; but Comte was a great thinker,
nevertheless, and ought to be treated with reverence by all smaller
fry.

I have just been reading the "Survey of the Middle Ages" contained in
the fifth volume of the "Philosophie Positive," and to my apprehension
few chapters can be fuller of luminous ideas. I am thankful to learn
from it. There may be more profundity in the _Cornhill's_ exposition
than I am able to penetrate, or, possibly, the first article may
contain weightier matter than the second.

Mrs. Bodichon is near us now, and one always gets good from contact
with her healthy, practical life. Mr. Lewes is gone to see Mrs.
Congreve and carry his net to the Wimbledon ponds. I hope he will get
a little strength as well as grist for his microscope.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 18th July, 1861.]

The English "Imitation" I told you of, which is used by the Catholics,
is Challoner's. I have looked into it again since I saw you, and I
think, if you want to give the book away, this translation is as good
as any you are likely to get among current editions. If it were for
yourself, an old bookstall would be more likely to furnish what you
want. Don't ever think of me as valuing either you or Mr. Congreve
less instead of more. You naughtily implied something of that kind
just when you were running away from me. How could any goodness become
less precious to me unless my life had ceased to be a growth, and had
become mere shrinking and degeneracy? I always imagine that if I were
near you now I should profit more by the gift of your presence--just
as one feels about all past sunlight.

[Sidenote: Diary, 1861.]

_July 24._--Walked with George over Primrose Hill. We talked of Plato
and Aristotle.

_July 26._--In the evening went to see Fechter as Hamlet, and sat next
to Mrs. Carlyle.

_July 30._--Read little this morning--my mind dwelling with much
depression on the probability or improbability of my achieving the
work I wish to do. I struck out two or three thoughts towards an
English novel. I am much afflicted with hopelessness and melancholy
just now, and yet I feel the value of my blessings.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 30th July, 1861.]

Thornie, our second boy, is at home from Edinburgh for his holidays,
and I am apt to give more thought than is necessary to any little
change in our routine. We had a treat the other night which I wished
you could have shared with us. We saw Fechter in Hamlet. His
conception of the part is very nearly that indicated by the critical
observations in "Wilhelm Meister," and the result is deeply
interesting--the naturalness and sensibility of the _Wesen_ overcoming
in most cases the defective intonation. And even the intonation is
occasionally admirable; for example, "And for my soul, what can he do
to that?" etc., is given by Fechter with perfect simplicity, whereas
the herd of English actors imagine themselves in a pulpit when they
are saying it. _À propos_ of the pulpit, I had another failure in my
search for edification last Sunday. Mme. Bodichon and I went to Little
Portland Street Chapel, and lo! instead of James Martineau there was a
respectable old Unitarian gentleman preaching about the dangers of
ignorance and the satisfaction of a good conscience, in a tone of
amiable propriety which seemed to belong to a period when brains were
untroubled by difficulties, and the lacteals of all good Christians
were in perfect order. I enjoyed the fine selection of collects he
read from the Liturgy. What an age of earnest faith, grasping a noble
conception of life and determined to bring all things into harmony
with it, has recorded itself in the simple, pregnant, rhythmical
English of those collects and of the Bible! The contrast when the good
man got into the pulpit and began to pray in a borrowed, washy
lingo--extempore in more senses than one!

[Sidenote: Diary, 1861.]

_Aug. 1._--Struggling constantly with depression.

_Aug. 2._--Read Boccaccio's capital story of Fra Cipolla--one of his
few good stories--and the Little Hunchback in the "Arabian Nights,"
which is still better.

_Aug. 10._--Walked with G. We talked of my Italian novel. In the
evening, Mr. Pigott and Mr. Redford.

_Aug. 12._--Got into a state of so much wretchedness in attempting to
concentrate my thoughts on the construction of my story that I became
desperate, and suddenly burst my bonds, saying, I will not think of
writing!

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 12th Aug. 1861.]

That doctrine which we accept rather loftily as a commonplace when we
are quite young--namely, that our happiness lies entirely within, in
our own mental and bodily state, which determines for us the influence
of everything outward--becomes a daily lesson to be learned, and
learned with much stumbling, as we get older. And until we know our
friends' private thoughts and emotions we hardly know what to grieve
or rejoice over for them.

[Sidenote: Diary, 1861.]

_Aug. 17._--Mr. Pigott and Mr. Redford came, who gave us some music.

_Aug. 20._--This morning I conceived the plot of my novel with new
distinctness.

_Aug. 24._--Mr. Pigott and Mr. Redford came, and we had music. These
have been placid, ineffective days, my mind being clouded and
depressed.

_Aug. 26._--Went with Barbara to her school, and spent the afternoon
there.

_Aug. 31._--In the evening came Mr. Pigott and Mr. Redford, and we had
some music.

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles L. Lewes, 11th Sept. 1861, from Malvern.]

Your letter was a great delight to us, as usual; and the check, too,
was welcome to people under hydropathic treatment, which appears to
stimulate waste of coin as well as of tissue. Altogether, we are
figures in keeping with the landscape when it is well damped or
"packed" under the early mist.

We thought rather contemptuously of the hills on our arrival; like
travelled people, we hinted at the Alps and Apennines, and smiled
with pity at our long-past selves, that had felt quite a thrill at the
first sight of them. But now we have tired our limbs by walking round
their huge shoulders we begin to think of them with more respect. We
simply looked at them at first; we feel their presence now, and creep
about them with due humility--whereby, you perceive, there hangs a
moral. I do wish you could have shared for a little while with us the
sight of this place. I fear you have never seen England under so
lovable an aspect. On the southeastern side, where the great green
hills have their longest slope, Malvern stands, well nestled in fine
trees--chiefly "sounding sycamores"--and beyond there stretches to the
horizon, which is marked by a low, faint line of hill, a vast level
expanse of grass and cornfields, with hedge-rows everywhere plumed
with trees, and here and there a rolling mass of wood; it is one of
the happiest scenes the eyes can look on--_freundlich_, according to
the pretty German phrase. On the opposite side of this main range of
hills there is a more undulated and more thickly wooded country which
has the sunset all to itself, and is bright with departing lights when
our Malvern side is in cold evening shadow. We are so fortunate as to
look out over the wide southeastern valley from our sitting-room
window.

Our landlady is a quaint old personage, with a strong Cheshire accent.
She is, as she tells us, a sharp old woman, and "can see most things
pretty quick;" and she is kind enough to communicate her wisdom very
freely to us less crisply baked mortals.

[Sidenote: Diary, 1861.]

_Sept. 11._--Yesterday we returned from Malvern (having gone there on
4th). During our stay I read Mrs. Jameson's book on the "Legends of
the Monastic Orders," corrected the first volume of "Adam Bede" for
the new edition, and began Marchese's "Storia di San Marco."

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 18th Sept. 1861.]

I enter into your and Cara's furniture-adjusting labors and your
enjoyment of church and chapel afterwards. One wants a temple besides
the outdoor temple--a place where human beings do not ramble apart,
but _meet_ with a common impulse. I hope you have some agreeable lens
through which you can look at circumstances--good health, at least.
And really I begin to think people who are robust are in a position to
pity all the rest of the world--except, indeed, that there are certain
secrets taught only by pain, which are, perhaps, worth the purchase.

[Sidenote: Diary, 1861.]

_Sept. 23._--I have been unwell ever since we returned from Malvern,
and have been disturbed, from various causes, in my work, so that I
have scarcely done anything except correct my own books for a new
edition. To-day I am much better, and hope to begin a more effective
life to-morrow.

_Sept. 28._--In the evening Mr. Spencer, Mr. Pigott, and Mr. Redford
came. We talked with Mr. Spencer about his chapter on the "Direction
of Force"--_i.e._, line of least resistance.

_Sept. 29_ (Sunday).--Finished correcting "Silas Marner." I have thus
corrected all my books for a new and cheaper edition, and feel my mind
free for other work. Walked to the Zoo with the boys.

_Oct. 3._--To-day our new grand piano came--a great addition to our
pleasures.

_Oct. 4._--My mind still worried about my plot--and without any
confidence in my ability to do what I want.

_Oct. 5._--In the evening Mr. Redford and Mr. Spencer came, and we had
much music.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 6th Oct. 1861.]

We are enjoying a great pleasure, a new grand piano, and last evening
we had a Beethoven night. We are looking out for a violinist: we have
our violoncello, who is full of sensibility, but with no negative in
him--_i.e._, no obstinate sense of time--a man who is all assent and
perpetual _rallentando_. We can enjoy the pleasure the more because
Mr. Lewes's health is promising.

[Sidenote: Diary, 1861.]

_Oct. 7._--Began the first chapter of my novel ("Romola").

_Oct. 9._--Read Nerli.

_Oct. 11._--Nardi's "History of Florence." In the afternoon walked
with Barbara, and talked with her from lunch till dinner-time.

_Oct. 12._--In the evening we had our usual Saturday mixture of
visitors, talk, and music; an agreeable addition being Dr. M'Donnell
of Dublin.

_Oct. 14._--Went with Barbara to her school to hear the children sing.

_Oct. 18._--Walked with G. and Mr. Spencer to Hampstead, and continued
walking for more than five hours. In the evening we had music. Mrs.
Bodichon and Miss Parkes were our additional visitors.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 23d Oct. 1861.]

I am rather jealous of the friends who get so much of you--especially
when they are so unmeritorious as to be evangelical and spoil your
rest. But I will not grumble. I am in the happiest, most contented
mood, and have only good news to tell you. I have hardly any trouble
nearer to me than the American War and the prospects of poor cotton
weavers. While you were shivering at Boulogne we were walking fast to
avoid shivering at Malvern, and looking slightly blue after our sitz
baths. Nevertheless that discipline answered admirably, and Mr.
Lewes's health has been steadily improving since our Malvern
expedition. As for me, imagine what I must be to have walked for five
hours the other day! Or, better still, imagine me always cheerful, and
infer the altered condition of my mucous membrane. The difference must
be there; for it is not in my moral sentiments or in my circumstances,
unless, indeed, a new grand piano, which tempts me to play more than I
have done for years before, may be reckoned an item important enough
to have contributed to the change. We talk of you very often, and the
image of you is awakened in my mind still oftener. You are associated
by many subtile, indescribable ties with some of my most precious and
most silent thoughts. I am so glad you have the comfort of feeling
that Mr. Congreve is prepared for his work again. I am hoping to hear,
when we see you, that the work will be less and less fagging, now the
introductory years are past.

Charley is going to Switzerland for his holiday next month. We shall
enjoy our dual solitude; yet the dear boy is more and more precious to
us from the singular rectitude and tenderness of his nature. Make
signs to us as often as you can. You know how entirely Mr. Lewes
shares my delight in seeing you and hearing from you.

[Sidenote: Diary, 1861.]

_Oct. 28_ and _30_.--Not very well. Utterly desponding about my book.

_Oct. 31._--Still with an incapable head--trying to write, trying to
construct, and unable.

_Nov. 6._--So utterly dejected that, in walking with G. in the Park, I
almost resolved to give up my Italian novel.

_Nov. 10_ (Sunday).--New sense of things to be done in my novel, and
more brightness in my thoughts. Yesterday I was occupied with ideas
about my next English novel; but this morning the Italian scenes
returned upon me with fresh attraction. In the evening read "Monteil."
A marvellous book; crammed with erudition, yet not dull or tiresome.

_Nov. 14._--Went to the British Museum reading-room for the first
time--looking over costumes.

_Nov. 20._--Mrs. Congreve, Miss Bury, and Mr. Spencer to lunch.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 22d Nov. 1861.]

Your loving words of remembrance find a very full answer in my
heart--fuller than I can write. The years seem to _rush_ by now, and I
think of death as a fast-approaching end of a journey--double and
treble reason for loving as well as working while it is day. We went
to see Fechter's Othello the other night. It is lamentably bad. He has
not weight and passion enough for deep tragedy; and, to my feeling,
the play is so degraded by his representation that it is positively
demoralizing--as, indeed, all tragedy must be when it fails to move
pity and terror. In this case it seems to move only titters among the
smart and vulgar people who always make the bulk of a theatre
audience. We had a visit from our dear friend Mrs. Congreve on
Wednesday--a very infrequent pleasure now; for between our own
absences from home and hers, and the fatigue of London journeying, it
is difficult for us to manage meetings. Mr. Congreve is, as usual,
working hard in his medical studies--toiling backward and forward
daily. What courage and patience are wanted for every life that aims
to produce anything!

[Sidenote: Journal, 1861.]

_Nov. 30._--In the evening we had Wilkie Collins, Mr. Pigott, and Mr.
Spencer, and talked without any music.

_Dec. 3-7._--I continued very unwell until Saturday, when I felt a
little better. In the evening Dr. Baetcke, Mr. Pigott, and Mr.
Redford.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 6th Dec. 1861.]

Miss Marshall came to see us yesterday. That is always a pleasure to
me, not only from the sense I have of her goodness, but because she
stirs so many remembrances. The first time I saw her was at Rufa's[32]
wedding; and don't you remember the evening we spent at Mrs. Dobson's?
How young we all were then--how old now! She says you are all under
the impression that Mr. Lewes is still very ailing. Thank all good
influences it is not so. He has been mending ever since we went to
Malvern, and is enjoying life and work more than he has done before
for nearly a year. He has long had it in his mind to write a history
of science--a great, great undertaking, which it is happiness to both
of us to contemplate as possible for him. And now he is busy with
Aristotle, and works with all the zest that belongs to fresh ideas.
Strangely enough, after all the ages of writing about Aristotle, there
exists no fair appreciation of his position in natural science.

I am particularly grumbling and disagreeable to myself just now, and I
think no one bears physical pain so ill as I do, or is so thoroughly
upset by it mentally.

Bulwer has behaved very nicely to me, and I have a great respect for
the energetic industry with which he has made the most of his powers.
He has been writing diligently in very various departments for more
than thirty years, constantly improving his position, and profiting by
the lessons of public opinion and of other writers.

I'm sorry you feel any degeneracy in Mr. George Dawson. There was
something very winning about him in old days, and even what was not
winning, but the reverse, affected me with a sort of kindly pity. With
such a gift of tongue as he had, it was inevitable that speech should
outrun feeling and experience, and I could well imagine that his
present self might look back on that self of 21-27 with a sort of
disgust. It so often happens that others are measuring us by our past
self while we are looking back on that self with a mixture of disgust
and sorrow. It would interest me a good deal to know just how Mr.
Dawson preaches now.

I am writing on my knees with my feet on the fender, and in that
attitude I always write very small--but I hope your sight is not
teased by small writing.

Give my best love to Cara, and sympathy with her in the pleasure of
grasping an old friend by the hand, and having long talks after the
distance of years. I know Mr. Bray will enjoy this too--and the new
house will seem more like the old one for this warming.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1861.]

_Dec. 8_ (Sunday).--G. had a headache, so we walked out in the morning
sunshine. I told him my conception of my story, and he expressed great
delight. Shall I ever be able to carry out my ideas? Flashes of hope
are succeeded by long intervals of dim distrust. Finished the eighth
volume of Lastri and began the ninth chapter of Varchi, in which he
gives an accurate account of Florence.

_Dec. 12._--Finished writing my plot, of which I must make several
other draughts before I begin to write my book.

_Dec. 13._--Read Poggiana. In the afternoon walked to Molini's and
brought back Savonarola's "Dialogus de Veritate Prophetica," and
"Compendium Revelationum," for £4!

_Dec. 14._--In the evening came Mr. Huxley, Mr. Pigott, and Mr.
Redford.

_Dec. 17._--Studied the topography of Florence.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 31st Dec. 1861.]

It was pleasant to have a greeting from you at this season, when all
signs of human kindness have a double emphasis. As one gets older
epochs have necessarily some sadness, even for those who have, as I
have, much family joy. The past, that one would like to mend, spreads
behind one so lengthily, and the years of retrieval keep
shrinking--the terrible _peau de chagrin_ whose outline narrows and
narrows with our ebbing life.

I hardly know whether it would be agreeable to you, or worth your
while, ever to come to us on a Saturday evening, when we are always at
home to any friend who may be kind enough to come to us. It would be
very pleasant to us if it were pleasant to you.

     During the latter half of 1861, I find the following among
     the books read: "Histoire des Ordres Religieux," Sacchetti's
     "Novelle," Sismondi's "History of the Italian Republics,"
     "Osservatore Fiorentino," Tennemann's "History of
     Philosophy," T. A. Trollope's "Beata," Sismondi's "Le Moyen
     Age Illustré," "The Monks of the West," "Introduction to
     Savonarola's Poems," by Audin de Réans, Renan's "Études
     d'Histoire Religieuse," Virgil's "Eclogues," Buhle's "History
     of Modern Philosophy," Hallam on the "Study of Roman Law in
     the Middle Ages," Gibbon on the "Revival of Greek Learning,"
     Nardi, Bulwer's "Rienzi," Burlamacchi's "Life of Savonarola,"
     Pulci, Villari's "Life of Savonarola," Mrs. Jameson's "Sacred
     and Legendary Art," "Hymni and Epigrammati" of Marullus,
     Politian's "Epistles," Marchese's Works, Tiraboschi, Rock's
     "Hierurgia," Pettigrew "On Medical Superstition," Manni's
     "Life of Burchiello," Machiavelli's Works, Ginguené, Muratori
     "On Proper Names," Cicero "De Officiis," Petrarch's Letters,
     Craik's "History of English Literature," "Conti
     Carnivaleschi," Letters of Filelfo, Lastri, and Varchi,
     Heeren on the Fifteenth Century.


_SUMMARY._

JULY, 1860, TO DECEMBER, 1861.

     Return from Italy to Wandsworth, accompanied by Charles
     Lewes--"Mill on the Floss" success--6000 sold--Letter to John
     Blackwood--French translation of "Adam Bede," by M. d'Albert
     of Geneva--Letter to Miss Hennell on her "Thoughts in Aid of
     Faith"--Letter to John Blackwood on Sir Edward Lytton's
     criticism of "The Mill on the Floss"--Letter to Mrs. Bray,
     recalling feelings on journey to Italy in 1849--Letter to
     Miss Sara Hennell--Article on Strikes, by Henry Fawcett, in
     _Westminster_--Sitting to Lawrence for portrait--Letter to
     Madame Bodichon--Interest in her schools--Letter to Miss
     Hennell, explaining criticism of "Thoughts in Aid of
     Faith"--Reading Emerson's "Man the Reformer"--Deprecates
     writing about opinions on large questions in letters--Letter
     to John Blackwood--Italian novel project--Letter to Madame
     Bodichon--Love of the country--Removal to 10 Harewood
     Square--"Brother Jacob" written--Letter to Mrs.
     Congreve--Frederic Harrison's article in _Westminster_ on
     "Essays and Reviews"--Letter to John Blackwood--Religious
     party standpoint--Classical quotations--Letter to Miss
     Hennell on re-reading "Thoughts in Aid of Faith"--Tribute to
     Mr. Lewes's dispassionate judgment--Suffering from loss of
     the country--Independence secured--Anthony Trollope and
     Arthur Helps--Queen's admiration of "Mill on the
     Floss"--Writing "Silas Marner" a sudden inspiration--Letter
     to Mrs. Congreve--Monday Popular Concerts--Moved to 16
     Blandford Square--Waste of time in furnishing--Letter to
     Madame Bodichon--On religious forms and ceremonies--Herbert
     Spencer's new work, the best thing he has done--Letter to
     John Blackwood--"Silas Marner"--Letters to Mrs.
     Congreve--Zoological Gardens--Visit to Dorking--Letter to
     John Blackwood--Scott--Letters to Miss Hennell--Private
     correspondence--Letter to Mrs. Congreve--Arthur Clough's
     death--Letter to John Blackwood--"Silas Marner"--Books belong
     to successive mental phases--"Silas Marner" finished--Visit
     to Hastings--Letter to Charles Bray--Marriage of Mr. William
     Smith--Letter to John Blackwood--Subscription to "Silas
     Marner" 3300--Article in _Macmillan_ on "The Mill"--Letter to
     Mrs. Peter Taylor--Position--Letter to John Blackwood--Total
     Subscription to "Silas Marner" 5500--Criticism on "The
     Mill"--Letter to Mrs. P. Taylor--Never pays visits--Letter to
     Miss Hennell--Hearing Beethoven and Mendelssohn music--Start
     on second journey to Italy--Letter to Charles Lewes,
     describing drive from Toulon to Nice--Arrival at
     Florence--Letter to John Blackwood--No painting of misers
     with paper money--Letter to Charles Lewes--Feels hopeful
     about future work--Letter to John Blackwood--Italian novel
     simmering--Letter to Charles Lewes--Beatrice
     Trollope--Expedition to Camaldoli and La Vernia with Mr. T.
     A. Trollope--Return home by Lago Maggiore and St.
     Gothard--Dinner at Greenwich with John Blackwood, Colonel
     Hamley, etc.--Reflections on waste of youth--Letters to Miss
     Hennell describing La Vernia--Improvement in general
     philosophic attitude--Articles on "Study of History" in the
     _Cornhill_--Positivism one-sided--Admiration of Comte--Letter
     to Miss Hennell--Fechter in Hamlet--The Liturgy of the
     English Church--Depression--Musical Evenings with Mr. Pigott
     and Mr. Redford--Trip to Malvern--Letter to Miss Hennell--New
     grand piano--Began "Romola"--Saturday visitors--Letter to
     Mrs. Congreve--Better spirits--Renewed depression--Letter to
     Miss Hennell--Time flying--Fechter as Othello--Letter to Miss
     Hennell--Lewes busy with Aristotle--Bulwer--George
     Dawson--Reading towards "Romola"--Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor
     on the Past--Books read.

FOOTNOTES:

[21] Death of Madame Bodichon's father.

[22] "Thoughts in Aid of Faith."

[23] M. d'Albert.

[24] "And how can it be otherwise than real to us, this belief that
has nourished the souls of us all, and seems to have moulded actually
anew their internal constitution, as well as stored them up with its
infinite variety of external interests and associations! What other
than a very real thing has it been in the life of the world--sprung
out of, and again causing to spring forth, such volumes of human
emotion--making a current, as it were, of feeling, that has drawn
within its own sphere all the moral vitality of so many ages! In all
this reality of influence there is indeed the testimony of
Christianity having truly formed an integral portion of the organic
life of humanity. The regarding it as a mere excrescence, the product
of morbid, fanatical humors, is a reaction of judgment, that, it is to
be hoped, will soon be seen on all hands to be in no way implied of
necessity in the formal rejection of it."--_Thoughts in Aid of Faith_,
p. 105.

[25] "These sentiments, which are born within us, slumbering as it
were in our nature, ready to be awakened into action immediately they
are roused by hint of corresponding circumstances, are drawn out of
the whole of previous human existence. They constitute our treasured
inheritance out of all the life that has been lived before us, to
which no age, no human being who has trod the earth and laid himself
to rest, with all his mortal burden upon her maternal bosom, has
failed to add his contribution. No generation has had its engrossing
conflict, sorely battling out the triumphs of mind over material
force, and through forms of monstrous abortions concurrent with its
birth, too hideous for us now to bear in contemplation, moulding the
early intelligence by every struggle, and winning its gradual
powers--no single soul has borne itself through its personal
trial--without bequeathing to us of its fruit. There is not a
religious thought that we take to ourselves for secret comfort in our
time of grief, that has not been distilled out of the multiplicity of
the hallowed tears of mankind; not an animating idea is there for our
fainting courage that has not gathered its inspiration from the
bravery of the myriad armies of the world's heroes."--_Thoughts in Aid
of Faith_, p. 174.

[26] "Education of the Feelings." By Charles Bray. Published 1839.

[27] Mr. William Blackwood.

[28] Mr. Frederic Harrison, the now well-known writer, and a member of
the Positivist body.

[29] Lecture on Cell Forms.

[30] Arthur Hugh Clough, the poet.

[31] The death of Major Blackwood.

[32] Mrs. Charles Hennell (now Mrs. Call).




CHAPTER XII.


[Sidenote: Journal, 1862.]

_January 1._--Mr. Blackwood sent me a note enclosing a letter from
Montalembert about "Silas Marner." _I began again my novel of
"Romola."_

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 7th Jan. 1862.]

It is not unlikely that our thoughts and wishes met about New-year's
Day, for I was only prevented from writing to you in that week by the
fear of saying decidedly that we could _not_ go to you, and yet
finding afterwards that a clear sky, happening to coincide with an
absence of other hinderances, would have made that pleasure possible
for us. I think we believe in each other's thorough affection, and
need not dread misunderstanding. But you must not write again, as you
did in one note, a sort of apology for coming to us when you were
tired, as if we didn't like to see you anyhow and at any time! And we
especially like to think that our house can be a rest to you.

For the first winter in my life I am hardly ever free from cold. As
soon as one has departed with the usual final stage of stuffiness,
another presents itself with the usual introduction of sore throat.
And Mr. Lewes just now is a little ailing. But we have nothing serious
to complain of.

You seemed to me so bright and brave the last time I saw you, that I
have had cheerful thoughts of you ever since. Write to me always when
anything happens to you, either pleasant or sad, that there is no
reason for my not knowing, so that we may not spend long weeks in
wondering how all things are with you.

And do come to us whenever you can, without caring about my going to
you, for this is too difficult for me in chill and doubtful weather.
Are you not looking anxiously for the news from America?

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 13th Jan. 1862.]

As for the brain being useless after fifty, that is no general rule;
witness the good and hard work that has been done in plenty after that
age. I wish I could be inspired with just the knowledge that would
enable me to be of some good to you. I feel so ignorant and helpless.
The year _is_ opening happily for us, except--alas! the exception is a
great one--in the way of health. Mr. Lewes is constantly ailing, like
a delicate headachy woman. But we have abundant blessings.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 14th Jan. 1862.]

I hope you are able to enjoy Max Müller's great and delightful book
during your imprisonment. It tempts me away from other things. I have
read most of the numbers of "Orley Farm," and admire it very much,
with the exception of such parts as I have read about Moulder & Co.
Anthony Trollope is admirable in the presentation of even average life
and character, and he is so thoroughly wholesome-minded that one
delights in seeing his books lie about to be read. Have you read
"Beata" yet--the first novel written by his brother at Florence, who
is our especial favorite? Do read it when you can, if the opportunity
has not already come. I am going to be taken to a pantomime in the
daytime, like a good child, for a Christmas treat, not having had my
fair share of pantomime in the world.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1862.]

_Jan. 18_ (Saturday).--We had an agreeable evening. Mr. Burton[33]
and Mr. Clark[34] of Cambridge made an acceptable variety in our
party.

_Jan. 19-20._--Head very bad--producing terrible depression.

_Jan. 23._--Wrote again, feeling in brighter spirits. Mr. Smith the
publisher called and had an interview with G. He asked if I were open
to "a magnificent offer." This made me think about money--but it is
better for me not to be rich.

_Jan. 26_ (Sunday).--Detained from writing by the necessity of
gathering particulars: 1st, about Lorenzo de Medici's death; 2d, about
the possible retardation of Easter; 3d, about Corpus Christi day; 4th,
about Savonarola's preaching in the Quaresima of 1492. Finished "La
Mandragola"--second time reading for the sake of Florentine
expressions--and began "La Calandra."

_Jan. 31._--Have been reading some entries in my note-book of past
times in which I recorded my _malaise_ and despair. But it is
impossible to me to believe that I have ever been in so unpromising
and despairing a state as I now feel. After writing these words I read
to G. the Proem and opening scene of my novel, and he expressed great
delight in them.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 3d Feb. 1862.]

I was taken to see my pantomime. How pretty it is to see the theatre
full of children! Ah, what I should have felt in my real child days to
have been let into the further history of Mother Hubbard and her Dog!

George Stephenson is one of my great heroes--has he not a dear old
face?

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 3d Feb. 1862.]

I think yours is the instinct of all delicate natures--not to speak to
authors about their writings. It is better for us all to hear as
little about ourselves as possible; to do our work faithfully, and be
satisfied with the certainty that if it touches many minds, it cannot
touch them in a way quite aloof from our intention and hope.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1862.]

_Feb. 7._--A week of February already gone! I have been obliged to be
very moderate in work from feebleness of head and body; but I have
rewritten, with additions, the first chapter of my book.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 8th Feb. 1862.]

I am wondering whether you could spare me, _for a few weeks_, the
Tempest music, and any other vocal music of that or of a kindred
species? I don't want to buy it until our singers have experimented
upon it. Don't think of sending me anything that you are using at all,
but if said music be lying idle, I should be grateful for the loan. We
have several operas--Don Giovanni, Figaro, the Barbiere, Flauto
Magico, and also the music of Macbeth; but I think that is all our
stock of concerted vocal music.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1862.]

_Feb. 11._--We set off to Dorking. The day was lovely, and we walked
through Mr. Hope's park to Betchworth. In the evening I read aloud
Sybel's "Lectures on the Crusades."

_Feb. 12._--The day was gray, but the air was fresh and pleasant. We
walked to Wootton Park--Evelyn's Wootton--lunched at a little roadside
inn there, and returned to Dorking to dine. During stay at Dorking
finished the first twelve cantos of Pulci.

_Feb. 13._--Returned home.

[Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 15th Feb. 1862.]

I think it is a reasonable law that the one who takes wing should be
the first to write--not the bird that stays in the old cage, and may
be supposed to be eating the usual seed and groundsel, and looking at
the same slice of the world through the same wires.

I think the highest and best thing is rather to suffer with real
suffering than to be happy in the imagination of an unreal good. I
would rather know that the beings I love are in some trouble, and
suffer because of it, even though I can't help them, than be fancying
them happy when they are not so, and making myself comfortable on the
strength of that false belief. And so I am impatient of all ignorance
and concealment. I don't say "that is wise," but simply "that is my
nature." I can enter into what you have felt, for serious illness,
such as seems to bring death near, makes one feel the simple human
brother and sisterhood so strongly that those we were apt to think
almost indifferent to us before, touch the very quick of our hearts. I
suppose if we happened only to hold the hand of a hospital patient
when she was dying, her face, and all the memories along with it,
would seem to lie deeper in our experience than all we knew of many
old friends and blood relations.

We have had no troubles but the public troubles--anxiety about the war
with America and sympathy with the poor Queen. My best consolation is
that an example on so tremendous a scale (as the war) of the need for
the education of mankind through the affections and sentiments, as a
basis for true development, will have a strong influence on all
thinkers, and be a check to the arid, narrow antagonism which, in some
quarters, is held to be the only form of liberal thought.

George has fairly begun what we have long contemplated as a happiness
for him--a History of Science, and has written so thorough an analysis
and investigation of Aristotle's Natural Science that he feels it will
make an epoch for the men who are interested at once in the progress
of modern science and in the question how far Aristotle went both in
the observation of facts and in their theoretic combination--a
question never yet cleared up after all these ages. This work makes
him "very jolly," but his dear face looks very pale and narrow. Those
only can thoroughly feel the meaning of death who know what is perfect
love.

God bless you--that is not a false word, however many false ideas may
have been hidden under it. No--not false ideas, but temporary
ones--caterpillars and chrysalids of future ideas.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1862.]

_Feb. 17._--I have written only the two first chapters of my novel
besides the Proem, and I have an oppressive sense of the
far-stretching task before me, health being feeble just now. I have
lately read again with great delight Mrs. Browning's "Casa Guidi
Windows." It contains, amongst other admirable things, a very noble
expression of what I believe to be the true relation of the religious
mind to the past.

_Feb. 26._--I have been very ailing all this last week, and have
worked under impeding discouragement. I have a distrust in myself, in
my work, in others' loving acceptance of it, which robs my otherwise
happy life of all joy. I ask myself, without being able to answer,
whether I have ever before felt so chilled and oppressed. I have
written now about sixty pages of my romance. Will it ever be finished?
Ever be worth anything?

_Feb. 27._--George Smith, the publisher, brought the proof of G.'s
book, "Animal Studies," and laid before him a proposition to give me
£10,000 for my new novel--_i.e._, for its appearance in the
_Cornhill_, and the entire copyright at home and abroad.

_March 1._--The idea of my novel appearing in the _Cornhill_ is given
up, as G. Smith wishes to have it commenced in May, and I cannot
consent to begin publication until I have seen nearly to the end of
the work.

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles L. Lewes, 10th March, 1862, from
Englefield Green.]

We had agreeable weather until yesterday, which was wet and
blustering, so that we could only snatch two short walks. Pater is
better, I think; and I, as usual, am impudently flourishing in country
air and idleness. On Friday Mr. Bone, our landlord, drove us out in
his pony carriage to see the "meet" of the stag-hounds, and on
Saturday ditto to see the fox-hunters; so you perceive we have been
leading rather a grand life.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1862.]

_March 11._--On Wednesday last, the 5th, G. and I set off to
Englefield Green, where we have spent a delightful week at the Barley
Mow Inn. I have finished Pulci there, and read aloud the "Château
d'If."

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 12th March, 1862.]

We returned from our flight into the country yesterday, not without a
sigh at parting with the pure air and the notes of the blackbirds for
the usual canopy of smoke and the sound of cab-wheels. I am not going
out again, and our life will have its old routine--lunch at half-past
one, walk till four, dinner at five.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1862.]

_March 24._--After enjoying our week at Egham, I returned to
protracted headache. Last Saturday we received as usual, and our party
was joined by Mr. and Mrs. Noel. I have begun the fourth chapter of my
novel, but have been working under a weight.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 27th March, 1862.]

I congratulate you on being out of London, which is more like a
pandemonium than usual. The fog and rain have been the more oppressive
because I have seen them through Mr. Lewes's almost constant
discomfort. I think he has had at least five days of sick headache
since you saw him. But then he is better tempered and more cheerful
_with_ headache than most people are without it; and in that way he
lightens his burden. Have you noticed in the _Times_ Mr. Peabody's
magnificent deed?--the gift of £150,000 for the amelioration (body and
soul, I suppose) of the poorer classes in London. That is a pleasant
association to have with an American name.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1862.]

_April 1._--Much headache this last week.

_April 2._--Better this morning; writing with enjoyment. At the
seventy-seventh page. Read Juvenal this morning and Nisard.

_April 16._--As I had been ailing for a fortnight or more, we resolved
to go to Dorking, and set off to-day.

_May 6._--We returned from Dorking after a stay of three weeks, during
which we have had delicious weather.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, May, 1862.]

Our life is the old accustomed duet this month. We enjoy an interval
of our double solitude. Doesn't the spring look lovelier every year to
eyes that want more and more light? It was rather saddening to leave
the larks and all the fresh leaves to come back to the rolling of cabs
and "the blacks;" but in compensation we have all our conveniences
about us.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1862.]

_May 23._--Since I wrote last, very important decisions have been
made. I am to publish my novel of "Romola" in the _Cornhill Magazine_
for £7000, paid in twelve monthly payments. There has been the regret
of leaving Blackwood, who has written me a letter in the most perfect
spirit of gentlemanliness and good-feeling.

_May 27._--Mr. Helps, Mr. Burton, and Mr. T. A. Trollope dined with
us.

_May 31._--Finished the second part, extending to page 183.

_June 30._--I have at present written only the scene between Romola
and her brother in San Marco towards Part IV. This morning I had a
delightful, generous letter from Mr. Anthony Trollope about "Romola."

_July 6._--The past week has been unfruitful from various causes. The
consequence is that I am no further on in my MS., and have lost the
excellent start my early completion of the third part had given me.

_July 10._--A dreadful palsy has beset me for the last few days. I
have scarcely made any progress. Yet I have been very well in body. I
have been reading a book often referred to by Hallam--Meiners's "Lives
of Mirandula and Politian." They are excellent. They have German
industry, and are succinctly and clearly written.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 12th Sept. 1862, from
Littlehampton.]

Imagine me--not fuming in imperfect resignation under London smoke,
but--with the wide sky of the coast above me, and every comfort
positive and negative around me, even to the absence of staring eyes
and crinolines. Worthing was so full that it rejected us, and, to our
great good-fortune, sent us here. We were pleased to hear that you had
seen Mr. Spencer. We always feel him particularly welcome when he
comes back to town; there is no one like him for talking to about
certain things.

You will come and dine or walk with us whenever you have nothing
better to do in your visit to town. I take that for granted. We lie,
you know, on the way _between_ the Exhibition and Mr. Noel's.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1862.]

_Sept. 23._--Returned from our stay in the country, first at the Beach
Hotel, Littlehampton, and for the last three days at Dorking.

_Sept. 26._--At page 62, Part VI. Yesterday a letter came from Mr. T.
A. Trollope, full of encouragement for me. _Ebenezer._

_Oct. 2._--At page 85. Scene between Tito and Romola.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 2d Oct. 1862.]

Welcome to your letter, and welcome to the hope of seeing you again! I
have an engagement on Monday from lunch till dinner. Apart from that,
I know of nothing that will take us farther than for our daily walk,
which, you know, begins at two. But we will alter the order of any day
for the sake of seeing you. Mr. Lewes's absence of a fortnight at Spa
was a great success. He has been quite brilliant ever since. Ten days
ago we returned from a stay of three weeks in the country--chiefly at
Littlehampton, and we are both very well. Everything is prosperous
with us; and we are so far from griefs that if we had a wonderful
emerald ring we should perhaps be wise to throw it away as a
propitiation of the envious gods.

So much in immediate reply to your kind anxiety. Everything else when
we meet.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1862.]

_Oct. 31._--Finished Part VII., having determined to end at the point
where Romola has left Florence.

_Nov. 14._--Finished reading "Boccaccio" through for the second time.

_Nov. 17._--Read the "Orfeo and Stanze" of Poliziano. The latter are
wonderfully fine for a youth of sixteen. They contain a description of
a Palace of Venus, which seems the suggestion of Tennyson's Palace of
Art in many points.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 26th Nov. 1862.]

I wish I knew that this birthday has found you happier than any that
went before. There are so many things--best things--that only come
when youth is past that it may well happen to many of us to find
ourselves happier and happier to the last. We have been to a Monday
Pop. this week to hear Beethoven's Septett, and an amazing thing of
Bach's, played by the amazing Joachim. But there is too much "Pop."
for the thorough enjoyment of the chamber music they give. You will be
interested to know that there is a new muster of scientific and
philosophic men lately established, for the sake of bringing people
who care to know and speak the truth, as well as they can, into
regular communication. Mr. Lewes was at the first meeting at Clunn's
Hotel on Friday last. The plan is to meet and dine moderately and
cheaply, and no one is to be admitted who is not "thorough" in the
sense of being free from the suspicion of temporizing and professing
opinions on official grounds. The plan was started at Cambridge. Mr.
Huxley is president and Charles Kingsley is vice. If they are
sufficiently rigid about admissions, the club may come to
good--bringing together men who think variously, but have more hearty
feelings in common than they give each other credit for. Mr. Robert
Chambers (who lives in London now) is very warm about the matter. Mr.
Spencer, too, is a member.

[Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 26th Nov. 1862.]

Pray don't ever ask me again not to rob a man of his religious belief,
as if you thought my mind tended to such robbery. I have too profound
a conviction of the efficacy that lies in all sincere faith, and the
spiritual blight that comes with no faith, to have any negative
propagandism in me. In fact I have very little sympathy with
Freethinkers as a class, and have lost all interest in mere antagonism
to religious doctrines. I care only to know, if possible, the lasting
meaning that lies in all religious doctrine from the beginning till
now. That speech of Carlyle's,[35] which sounds so odious, must, I
think, have been provoked by something in the _manner_ of the
statement to which it came as an answer--else it would hurt me very
much that he should have uttered it.

You left a handkerchief at our house. I will take care of it till next
summer. I look forward with some longing to that time when I shall
have lightened my soul of one chief thing I wanted to do, and be freer
to think and feel about other people's work. We shall see you oftener,
I hope, and have a great deal more talk than ever we have had before
to make amends for our stinted enjoyment of you this summer.

God bless you, dear Barbara. You are very precious to us.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1862.]

_Nov. 30_ (Sunday).--Finished Part VIII. Mr. Burton came.

_Dec. 16._--In the evening Browning paid us a visit for the first
time.

_Dec. 17._--At page 22 only. I am extremely spiritless, dead, and
hopeless about my writing. The long state of headache has left me in
depression and incapacity. The constantly heavy-clouded and often wet
weather tend to increase the depression. I am inwardly irritable, and
unvisited by good thoughts. Reading the "Purgatorio" again, and the
"Compendium Revelationum" of Savonarola. After this record I read
aloud what I had written of Part IX. to George, and he, to my
surprise, entirely approved of it.

_Dec. 24._--Mrs. F. Malleson brought me a beautiful plant as a
Christmas offering. In the evening we went to hear the Messiah at Her
Majesty's Theatre.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 24th Dec. 1862.]

I am very sensitive to words and looks and all signs of sympathy, so
you may be sure that your kind wishes are not lost upon me.

As you will have your house full, the wish for a "Merry Christmas" may
be literally fulfilled for you. We shall be quieter, with none but our
family trio, but that is always a happy one. We are going to usher in
the day by hearing the Messiah to-night at Her Majesty's.

Evening will be a pleasanter time for a little genial talk than
"calling hours;" and if you will come to us without ceremony, you will
hardly run the risk of not finding us. We go nowhere except to
concerts.

We are longing to run away from London, but I dare say we shall not do
so before March. Winter is probably yet to come, and one would not
like to be caught by frost and snow away from one's own hearth.

Always believe, without my saying it, that it gladdens me to know when
anything I do has value for you.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 26th Dec. 1862.]

It is very sweet to me to have any proof of loving remembrance. That
would have made the book-marker precious even if it had been ugly. But
it is perfectly beautiful--in color, words, and symbols. Hitherto I
have been discontented with the Coventry book-marks; for at the shop
where we habitually see them they have all got--"Let the people praise
Thee, O God," on them, and nothing else. But I can think of no motto
better than those three words. I suppose no wisdom the world will ever
find out will make Paul's words obsolete--"Now abide, etc., but the
greatest of these is Charity." Our Christmas, too, has been quiet. Mr.
Lewes, who talks much less about goodness than I do, but is always
readier to do the right thing, thinks it rather wicked for us to eat
our turkey and plum-pudding without asking some forlorn person to eat
it with us. But I'm afraid we were glad, after all, to find ourselves
alone with "the boy." On Christmas-eve a sweet woman, remembering me
as you have done, left a beautiful plant at the door, and after that
we went to hear the Messiah at Her Majesty's. We felt a considerable
_minus_ from the absence of the organ, contrary to advertisement:
nevertheless it was good to be there. What pitiable people those are
who feel no poetry in Christianity! Surely the acme of poetry hitherto
is the conception of the suffering Messiah and the final triumph, "He
shall reign for ever and for ever." The Prometheus is a very imperfect
fore-shadowing of that symbol wrought out in the long history of the
Jewish and Christian ages.

Mr. Lewes and I have both been in miserable health during all this
month. I have had a fortnight's incessant _malaise_ and feebleness;
but as I had had many months of tolerable health, it was my turn to be
uncomfortable. If my book-marker were just a little longer, I should
keep it in my beautiful Bible in large print, which Mr. Lewes bought
for me in prevision for my old age. He is not fond of reading the
Bible himself, but "sees no harm" in my reading it.

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 29th Dec. 1862.]

I am not quite sure what you mean by "charity" when you call it
humbug. If you mean that attitude of mind which says "I forgive my
fellow-men for not being as good as I am," I agree with you in hoping
that it will vanish, as also the circumstantial form of alms-giving.
But if you are alluding to anything in my letter, I meant what charity
meant in the elder English, and what the translators of the Bible
meant in their rendering of the thirteenth chapter of 1st
Corinthians--_Caritas_, the highest love or fellowship, which I am
happy to believe that no philosophy will expel from the world.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1862.]

_Dec. 31_ (Last day of the kind old year).--Clear and pleasantly mild.
Yesterday a pleasant message from Mr. Hannay about "Romola." We have
had many blessings this year. Opportunities which have enabled us to
acquire an abundant independence; the satisfactory progress of our two
eldest boys; various grounds of happiness in our work; and
ever-growing happiness in each other. I hope with trembling that the
coming year may be as comforting a retrospect--with trembling because
my work is not yet done. Besides the finishing of "Romola," we have to
think of Thornie's passing his final examination, and, in case of
success, his going out to India; of Bertie's leaving Hofwyl, and of
our finding a new residence. I have had more than my average amount of
comfortable health until this last month, in which I have been
constantly ailing, and my work has suffered proportionately.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 2d Feb. 1863.]

The letter with the one word in it, like a whisper of sympathy, lay on
my plate when I went down to lunch this morning. The generous movement
that made you send it has gladdened me all day. I have had a great
deal of pretty encouragement from immense big-wigs--some of them
saying "Romola" is the finest book they ever read; but the opinion of
big-wigs has one sort of value, and the fellow-feeling of a long known
friend has another. One can't do quite well without both. _En
revanche_, I am a feeble wretch, with eyes that threaten to get
bloodshot on the slightest provocation. We made a rush to Dorking for
a day or two, and the quiet and fresh air seemed to make a new
creature of me; but when we get back to town, town sensations return.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 9th March, 1863.]

That scheme of a sort of Philosophical Club that I told you of went to
pieces before it was finished, like a house of cards. So it will be to
the end, I fancy, with all attempts at combinations that are not based
either on material interests or on opinions that are not merely
opinions but _religion_. Doubtless you have been interested in the
Colenso correspondence, and perhaps in Miss Cobbe's rejoinder to Mrs.
Stowe's remonstrating answer to the women of England. I was glad to
see how free the answer was from all tartness or conceit. Miss Cobbe's
introduction to the new edition of Theodore Parker is also very
honorable to her--a little too metaphorical here and there, but with
real thought and good feeling.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 18th April, 1863.]

It is a comfort to hear of you again, and to know that there is no
serious trouble to mar the spring weather for you. I must carry that
thought as my consolation for not seeing you on Tuesday--not quite a
sufficient consolation, for my eyes desire you very much after these
long months of almost total separation. The reason I cannot have that
pleasure on Tuesday is that, according to a long arranged plan, I am
going on Monday to Dorking again for a fortnight. I should be still
more vexed to miss you if I were in better condition, but at present I
am rather like a shell-less lobster, and inclined to creep out of
sight. I shall write to you, or try to see you, as soon as I can
after my return. I wish you could have told me of a more decided
return to ordinary health in Mr. Congreve, but I am inclined to hope
that the lecturing may rather benefit than injure him, by being a
moral tonic. How much there is for us to talk about! But only to look
at dear faces that one has seen so little of for a long while seems
reason enough for wanting to meet. Mr. Lewes is better than usual just
now, and you must not suppose that there is anything worse the matter
with me than you have been used to seeing in me. Please give my
highest regards to Mr. Congreve, and love to Emily, who, I hope, has
quite got back the roses which had somewhat paled. My pen straggles as
if it had a stronger will than I.

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles L. Lewes, 28th April, 1863, from
Dorking.]

Glad you enjoyed "Esmond." It is a fine book. Since you have been
interested in the historical suggestions, I recommend you to read
Thackeray's "Lectures on the English Humorists," which are all about
the men of the same period. There is a more exaggerated estimate of
Swift and Addison than is implied in "Esmond;" and the excessive
laudation of men who are considerably below the tip-top of human
nature, both in their lives and genius, rather vitiates the Lectures,
which are otherwise admirable, and are delightful reading.

The wind is high and cold, making the sunshine seem hard and
unsympathetic.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1863.]

_May 6._--We have just returned from Dorking, whither I went a
fortnight ago to have solitude while George took his journey to Hofwyl
to see Bertie. The weather was severely cold for several days of my
stay, and I was often ailing. That has been the way with me for a
month and more, and in consequence I am backward with my July number
of "Romola"--the last part but one.

     I remember my wife telling me, at Witley, how cruelly she had
     suffered at Dorking from working under a leaden weight at
     this time. The writing of "Romola" ploughed into her more
     than any of her other books. She told me she could put her
     finger on it as marking a well-defined transition in her
     life. In her own words, "I began it a young woman--I finished
     it an old woman."

[Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 12th May, 1863.]

Yes! we shall be in town in June. Your coming would be reason good
enough, but we have others--chiefly, that we are up to the ears in
boydom and imperious parental duties. All is as happy and prosperous
with us as heart can lawfully desire, except my health. I have been a
mere wretch for several months past. You will come to me like the
morning sunlight, and make me a little less of a flaccid
cabbage-plant.

It is a very pretty life you are leading at Hastings, with your
painting all morning, and fair mothers and children to look at the
rest of the day.

I am terribly frightened about Mrs. ----. She wrote to me, telling me
that we were sure to suit each other, neither of us holding the
opinions of the _Moutons de Panurge_. Nothing could have been more
decisive of the opposite prospect to me. If there is one attitude more
odious to me than any other of the many attitudes of "knowingness," it
is that air of lofty superiority to the vulgar. However, she will soon
find out that I am a very commonplace woman.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1863.]

_May 16._--Finished Part XIII. Killed Tito in great excitement.

_May 18._--Began Part XIV.--the last! Yesterday George saw Count
Arrivabene, who wishes to translate "Romola," and says the Italians
are indebted to me.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 1st June, 1863.]

Health seems, to those who want it, enough to make daylight a
gladness. But the explanation of evils is never consoling except to
the explainer. We are just as we were, thinking about the questionable
house (The Priory), and wondering what would be the right thing to do;
hardly liking to lock up any money in land and bricks, and yet
frightened lest we should not get a quiet place just when we want it.
But I dare say we shall have it after all.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1863.]

_June 6._--We had a little evening party with music, intended to
celebrate the completion of "Romola," which, however, is not
absolutely completed, for I have still to alter the epilogue.

_June 9._--Put the last stroke to "Romola." _Ebenezer!_ Went in the
evening to hear La Gazza Ladra.

     The manuscript of "Romola" bears the following inscription:

     "To the Husband whose perfect love has been the best source of
     her insight and strength, this manuscript is given by his
     devoted wife, the writer."

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 10th June, 1863.]

How impossible it is for strong, healthy people to understand the way
in which bodily _malaise_ and suffering eats at the root of one's
life! The philosophy that is true--the religion that is strength to
the healthy--is constantly emptiness to one when the head is
distracted and every sensation is oppressive.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1863.]

_June 16._--George and I set off to-day to the Isle of Wight, where we
had a delightful holiday. On Friday, the 19th, we settled for a week
at Niton, which, I think, is the prettiest place in all the island. On
the following Friday we went on to Freshwater, and failed, from
threatening rain, in an attempt to walk to Alum Bay, so that we rather
repented of our choice. The consolation was that we shall know better
than to go to Freshwater another time. On the Saturday morning we
drove to Ryde, and remained there until Monday the 29th.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 21st June, 1863.]

Your letter was a welcome addition to our sunshine this Sabbath
morning. For in this particular we seem to have been more fortunate
than you, having had almost constant sunshine since we arrived at
Sandown, on Tuesday evening.

This place is perfect, reminding me of Jersey, in its combination of
luxuriant greenth with the delights of a sandy beach. At the _end_ of
our week, if the weather is warmer, we shall go on to Freshwater for
our remaining few days. But the wind at present is a little colder
than one desires it, when the object is to get rid of a cough, and
unless it gets milder we shall go back to Shanklin. I am enjoying the
hedge-row grasses and flowers with something like a released
prisoner's feeling--it is so long since I had a bit of real English
country.

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles L. Lewes, 21st June, 1863.]

I am very happy in my holiday, finding quite a fresh charm in the
hedge-row grasses and flowers after my long banishment from them. We
have a flower-garden just round us, and then a sheltered grassy walk,
on which the sun shines through the best part of the day; and then a
wide meadow, and beyond that trees and the sea. Moreover, our landlady
has cows, and we get the quintessence of cream--excellent bread and
butter also, and a young lady, with a large crinoline, to wait upon
us--all for 25_s._ per week; or, rather, we get the apartment in which
we enjoy those primitive and modern blessings for that moderate sum.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1863.]

_July 4._--Went to see Ristori in Adrienne Lecouvreur and did not like
it. I have had hemicrania for several days, and have been almost idle
since my return home.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 11th July, 1863.]

Constant languor from the new heat has made me shirk all exertion not
imperative. And just now there are not only those excitements of the
season, which even we quiet people get our share of, but there is an
additional boy to be cared for--Thornie, who is this week passing his
momentous examination.

A pretty thing has happened to an acquaintance of mine, which is quite
a tonic to one's hope. She has all her life been working hard in
various ways, as house-keeper, governess, and several et ceteras that
I can't think of at this moment--a dear little dot, about four feet
eleven in height; pleasant to look at, and clever; a working-woman,
without any of those epicene queernesses that belong to the class. Her
life has been a history of family troubles, and she has that
susceptible nature which makes such troubles hard to bear. More than
once she has told me that courage quite forsook her. She felt as if
there were no good in living and striving; it was difficult to discern
or believe in any results for others, and there seemed none worth
having for herself. Well! a man of fortune and accomplishments has
just fallen in love with her, now she is thirty-three. It is the
prettiest story of a swift decided passion, and made me cry for joy.
Madame Bodichon and I went with her to buy her wedding-clothes. The
future husband is also thirty-three--old enough to make his selection
an honor. Fond of travelling and science and other good things, such
as a man deserves to be fond of who chooses a poor woman in the teeth
of grand relatives: brought up a Unitarian, just turned Catholic. If
you will only imagine everything I have not said, you will think this
a very charming fairy tale.

We are going this evening to see the French actress in Juliet (Stella
Colas), who is astonishing the town. Last week we saw Ristori, the
other night heard the Faust, and next week we are going to hear the
Elisir d'Amore and Faust again! So you see we are trying to get some
compensation for the necessity of living among bricks in this sweet
summer time. I can bear the opera better than any other evening
entertainment, because the house is airy and the stalls are
comfortable. The opera is a great, great product--pity we can't always
have fine _Weltgeschichtliche_ dramatic motives wedded with fine
music, instead of trivialities or hideousnesses. Perhaps this last is
too strong a word for anything except the Traviata. Rigoletto is
unpleasant, but it is a superlatively fine tragedy in the Nemesis. I
think I don't know a finer.

We are really going to buy the Priory after all. You would think it
very pretty if you saw it now, with the roses blooming about it.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1863.]

_July 12._--I am now in the middle of G.'s "Aristotle," which gives me
great delight.

_July 23._--Reading Mommsen and Story's "Roba di Roma;" also Liddell's
"Rome," for a narrative to accompany Mommsen's analysis.

_July 29._--In the evening we went to Covent Garden to hear Faust for
the third time. On our return we found a letter from Frederick
Maurice--the greatest, most generous tribute ever given to me in my
life.[36]

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 30th July, 1863.]

I have wanted for several days to make some feeble sign in writing
that I think of your trouble. But one claim after another has arisen
as a hinderance. Conceive us, please, with three boys at home, all
bigger than their father! It is a congestion of youthfulness on our
mature brains that disturbs the course of our lives a little, and
makes us think of most things as good to be deferred till the boys are
settled again. I tell you so much to make you understand that
"omission" is not with me equivalent to "neglect," and that I _do_
care for what happens to you.

Renan is a favorite with me. I feel more kinship with his mind than
with that of any other living French author. But I think I shall not
do more than look through the Introduction to his "Vie de
Jésus"--unless I happen to be more fascinated by the constructive part
than I expect to be from the specimens I have seen. For minds
acquainted with the European culture of this last half-century,
Renan's book can furnish no new result; and they are likely to set
little store by the too facile construction of a life from materials
of which the biographical significance becomes more dubious as they
are more closely examined. It seems to me the soul of Christianity
lies not at all in the facts of an individual life, but in the ideas
of which that life was the meeting-point and the new starting-point.
We can never have a satisfactory basis for the history of the man
Jesus, but that negation does not affect the Idea of the Christ either
in its historical influence or its great symbolic meanings. Still,
such books as Renan's have their value in helping the popular
imagination to feel that the sacred past is, of one woof with that
human present, which ought to be sacred too.

You mention Renan in your note, and the mention has sent me off into
rather gratuitous remarks, you perceive. But such scrappy talk about
great subjects may have a better excuse than usual, if it just serves
to divert your mind from the sad things that must be importuning you
now.

[Sidenote: Letter to R. H. Hutton, 8th Aug. 1863.]

After reading your article on "Romola," with careful reference to the
questions you put to me in your letter, I can answer sincerely that I
find nothing fanciful in your interpretation. On the contrary, I am
confirmed in the satisfaction I felt, when I first listened to the
article, at finding that certain chief elements of my intention have
impressed themselves so strongly on your mind, notwithstanding the
imperfect degree in which I have been able to give form to my ideas.
Of course, if I had been called on to expound my own book, there are
other things that I should want to say, or things that I should say
somewhat otherwise; but I can point to nothing in your exposition of
which my consciousness tells me that it is erroneous, in the sense of
saying something which I neither thought nor felt. You have seized
with a fulness which I had hardly hoped that my book could suggest,
what it was my effort to express in the presentation of Bardo and
Baldasarre; and also the relation of the Florentine political life to
the development of Tito's nature. Perhaps even a judge so discerning
as yourself could not infer from the imperfect result how strict a
self-control and selection were exercised in the presentation of
details. I believe there is scarcely a phrase, an incident, an
allusion, that did not gather its value to me from its supposed
subservience to my main artistic objects. But it is likely enough that
my mental constitution would always render the issue of my labor
something excessive--wanting due proportion. It is the habit of my
imagination to strive after as full a vision of the medium in which a
character moves as of the character itself. The psychological causes
which prompted me to give such details of Florentine life and history
as I have given, are precisely the same as those which determined me
in giving the details of English village life in "Silas Marner," or
the "Dodson" life, out of which were developed the destinies of poor
Tom and Maggie. But you have correctly pointed out the reason why my
tendency to excess in this effort after artistic vision makes the
impression of a fault in "Romola" much more perceptibly than in my
previous books. And I am not surprised at your dissatisfaction with
Romola herself. I can well believe that the many difficulties
belonging to the treatment of such a character have not been overcome,
and that I have failed to bring out my conception with adequate
fulness. I am sorry she has attracted you so little; for the great
problem of her life, which essentially coincides with a chief problem
in Savonarola's, is one that readers need helping to understand. But
with regard to that and to my whole book, my predominant feeling
is--not that I have achieved anything, but--that great, great facts
have struggled to find a voice through me, and have only been able to
speak brokenly. That consciousness makes me cherish the more any proof
that my work has been seen to have some true significance by minds
prepared not simply by instruction, but by that religious and moral
sympathy with the historical life of man which is the larger half of
culture.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1863.]

_Aug. 10._--Went to Worthing. A sweet letter from Mrs. Hare, wife of
Julius Hare, and Maurice's sister.

_Aug. 18._--Returned home much invigorated by the week of change, but
my spirits seem to droop as usual now I am in London again.

[Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 19th Aug. 1863.]

I was at Worthing when your letter came, spending all my daylight
hours out-of-doors, and trying with all my might to get health and
cheerfulness. I will tell you the true reason why I did not go to
Hastings. I thought you would be all the better for not having that
solicitation of your kindness that the fact of my presence there might
have caused. What you needed was precisely to get away from people to
whom you would inevitably want to be doing something friendly, instead
of giving yourself up to passive enjoyment. Else, of course, I should
have liked everything you write about and invite me to.

We only got home last night, and I suppose we shall hardly be able to
leave town again till after the two younger boys have left us, and
after we have moved into the new house.

Since I saw you I have had some sweet woman's tenderness shown me by
Mrs. Hare, the widow of Archdeacon Hare, and the sister of Frederick
Maurice.

I _know_ how you are enjoying the country. I have just been having the
joy myself. The wide sky, the _not_ London, makes a new creature of me
in half an hour. I wonder, then, why I am ever depressed--why I am so
shaken by agitations. I come back to London, and again the air is full
of demons.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray and Miss Sara Hennell, 1st Sept. 1863.]

I think I get a little freshness from the breeze that blows on you--a
little lifting of heart from your wide sky and Welsh mountains. And
the edge of autumn on the morning air makes even London a place in
which one can believe in beauty and delight. Delicate scent of dried
rose-leaves and the coming on of the autumnal airs are two things
that make me feel happy before I know why.

The Priory is all scaffolding and paint; and we are still in a
nightmare of uncertainty about our boys. But then I have by my side a
dear companion, who is a perpetual fountain of courage and
cheerfulness, and of considerate tenderness for my lack of those
virtues. And besides that I have Roman history! Perhaps that sounds
like a bitter joke to you, who are looking at the sea and sky and not
thinking of Roman history at all. But this too, read aright, has its
gospel and revelation. I read it much as I used to read a chapter in
the Acts or Epistles. Mommsen's "History of Rome" is so fine that I
count all minds graceless who read it without the deepest stirrings.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, Oct. 1863.]

I cannot be quite easy without sending this little sign of love and
good wishes on the eve of your journey. I shall think of you with all
the more delight, because I shall imagine you winding along the
Riviera and then settling in sight of beautiful things not quite
unknown to me. I hope your life will be enriched very much by these
coming months; but above all, I hope that Mr. Congreve will come back
strong. Tell him I have been greatly moved by the "Discours
Préliminaire."[37]

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 16th Oct. 1863.]

If I wait to write until I have anything very profitable to say, you
will have time to think that I have forgotten you or else to forget
me--and both consequences would be unpleasant to me.

Well, our poor boy Thornie parted from us to-day and set out on his
voyage to Natal. I say "poor," as one does about all beings that are
gone away from us for a long while. But he went away in excellent
spirits, with a large packet of recommendatory letters to all sorts of
people, and with what he cares much more for, a first-rate rifle and
revolver--and already with a smattering of Dutch Zulu, picked up from
his grammars and dictionaries.

What are you working at, I wonder? Cara says you are writing; and,
though I desire not to ask prying questions, I should feel much joy in
your being able to tell me that you are at work on something which
gives you a life apart from circumstantial things.

I am taking a deep bath of other people's thoughts, and all doings of
my own seem a long way off me. But my bath will be sorely interrupted
soon by the miserable details of removal from one house to another.
Happily Mr. Owen Jones has undertaken the ornamentation of the
drawing-room, and will prescribe all about chairs, etc. I think, after
all, I like a clean kitchen better than any other room.

We are far on in correcting the proofs of the new edition of "Goethe,"
and are about to begin the printing of the "Aristotle," which is to
appear at Christmas or Easter.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1863.]

_Nov. 5._--We moved into our new house--The Priory, 21 North Bank,
Regent's Park.

_Nov. 14._--We are now nearly in order, only wanting a few details of
furniture to finish our equipment for a new stage in our life's
journey. I long very much to have done thinking of upholstery, and to
get again a consciousness that there are better things than that to
reconcile one with life.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 14th Nov. 1863.]

At last we are in our new home, with only a few details still left to
arrange. Such fringing away of precious life, in thinking of carpets
and tables, is an affliction to me, and seems like a nightmare from
which I shall find it bliss to awake into my old world of care for
things quite apart from upholstery.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 28th Nov. 1863.]

I have kissed your letter in sign of my joy at getting it. But the
cold draughts of your Florentine room came across my joy rather
harshly. I know you have good reasons for what you do, yet I cannot
help saying, Why do you stay at Florence, the city of draughts rather
than of flowers?

Mr. Congreve's suffering during the journey and your suffering in
watching him saddens me as I think of it. For a long while to come I
suppose human energy will be greatly taken up with resignation rather
than action. I wish my feeling for you could travel by some helpful
vibrations good for pains.

For ourselves, we have enough ease now to be able to give some of it
away. But our removal into our new home on the 5th of November was not
so easy as it might have been, seeing that I was only half recovered
from a severe attack of influenza, which had caused me more terrible
pains in the head and throat than I have known for years. However, the
crisis is past now, and we think our little home altogether charming
and comfortable. Mr. Owen Jones has been unwearied in taking trouble
that everything about us may be pretty. He stayed two nights till
after twelve o'clock, that he might see every engraving hung in the
right place; and as you know I care even more about the fact of
kindness than its effects, you will understand that I enjoy being
grateful for all this friendliness on our behalf. But so tardy a
business is furnishing, that it was not until Monday last that we had
got everything in its place in preparation for the next day--Charlie's
twenty-first birthday--which made our house-warming a doubly
interesting epoch. I wish your sweet presence could have adorned our
drawing-room and made it look still more agreeable in the eyes of all
beholders. You would have liked to hear Jansa play on his violin, and
you would perhaps have been amused to see an affectionate but dowdy
friend of yours splendid in a gray moire antique--the consequence of a
severe lecture from Owen Jones on her general neglect of personal
adornment. I am glad to have got over this crisis of maternal and
house-keeping duty. My soul never flourishes on attention to details
which others can manage quite gracefully without any conscious loss of
power for wider thoughts and cares. Before we began to move I was
swimming in Comte and Euripides and Latin Christianity: _now_ I am
sitting among puddles, and can get sight of no deep water. _Now_ I
have a mind made up of old carpets fitted in new places, and new
carpets suffering from accidents; chairs, tables, and prices; muslin
curtains and down draughts in cold chimneys. I have made a vow never
to think of my own furniture again, but only of other people's.

[Illustration: Drawing-room at the Priory.]

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 4th Dec. 1863.]

The book[38] is come, with its precious inscription, and I have read a
great piece of it already (11 A.M.), besides looking through it to get
an idea of its general plan. See how fascination shifts its quarter as
our life goes on! I cannot be induced to lay aside my regular books
for half an hour to read "Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings," but I pounce on a
book like yours, which tries to tell me as much as it can in brief
space of the "natural order," and am seduced into making it my
after-breakfast reading instead of the work I had prescribed for
myself in that pleasant quiet time. I read so slowly and read so few
books that this small fact among my small habits seems a great matter
to me. I thank you, dear Cara, not simply for giving me the book, but
for having put so much faithful labor in a worthy direction, and
created a lasting benefit which I can share with others. Whether the
circulation of a book be large or small, there is always this supreme
satisfaction about solid honest work, that as far as it goes its
effect must be good, and as all effects spread immeasurably, what we
have to care for is _kind_ and not quantity. I am a shabby
correspondent, being in ardent practice of the piano just now, which
makes my days shorter than usual.

[Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 4th Dec. 1863.]

I am rather ashamed to hear of any one trying to be useful just now,
for I am doing nothing but indulging myself--enjoying being petted
very much, enjoying great books, enjoying our new, pretty, quiet home,
and the study of Beethoven's sonatas for piano and violin, with the
mild-faced old Jansa, and not being at all unhappy as you imagine me.
I sit taking deep draughts of reading--"Politique Positive,"
Euripides, Latin Christianity, and so forth, and remaining in glorious
ignorance of "the current literature." Such is our life; and you
perceive that instead of being miserable, I am rather following a
wicked example, and saying to my soul, "Soul, take thine ease." I am
sorry to think of you without any artistic society to help you and
feed your faith. It is hard to believe long together that anything is
"worth while," unless there is some eye to kindle in common with our
own, some brief word uttered now and then to imply that what is
infinitely precious to us is precious alike to another mind. I fancy
that to do without that guarantee one must be rather insane--one must
be a bad poet, or a spinner of impossible theories, or an inventor of
impossible machinery. However, it is but brief space either of time or
distance that divides you from those who thoroughly share your cares
and joys--always excepting that portion which is the hidden private
lot of every human being. In the most entire confidence even of
husband and wife there is always the unspoken residue--the _undivined_
residue--perhaps of what is most sinful, perhaps of what is most
exalted and unselfish.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 26th Dec. 1863.]

I get less and less inclined to write any but the briefest letters. My
books seem to get so far off me when once I have written them, that I
should be afraid of looking into "The Mill;" but it was written
faithfully and with intense feeling when it was written, so I will
hope that it will do no mortal any harm. I am indulging myself
frightfully; reading everything except the "current literature," and
getting more and more out of _rapport_ with the public taste. I have
read Renan's book, however, which has proved to be eminently _in_ the
public taste. It will have a good influence on the whole, I imagine;
but this "Vie de Jésus," and still more, Renan's "Letter to Berthelot"
in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, have compelled me to give up the high
estimate I had formed of his mind. Judging from the indications in
some other writings of his, I had reckoned him among the finest
thinkers of the time. Still, his "Life of Jesus" has so much artistic
merit that it will do a great deal towards the culture of ordinary
minds, by giving them a sense of unity between that far off past and
our present.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 26th Dec. 1863.]

We are enjoying our new house--enjoying its quiet and freedom from
perpetual stair-mounting--enjoying also the prettiness of coloring and
arrangement; all of which we owe to our dear good friend, Mr. Owen
Jones. He has determined every detail, so that we can have the
pleasure of admiring what is our own without vanity. And another
magnificent friend has given me the most splendid reclining chair
conceivable, so that I am in danger of being envied by the gods,
especially as my health is thoroughly good withal. I should like to be
sure that you are just as comfortable externally and internally. I
dare say you are, being less of a cormorant in your demands on life
than I am; and it is _that_ difference which chiefly distinguishes
human lots when once the absolute needs are satisfied.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 28th Dec. 1863.]

Your affectionate greeting comes as one of the many blessings that are
brightening this happy Christmas.

We have been giving our evenings up to parental duties--_i.e._, to
games and music for the amusement of the youngsters. I am wonderfully
well in body, but rather in a self-indulgent state mentally, saying,
"Soul, take thine ease," after a dangerous example.

Of course I shall be glad to see your fair face whenever it can shine
upon me; but I can well imagine, with your multitudinous connections,
Christmas and the New Year are times when all _unappointed_ visits
must be impossible to you.

All good to you and yours through the coming year! and amongst the
good may you continue to feel some love for me; for love is one of the
conditions in which it is even better to give than to receive.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 19th Jan. 1864.]

According to your plans you must be in Rome. I have been in good
spirits about you ever since I last heard from you, and the foggy
twilight which, for the last week, has followed the severe frost, has
made me rejoice the more that you are in a better climate and amongst
lovelier scenes than we are groping in. I please myself with thinking
that you will all come back with stores of strength and delightful
memories. Only, if this were the best of all possible worlds, Mr.
Lewes and I should be able to meet you in some beautiful place before
you turn your backs on Italy. As it is, there is no hope of such a
meeting. March is Charlie's holiday month, and when he goes out we
like to stay at home for the sake of recovering for that short time
our unbroken _tête-à-tête_. We have every reason to be cheerful if the
fog would let us. Last night I finished reading the last proofs of the
"Aristotle," which makes an octavo volume of rather less than 400
pages. I think it is a book which will be interesting and valuable to
the few, but perhaps _only_ to the few. However, George's happiness in
writing his books makes him less dependent than most authors on the
audience they find. He felt that a thorough account of Aristotle's
science was a bit of work which needed doing, and he has given his
utmost pains to do it worthily. These are the two most important
conditions of authorship; all the rest belong to the "less modifiable"
order of things. I have been playing energetically on the piano
lately, and taking lessons in accompanying the violin from Herr Jansa,
one of the old Beethoven Quartette players. It has given me a fresh
kind of muscular exercise, as well as nervous stimulus, and, I think,
has done its part towards making my health better. In fact I am very
well physically. I wish I could be as clever and active as you about
our garden, which might be made much prettier this spring if I had
judgment and industry enough to do the right thing. But it is a
native vice of mine to like all such matters attended to by some one
else, and to fold my arms and enjoy the result. Some people are born
to make life pretty, and others to grumble that it is not pretty
enough. But pray make a point of liking me in spite of my
deficiencies.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 21st Jan. 1864.]

I comfort myself with the belief that your nature is less rebellious
under trouble than mine--less craving and discontented.

Resignation to trial, which can never have a _personal_ compensation,
is a part of our life task which has been too much obscured for us by
unveracious attempts at universal consolation. I think we should be
more tender to each other while we live, if that wretched falsity
which makes men quite comfortable about their fellows' troubles were
thoroughly got rid of.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 22d Jan. 1864.]

I often imagine you, not without a little longing, turning out into
the fields whenever you list, as we used to do in the old days at
Rosehill. That power of turning out into the fields is a great
possession in life--worth many luxuries.

Here is a bit of news not, I think, too insignificant for you to tell
Cara. The other day Mr. Spencer, senior (Herbert Spencer's father),
called on us, and knowing that he has been engaged in education all
his life, that he is a man of extensive and accurate knowledge, and
that, on his son's showing, he is a very able teacher, I showed him
Cara's "British Empire." Yesterday Herbert Spencer came, and on my
inquiring told me that his father was pleased with Cara's book, and
thought highly of it. Such testimonies as this, given apart from
personal influence and by a practised judge, are, I should think,
more gratifying than any other sort of praise to all faithful writers.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1864.]

_Jan. 30._--We had Browning, Dallas, and Burton to dine with us, and
in the evening a gentlemen's party.

_Feb. 14._--Mr. Burton dined with us, and asked me to let him take my
portrait.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 3d March, 1864.]

It was pleasant to have news of you through the fog, which reduces my
faith in all good and lovely things to its lowest ebb.

I hope you are less abjectly under the control of the skyey influences
than I am. The soul's calm sunshine in me is half made up of the outer
sunshine. However, we are going on Friday to hear the Judas Maccabæus,
and Handel's music always brings me a revival.

I have had a great personal loss lately in the death of a sweet
woman,[39] to whom I have sometimes gone, and hoped to go again, for a
little moral strength. She had long been confined to her room by
consumption, which has now taken her quite out of reach except to
memory, which makes all dear human beings undying to us as long as we
ourselves live.

I am glad to know that you have been interested in "David Gray."[40]
It is good for us all that these true stories should be well told.
Even those to whom the power of helping rarely comes, have their
imaginations instructed so as to be more just and tender in their
thoughts about the lot of their fellows.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 7th March, 1864.]

I felt it long since I had had news from you, but my days go by, each
seeming too short for what I must do, and I don't like to molest you
with mere questions.

I have been spoiled for correspondence by Mr. Lewes's goodness in
always writing letters for me where a proxy is admissible. And so it
has come to be a great affair with me to write even a note, while
people who keep up a large correspondence, and set apart their hour
for it, find it easy to cover reams of paper with talk from the end of
the pen.

You say nothing of yourself, which is rather unkind. We are enjoying a
perfect _tête à tête_. On Friday we are going to hear the Judas
Maccabæus, and try if possible to be stirred to something heroic by
"Sound an alarm."

I was more sorry than it is usually possible to be about the death of
a person utterly unknown to me, when I read of Maria Martineau's
death. She was a person whose office in life seemed so thoroughly
defined and so valuable. For an invalid like Harriet Martineau to be
deprived of a beloved nurse and companion, is a sorrow that makes one
ashamed of one's small grumblings. But, oh dear, oh dear! when _will_
people leave off their foolish talk about all human lots being equal;
as if anybody with a sound stomach ever knew misery comparable to the
misery of a dyspeptic.

Farewell, dear Sara; be generous, and don't always wait an age in
silence because I don't write.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 8th March, 1864.]

If you were anybody but yourself I should dislike you, because I have
to write letters to you. As it is, your qualities triumph even over
the vice of being in Italy (too far off for a note of three lines),
and expecting to hear from me, though I fear I should be graceless
enough to let you expect in vain if I did not care very much to hear
from _you_, and did not find myself getting uneasy when many weeks
have been passed in ignorance about you. I do hope to hear that you
got your fortnight of sight-seeing before leaving Rome--at least, you
would surely go well over the great galleries. If not, I shall be
vexed with you, and I shall only be consoled for your not going to
Venice by the chance of the Austrians being driven or bought out of
it--on no slighter grounds. For I suppose you will not go to Italy
again for a long, long while, so as to leave any prospect of the
omission being made up for by-and-by.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 20th March, 1864.]

We run off to Scotland for the Easter week, setting out on Sunday
evening; so if the spring runs away again, I hope it will run
northward. We shall return on Monday, the 4th April. Some news of your
inwards and outwards would be acceptable; but don't write unless you
really _like_ to write. You see Strauss has come out with a _popular_
"Life of Jesus."

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 25th March, 1864.]

Fog, east wind, and headache: there is my week's history. But this
morning, when your letter came to me, I had got up well and was
reading the sorrows of the aged Hecuba with great enjoyment. I wish an
immortal drama could be got out of _my_ sorrows, that people might be
the better for them two thousand years hence. But fog, east wind, and
headache are not great dramatic motives.

Your letter was a reinforcement of the delicious sense of _bien être_
that comes with the departure of bodily pain; and I am glad,
retrospectively, that beyond our fog lay your moonlight and your view
of the glorious sea. It is not difficult to me to believe that you
look a new creature already. Mr. Lewes tells me the country air has
always a magical effect on me, even in the first hour; but it is not
the air alone, is it? It is the wide sky, and the hills, and the
wild-flowers which are linked with all calming thoughts, just as every
object in town has its perturbing associations.

I share your joy in the Federal successes--with that check that
attends all joy in a war not absolutely ended. But you have worked and
earned more joy than those who have been merely passives.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1864.]

_April 6._--Mr. Spencer called for the first time after a long
correspondence on the subject of his relation to Comte.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 9th April, 1864.]

Yes! I am come back from Scotland--came back last Saturday night.

I was much pleased to see Cara so wonderfully well and cheerful. She
seems to me ten times more cheerful than in the old days. I am
interested to know more about your work which is filling your life
now, but I suppose I shall know nothing until it is in print--and
perhaps that is the only form in which one can do any one's work full
justice. It is very disappointing to me to hear that Cara has at
present so little promise of monetary results from her conscientious
labor. I fear the fatal system of half profits is working against her
as against others. We are going to the opera to-night to hear the
Favorita. It was the first opera I ever _saw_ (with you I saw it!),
and I have never seen it since--that is the reason I was anxious to go
to-night.

This afternoon we go to see Mulready's pictures--so the day will be a
full one.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1864.]

_April 18._--We went to the Crystal Palace to see Garibaldi.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 30th April, 1864.]

Only think! next Wednesday morning we start for Italy. The move is
quite a sudden one. We need a good shake for our bodies and minds,
and must take the spring-time, before the weather becomes too hot. We
shall not be away more than a month or six weeks at the utmost. Our
friend Mr. Burton, the artist, will be our companion for at least part
of the time. He has just painted a divine picture, which is now to be
seen at the old Water-Color Exhibition. The subject is from a Norse
legend; but that is no matter--the picture tells its story. A knight
in mailed armor and surcoat has met the fair, tall woman he (secretly)
loves, on a turret stair. By an uncontrollable movement he has seized
her arm and is kissing it. She, amazed, has dropped the flowers she
held in her other hand. The subject might have been made the most
vulgar thing in the world--the artist has raised it to the highest
pitch of refined emotion. The kiss is on the fur-lined _sleeve_ that
covers the arm, and the face of the knight is the face of a man to
whom the kiss is a sacrament.

How I should like a good long talk with you! From what you say of your
book that is to come, I expect to be very much interested in it. I
think I hardly ever read a book of the kind you describe without
getting some help from it. It is to this strong influence that is felt
in all personal statements of inward experience that we must perhaps
refer the excessive publication of religious journals.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1864.]

_May 4._--We started for Italy with Mr. Burton.

_June 20._--Arrived at our pretty home again after an absence of seven
weeks.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 25th June, 1864.]

Your letter has affected me deeply. Thank you very much for writing
it. It seems as if a close view of almost every human lot would
disclose some suffering that makes life a doubtful good--except
perhaps at certain epochs of fresh love, fresh creative activity, or
unusual power of helping others. One such epoch we are witnessing in a
young life that is very near to us. Our "boy" Charles has just become
engaged, and it is very pretty to see the happiness of a pure first
love, full at present of nothing but promise. It will interest you to
know that the young lady who has won his heart, and seems to have
given him her own with equal ardor and entireness, is the
grand-daughter of Dr. Southwood Smith, whom he adopted when she was
three years old, and brought up under his own eye. She is very
handsome, and has a splendid contralto voice. Altogether Pater and I
rejoice--for though the engagement has taken place earlier than we
expected, or should perhaps have chosen, there are counterbalancing
advantages. I always hoped Charlie would be able to choose or rather
find the other half of himself by the time he was twenty-three; the
event has only come a year and a half sooner. This is the news that
greeted us on our return! We had seen before we went that the
acquaintance, which was first made eighteen months or more ago, had
become supremely interesting to Charlie. Altogether we rejoice.

Our journey was delightful in spite of Mr. Lewes's frequent _malaise_;
for his cheerful nature is rarely subdued even by bodily discomfort.
We saw only one place that we had not seen before--namely, Brescia;
but all the rest seemed more glorious to us than they had seemed four
years ago. Our course was to Venice, where we stayed a fortnight,
pausing only at Paris, Turin and Milan on our way thither, and taking
Padua, Verona, Brescia, and again Milan, as points of rest on our way
back. Our friend Mr. Burton's company was very stimulating, from his
great knowledge, not of pictures only, but of almost all other
subjects. He has had the advantage of living in Germany for five or
six years, and has gained those large, serious views of history which
are a special product of German culture, and this was his first visit
to Italy, so you may imagine his eager enjoyment in finding it
beautiful beyond his hopes. We crossed the Alps by the St. Gothard,
and stayed a day or two at Lucerne; and this, again, was a first sight
of Switzerland to him.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, July, 1864.]

Looking at my little mats this morning while I was dressing, I felt
very grateful for them, and remembered that I had not shown my
gratitude when you gave them to me. If I were a "conceited" poet, I
should say your presence was the sun, and the mats were the tapers;
but now you are away, I delight in the tapers. How pretty the pattern
is--and your brain counted it out! They will never be worn quite away
while I live, or my little purse for coppers either.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1864.]

_July 17._--Horrible scepticism about all things paralyzing my mind.
Shall I ever be good for anything again? Ever do anything again?

_July 19._--Reading Gibbon, Vol. I., in connection with Mosheim, also
Gieseler on the condition of the world at the appearance of
Christianity.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 28th Aug. 1864.]

I am distressed to find that I have let a week pass without writing in
answer to your letter, which made me very glad when I got it.
Remembering you just a minute ago, I started up from Max Müller's new
volume, with which I was consoling myself under a sore throat, and
rushed to the desk that I might not risk any further delay.

It was just what I wanted to hear about you that you were having some
change, and I think the freshness of the companionship must help other
good influences, not to speak of the "Apologia," which breathed much
life into me when I read it. Pray mark that beautiful passage in which
he thanks his friend Ambrose St. John. I know hardly anything that
delights me more than such evidences of sweet brotherly love being a
reality in the world. I envy you your opportunity of seeing and
hearing Newman, and should like to make an expedition to Birmingham
for that sole end.

My trouble now is George's delicate health. He gets thinner and
thinner. He is going to try what horseback will do, and I am looking
forward to that with some hope.

Our boy's love-story runs smoothly, and seems to promise nothing but
good. His attraction to Hampstead gives George and me more of our dear
old _tête-à-tête_, which we can't help being glad to recover.

Dear Cara and Mr. Bray! I wish they too had joy instead of sadness
from the young life they have been caring for these many years. When
you write to Cara, or see her, assure her that she is remembered in my
most affectionate thoughts, and that I often bring her present
experience before my mind--more or less truly--for we can but blunder
about each other, we poor mortals.

Write to me whenever you can, dear Sara; I should have answered
immediately but for sickness, visitors, business, etc.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1864.]

_Sept. 6.--I am reading about Spain, and trying a drama on a subject
that has fascinated me--have written the prologue, and am beginning
the First Act. But I have little hope of making anything
satisfactory._

_Sept. 13_ to _30_.--Went to Harrogate and Scarborough, seeing York
Minster and Peterborough.

[Illustration: Fac-simile of George Eliot's hand-writing.]

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 15th Sept. 1864, from
Harrogate.]

We journeyed hither on Tuesday, and found the place quite as pretty
as we expected. The great merit of Harrogate is that one is everywhere
close to lovely open walks. Your "plan" has been a delightful
reference for Mr. Lewes, who takes it out of his pocket every time we
walk. At present, of course, there is not much improvement in health
to be boasted of, but we hope that the delicious bracing air, and also
the chalybeate waters, which have not yet been tried, will not be
without good effect. The journey was long. How hideous those towns of
Holbeach and Wakefield are! It is difficult to keep up one's faith in
a millennium within sight of this modern civilization which consists
in "development of industries." Egypt and her big calm gods seems
quite as good.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 26th Sept. 1864, from
Scarborough.]

We migrated on Friday last from delightful Harrogate, pausing at York
to see the glorious Cathedral. The weather is perfect, the sea blue as
a sapphire, so that we see to utmost advantage the fine line of coast
here and the magnificent breadth of sand. Even the Tenby sands are not
so fine as these. Better than all, Mr. Lewes, in spite of a sad check
of a few days, is strengthened beyond our most hopeful expectations by
this brief trial of fresh conditions. He is wonderful for the rapidity
with which he "picks up" after looking alarmingly feeble and even
wasted. We paid a visit to Knaresborough the very last day of our stay
at Harrogate, and were rejoiced that we had not missed the sight of
that pretty characteristic northern town. There is a ruined castle
here too, standing just where one's eyes would desire it on a grand
line of cliff; but perhaps you know the place. Its only defect is that
it is too large, and therefore a little too smoky; but except in Wales
or Devonshire I have seen no sea-place on our English coast that has
greater natural advantages. I don't know quite why I should write you
this note all about ourselves--except that your goodness having helped
us to the benefit we have got, I like you to know of the said benefit.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, Sunday, Oct. (?) 1864.]

The wished-for opportunity is coming very soon. Next Saturday Charlie
will go to Hastings, and will not return till Sunday evening. Will
you--can you--arrange to come to us on Saturday to lunch or dinner,
and stay with us till Sunday evening? We shall be very proud and happy
if you will consent to put up with such travelling quarters as we can
give you. You will be rejoicing our hearts by coming, and I know that
for the sake of cheering others you would endure even large privations
as well as small ones.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, Monday-week following.]

What a pure delight it was to have you with us! I feel the better for
it in spite of a cold which I caught yesterday--perhaps owing to the
loss of your sunny presence all of a sudden.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 2d Oct. 1864.]

It makes me very, very happy to see George so much better, and to
return with that chief satisfaction to the quiet comforts of home. We
register Harrogate among the places to be revisited.

I have had a fit of Spanish history lately, and have been learning
Spanish grammar--the easiest of all the Romance grammars--since we
have been away. Mr. Lewes has been rubbing up his Spanish by reading
Don Quixote in these weeks of _idlesse_; and I have read aloud and
translated to him, like a good child. I find it so much easier to
learn anything than to feel that I have anything worth teaching.

All is perfectly well with us, now the "little Pater" is stronger, and
we are especially thankful for Charlie's prospect of marriage. We
could not have desired anything more suited to his character and more
likely to make his life a good one. But this blessing which has
befallen us only makes me feel the more acutely the cutting off of a
like satisfaction from the friends I chiefly love.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1864.]

_Oct. 5._--Finished the first draught of the First Act of my drama,
and read it to George.

_Oct. 15._--Went to the Maestro (Burton) for a sitting.

_Nov. 4._--Read my Second Act to George. It is written in verse--my
first serious attempt at blank verse. G. praises and encourages me.

_Nov. 10._--I have been at a very low ebb, body and mind, for the last
few days, sticking in the mud continually in the construction of my
3d, 4th, and 5th Acts. Yesterday Browning came to tell us of a bust of
Savonarola in terra-cotta, just discovered at Florence.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 23d Nov. 1864.]

I believe I have thought of you every day for the last fortnight, and
I remembered the birthday--and "everything." But I was a little cross,
because I had heard nothing of you since Mr. Bray's visit. And I said
to myself, "If she wanted to write she _would_ write." I confess I was
a little ashamed when I saw the outside of your letter ten minutes
ago, feeling that I should read within it the proof that you were as
thoughtful and mindful as ever.

Yes, I do heartily give my greeting--_had_ given it already. And I
desire very much that the work which is absorbing you may give you
some happiness besides that which belongs to the activity of
production.

It is very kind of you to remember Charlie's date too. He is as happy
as the day is long, and very good--one of those creatures to whom
goodness comes naturally--not any exalted goodness, but every-day
serviceable goodness, such as wears through life. Whereas exalted
goodness comes in brief inspirations, and requires a man to die lest
he should spoil his work.

I have been ill, but now am pretty well, with much to occupy and
interest me, and with no trouble except those bodily ailments.

I could chat a long while with you--but I restrain myself, because I
must not carry on my letter-writing into the "solid day."

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, Christmas-day, 1864.]

Your precious letter _did_ come last night, and crowned the day's
enjoyment. Our family party went off very well, entirely by dint of
George's exertions. I wish you had seen him acting charades, and heard
him make an after-supper speech. You would have understood all the
self-forgetful goodness that lay under the assumption of boyish animal
spirits. A horrible German whom I have been obliged to see has been
talking for two hours, with the hardest eyes, blind to all
possibilities that he was boring us, and so I have been robbed of all
the time I wanted for writing to you. I can only say now that I bore
you on my heart--you and all yours known to me--even before I had had
your letter yesterday. Indeed you are not apart from any delight I
have in life: I long always that you should share it, if not
otherwise, at least by knowing of it, which to you is a sort of
sharing. Our double loves and best wishes for all of you--Rough being
included, as I trust you include Ben. Are they not idlers with us?
Also a title to regard as well as being _collaborateurs_.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1864.]

_Dec. 24._--A family party in the evening.

_Dec. 25._--I read the Third Act of my drama to George, who praised it
highly. We spent a perfectly quiet evening, intending to have our
Christmas-day's jollity on Tuesday when the boys are at home.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1865.]

_Jan. 1._--The last year has been unmarked by any trouble except bad
health. The bright spots in the year have been the publication of
"Aristotle" and our journey to Venice. With me the year has not been
fruitful. I have written three Acts of my drama, and am now in a
condition of body and mind to make me hope for better things in the
coming year. The last quarter has made an epoch for me, by the fact
that, for the first time in my serious authorship I have written
verse. In each other we are happier than ever. I am more grateful to
my dear husband for his perfect love, which helps me in all good and
checks me in all evil--more conscious that in him I have the greatest
of blessings.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 3d Jan. 1865.]

I hope the wish that this New Year may be a happy one to you does not
seem to be made a mockery by any troubles or anxieties pressing on
you.

I enclose a check, which I shall be obliged if you will offer to Mr.
Congreve, as I know he prefers that payments should be made at the
beginning of the year.

I shall think of you on the nineteenth. I wonder how many there really
were in that "small upper room" 1866 years ago.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1865.]

_Jan. 8._--Mrs. Congreve staying with us for a couple of nights.
Yesterday we went to Mr. Burton's to see my portrait, with which she
was much pleased. Since last Monday I have been writing a poem, the
matter of which was written in prose three or four years ago--"My
Vegetarian Friend."

_Jan. 15_ to _25_.--Visit to Paris.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, Friday (?), 27th Jan. 1865.]

Are we not happy to have reached home on Wednesday before this real
winter came? We enjoyed our visit to Paris greatly, in spite of bad
weather, going to the theatre or opera nearly every night, and seeing
sights all day long. I think the most interesting sight we saw was
Comte's dwelling. Such places, that knew the great dead, always move
me deeply; and I had an unexpected sight of interest in the photograph
taken at the very last. M. Thomas was very friendly, and pleasant to
talk to because of his simple manners. We gave your remembrances to
him, and promised to assure you of his pleasure in hearing of you. I
wish some truer representation of Mr. Congreve hung up in the Salon
instead of that (to me) exasperating photograph.

We thought the apartment very _freundlich_, and I flattered myself
that I could have written better in the little study there than in my
own. Such self-flattery is usually the most amiable phase of
discontent with one's own inferiority.

I am really stronger for the change.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1865.]

_Jan. 28._--Finished my poem on "Utopias."

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 6th Feb. 1865.]

I suspect you have come to dislike letters, but until you say so, I
must write now and then to gratify myself. I want to send my love,
lest all the old messages shall have lost their scent, like old
lavender bags.

Since I wrote to you last we have actually been to Paris! A little
business was an excuse for getting a great deal of pleasure; and I,
for whom change of air and scene is always the best tonic, am much
brightened by our wintry expedition, which ended just in time for us
to escape the heavy fall of snow.

We are very happy, having almost recovered our old _tête-à-tête_, of
which I am so selfishly fond that I am beginning to feel it an heroic
effort when I make up my mind to invite half a dozen visitors. But it
is necessary to strive against this unsocial disposition, so we are
going to have some open evenings.

There is great talk of a new periodical--a fortnightly apparition,
partly on the plan of the _Revue des Deux Mondes_. Mr. Lewes has
consented to become its editor, if the preliminaries are settled so as
to satisfy him.

_Ecco!_ I have told you a little of our news, not daring to ask you
anything about yourself, since you evidently don't want to tell me
anything.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 19th Feb. 1865.]

The party was a "mull." The weather was bad. Some of the invited were
ill and sent regrets, others were not ardent enough to brave the damp
evening--in fine, only twelve came. We had a charade, which, like our
neighbors, was no better than it should have been, and some rather
languid music, our best musicians half failing us--so ill is merit
rewarded in this world! If the severest sense of fulfilling a duty
could make one's parties pleasant, who so deserving as I? I turn my
inward shudders into outward smiles, and talk fast, with a sense of
lead on my tongue. However, Mr. Pigott made a woman's part in the
charade so irresistibly comic that I tittered at it at intervals in my
sleepless hours. I am rather uncomfortable about you, because you
seemed so much less well and strong the other day than your average.
Let me hear before long how you and Mr. Congreve are.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1865.]

_Feb. 21._--Ill and very miserable. George has taken my drama away
from me.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 27th Feb. 1865.]

The sun shone through my window on your letter as I read it, adding to
its cheeriness. It was good of you to write it. I was ill last week,
and had mental troubles besides--happily such as are unconnected with
any one's experience except my own. I am still ailing, but striving
hard "not to mind," and not to diffuse my inward trouble, according to
Madame de Vaux's excellent maxim. I shall not, I fear, be able to get
to you till near the end of next week--towards the 11th. I think of
you very often, and especially when my own _malaise_ reminds me how
much of your time is spent in the same sort of endurance. Mr. Spencer
told us yesterday that Dr. Ransom said he had cured himself of
dyspepsia by leaving off stimulants--the full benefit manifesting
itself after two or three months of abstinence. I am going to try. All
best regards to Mr. Congreve and tenderest sisterly love to yourself.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1865.]

_March 1._--I wrote an article for the _Pall Mall Gazette_--"A Word
for the Germans."

_March 12._--Went to Wandsworth, to spend the Sunday and Monday with
Mr. and Mrs. Congreve. Feeling very ailing; in constant dull pain,
which makes all effort burdensome.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 16th March, 1865.]

I did not promise, like Mr. Collins, that you should receive a letter
of thanks for your kind entertainment of me; but I feel the need of
writing a word or two to break the change from your presence to my
complete absence from you. It was really an enjoyment to be with you,
in spite of the bodily uneasiness which robbed me of half my mind. One
thing only I regret--that in my talk with you I think I was rather
merciless to other people. Whatever vices I have seem to be
exaggerated by my _malaise_--such "chastening" not answering the
purpose of purification in my case. Pray set down any unpleasant
notions I have suggested about others to my account--_i.e._, as being
_my_ unpleasantness, and not theirs. When one is bilious, other
people's complexions look yellow, and one of their eyes higher than
the other--all the fault of one's own evil interior. I long to hear
from you that you are better, and if you are not better, still to hear
from you before too long an interval. Mr. Congreve's condition is
really cheering, and he goes about with me as a pleasant picture--like
that Raphael the Tuscan duke chose always to carry with him.

I got worse after I left you; but to-day I am better, and begin to
think there is nothing serious the matter with me except the
"weather," which every one else is alleging as the cause of their
symptoms.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 18th March, 1865.]

I believe you are one of the few who can understand that in certain
crises direct expression of sympathy is the least possible to those
who most feel sympathy. If I could have been with you in bodily
presence, I should have sat silent, thinking silence a sign of feeling
that speech, trying to be wise, must always spoil. The truest things
one can say about great Death are the oldest, simplest things that
everybody knows by rote, but that no one knows really till death has
come very close. And when that inward teaching is going on, it seems
pitiful presumption for those who are outside to be saying anything.
There is no such thing as consolation when we have made the lot of
another our own. I don't know whether you strongly share, as I do, the
old belief that made men say the gods loved those who died young. It
seems to me truer than ever, now life has become more complex, and
more and more difficult problems have to be worked out. Life, though a
good to men on the whole, is a doubtful good to many, and to some not
a good at all. To my thought it is a source of constant mental
distortion to make the denial of this a part of religion--to go on
pretending things are better than they are. To me early death takes
the aspect of salvation; though I feel, too, that those who live and
suffer may sometimes have the greater blessedness of _being_ a
salvation. But I will not write of judgments and opinions. What I want
my letter to tell you is that I love you truly, gratefully,
unchangeably.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1865.]

_March 25._--I am in deep depression, feeling powerless. I have
written nothing but beginnings since I finished a little article for
the _Pall Mall_, on the Logic of Servants. Dear George is all
activity, yet is in very frail health. How I worship his good humor,
his good sense, his affectionate care for every one who has claims on
him! That worship is my best life.

_March 29._--Sent a letter on "Futile Lying," from Saccharissa to the
_Pall Mall_.

I have begun a novel ("Felix Holt").

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 11th April, 1865.]

We are wondering if, by any coincidence or condition of things, you
could come to us on Thursday, when we have our last evening
party--wondering how you are--wondering everything about you, and
knowing nothing. Could you resolve some of our wonderings into
cheering knowledge? It is ages since you made any sign to us. Are _we_
to be blamed or you? I hope you are not unfavorably affected by the
sudden warmth which comes with the beautiful sunshine. Some word of
you, in pity!

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 22d April, 1865.]

If the sun goes on shining in this glorious way, I shall think of your
journey with pleasure. The sight of the country _must_ be a good when
the trees are bursting into leaf. But I will remember your warning to
Emily, and not insist too much on the advantages of paying visits. Let
us hear of you sometimes, and think of us as very busy and very happy,
but always including you in our world, and getting uneasy when we are
left too much to our imaginations about you. Tell Emily that Ben and I
are the better for having seen her. He has added to his store of
memories, and will recognize her when she comes again.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1865.]

_May 4._--Sent an article on Lecky's "History of Rationalism" for the
_Fortnightly_. For nearly a fortnight I have been ill, one way or
other.

_May 10._--Finished a letter of Saccharissa for the _Pall Mall_.
Reading Æschylus, "Theatre of the Greeks," Klein's "History of the
Drama," etc.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 11th May, 1865.]

This note will greet you on your return, and tell you that we were
glad to hear of you in your absence, even though the news was not of
the brightest. Next week we are going away--I don't yet know exactly
where; but it is firmly settled that we start on Monday. It will be
good for the carpets, and it will be still better for us, who need a
wholesome shaking, even more than the carpets do.

The first number of the _Review_ was done with last Monday, and will
be out on the 15th. You will be glad to hear that Mr. Harrison's
article is excellent, but the "mull" which George declares to be the
fatality with all first numbers is so far incurred with regard to this
very article that, from overwhelming alarm at its length, George put
it (perhaps too hastily) into the smaller type. I hope the importance
of the subject and the excellence of the treatment will overcome that
disadvantage.

Nurse all pleasant thoughts in your solitude, and count our affection
among them.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 18th May, 1865.]

We have just returned from a five days' holiday at the coast, and are
much invigorated by the tonic breezes.

We have nothing to do with the _Fortnightly_ as a money speculation.
Mr. Lewes has simply accepted the post of editor, and it was seemly
that I should write a little in it. But do not suppose that I am going
into periodical writing. And your friendship is not required to read
one syllable for our sakes. On the contrary, you have my full sympathy
in abstaining. Rest in peace, dear Sara, and finish your work, that
you may have the sense of having spoken out what was within you. That
is really a good--I mean, when it is done in all seriousness and
sincerity.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1865.]

_May 28._--Finished Bamford's "Passages from the Life of a Radical."
Have just begun again Mill's "Political Economy," and Comte's "Social
Science," in Miss Martineau's edition.

_June 7._--Finished _Annual Register_ for 1832. Reading Blackstone.
Mill's second article on "Comte," to appear in the _Westminster_, lent
me by Mr. Spencer. My health has been better of late.

_June 15._--Read again Aristotle's "Poetics" with fresh admiration.

_June 20._--Read the opening of my novel to G. Yesterday we drove to
Wandsworth. Walked together on Wimbledon Common, in outer and inner
sunshine, as of old; then dined with Mr. and Mrs. Congreve, and had
much pleasant talk.

_June 25._--Reading English History, reign of George III.;
Shakespeare's "King John." Yesterday G. dined at Greenwich with the
multitude of so-called writers for the _Saturday_. He heard much
commendation of the _Fortnightly_, especially of Bagehot's articles,
which last is reassuring after Mr. Trollope's strong objections.

_July 3._--Went to hear the "Faust" at Covent Garden: Mario, Lucca,
and Graziani. I was much thrilled by the great symbolical situations,
and by the music--more, I think, than I had ever been before.

_July 9_ (Sunday).--We had Browning, Huxley, Mr. Warren, Mr. Bagehot,
and Mr. Crompton, and talk was pleasant.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, Sunday, 10th July, 1865.]

Success to the canvassing! It is "very meet and right and your bounden
duty" to be with Mr. Taylor in this time of hard work, and I am glad
that your health has made no impediment. I should have liked to be
present when you were cheered. The expression of a common feeling by a
large mass of men, when the feeling is one of good-will, moves me like
music. A public tribute to any man who has done the world a service
with brain or hand has on me the effect of a great religious rite,
with pealing organ and full-voiced choir.

I agree with you in your feeling about Mill. Some of his works have
been frequently my companions of late, and I have been going through
many _actions de grâce_ towards him. I am not anxious that he should
be in Parliament: thinkers can do more outside than inside the House.
But it would have been a fine precedent, and would have made an epoch,
for such a man to have been asked for and elected solely on the ground
of his mental eminence. As it is, I suppose it is pretty certain that
he will _not_ be elected.

I am glad you have been interested in Mr. Lewes's article. His great
anxiety about the _Fortnightly_ is to make it the vehicle for sincere
writing--real contributions of opinion on important topics. But it is
more difficult than the inexperienced could imagine to get the sort of
writing which will correspond to that desire of his.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1865.]

_July 16._--Madame Bohn, niece of Professor Scherer, called. She said
certain things about "Romola" which showed that she had felt what I
meant my readers to feel. She said she knew the book had produced the
same effect on many others. I wish I could be encouraged by this.

_July 22._--Sat for my portrait--I suppose for the last time.

_July 23._--I am going doggedly to work at my novel, seeing what
determination can do in the face of despair. Reading Neale's "History
of the Puritans."

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 1st Aug. 1865.]

I received yesterday the circular about the Mazzini Fund. Mr. Lewes
and I would have liked to subscribe to a tribute to Mazzini, or to a
fund for his use, of which the application was defined and guaranteed
by his own word. As it is, the application of the desired fund is only
intimated in the vaguest manner by the Florentine committee. The
reflection is inevitable that the application may ultimately be the
promotion of conspiracy, the precise character of which is necessarily
unknown to subscribers. Now, though I believe there are cases in which
conspiracy may be a sacred, necessary struggle against organized
wrong, there are also cases in which it is hopeless, and can produce
nothing but misery; or needless, because it is not the best means
attainable of reaching the desired end; or unjustifiable, because it
resorts to acts which are more unsocial in their character than the
very wrong they are directed to extinguish; and in these three
supposable cases it seems to me that it would be a social crime to
further conspiracy even by the impulse of a little finger, to which
one may well compare a small money subscription.

I think many persons to whom the circular might be sent would take
something like this view, and would grieve, as we do, that a
proposition intended to honor Mazzini should come in a form to which
they cannot conscientiously subscribe.

I trouble you and Mr. Taylor with this explanation, because both Mr.
Lewes and I have a real reverence for Mazzini, and could not therefore
be content to give a silent negative.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 1st Aug. 1865.]

I fear that my languor on Saturday prevented me from fairly showing
you how sweet and precious your presence was to me then, as at all
times. We have almost made up our minds to start some time in this
month for a run in Normandy and Brittany. We both need the change,
though when I receive, as I did yesterday, a letter from some friend,
telling me of cares and trials from which I am quite free, I am
ashamed of wanting anything.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1865.]

_Aug. 2._--Finished the "Agamemnon" second time.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 6th Aug. 1865.]

When I wrote to you last I quite hoped that I should see you and Emily
before we left home, but now it is settled that we start on Thursday
morning, and I have so many little things to remember and to do that I
dare not set apart any of the intervening time for the quiet enjoyment
of a visit from you. It is not quite so cheerful a picture as I should
like to carry with me, that of you and Emily so long alone, with Mr.
Congreve working at Bradford. But your friends are sure to think of
you, and want to see you. I hope you did not suffer so severely as we
did from the arctic cold that rushed in after the oppressive heat. Mr.
T. Trollope came from Italy just when it began. He says it is always
the same when he comes to England, people always say it has just been
very hot, and he believes that means they had a few days in which they
were not obliged to blow on their fingers.

When you write to Mr. Congreve pray tell him that we were very
grateful for his Itinerary, which is likely useful to us--indeed, has
already been useful in determining our route.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1865.]

_Sept. 7._--We returned home after an expedition into Brittany. Our
course was from Boulogne to St. Valéry, Dieppe, Rouen, Caen, Bayeux,
St. Lô, Vire, Avranches, Dol, St. Malo, Rennes, Avray, and
Carnac--back by Nantes, Tours, Le Mans, Chartres, Paris, Rouen,
Dieppe, Abbeville, and so again to Boulogne.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 14th Sept. 1865.]

We came home again on Thursday night--this day week--after a month's
absence in Normandy and Brittany. I have been thinking of you very
often since, but believed that you did not care to have the
interruption of letters just now, and would rather defer
correspondence till your mind was freer. If I had _suspected_ that you
would feel any want satisfied by a letter I should certainly have
written. I had not heard of Miss Bonham Carter's death, else I should
have conceived something of your state of mind. I think you and I are
alike in this, that we can get no good out of pretended comforts,
which are the devices of self-love, but would rather, in spite of
pain, grow into the endurance of all "naked truths." So I say no word
about your great loss, except that I love you, and sorrow with you.

The circumstances of life--the changes that take place in
ourselves--hem in the expression of affections and memories that live
within us, and enter almost into every day, and long separations often
make intercourse difficult when the opportunity comes. But the delight
I had in you, and in the hours we spent together, and in all your acts
of friendship to me, is really part of my life, and can never die out
of me. I see distinctly how much poorer I should have been if I had
never known you. If you had seen more of me in late years, you would
not have such almost cruel thoughts as that the book into which you
have faithfully put your experience and best convictions could make
you "repugnant" to me. Whatever else my growth may have been, it has
not been towards irreverence and ready rejection of what other minds
can give me. You once unhappily mistook my feeling and point of view
in something I wrote _à propos_ of an argument in your "Aids to
Faith," and _that_ made me think it better that we should not write on
large and difficult subjects in hasty letters. But it has often been
painful to me--I should say, it has constantly been painful to
me--that you have ever since inferred me to be in a hard and
unsympathetic state about your views and your writing. But I am
habitually disposed myself to the same unbelief in the sympathy that
is given me, and am the last person who should be allowed to complain
of such unbelief in another. And it is very likely that I may have
been faulty and disagreeable in my expressions.

Excuse all my many mistakes, dear Sara, and never believe otherwise
than that I have a glow of joy when you write to me, as if my
existence were some good to you. I know that I am, and can be, very
little practically; but to have the least value for your thought is
what I care much to be assured of.

Perhaps, in the cooler part of the autumn, when your book is out of
your hands, you will like to move from home a little and see your
London friends?

Our travelling in Brittany was a good deal marred and obstructed by
the emperor's _fête_, which sent all the world on our track towards
Cherbourg and Brest. But the Norman churches, the great cathedrals at
Le Mans, Tours, and Chartres, with their marvellous painted glass,
were worth much scrambling to see.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 28th Oct. 1865.]

I have read Mr. Masson's book on "Recent Philosophy." The earlier part
is a useful and creditable survey, and the classification ingenious.
The later part I thought poor. If, by what he says of Positivism, you
mean what he says at p. 246, I should answer it is simply "stuff"--he
might as well have written a dozen lines of jargon. There are a few
observations about Comte, scattered here and there, which are true and
just enough. But it seems to me much better to read a man's own
writing than to read what others say about him, especially when the
man is first-rate and the "others" are third-rate. As Goethe said long
ago about Spinoza, "Ich zog immer vor von dem Menschen zu erfahren
_wie er dachte_ als von einem anderen zu hören _wie er hätte denken
sollen_."[41] However, I am not fond of expressing criticism or
disapprobation. The difficulty is to digest and live upon any valuable
truth one's self.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1865.]

_Nov. 15._--During the last three weeks George has been very poorly,
but now he is better. I have been reading Fawcett's "Economic
Condition of the Working Classes," Mill's "Liberty," looking into
Strauss's second "Life of Jesus," and reading Neale's "History of the
Puritans," of which I have reached the fourth volume. Yesterday the
news came of Mrs. Gaskell's death. She died suddenly, while reading
aloud to her daughter.

_Nov. 16._--Writing Mr. Lyon's story, which I have determined to
insert as a narrative. Reading the Bible.

_Nov. 24._--Finished Neale's "History of the Puritans." Began Hallam's
"Middle Ages."

_Dec. 4._--Finished second volume of Hallam. The other day read to the
end of chapter nine of my novel to George, who was much pleased and
found no fault.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 4th Dec. 1865.]

We send to-day "Orley Farm," "The Small House at Allington," and the
"Story of Elizabeth." The "Small House" is rather lighter than "Orley
Farm." "The Story of Elizabeth" is by Miss Thackeray. It is not so
cheerful as Trollope, but is charmingly written. You can taste it and
reject it if it is too melancholy. I think more of you than you are
likely to imagine, and I believe we talk of you all more than of any
other mortals.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 7th Dec. 1865.]

It is worth your while to send for the last _Fortnightly_ to read an
article of Professor Tyndall's "On the Constitution of the Universe."
It is a splendid piece of writing on the higher physics, which I know
will interest you. _À propos_ of the feminine intellect, I had a bit
of experience with a superior woman the other day, which reminded me
of Sydney Smith's story about his sermon on the Being of a God. He
says, that after he had delivered his painstaking argument, an old
parishioner said to him, "I don't agree wi' you, Mr. Smith; _I think
there be a God_."

[Sidenote: Journal, 1865.]

_Dec. 11._--For the last three days I have been foundering from a
miserable state of head. I have written chapter ten. This evening read
again Macaulay's Introduction.

_Dec. 15._--To-day is the first for nearly a week on which I have been
able to write anything fresh. I am reading Macaulay and Blackstone.
This evening we went to hear "The Messiah" at Exeter Hall.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 21st Dec. 1865.]

"A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year" is a sort of hieroglyph for
I love you and wish you well all the year round. Christmas to me is
like a great many other pleasures, which I am glad to imagine as
enjoyed by others, but have no delight in myself. Berried holly and
smiling faces and snap-dragon, grandmamma and the children, turkey and
plum-pudding--they are all precious things, and I would not have the
world without them; but they tire me a little. I enjoy the common days
of the year more. But for the sake of those who are stronger I rejoice
in Christmas.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1865.]

_Dec. 24._--For two days I have been sticking in the mud from doubt
about my construction. I have just consulted G., and he confirms my
choice of incidents.

_Dec. 31._--The last day of 1865. I will say nothing but that I
trust--I will strive--to add more ardent effort towards a good result
from all the outward good that is given to me. My health is at a lower
ebb than usual, and so is George's. Bertie is spending his holidays
with us, and shows hopeful characteristics. Charles is happy.


_SUMMARY._

JANUARY, 1862, TO DECEMBER, 1865.

     Begins "Romola" again--Letter to Miss Hennell--Max Müller's
     book--"Orley Farm"--Anthony Trollope--T. A. Trollope's
     "Beata"--Acquaintance with Mr. Burton and Mr. W. G.
     Clark--George Smith, publisher, suggests a "magnificent
     offer"--Depression about "Romola"--Letter to Mrs. Bray asking
     for loan of music--Pantomime--First visit to Dorking--Letter
     to Madame Bodichon--Impatience of concealment--Anxiety about
     war with America--Sympathy with queen--Mr. Lewes begins
     "History of Science"--Mrs. Browning's "Casa Guidi
     Windows"--Depression--George Smith offers £10,000 for
     "Romola" for the _Cornhill_--Idea given up--Visit to
     Englefield Green--Working under a weight--Second visit to
     Dorking for three weeks--Delight in spring--Accepts £7000 for
     "Romola" in _Cornhill_--Regret at leaving Blackwood--Palsy
     in writing--Visit to Littlehampton and to Dorking third
     time--Letter to Mrs. Congreve--Mr. Lewes at Spa--George Eliot
     in better spirits--Letter to Miss Hennell--Joachim's
     playing--New Literary Club--Reading Poliziano--Suggestion of
     Tennyson's "Palace of Art"--Visit from
     Browning--Depression--Letter to Madame Bodichon--No negative
     propaganda--Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor--"The Messiah" on
     Christmas day--Letter to Miss Hennell--St. Paul's
     "Charity"--The Poetry of Christianity--The Bible--Adieu to
     year 1862--Letter to Miss Hennell--Encouragement about
     "Romola"--Literary Club dissolves--Miss Cobbe--Letter to Mrs.
     Congreve--Depression--Fourth visit to Dorking for
     fortnight--Letter to Charles Lewes on Thackeray's
     Lectures--The effect of writing "Romola"--Letter to Madame
     Bodichon--Odiousness of intellectual superciliousness--Letter
     to Mrs. Bray--Thinking of the Priory--"Romola"
     finished--Inscription--Visit to Isle of
     Wight--Ristori--Letter to Miss Hennell--Thornton
     Lewes--London amusements--Opera--Reading Mommsen, Liddell's
     "Rome," and "Roba di Roma"--Letter from Frederick Maurice
     referred to as most generous tribute ever given--Letter to
     Mrs. Peter Taylor--Renan's "Vie de Jésus"--Visit to
     Worthing--Mrs. Hare--Return to London--Depression--Letter to
     R. H. Hutton on "Romola"--The importance of the medium in
     which characters move--Letter to Madame Bodichon--Effect of
     London on health--Letter to Mrs. Bray--Delight in
     autumn--Mommsen's History--Letter to Mrs. Congreve--The
     "Discours Préliminaire"--Removal to the Priory--Mr. Owen
     Jones decorates the house--Jansa the violinist--Letter to
     Mrs. Bray--"Physiology for Schools"--Letter to Madame
     Bodichon--Enjoying rest, and music with Jansa--Letter to Miss
     Hennell--Renan--Letter to Mrs. Bray--Enjoyment of
     Priory--Letter to Mrs. Congreve--Mr. Lewes's "Aristotle"
     finished--Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor--Compensation--Letter
     to Mrs. P. A. Taylor--Effect of sunshine--Death of Mrs.
     Hare--"David Gray"--Letter to Miss Hennell--Dislike of
     note-writing--Visit to Glasgow--Letter to Mrs. Peter
     Taylor--Joy in Federal successes--Crystal Palace to see
     Garibaldi--Mr. Burton's picture of a Legendary Knight in
     Armor--Third visit to Italy with Mr. Burton for seven
     weeks--Return to London--Charles Lewes's engagement to Miss
     Gertrude Hill--Pleasure in Mr. Burton's companionship in
     travel--Letter to Mrs. Congreve--Present of
     mats--Depression--Reading Gibbon--Gieseler--Letter to Miss
     Hennell--Reading Max Müller--Reference to the
     "Apologia"--Newman--Reading about Spain--Trying a
     drama--Letter to Miss Hennell--Harrogate--Development of
     Industries--Scarborough--Letters to Mrs. Congreve--Pleasure
     in her visit--Letter to Miss Hennell--Learning Spanish--Two
     acts of drama written--Sticking in construction of
     remainder--Letter to Mrs. Congreve--Christmas
     greeting--Retrospect of year 1864--Letter to Mrs. Congreve,
     first payment to Positivist Fund--Comparison with "small
     upper room" 1866 years ago--Mrs. Congreve staying at the
     Priory--Poem "My Vegetarian Friend" written--Visit to
     Paris--Letter to Mrs. Congreve--Visit to Comte's apartment in
     Paris--Finished poem on "Utopias"--Letter to Miss Sara
     Hennell--Delight in dual solitude--_Fortnightly
     Review_--Letter to Mrs. Congreve--Charades--Depression--Mr.
     Lewes takes away drama--Article for the _Pall Mall_, "A Word
     for the Germans"--Letter to Mrs. Congreve--Visit to
     Wandsworth--Depression--Letter to Mrs. Congreve after
     visit--Letter to Mrs. Bray on a young friend's death--Deep
     depression--Admiration of Mr. Lewes's good spirits--"Felix
     Holt" begun--Article on Lecky's "History of Rationalism" in
     _Fortnightly_--Reading Æschylus, "Theatre of the
     Greeks"--Klein's "History of the Drama"--Letter to Mrs.
     Congreve--First number of the _Fortnightly_--Frederic
     Harrison's article--Reading Mill, Comte, and
     Blackstone--Aristotle's "Poetics"--Dine with Congreves at
     Wandsworth--"Faust" at Covent Garden--Sunday
     reception--Browning, Huxley, and Bagehot--Letter to Mrs.
     Peter Taylor on J. S. Mill--The _Fortnightly Review_--Mr.
     Burton's portrait finished--Mazzini subscription--Letter of
     adieu to Mrs. Congreve--Expedition to Brittany for
     month--Letter to Miss Hennell--"Pretended
     comforts"--Recollection of early feelings--Delight in her
     friendship--Masson's "Recent Philosophy"--Comte--Goethe on
     Spinoza--Reading Fawcett's "Economic Condition of Working
     Classes"--Mill's "Liberty"--Strauss's second "Life of
     Jesus"--Neale's "History of the Puritans"--Hallam's "Middle
     Ages"--Letter to Miss Hennell on Tyndall's article on "The
     Constitution of the Universe"--View of Christmas
     day--Retrospect of 1865.

FOOTNOTES:

[33] Now Sir Frederic Burton, Director of the National Gallery, to
whom we are indebted for the drawing of George Eliot now in the
National Portrait Gallery, South Kensington, and who was a very
intimate and valued friend of Mr. and Mrs. Lewes.

[34] Mr. W. G. Clark, late Public Orator at Cambridge, well known as a
scholar, and for his edition of Shakspeare in conjunction with Mr.
Aldis Wright.

[35] Some general remark of Carlyle's--Madame Bodichon cannot remember
exactly what it was.

[36] I regret that I have not been able to find this letter.

[37] Auguste Comte's.

[38] "Physiology for Schools." By Mrs. Bray.

[39] Mrs. Julius Hare, who gave her Maurice's book on the Lord's
Prayer.

[40] A story by Mr. Robert Buchanan in the _Cornhill_, Feb. 1864.

[41] "I always preferred to learn from the man himself what _he_
thought, rather than to hear from some one else what _he ought to have
thought_."




CHAPTER XIII.


[Sidenote: Letter to Frederic Harrison, 5th Jan. 1866.]

I have had it in my mind to write to you for many days, wanting to
tell you, yet feeling there might be some impertinence in doing so, of
the delight and gratitude I felt in reading your article on
"Industrial Co-operation." Certain points admirably brought out in
that article would, I think, be worth the labor of a life if one could
help in winning them thorough recognition. I don't mean that my
thinking so is of any consequence, but simply that it is of
consequence to me when I find your energetic writing confirm my own
faith.

It would be fortunate for us if you had nothing better to do than look
in on us on Tuesday evening. Professor Huxley will be with us, and one
or two others whom you know, and your presence would make us all the
brighter.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1866.]

_Jan. 9._--Professors Huxley and Beesley, Mr. Burton, and Mr. Spencer
dined with us. Mr. Harrison in the evening.

[Sidenote: Letter to Frederic Harrison, 12th Jan. 1866.]

The ample and clear statement you have sent me with kind promptness
has put me in high spirits--as high spirits as can belong to an
unhopeful author. Your hypothetical case of a settlement suits my
needs surprisingly well. I shall be thankful to let Sugden alone, and
throw myself entirely on your goodness, especially as what I want is
simply a basis of legal possibilities and not any command of details.
I want to be sure that my chords will not offend a critic
accomplished in thorough bass--not at all to present an exercise in
thorough bass.

I was going to write you a long story, but, on consideration, it seems
to me that I should tax your time less, and arrive more readily at a
resolution of my doubts on various points not yet mentioned to you, if
you could let me speak instead of writing to you.

On Wednesday afternoons I am always at home; but on any day when I
could be sure of your coming I would set everything aside for the sake
of a consultation so valuable to me.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1866.]

_Jan. 20._--For the last fortnight I have been unusually disabled by
ill-health. I have been consulting Mr. Harrison about the law in my
book, with satisfactory result.

[Sidenote: Letter to Frederic Harrison, 22d Jan. 1866.]

I had not any opportunity, or not enough presence of mind, to tell you
yesterday how much I felt your kindness in writing me that last little
note of sympathy.

In proportion as compliments (always beside the mark) are discouraging
and nauseating, at least to a writer who has any serious aims, genuine
words from one capable of understanding one's conceptions are precious
and strengthening.

Yet I have no confidence that the book will ever be worthily written.
And now I have something else to ask. It is that if anything strikes
you as untrue in cases where my drama has a bearing on momentous
questions, especially of a public nature, you will do me the great
kindness to tell me of your doubts.

On a few moral points, which have been made clear to me by my
experience, I feel sufficiently confident--without such confidence I
could not write at all. But in every other direction I am so much in
need of fuller instruction as to be constantly under the sense that I
am more likely to be wrong than right.

Hitherto I have read my MS. (I mean of my previous books) to Mr.
Lewes, by forty or fifty pages at a time, and he has told me if he
felt an objection to anything. No one else has had any knowledge of my
writings before their publication. (I except, of course, the
publishers.)

But now that you are good enough to incur the trouble of reading my
MS., I am anxious to get the full benefit of your participation.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 28th Jan. 1866.]

We arrived here on Tuesday, and have been walking about four hours
each day, and the walks are so various that each time we have turned
out we have found a new one. George is already much the better for the
perfect rest, quiet, and fresh air. Will you give my thanks to Mr.
Congreve for the "Synthèse" which I have brought with me and am
reading? I expect to understand three chapters well enough to get some
edification.

George had talked of our taking the train to Dover to pay you a
"morning call." He observes that it would have been a "dreadful sell"
if we had done so. Your letter, therefore, was providential--and
without doubt it came from a dear little Providence of mine that sits
in your heart.

[Sidenote: Letter to Frederic Harrison, 31st Jan. 1866.]

I have received both your precious letters--the second edition of the
case, and the subsequent note. The story is sufficiently in the track
of ordinary probability; and the careful trouble you have so
generously given to it has enabled me to feel a satisfaction in my
plot which beforehand I had sighed for as unattainable.

There is still a question or two which I shall want to ask you, but I
am afraid of taxing your time and patience in an unconscionable
manner. So, since we expect to return to town at the end of next week,
I think I will reserve my questions until I have the pleasure and
advantage of an interview with you, in which _pros_ and _cons_ can be
more rapidly determined than by letter. It seems to me that you have
fitted my phenomena with a _rationale_ quite beautifully. If there is
any one who could have done it better, I am sure I know of no man who
_would_. Please to put your help of me among your good deeds for this
year of 1866.

To-day we have resolute rain, for the first time since we came down.
You don't yet know what it is to be a sickly wretch, dependent on
these skyey influences. But Heine says illness "spiritualizes the
members." It had need do some good in return for one's misery.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 12th Feb. 1866.]

Thanks for your kind letter. Alas! we had chiefly bad weather in the
country. George was a little benefited, but only a little. He is too
far "run down" to be wound up in a very short time. We enjoyed our
return to our comfortable house, and, perhaps, that freshness of home
was the chief gain from our absence.

You see, to counterbalance all the great and good things that life has
given us beyond what our fellows have, we hardly know now what it is
to be free from bodily _malaise_.

After the notion I have given you of my health you will not wonder if
I say that I don't know when anything of mine will appear. I can never
reckon on myself.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1866.]

_March 7._--I am reading Mill's "Logic" again. Theocritus still, and
English History and Law.

_March 17._--To St. James's Hall hearing Joachim, Piatti, and Hallé in
glorious Beethoven music.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 9th April, 1866.]

Don't think any evil of me for not writing. Just now the days are
short, and art is long to artists with feeble bodies. If people don't
say expressly that they want anything from me, I easily conclude that
they will do better without me, and have a good weight of idleness,
or, rather, bodily fatigue, which puts itself into the scale of
modesty. I torment myself less with fruitless regrets that my
particular life has not been more perfect. The young things are
growing, and to me it is not melancholy but joyous that the world will
be brighter after I am gone than it has been in the brief time of my
existence. You see my pen runs into very old reflections. The fact is,
I have no details to tell that would much interest you. It is true
that I am going to bring out another book, but just _when_ is not
certain.

[Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 10th April, 1866.]

The happiness in your letter was delightful to me, as you guessed it
would be. See how much better things may turn out for all mankind,
since they mend for single mortals even in this confused state of the
bodies social and politic.

As soon as we can leave we shall go away, probably to Germany, for six
weeks or so. But that will not be till June. I am finishing a book
which has been growing slowly, like a sickly child, because of my own
ailments; but now I am in the later acts of it I can't move till it is
done.

You know all the news, public and private--all about the sad cattle
plague, and the reform bill, and who is going to be married and who is
dead--so I need tell you nothing. You will find the English world
extremely like what it was when you left it--conversation more or less
trivial and insincere, literature just now not much better, and
politics worse than either. Bring some sincerity and energy to make a
little draught of pure air in your particular world. I shall expect
you to be a heroine in the best sense, now you are happier after a
time of suffering. See what a talent I have for telling other people
to be good!

We are getting patriarchal, and think of old age and death as journeys
not far off. All knowledge, all thought, all achievement seems more
precious and enjoyable to me than it ever was before in life. But as
soon as one has found the key of life, "it opes the gates of death."
Youth has not learned the _art_ of living, and we go on bungling till
our experience can only serve us for a very brief space. That is the
"external order" we must submit to.

I am too busy to write except when I am tired, and don't know very
well what to say, so you must not be surprised if I write in a dreamy
way.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1866.]

_April 21._--Sent MS. of two volumes to Blackwood.

_April 25._--Blackwood has written to offer me £5000 for "Felix Holt."
I have been ailing, and uncertain in my strokes, and yesterday got no
further than p. 52 of Vol. III.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 25th April, 1866.]

It is a great pleasure to me to be writing to you again, as in the old
days. After your kind letters, I am chiefly anxious that the
publication of "Felix Holt" may be a satisfaction to you from
beginning to end.

Mr. Lewes writes about other business matters, so I will only say that
I am desirous to have the proofs as soon and as rapidly as will be
practicable.

They will require correcting with great care, and there are large
spaces in the day when I am unable to write, in which I could be
attending to my proofs.

I think I ought to tell you that I have consulted a legal friend about
my law, to guard against errors. The friend is a Chancery barrister,
who "ought to know."

After I had written the first volume, I applied to him, and he has
since read through my MS.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 27th April, 1866.]

How very good it was of you to write me a letter which is a guarantee
to me of the pleasantest kind that I have made myself understood.

The tone of the prevalent literature just now is not encouraging to a
writer who at least wishes to be serious and sincere; and, owing to my
want of health, a great deal of this book has been written under so
much depression as to its practical effectiveness that I have
sometimes been ready to give it up.

Your letter has made me feel, more strongly than any other testimony,
that it would have been a pity if I had listened to the tempter
Despondency. I took a great deal of pains to get a true idea of the
period. My own recollections of it are childish, and of course
disjointed, but they help to illuminate my reading. I went through the
_Times_ of 1832-33 at the British Museum, to be sure of as many
details as I could. It is amazing what strong language was used in
those days, especially about the Church. "Bloated pluralists,"
"Stall-fed dignitaries," etc., are the sort of phrases conspicuous.
There is one passage of prophecy which I longed to quote, but I
thought it wiser to abstain. "Now, the beauty of the Reform Bill is
that, under its mature operation, the people must and will become free
agents"--a prophecy which I hope is true, only the maturity of the
operation has not arrived yet.

Mr. Lewes is well satisfied with the portion of the third volume
already written; and, as I am better in health just now, I hope to go
on with spirit, especially with the help of your cordial sympathy. I
trust you will see, when it comes, that the third volume is the
natural issue prepared for by the first and second.

[Sidenote: Letter to Frederic Harrison, 27th April, 1866.]

A thousand thanks for your note. Do not worry yourself so much about
those two questions that you will be forced to hate me. On Tuesday
next we are to go to Dorking for probably a fortnight. I wished you to
read the first hundred pages of my third volume; but I fear now that I
must be content to wait and send you a duplicate proof of a chapter or
two that are likely to make a lawyer shudder by their poetic license.
Please to be in great distress sometime for want of my advice, and
tease me considerably to get it, that I may prove my grateful memory
of these days.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 30th April, 1866.]

To-morrow we go--Mr. Lewes's bad health driving us--to Dorking, where
everything will reach me as quickly as in London.

I am in a horrible fidget about certain points which I want to be sure
of in correcting my proofs. They are chiefly two questions. I wish to
know,

1. Whether, in Napoleon's war with England, after the breaking-up of
the Treaty of Amiens, the seizure and imprisonment of civilians was
exceptional, or whether it was continued throughout the war?

2. Whether, in 1833, in the case of transportation to one of the
colonies, when the sentence did not involve hard labor, the sentenced
person might be at large on his arrival in the colony?

It is possible you may have some one near at hand who will answer
these questions. I am sure you will help me if you can, and will
sympathize in my anxiety not to have even an allusion that involves
practical impossibilities.

One can never be perfectly accurate, even with one's best effort, but
the effort must be made.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1866.]

_May 31._--Finished "Felix Holt."

     The manuscript bears the following inscription:

     "From George Eliot to her dear Husband, this thirteenth year
     of their united life, in which the deepening sense of her own
     imperfectness has the consolation of their deepening love."

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 5th June, 1866.]

My last hope of seeing you before we start has vanished. I find that
the things urged upon me to be done in addition to my own small
matters of preparation will leave me no time to enjoy anything that I
should have chosen if I had been at leisure. Last Thursday only I
finished writing, in a state of nervous excitement that had been
making my head throb and my heart palpitate all the week before. As
soon as I had finished I felt well. You know how we had counted on a
parting sight of you; and I should have particularly liked to see
Emily and witness the good effect of Derbyshire. But send us a word or
two if you can, just to say how you _all three_ are. We start on
Thursday evening for Brussels. Then to Antwerp, the Hague, and
Amsterdam. Out of Holland we are to find our way to Schwalbach. Let
your love go with us, as mine will hover about you and all yours--that
group of three which the word "Wandsworth" always means for us.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 5th June, 1866.]

I finished writing ("Felix Holt") on the last day of May, after days
and nights of throbbing and palpitation--chiefly, I suppose, from a
nervous excitement which I was not strong enough to support well. As
soon as I had done I felt better, and have been a new creature ever
since, though a little overdone with visits from friends and attention
(_miserabile dictu!_) to petticoats, etc.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 6th June, 1866.]

I can't help being a little vexed that the course of things hinders
my having the great delight of seeing you again, during this visit to
town. Now that my mind is quite free, I don't know anything I should
have chosen sooner than to have a long, long quiet day with you.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1866.]

_June 7._--Set off on our journey to Holland.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 25th June, 1866, from Schwalbach.]

I wish you could know how idle I feel, how utterly disinclined to
anything but mere self-indulgence; because that knowledge would enable
you to estimate the affection and anxiety which prompt me to write in
spite of disinclination. June is so far gone, that by the time you get
this letter you will surely have some result of the examination to
tell me of; and I can't bear to deprive myself of that news by not
letting you know where we are. "In Paradise," George says; but the
Paradise is in the fields and woods of beech and fir, where we walk in
uninterrupted solitude in spite of the excellent roads and delightful
resting-places, which seem to have been prepared for visitors in
general. The promenade, where the ladies--chiefly Russian and German,
with only a small sprinkling of English and Americans--display their
ornamental petticoats and various hats, is only the outskirt of
Paradise; but we amuse ourselves there for an hour or so in the early
morning and evening, listening to the music and learning the faces of
our neighbors. There is a deficiency of men, children, and dogs,
otherwise the winding walks, the luxuriant trees and grass, and the
abundant seats of the promenade have every charm one can expect at a
German bath. We arrived here last Thursday, after a fortnight spent in
Belgium and Holland; and we still fall to interjections of delight
whenever we walk out--first at the beauty of the place, and next at
our own happiness in not having been frightened away from it by the
predictions of travellers and hotel-keepers, that we should find no
one here--that the Prussians would break up the railways, etc.,
etc.--Nassau being one of the majority of small states who are against
Prussia. I fear we are a little in danger of becoming like the Bürger
in "Faust," and making it too much the entertainment of our holiday to
have a

     "Gespräch von Krieg und Kriegsgeschrei
     Wenn hinten, weit, in der Türkei,
     Die Völker auf einander schlagen."

Idle people are so eager for newspapers that tell them of other
people's energetic enthusiasm! A few soldiers are quartered here, and
we see them wisely using their leisure to drink at the Brunnen. They
are the only suggestion of war that meets our eyes among these woody
hills. Already we feel great benefit from our quiet journeying and
repose. George is looking remarkably well, and seems to have nothing
the matter with him. You know how magically quick his recoveries seem.
I am too refined to say anything about our excellent quarters and good
meals; but one detail, I know, will touch your sympathy. We dine in
our own room! It would have marred the _Kur_ for me if I had had every
day to undergo a _table d'hôte_ where almost all the guests are
English, presided over by the British chaplain. Please don't suspect
me of being scornful towards my fellow countrymen or women: the fault
is all mine that I am miserably _gênée_ by the glances of strange
eyes.

We want news from you to complete our satisfaction, and no one can
give it but yourself. Send us as many matter-of-fact details as you
have the patience to write. We shall not be here after the 4th, but at
Schlangenbad.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 3d Aug. 1866.]

We got home last night, after a rough passage from Ostend. You have
been so continually a recurrent thought to me ever since I had your
letter at Schwalbach, that it is only natural I should write to you as
soon as I am at my old desk again. The news of Mr. Congreve's
examination being over made me feel for several days that something
had happened which caused me unusual lightness of heart. I would not
dwell on the possibility of your having to leave Wandsworth, which, I
know, would cause you many sacrifices. I clung solely to the great,
cheering fact that a load of anxiety had been lifted from Mr.
Congreve's mind. May we not put in a petition for some of his time
now? And will he not come with you and Emily to dine with us next
week, on any day except Wednesday and Friday? The dinner-hour seems
more propitious for talk and enjoyment than lunch-time; but in all
respects choose what will best suit your health and habits--only let
us see you.

[Sidenote: Letter to Frederic Harrison, 4th Aug. 1866.]

We returned from our health-seeking journey on Thursday evening, and
your letter was the most delightful thing that awaited me at home. Be
sure it will be much read and meditated; and may I not take it as an
earnest that your help, which has already done so much for me, will be
continued? I mean, that you will help me by your thoughts and your
sympathy--not that you will be teased with my proofs.

I meant to write you a long letter about the æsthetic problem; but Mr.
Lewes, who is still tormented with headachy effects from our rough
passage, comes and asks me to walk to Hampstead with him, so I send
these hasty lines. Come and see us soon.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 4th Aug. 1866.]

We got home on Thursday evening, and are still feeling some unpleasant
effects from our very rough passage--an inconvenience which we had
waited some days at Ostend to avoid. But the wind took no notice of
us, and went on blowing.

I was much pleased with the handsome appearance of the three volumes
which were lying ready for me. My hatred of bad paper and bad print,
and my love of their opposites, naturally get stronger as my eyes get
weaker; and certainly that taste could hardly be better gratified than
it is by Messrs. Blackwood & Sons.

Colonel Hamley's volume is another example of that fact. It lies now
on my revolving desk as one of the books I mean first to read. I am
really grateful to have such a medium of knowledge, and I expect it to
make some pages of history much less dim to me.

My impression of Colonel Hamley, when we had that pleasant dinner at
Greenwich, and afterwards when he called in Blandford Square, was
quite in keeping with the high opinion you express. Mr. Lewes liked
the article on "Felix" in the Magazine very much. He read it the first
thing yesterday morning, and told me it was written in a nice spirit,
and the extracts judiciously made.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 10th Aug. 1866.]

I have had a delightful holiday, and find my double self very much the
better for it. We made a great round in our journeying. From Antwerp
to Rotterdam, the Hague, Leyden, Amsterdam, Cologne; then up the Rhine
to Coblentz, and thence to Schwalbach, where we stayed a fortnight.
From Schwalbach to Schlangenbad, where we stayed till we feared the
boats would cease to go to and fro; and, in fact, only left just in
time to get down the Rhine to Bonn by the Dutch steamer. From Bonn,
after two days, we went to Aix; then to dear old Liége, where we had
been together thirteen years before; and, to avoid the King of the
Belgians, ten minutes backwards to the baths of pretty Chaudfontaine,
where we remained three days. Then to Louvain, Ghent, and Bruges; and,
last of all, to Ostend, where we waited for a fine day and calm sea,
until we secured--a very rough passage indeed.

Ought we not to be a great deal wiser and more efficient personages,
or else to be ashamed of ourselves? Unhappily, this last alternative
is not a compensation for wisdom.

I thought of you--to mention one occasion among many--when we had the
good fortune, at Antwerp, to see a placard announcing that the company
from the Ober-Ammergau, Bavaria, would represent, that Sunday evening,
the _Lebensgeschichte_ of our Saviour Christ, at the Théatre des
Variétés. I remembered that you had seen the representation with deep
interest--and these actors are doubtless the successors of those you
saw. Of course we went to the theatre. And the Christ was, without
exaggeration, beautiful. All the rest was inferior, and might even
have had a painful approach to the ludicrous; but both the person and
the action of the Jesus were fine enough to overpower all meaner
impressions. Mr. Lewes, who, you know, is keenly alive to everything
"stagey" in physiognomy and gesture, felt what I am saying quite as
much as I did, and was much moved.

Rotterdam, with the grand approach to it by the broad river; the rich
red brick of the houses; the canals, uniformly planted with trees, and
crowded with the bright brown masts of the Dutch boats--is far finer
than Amsterdam. The color of Amsterdam is ugly; the houses are of a
chocolate color, almost black (an artificial tinge given to the
bricks), and the woodwork on them screams out in ugly patches of
cream-color; the canals have no trees along their sides, and the
boats are infrequent. We looked about for the very Portuguese
synagogue where Spinoza was nearly assassinated as he came from
worship. But it no longer exists. There are no less than three
Portuguese synagogues now--very large and handsome. And in the evening
we went to see the worship there. Not a woman was present, but of
devout men not a few--a curious reversal of what one sees in other
temples. The chanting and the swaying about of the bodies--almost a
wriggling--are not beautiful to the sense; but I fairly cried at
witnessing this faint symbolism of a religion of sublime, far-off
memories. The skulls of St. Ursula's eleven thousand virgins seem a
modern suggestion compared with the Jewish Synagogue. At Schwalbach
and Schlangenbad our life was led chiefly in the beech woods, which we
had all to ourselves, the guests usually confining themselves to the
nearer promenades. The guests, of course, were few in that serious
time; and between war and cholera we felt our position as health--and
pleasure--seekers somewhat contemptible.

There is no end to what one could say, if one did not feel that long
letters cut pieces not to be spared out of the solid day.

I think I have earned that you should write me one of those perfect
letters in which you make me see everything you like about yourself
and others.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1866.]

_Aug. 30._--I have taken up the idea of my drama, "The Spanish Gypsy,"
again, and am reading on Spanish subjects--Bouterwek, Sismondi,
Depping, Llorante, etc.

[Sidenote: Letter to Frederic Harrison, 15th Aug. 1866.]

I have read several times your letter of the 19th, which I found
awaiting me on my return, and I shall read it many times again. Pray
do not even say, or inwardly suspect, that anything you take the
trouble to write to me will not be valued. On the contrary, please to
imagine as well as you can the experience of a mind morbidly
desponding, of a consciousness tending more and more to consist in
memories of error and imperfection rather than in a strengthening
sense of achievement--and then consider how such a mind must need the
support of sympathy and approval from those who are capable of
understanding its aims. I assure you your letter is an evidence of a
fuller understanding than I have ever had expressed to me before. And
if I needed to give emphasis to this simple statement, I should
suggest to you all the miseries one's obstinate egoism endures from
the fact of being a writer of novels--books which the dullest and
silliest reader thinks himself competent to deliver an opinion on. But
I despise myself for feeling any annoyance at these trivial things.

That is a tremendously difficult problem which you have laid before
me; and I think you see its difficulties, though they can hardly press
upon you as they do on me, who have gone through again and again the
severe effort of trying to make certain ideas thoroughly incarnate, as
if they had revealed themselves to me first in the flesh and not in
the spirit. I think æsthetic teaching is the highest of all teaching,
because it deals with life in its highest complexity. But if it ceases
to be purely æsthetic--if it lapses anywhere from the picture to the
diagram--it becomes the most offensive of all teaching. Avowed Utopias
are not offensive, because they are understood to have a scientific
and expository character: they do not pretend to work on the emotions,
or couldn't do it if they did pretend. I am sure, from your own
statement, that you see this quite clearly. Well, then, consider the
sort of agonizing labor to an English-fed imagination to make out a
sufficiently real background for the desired picture--to get
breathing, individual forms, and group them in the needful relations,
so that the presentation will lay hold on the emotions as human
experience--will, as you say, "flash" conviction on the world by means
of aroused sympathy.

I took unspeakable pains in preparing to write "Romola"--neglecting
nothing I could find that would help me to what I may call the "idiom"
of Florence, in the largest sense one could stretch the word to; and
then I was only trying to give _some_ out of the normal relations. I
felt that the necessary idealization could only be attained by adopting
the clothing of the past. And again, it is my way (rather too much so,
perhaps) to urge the human sanctities through tragedy--through pity and
terror, as well as admiration and delight. I only say all this to show
the tenfold arduousness of such a work as the one your problem demands.
On the other hand, my whole soul goes with your desire that it should
be done; and I shall at least keep the great possibility (or
impossibility) perpetually in my mind, as something towards which I
must strive, though it may be that I can do so only in a fragmentary
way.

At present I am going to take up again a work which I laid down before
writing "Felix." It is--_but, please, let this be a secret between
ourselves_--an attempt at a drama, which I put aside at Mr. Lewes's
request, after writing four acts, precisely because it was in that
stage of creation--or _Werden_--in which the idea of the characters
predominates over the incarnation. Now I read it again, I find it
impossible to abandon it; the conceptions move me deeply, and they
have never been wrought out before. There is not a thought or symbol
that I do not long to use: but the whole requires recasting; and, as I
never recast anything before, I think of the issue very doubtfully.
When one has to work out the dramatic action for one's self, under the
inspiration of an idea, instead of having a grand myth or an Italian
novel ready to one's hand, one feels anything but omnipotent. Not that
I should have done any better if I had had the myth or the novel, for
I am not a good user of opportunities. I think I have the right
_locus_ and historic conditions, but much else is wanting.

I have not, of course, said half what I meant to say; but I hope
opportunities of exchanging thoughts will not be wanting between us.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 6th Sept. 1866.]

It is so long since we exchanged letters, that I feel inclined to
break the silence by telling you that I have been reading with much
interest the "Operations of War," which you enriched me with. Also
that I have had a pretty note, in aged handwriting, from Dean Ramsay,
with a present of his "Reminiscences of Scottish Life." I suppose you
know him quite well, but I never heard you mention him. Also--what
will amuse you--that my readers take quite a tender care of my text,
writing to me to tell me of a misprint, or of "one phrase" which they
entreat to have altered, that no blemish may disfigure "Felix." Dr.
Althaus has sent me word of a misprint which I am glad to know of--or,
rather, of a word slipped out in the third volume. "She _saw_ streaks
of light, etc. ... _and_ sounds." It must be corrected when the
opportunity comes.

We are very well, and I am swimming in Spanish history and literature.
I feel as if I were molesting you with a letter without any good
excuse, but you are not bound to write again until a wet day makes
golf impossible, and creates a dreariness in which even letter-writing
seems like a recreation.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 11th Sept. 1866.]

I am glad to know that Dean Ramsay is a friend of yours. His sympathy
was worth having, and I at once wrote to thank him. Another
wonderfully lively old man--Sir Henry Holland--came to see me about
two Sundays ago, to bid me good-bye before going on an excursion
to--North America!--and to tell me that he had just been re-reading
"Adam Bede" for the fourth time. "I often read in it, you know,
besides. But this is the fourth time quite through." I, of course,
with the mother's egoism on behalf of the youngest born, was jealous
for "Felix." Is there any possibility of satisfying an author? But one
or two things that George read out to me from an article in
_Macmillan's Magazine_, by Mr. Mozley, did satisfy me. And yet I
sicken again with despondency under the sense that the most carefully
written books lie, both outside and inside people's minds, deep
undermost in a heap of trash.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1866.]

_Sept. 15._--Finished Depping's "Juifs au Moyen Âge." Reading Chaucer,
to study English. Also reading on Acoustics, Musical Instruments, etc.

_Oct. 15._--Recommenced "The Spanish Gypsy," intending to give it a
new form.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 22d Nov. 1866.]

For a wonder I remembered the day of the month, and felt a delightful
confidence that I should have a letter from her who always remembers
such things at the right moment. You will hardly believe in my
imbecility. I can never be quite sure whether your birthday is the
21st or the 23d. I know every one must think the worse of me for this
want of retentiveness that seems a part of affection; and it is only
justice that they should. Nevertheless I am not quite destitute of
lovingness and gratitude, and perhaps the consciousness of my own
defect makes me feel your goodness the more keenly. I shall reckon it
part of the next year's happiness for me if it brings a great deal of
happiness to you. That will depend somewhat--perhaps chiefly--on the
satisfaction you have in giving shape to your ideas. But you say
nothing on that subject.

We knew about Faraday's preaching, but not of his loss of faculty. I
begin to think of such things as very near to me--I mean, decay of
power and health. But I find age has its fresh elements of
cheerfulness.

Bless you, dear Sara, for all the kindness of many years, and for the
newest kindness that comes to me this morning. I am very well now, and
able to enjoy my happiness. One has happiness sometimes without being
able to enjoy it.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1866.]

_Nov. 22._--Reading Renan's "Histoire des Langues Sémitiques"--Ticknor's
"Spanish Literature."

_Dec. 6._--We returned from Tunbridge Wells, where we have been for a
week. I have been reading Cornewall Lewis's "Astronomy of the
Ancients," Ockley's "History of the Saracens," "Astronomical
Geography," and Spanish ballads on Bernardo del Carpio.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 7th Dec. 1866.]

We have been to Tunbridge Wells for a week, hoping to get plenty of
fresh air, and walking in that sandy, undulating country. But for
three days it rained incessantly.

No; I don't feel as if my faculties were failing me. On the contrary,
I enjoy all subjects--all study--more than I ever did in my life
before. But that very fact makes me more in need of resignation to the
certain approach of age and death. Science, history, poetry--I don't
know which draws me most, and there is little time left me for any
one of them. I learned Spanish last year but one, and see new vistas
everywhere. That makes me think of time thrown away when I was
young--time that I should be so glad of now. I could enjoy everything,
from arithmetic to antiquarianism, if I had large spaces of life
before me. But instead of that I have a very small space. Unfeigned,
unselfish, cheerful resignation is difficult. But I strive to get it.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1866.]

_Dec. 11._--Ill ever since I came home, so that the days seem to have
made a muddy flood, sweeping away all labor and all growth.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 22d Dec. 1866.]

Just before we received Dr. Congreve's letter we had changed our
plans. George's increasing weakness and the more and more frequent
intervals in which he became unable to work, made me at last urge him
to give up the idea of "finishing," which often besets us vainly. It
will really be better for the work as well as for himself that he
should let it wait. However, I care about nothing just now except that
he should be doing all he can to get better. So we start next Thursday
for Bordeaux, staying two days in Paris on our way. Madame Mohl writes
us word that she hears from friends of the delicious weather--mild,
sunny weather--to be had now on the French southwestern and
southeastern coast. You will all wish us well on our journey, I know.
But _I_ wish I could carry a happier thought about you than that of
your being an invalid. I shall write to you when we are at Biarritz or
some other place that suits us, and when I have something good to
tell. No; in any case I shall write, because I shall want to hear all
about you. Tell Dr. Congreve we carry the "Politique" with us. Mr.
Lewes gets more and more impressed by it, and also by what he is able
to understand of the "Synthèse." I am writing in the dark. Farewell.
With best love to Emily, and dutiful regards to Dr. Congreve.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1866.]

_Dec. 27._--Set off in the evening on our journey to the south.


_SUMMARY._

JANUARY, 1866, TO DECEMBER, 1866.

     Letters to Frederic Harrison on Industrial
     Co-operation--Consults him about law in "Felix Holt"--Asks
     his opinion on other questions--Letter to Mrs.
     Congreve--Visit to Tunbridge Wells--Reading Comte's
     "Synthèse"--Letter to F. Harrison on "case" for "Felix
     Holt"--Letter to Miss Hennell--Joy in the world getting
     better--Letter to Madame Bodichon--"Felix Holt" growing like
     a sickly child--Want of sincerity in England--Desire for
     knowledge increases--Blackwood offers £5000 for "Felix
     Holt"--Letters to John Blackwood renewing
     correspondence--Thanks for encouragement--Painstaking with
     "Felix Holt"--Letter to F. Harrison on legal points--The book
     finished--Inscription--Letter of adieu to Mrs.
     Congreve--Letter to Mrs. Bray--Excitement of finishing "Felix
     Holt"--Journey to Holland and Germany--Letter to Mrs.
     Congreve from Schwalbach--Return to the Priory--Letter to F.
     Harrison asking for sympathy--Letter to John
     Blackwood--Colonel Hamley--Letter to Miss Hennell describing
     German trip--Miracle play at Antwerp--Amsterdam
     synagogue--Takes up drama "The Spanish Gypsy" again--Reading
     on Spanish subjects--Letter to F. Harrison--Need of
     sympathy--Æsthetic teaching--Tells him of the proposed
     drama--Letters to John Blackwood--Dean Ramsay--Sir Henry
     Holland--Article on "Felix Holt" in _Macmillan's
     Magazine_--"The Spanish Gypsy" recommenced--Reading Renan's
     "Histoire des Langues Sémitiques" and Ticknor's "Spanish
     Literature"--Visit to Tunbridge Wells for a week--Reading
     Cornewall Lewis's "Astronomy of the Ancients"--Ockley's
     "History of the Saracens," and Spanish Ballads--Letter to
     Miss Hennell--Enjoyment of study--Depression--Letter of adieu
     to Mrs. Congreve--Set off on journey to Spain.


END OF VOL. II.


       *       *       *       *       *


Transcriber's Notes:

Obvious typographical errors were repaired.

Duplicate sidenotes (repeated at the top of continuation pages) were
deleted.

Latin-1 file: _underscores_ enclose italicized content.

Sidenote at the bottom of p. 215, and repeated on continuation p. 216,
"Letter to Miss Sara Hennell"--p. 215 sidenote (retained) shows "18th
April," but continuation sidenote on p. 216 (deleted) shows "13th
April."

Sidenote p. 227, "Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 12th Aug.
1861"--original reads "1860."





GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE

VOL. III.--SUNSET


"OUR FINEST HOPE IS FINEST MEMORY"


[Illustration: No. 4 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea.]




            GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE
  _as related in her Letters and Journals_

     ARRANGED AND EDITED BY HER HUSBAND
                J. W. CROSS

             WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

        IN THREE VOLUMES.--VOLUME III


                 NEW YORK
      HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE




GEORGE ELIOT'S WORKS.

_LIBRARY EDITION._

     ADAM BEDE. Illustrated. 12mo, Cloth, $1.25.

     DANIEL DERONDA. 2 vols., 12mo, Cloth, $2.50.

     ESSAYS and LEAVES FROM A NOTE-BOOK. 12mo, Cloth, $1.25.

     FELIX HOLT, THE RADICAL. Illustrated. 12mo, Cloth, $1.25.

     MIDDLEMARCH. 2 vols., 12mo, Cloth, $2.50.

     ROMOLA. Illustrated. 12mo, Cloth, $1.25.

     SCENES OF CLERICAL LIFE, and SILAS MARNER. Illustrated.
     12mo, Cloth, $1.25.

     THE IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 12mo, Cloth, $1.25.

     THE MILL ON THE FLOSS. Illustrated. 12mo, Cloth, $1.25.


PUBLISHED BY HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK.

HARPER & BROTHERS _will send any of the above volumes by mail, postage
prepaid, to any part of the United States or Canada, on receipt of the
price. For other editions of George Eliot's works published by Harper
& Brothers see advertisement at end of third volume_.




CONTENTS OF VOL. III.


     CHAPTER XIV.
     JANUARY, 1867, TO DECEMBER, 1867.

       Tour in Spain                                      Page  1


     CHAPTER XV.
     JANUARY, 1868, TO DECEMBER, 1868.

       "The Spanish Gypsy"                                     24


     CHAPTER XVI.
     JANUARY, 1869, TO DECEMBER, 1872.

       Poems--"Middlemarch"                                    55


     CHAPTER XVII.
     JANUARY, 1873, TO DECEMBER, 1875.

       "Brewing," "Deronda"                                   138


     CHAPTER XVIII.
     MARCH, 1876, TO NOVEMBER, 1878.

       "Daniel Deronda"--Illness and Death of Mr. Lewes       197


     CHAPTER XIX.
     JANUARY, 1879, TO 22D DECEMBER, 1880.

       "Theophrastus Such"--Marriage with Mr. Cross--Death    249




ILLUSTRATIONS TO VOL. III.

     NO. 4 CHEYNE WALK, CHELSEA                   _Frontispiece._

     THE HEIGHTS, WITLEY.
     From a Sketch by Mrs. Allingham            _To face p. 216._




GEORGE ELIOT'S LIFE.




CHAPTER XIV.


    The new year of 1867 opens with the description of the journey
    to Spain.

[Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, Jan. 1867, from Bordeaux.]

We prolonged our stay in Paris in order to see Madame Mohl, who was
very good to us; invited the Scherers and other interesting people to
meet us at dinner on the 29th, and tempted us to stay and breakfast
with her on the 31st, by promising to invite Renan, which she did
successfully, and so procured us a bit of experience that we were glad
to have, over and above the pleasure of seeing a little more of
herself and M. Mohl. I like them both, and wish there were a chance of
knowing them better. We paid for our pleasure by being obliged to walk
in the rain (from the impossibility of getting a carriage) all the way
from the Rue de Rivoli--where a charitable German printer, who had
taken us up in his _fiacre_, was obliged to set us down--to the Hôtel
du Helder, through streets literally jammed with carriages and
omnibuses, carrying people who were doing the severe social duties of
the last day in the year. The rain it raineth every day, with the
exception of yesterday; we can't travel away from it, apparently. But
we start in desperation for Bayonne in half an hour.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 16th Jan. 1867, from Biarritz.]

Snow on the ground here, too--more, we are told, than has been seen
here for fifteen years before. But it has been obliging enough to
fall in the night, and the sky is glorious this morning, as it was
yesterday. Sunday was the one exception since the 6th, when we arrived
here to a state of weather which has allowed us to be out of doors the
greater part of our daylight. We think it curious that, among the many
persons who have talked to us about Biarritz, the Brownings alone have
ever spoken of its natural beauties; yet these are transcendent. We
agree that the sea never seemed so magnificent to us before, though we
have seen the Atlantic breaking on the rocks at Ilfracombe and on the
great granite walls of the Scilly Isles. In the southern division of
the bay we see the sun set over the Pyrenees; and in the northern we
have two splendid stretches of sand, one with huge fragments of dark
rock scattered about for the waves to leap over, the other an unbroken
level, firm to the feet, where the hindmost line of wave sends up its
spray on the horizon like a suddenly rising cloud. This part of the
bay is worthily called the Chambre de l'Amour; and we have its
beauties all to ourselves, which, alas! in this stage of the world,
one can't help feeling to be an advantage. The few families and
bachelors who are here (chiefly English) scarcely ever come across our
path. The days pass so rapidly, we can hardly believe in their number
when we come to count them. After breakfast we both read the
"Politique"--George one volume and I another--interrupting each other
continually with questions and remarks. That morning study keeps me in
a state of enthusiasm through the day--a moral glow, which is a sort
of _milieu subjectif_ for the sublime sea and sky. Mr. Lewes is
converted to the warmest admiration of the chapter on language in the
third volume, which about three years ago he thought slightly of. I
think the first chapter of the fourth volume is among the finest of
all, and the most finely written. My gratitude increases continually
for the illumination Comte has contributed to my life. But we both of
us study with a sense of having still much to learn and to understand.
About ten or half-past ten we go out for our morning walk; and then,
while we plunge about in the sand or march along the cliff, George
draws out a book and tries my paces in Spanish, demanding a
quick-as-light translation of nouns and phrases. Presently I retort
upon him, and prove that it is easier to ask than to answer. We find
this system of _vivâ-voce_ mutual instruction so successful that we
are disgusted with ourselves for not having used it before through all
our many years of companionship; and we are making projects for giving
new interest to Regent's Park by pursuing all sorts of studies in the
same way there. We seldom come indoors till one o'clock, and we turn
out again at three, often remaining to see the sunset. One other thing
I have been reading here which I must tell you of. It is a series of
three papers by Saveney, in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ of last year,
on "La Physique Moderne," an excellent summary, giving a glimpse of
the great vista opened in that region. I think you would like to read
them when you are strong enough for that sort of exertion.

We stayed three days in Paris, and passed our time very agreeably. The
first day we dined with Madame Mohl, who had kindly invited Professor
Scherer and his wife, Jules Simon, Lomenie, Lavergne, "and others" to
meet us. That was on the Saturday, and she tempted us to stay the
following Monday by saying she would invite Renan to breakfast with
us. Renan's appearance is something between the Catholic priest and
the dissenting minister. His manners are very amiable, his talk
pleasant, but not distinguished. We are entertaining great projects as
to our further journeying. It will be best for you to address _Poste
Restante_, Barcelona.

[Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 2d Feb. 1867.]

Are you astonished to see our whereabouts? We left Biarritz for San
Sebastian, where we stayed three days; and both there and all our way
to Barcelona our life has been a succession of delights. We have had
perfect weather, blue skies, and a warm sun. We travelled from San
Sebastian to Saragossa, where we passed two nights; then to Lerida for
one night, and yesterday to Barcelona. You know the scenery from San
Sebastian to Alsasua, through the lower Pyrenees, because it lies on
the way to Burgos and Madrid. At Alsasua we turned off through Navarre
into Aragon, seeing famous Pampeluna, looking as beautiful as it did
ages ago among the grand hills. At Saragossa the scene was thoroughly
changed; all through Aragon, as far as we could see, I should think
the country resembles the highlands of Central Spain. There is the
most striking effect of hills, flanking the plain of Saragossa, I ever
saw. They are of palish clay, washed by the rains into undulating
forms, and some slight herbage upon them makes the shadows of an
exquisite blue.

These hills accompanied us in the distance all the way through Aragon,
the snowy mountains topping them in the far distance. The land is all
pale brown, the numerous towns and villages just match the land, and
so do the sheepfolds, built of mud or stone. The herbage is all of an
ashy green. Perhaps if I had been in Africa I should say, as you do,
that the country reminded me of Africa; as it is, I think of all I
have read about the East. The men who look on while others work at
Saragossa also seem to belong to the East, with a great striped
blanket wrapped grandly round them, and a kerchief tied about their
hair. But though Aragon was held by the Moors longer than any part of
Northern Spain, the features and skins of the people seem to me to
bear less traces of the mixture there must have been than one would
fairly expect. Saragossa has a grand character still, in spite of the
stucco with which the people have daubed the beautiful small brick of
which the houses are built. Here and there one sees a house left
undesecrated by stucco; and all of them have the fluted tiles and the
broad eaves beautifully ornamented. Again, one side of the old
cathedral still shows the exquisite inlaid work which, in the
_façade_, has been overlaid hideously. Gradually, as we left Aragon
and entered Catalonia, the face of the country changed, and we had
almost every sort of beauty in succession; last of all, between
Monserrat and Barcelona, a perfect garden, with the richest red
soil--blossoms on the plum and cherry trees, aloes thick in the
hedges. At present we are waiting for the Spanish hardships to begin.
Even at Lerida, a place scarcely at all affected by foreign
travellers, we were perfectly comfortable--and such sights! The people
scattered on the brown slopes of rough earth round the fortress--the
women knitting, etc., the men playing at cards, one wonderful, gaudily
dressed group; another of handsome gypsies. We are actually going by
steam-boat to Alicante, and from Alicante to Malaga. Then we mean to
see Granada, Cordova, and Seville. We shall only stay here a few
days--if this weather continues.

[Sidenote: Letter to Frederic Harrison, 18th Feb. 1867, from Granada.]

Your kind letter, written on the 5th, reached me here this morning. I
had not heard of the criticism in the _Edinburgh_. Mr. Lewes read the
article, but did not tell me of the reviewer's legal wisdom, thinking
that it would only vex me to no purpose. However, I had felt sure that
something of that sort must have appeared in one review article or
another. I am heartily glad and grateful that you have helped justice
in general, as well as justice to me in particular, by getting the
vindication written for the _Pall Mall_. It was the best possible
measure to adopt. Since we left Barcelona, a fortnight ago, we have
seen no English papers, so that we have been in the dark as to English
news.

Were you not surprised to hear that we had come so far? The journey
from San Sebastian by Saragossa and Lerida turned out to be so easy
and delightful that we ceased to tremble, and determined to carry out
our project of going by steamer to Alicante and Malaga. You cannot do
better than follow our example; I mean, so far as coming to Spain is
concerned. Believe none of the fictions that bookmakers get printed
about the horrors of Spanish hotels and cookery, or the hardships of
Spanish travel--still less about the rudeness of Spaniards. It is true
that we have not yet endured the long railway journeys through Central
Spain, but wherever we have been hitherto we have found nothing
formidable, even for our rickety bodies.

We came hither from Malaga in the _berlina (coupé)_ of the diligence,
and have assured ourselves that Mr. Blackburne's description of a
supposed hen-roost, overturned in the Alameda at Malaga, which proved
to be the Granada diligence, is an invention. The vehicle is
comfortable enough, and the road is perfect; and at the end of it we
have found ourselves in one of the loveliest scenes on earth.

We shall remain here till the 23d, and then go to Cordova first, to
Seville next, and finally to Madrid, making our way homeward from
thence by easy stages. We expect to be in the smoky haze of London
again soon after the middle of March, if not before.

I wish I could believe that you were all having anything like the
clear skies and warm sun which have cheered our journeying for the
last month. At Alicante we walked among the palm-trees with their
golden fruit hanging in rich clusters, and felt a more delightful
warmth than that of an English summer. Last night we walked out and
saw the towers of the Alhambra, the wide Vega, and the snowy
mountains, by the brilliant moonlight. You see, we are getting a great
deal of pleasure, but we are not working, as you seem charitably to
imagine. We tire ourselves, but only with seeing or going to see
unforgetable things. You will say that we ought to work to better
purpose when we get home. Amen. But just now we read nothing but
Spanish novels--and not much of those. We said good-bye to philosophy
and science when we packed up our trunks at Biarritz.

Please keep some friendship warm for us, that we may not be too much
chilled by the English weather when we get back.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 21st Feb. 1867.]

We are both heartily rejoiced that we came to Spain. It was a great
longing of mine, for, three years ago, I began to interest myself in
Spanish history and literature, and have had a work lying by me,
partly written, the subject of which is connected with Spain. Whether
I shall ever bring it to maturity so as to satisfy myself sufficiently
to print it is a question not settled; but it is a work very near my
heart. We have had perfect weather ever since the 27th of
January--magnificent skies and a summer sun. At Alicante, walking
among the palm-trees, with the bare brown rocks and brown houses in
the background, we fancied ourselves in the tropics; and a gentleman
who travelled with us assured us that the aspect of the country
closely resembled Aden, on the Red Sea. Here, at Granada, of course,
it is much colder, but the sun shines uninterruptedly; and in the
middle of the day, to stand in the sunshine against a wall, reminds me
of my sensations at Florence in the beginning of June. The aspect of
Granada as we first approached it was a slight disappointment to me,
but the beauty of its position can hardly be surpassed. To stand on
one of the towers of the Alhambra and see the sun set behind the dark
mountains of Loja, and send its after-glow on the white summits of the
Sierra Nevada, while the lovely Vega spreads below, ready to yield all
things pleasant to the eye and good for food, is worth a very long,
long journey. We shall start to-morrow evening for Cordova; then we
shall go to Seville, back to Cordova, and on to Madrid.

During our short stay in Paris we went a little into society, and saw,
among other people who interested us, Professor Scherer, of whom you
know something. He charmed me greatly. He is a Genevese, you know, and
does not talk in ready-made epigrams, like a clever Frenchman, but
with well-chosen, moderate words, intended to express what he really
thinks and feels. He is highly cultivated; and his wife, who was with
him, is an Englishwoman of refined, simple manners.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 10th Mch. 1867, from Biarritz.]

At Biarritz again, you see, after our long, delightful journey, in
which we have made a great loop all round the east and through the
centre of Spain. Mr. Lewes says he thinks he never enjoyed a journey
so much, and you will see him so changed--so much plumper and
ruddier--that if pity has entered much into your regard for him he
will be in danger of losing something by his bodily prosperity. We
crowned our pleasures in Spain with the sight of the pictures in the
Madrid gallery. The skies were as blue at Madrid as they had been
through the previous part of our journeying, but the air was bitterly
cold; and naughty officials receive money for warming the museum, but
find other uses for the money. I caught a severe cold the last day of
our visit, and, after an uncomfortable day and night's railway
journey, arrived at Biarritz, only fit for bed and coddling.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1867.]

_March 16._--This evening we got home after a journey to the south of
Spain. I go to my poem and the construction of two prose works--if
possible.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 18th Mch. 1867.]

We got home on Saturday evening, after as fine a passage from Calais
to Dover as we ever had, even in summer. Your letter was among the
pleasant things that smiled at me on my return, and helped to
reconcile me to the rather rude transition from summer to winter which
we have made in our journey from Biarritz. This morning it is snowing
hard and the wind is roaring--a sufficiently sharp contrast to the hot
sun, the dust, and the mosquitoes of Seville.

We have had a glorious journey. The skies alone, both night and day,
were worth travelling all the way to see. We went to Cordova and
Seville, but we feared the cold of the central lands in the north, and
resisted the temptation to see Toledo, or anything else than the
Madrid pictures, which are transcendent.

Among the letters awaiting me was one from an American travelling in
Europe, who gives me the history of a copy of "Felix Holt," which, he
says, has been read by no end of people, and is now on its way through
Ireland, "where he found many friends anxious but unable to get it."
It seems people nowadays economize in nothing but books. I found also
the letter of a "Conveyancer" in the _Pall Mall_, justifying the law
of "Felix Holt" in answer to the _Edinburgh_ reviewer. I did not know,
before I was told of this letter in reply, that the _Edinburgh_
reviewer had found fault with my law.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1867.]

_March 21._--Received from Blackwood a check for £2166 13_s._ 4_d._,
being the second instalment of £1666 13_s._ 4_d._ towards the £5000
for "Felix Holt," together with £500 as the first instalment of £1000
for ten years' copyright of the cheap edition of my novels.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 21st Mch. 1867.]

Your letters, with the valuable enclosure of a check for £2166 13_s._
4_d._, have come to me this morning, and I am much obliged to you for
your punctual attention.

I long to see a specimen of the cheap edition of the novels. As to the
illustrations, I have adjusted my hopes so as to save myself from any
great shock. When I remember my own childish happiness in a
frightfully illustrated copy of the "Vicar of Wakefield," I can
believe that illustration may be a great good relatively, and that my
own present liking has no weight in the question.

I fancy that the placarding at railway stations is an effective
measure, for Ruskin was never more mistaken than in asserting that
people have no spare time to observe anything in such places. I am a
very poor reader of advertisements, but even I am forced to get them
unpleasantly by heart at the stations.

It is rather a vexatious kind of tribute when people write, as my
American correspondent did, to tell me of one paper-covered American
copy of "Felix Holt" brought to Europe and serving for so many readers
that it was in danger of being worn away under their hands. He, good
man, finds it easy "to urge greater circulation by means of cheap
sale," having "found so many friends in Ireland anxious but unable to
obtain the book." I suppose putting it in a yellow cover with figures
on it, reminding one of the outside of a show, and charging a shilling
for it, is what we are expected to do for the good of mankind. Even
then I fear it would hardly bear the rivalry of "The Pretty Milliner,"
or of "The Horrible Secret."

The work connected with Spain is not a romance. It is--prepare your
fortitude--it is--a poem. I conceived the plot, and wrote nearly the
whole as a drama in 1864. Mr. Lewes advised me to put it by for a time
and take it up again, with a view to recasting it. He thinks hopefully
of it. I need not tell you that I am _not_ hopeful, but I am quite
sure the subject is fine. It is not historic, but has merely historic
connections. The plot was wrought out entirely as an incorporation of
my own ideas. Of course, if it is ever finished to my satisfaction, it
is not a work for us to get money by, but Mr. Lewes urges and insists
that it shall be done. I have also my private projects about an
English novel, but I am afraid of speaking as if I could depend on
myself; at present I am rather dizzy, and not settled down to home
habits of regular occupation.

I understand that the conveyancer who wrote to the _Pall Mall_ is an
excellent lawyer in his department, and the lecturer on Real Property
at the Law Institution.

If a reviewer ever checked himself by considering that a writer whom
he thinks worth praising would take some pains to know the truth about
a matter which is the very hinge of said writer's story, review
articles would cut a shrunken figure.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1867.]

_May 5._--We went to Bouverie Street to hear the first of a course of
lectures on Positivism, delivered by Dr. Congreve. There were present
seventy-five people, chiefly men.

_May 11._--We had Mr. and Mrs. Call to dine with us, and an evening
party afterwards.

_May 12._--We went to hear Dr. Congreve's second lecture. The morning
was thoroughly wet; the audience smaller, but still good.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 13th May, 1867.]

Yesterday we went to the second of a course of lectures which Dr.
Congreve is delivering on Positivism in Bouverie Street. At the first
lecture on the 5th there was a considerable audience--about
seventy-five, chiefly men--of various ranks, from lords and M.P.'s
downwards, or upwards, for what is called social distinction seems to
be in a shifting condition just now. Yesterday the wet weather
doubtless helped to reduce the audience; still it was good. Curiosity
brings some, interest in the subject others, and the rest go with the
wish to express adhesion more or less thorough.

I am afraid you have ceased to care much about pictures, else I should
wish that you could see the Exhibition of Historical Portraits at
Kensington. It is really worth a little fatigue to see the English of
past generations in their habit as they lived--especially when
Gainsborough and Sir Joshua are the painters. But even Sir Godfrey
Kneller delights me occasionally with a finely conceived portrait
carefully painted. There is an unforgetable portrait of Newton by
him.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1867.]

_May 27._--Went with G. to the Academy Exhibition.

_May 29._--Went to the Exhibition of French Pictures--very agreeable
and interesting.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 30th May, 1867.]

I do sympathize with you most emphatically in the desire to see women
socially elevated--educated equally with men, and secured as far as
possible, along with every other breathing creature, from suffering
the exercise of any unrighteous power. That is a broader ground of
sympathy than agreement as to the amount and kind of result that may
be hoped for from a particular measure. But on this special point I am
far from thinking myself an oracle, and on the whole I am inclined to
hope for much good from the serious presentation of women's claims
before Parliament. I thought Mill's speech sober and judicious from
his point of view--Karslake's an abomination.

_À propos_ of what you say about Mr. Congreve, I think you have
mistaken his, or rather Comte's, position. There is no denial of an
unknown cause, but only a denial that such a conception is the proper
basis of a practical religion. It seems to me pre-eminently desirable
that we should learn not to make our personal comfort a standard of
truth.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1867.]

_June 1_ (Saturday).--Wrote up to the moment when Fedalma appears in
the Plaça.

_June 5._--Blackwood dined with us, and I read to him my poem down to
page 56. He showed great delight.

_June 26._--We went to Niton for a fortnight, returning July 10.

_July 16._--Received £2166 13_s._ 4_d._ from Blackwood, being the
final instalment for "Felix Holt," and (£500) copyright for ten
years.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 28th July, 1867.]

Again we take flight! To North Germany this time, and chiefly to
Dresden, where we shall be accessible through the _Poste Restante_. I
am ashamed of saying anything about our health--we are both "objects"
for compassion or contempt, according to the disposition of the
subject who may contemplate us.

Mr. Beesley (I think it was he) sent us Dr. Congreve's pamphlet last
night, and I read it aloud to George. We both felt a cordial
satisfaction in it. We have been a good deal beset by little
engagements with friends and acquaintances lately, and these, with the
preparations for our journey, have been rather too much for me. Mr.
Lewes is acting on the advice of Sir Henry Holland in giving up
zoologizing for the present, because it obliges him to hang down his
head. That is the reason we go inland, and not to the coast, as I
think I hinted to you that we expected to do.

You are sympathetic enough to be glad to hear that we have had
thoroughly cheerful and satisfactory letters from both our boys in
Natal. They are established in their purchased farm, and are very
happy together in their work. Impossible for mortals to have less
trouble than we. I should have written to you earlier this week--for
we start to-morrow--but that I have been laid prostrate with crushing
headache one half of my time, and always going out or seeing some one
the other half.

Farewell, dear. Don't write unless you have a real desire to gossip
with me a little about yourself and our mutual friends. You know I
always like to have news of you, but I shall not think it unkind--I
shall only think you have other things to do--if you are silent.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1867.]

_July 29._--We went to Dover this evening as the start on a journey
into Germany (North).

_Oct. 1._--We returned home after revisiting the scenes of cherished
memories--Ilmenau, Dresden, and Berlin. Of new places we have seen
Wetzlar, Cassel, Eisenach, and Hanover. At Ilmenau I wrote Fedalma's
soliloquy after her scene with Silva, and the following dialogue
between her and Juan. At Dresden I rewrote the whole scene between her
and Zarca.

_Oct. 9._--Reading "Los Judios en Espâna," Percy's "Reliques," "Isis,"
occasionally aloud.

_Oct. 10._--Reading the "Iliad," Book III. Finished "Los Judios en
Espâna," a wretchedly poor book.

_Oct. 11._--Began again Prescott's "Ferdinand and Isabella."

_Oct. 19._--George returned last evening from a walking expedition in
Surrey with Mr. Spencer.

     This entry is an interesting one to me, as it fixes the date
     of the first acquaintance with my family. Mr. Herbert Spencer
     was an old friend of ours, and in the course of their walk he
     and Mr. Lewes happened to pass through Weybridge, where my
     mother at that time lived. They came to dinner. Mr. Lewes,
     with his wonderful social powers, charmed all, and they
     passed a delightful evening. I was myself in America at the
     time, where I was in business as a banker at New York. My
     eldest sister had just then published a little volume of
     poems,[1] which was kindly received by the press. On the
     invitation of Mr. Lewes she went shortly afterwards to see
     George Eliot, then in the zenith of her fame; nor did she
     ever forget the affectionate manner in which the great author
     greeted her. This was the beginning of a close friendship
     between the families, which lasted, and increased in
     intimacy, to the end. Mr. Spencer, in writing to tell me that
     it was he who first made Mr. Lewes acquainted with George
     Eliot, adds, "You will perhaps be struck by the curious
     coincidence that it was also by me that Lewes was introduced
     to your family at Weybridge and remoter issues entailed."

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 20th Oct. 1867.]

Before I got your letter I was about to write to you and direct your
attention to an article in the forthcoming (October) number of the
_Quarterly Review_, on the Talmud. You really must go out of your way
to read it. It is written by one of the greatest Oriental scholars,
the man among living men who probably knows the most about the Talmud;
and you will appreciate the pregnancy of the article. There are also
beautiful, soul-cheering things selected for quotation.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1867.]

_Oct. 31._--I have now inserted all that I think of for the first part
of the "Spanish Gypsy." On Monday I wrote three new Lyrics. I have
also rewritten the first scenes in the gypsy camp, to the end of the
dialogue between Juan and Fedalma. But I have determined to make the
commencement of the second part continue the picture of what goes
forward in Bedmar.

_Nov. 1._--Began this morning Part II. "Silva was marching homeward,"
etc.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 9th Nov. 1867.]

About putting Fedalma in type. There would be advantages, but also
disadvantages; and on these latter I wish to consult you. I have more
than three thousand lines ready in the order I wish them to stand in,
and it would be good to have them in print to read them critically.
Defects reveal themselves more fully in type, and emendations might be
more conveniently made on proofs, since I have given up the idea of
copying the MS. as a whole. On the other hand, _could the thing be
kept private when it had once been in the printing-office_? And I
particularly wish not to have it set afloat, for various reasons.
Among others, I want to keep myself free from all inducements to
premature publication; I mean, publication before I have given my work
as much revision as I can hope to give it while my mind is still
nursing it. Beyond this, delay would be useless. The theory of laying
by poems for nine years may be a fine one, but it could not answer for
me to apply it. I could no more live through one of my books a second
time than I can live through last year again. But I like to keep
checks on myself, and not to create external temptations to do what I
should think foolish in another. If you thought it possible to secure
us against the oozing out of proofs and gossip, the other objections
would be less important. One difficulty is, that in my MS. I have
frequently two readings of the same passage, and, being uncertain
which of them is preferable, I wish them both to stand for future
decision. But perhaps this might be managed in proof. The length of
the poem is at present uncertain, but I feel so strongly what Mr.
Lewes insists on, namely, the evil of making it too long, that I shall
set it before me as a duty not to make it more than nine thousand
lines, and shall be glad if it turns out a little shorter.

Will you think over the whole question? I am sure your mind will
supply any prudential considerations that I may have omitted.

I am vexed by the non-success of the serial edition of the works. It
is not, Heaven knows, that I read my own books or am puffed up about
them, but I have been of late quite astonished by the strengthening
testimonies that have happened to come to me of people who care about
every one of my books, and continue to read them--especially young
men, who are just the class I care most to influence. But what sort of
data can one safely go upon with regard to the success of editions?

"Felix Holt" is immensely tempted by your suggestion,[2] but George
Eliot is severely admonished by his domestic critic not to scatter his
energies.

Mr. Lewes sends his best regards. He is in high spirits about the
poem.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1867.]

_Nov. 22._--Began an "Address to the Working Men, by Felix Holt," at
Blackwood's repeated request.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 22d Nov. 1867.]

Yes, indeed--when I do _not_ reciprocate "chaos is come again." I was
quite sure your letter would come, and was grateful beforehand.

There is a scheme on foot for a Woman's College, or, rather,
University, to be built between London and Cambridge, and to be in
connection with the Cambridge University, sharing its professors,
examinations, and degrees! _Si muove._

[Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 1st Dec. (?) 1867.]

I have written to Miss Davies to ask her to come to see me on Tuesday.

I am much occupied just now, but the better education of women is one
of the objects about which I have _no doubt_, and shall rejoice if
this idea of a college can be carried out.

I see Miss Julia Smith's beautiful handwriting, and am glad to think
of her as your guardian angel.

The author of the glorious article on the Talmud _is_ "that bright
little man" Mr. Deutsch--a very dear, delightful creature.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1867.]

_Dec. 4._--Sent off the MS. of the "Address" to Edinburgh.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 7th Dec. 1867.]

I agree with you about the phrase "Masters of the country."[3] I wrote
that part twice, and originally I distinctly said that the epithet was
false. Afterwards I left that out, preferring to make a stronger
_argumentum ad hominem_, in case any workman believed himself a future
master.

I think it will be better for you to write a preliminary note, washing
your hands of any over-trenchant statements on the part of the
well-meaning Radical. I much prefer that you should do so.

Whatever you agree with will have the advantage of not coming from one
who can be suspected of being a special pleader.

What you say about Fedalma is very cheering. But I am chiefly anxious
about the road still untravelled--the road I have still _zurück zu
legen_.

Mr. Lewes has to request several proofs of Fedalma, to facilitate
revision. But I will leave him to say how many. We shall keep them
strictly to ourselves, you may be sure, so that three or four will be
enough--one for him, one for me, and one for the resolution of our
differences.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood 12th Dec. 1867.]

I am very grateful to you for your generous words about my work. That
you not only feel so much sympathy, but are moved to express it so
fully, is a real help to me.

I am very glad to have had the revise of the "Address." I feel the
danger of not being understood. Perhaps, by a good deal longer
consideration and gradual shaping, I might have put the ideas into a
more concrete, easy form.

Mr. Lewes read the proof of the poem all through to himself for the
first time last night, and expressed great satisfaction in the
impression it produced. Your suggestion of having it put into type is
a benefit for which we have reason to be obliged to you.

I cannot help saying again that it is a strong cordial to me to have
such letters as yours, and to know that I have such a _first reader_
as you.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1867.]

_Dec. 21._--Finished reading "Averroës and Averroisme" and "Les
Médicins Juifs." Reading "First Principles."

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 22d Dec. 1867.]

Our Christmas will be very quiet. On the 27th Mr. Lewes means to start
on a solitary journey to Bonn, and perhaps to Würzburg, for anatomical
purposes. I don't mean that he is going to offer himself as an
anatomical subject, but that he wants to get answers to some questions
bearing on the functions of the nerves. It is a bad time for him to
travel in, but he hopes to be at home again in ten days or a
fortnight, and _I_ hope the run will do him good rather than harm.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1867.]

_Dec. 25._--George and I dined happily alone; he better for weeks than
he has been all the summer before; I more ailing than usual, but with
much mental consolation, part of it being the delight he expresses in
my poem, of which the first part is now in print.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 26th Dec. 1867.]

Thanks for the pretty remembrance. You were not unthought of before it
came. Now, however, I rouse all my courage under the thick fog to tell
you my inward wish--which is that the new year, as it travels on
towards its old age, may bring you many satisfactions undisturbed by
bodily ailment.

Mr. Lewes is going to-morrow on an unprecedented expedition--a rapid
run to Bonn, to make some anatomical researches with Professor Schutze
there. If he needs more than he can get at Bonn, he may go to
Heidelberg and Würzburg. But in any case he will not take more than a
fortnight.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 28th Dec. 1867.]

Public questions which, by a sad process of reduction, become piteous
private questions, hang cloudily over all prospects. The state of
Europe, the threat of a general war, the starvation of multitudes--one
can't help thinking of these things at one's breakfast. Nevertheless,
there is much enjoyment going on, and abundance of rosy children's
parties.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 30th Dec. 1867.]

It is very good and sweet of you to propose to come round for me on
Sunday, and I shall cherish particularly the remembrance of that
kindness. But, on our reading your letter, Mr. Lewes objected, on
grounds which I think just, to my going to any public manifestation
without him, since his absence could not be divined by outsiders.

I am companioned by dyspepsia, and feel life a struggle under the
leaden sky. Mme. Bodichon writes that in Sussex the air is cold and
clear, and the woods and lanes dressed in wintry loveliness of fresh,
grassy patches, mingled with the soft grays and browns of the trees
and hedges. Mr. Harrison shed the agreeable light of his kind eyes on
me yesterday for a brief space; but I hope I was more endurable to my
visitors than to myself, else I think they will not come again. I
object strongly to myself, as a bundle of unpleasant sensations with a
palpitating heart and awkward manners. Impossible to imagine the large
charity I have for people who detest me. But don't you be one of them.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 30th Dec. 1867.]

I am much obliged to you for your handsome check, and still more
gratified that the "Address" has been a satisfaction to you.

I am very glad to hear of your projected visit to town, and shall
hope to have a good batch of MS. for you to carry back. Mr. Lewes is
in an unprecedented state of delight with the poem, now that he is
reading it with close care. He says he is astonished that he can't
find more faults. He is especially pleased with the sense of variety
it gives; and this testimony is worth the more because he urged me to
put the poem by (in 1865) on the ground of monotony. He is really
exultant about it now, and after what you have said to me I know this
will please you.

Hearty wishes that the coming year may bring you much good, and that
the "Spanish Gypsy" may contribute a little to that end.


_SUMMARY._

JANUARY, 1867, TO DECEMBER, 1867.

     Letter to Madame Bodichon from Bordeaux--Madame
     Mohl--Scherer--Renan--Letter to Mrs. Congreve from
     Biarritz--Delight in Comte's "Politique"--Gratitude to him
     for illumination--Learning Spanish--Papers in the _Revue des
     Deux Mondes_, by Saveney--Letter to Madame Bodichon from
     Barcelona--Description of
     scenery--Pampeluna--Saragossa--Lerida--Letter to F. Harrison
     from Granada--The vindication of the _law_ in "Felix
     Holt"--Spanish travelling--Letter to John Blackwood from
     Granada--Alicante--Granada--Letter to Mrs. Congreve from
     Biarritz--Delight of the journey--Madrid pictures--Return to
     the Priory--Letter to John Blackwood--"Felix Holt"--Cheap
     edition of novels--"Spanish Gypsy"--Dr. Congreve's Lectures
     on Positivism--Letter to Miss Hennell--Historical Portraits
     at South Kensington--Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor--Women's
     claims--Comte's position--Fortnight's Visit to the Isle of
     Wight--Letter of adieu to Mrs. Congreve--Two months' visit to
     North Germany--Return to England--Reading on Spanish
     subjects--Mr. Lewes and Mr. Spencer at
     Weybridge--Acquaintance with Mrs. Cross and family--Letter to
     Miss Hennell--Deutsch's article on the Talmud--Letter to
     Blackwood about putting "Spanish Gypsy" in type--"Address to
     Workingmen, by Felix Holt"--Letter to Miss Hennell--Girton
     College--Letter to Madame Bodichon--The higher education of
     women--Letter to John Blackwood on the "Address"--Christmas
     day at the Priory--Letter to Miss Hennell--Visit of Mr. Lewes
     to Bonn--Letter to Mrs. Congreve--Depression--Letter to John
     Blackwood--Mr. Lewes on "Spanish Gypsy."

FOOTNOTES:

[1] "An Old Story and Other Poems," by Elizabeth D. Cross.

[2] "Address to the Working Men."

[3] In the "Address to the Working Men."




CHAPTER XV.


[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 9th Jan. 1868.]

There is a good genius presiding over your gifts--they are so
felicitous. You always give me something of which I have felt the want
beforehand, and can use continually. It is eminently so with my pretty
mittens; there was no little appendage I wanted more; and they are
just as warm at the wrist as I could have wished them to be--warming,
too, as a mark of affection at a time when all cheering things are
doubly welcome.

Mr. Lewes came home last night, and you may imagine that I am glad.
Between the bad weather, bad health, and solitude, I have been so far
unlike the wicked that I have not flourished like the green bay-tree.
To make amends, he--Mr. Lewes, not the wicked--has had a brilliant
time, gained great instruction, and seen some admirable men, who have
received him warmly.

I go out of doors very little, but I shall open the drawer and look at
my mittens on the days when I don't put them on.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1868.]

_Jan._--Engaged in writing Part III. of "Spanish Gypsy."

_Feb. 27._--Returned last evening from a very pleasant visit to
Cambridge.[4] I am still only at p. 5 of Part IV., having had a
wretched month of _malaise_.

_March 1._--Finished Guillemin on the "Heavens," and the 4th Book of
the "Iliad." I shall now read Grote.

_March 6._--Reading Lubbock's "Prehistoric Ages."

_March 8._--Saturday concert. Joachim and Piatti, with Schubert's
Ottett.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 17th Mch. 1868.]

We go to-morrow morning to Torquay for a month, and I can't bear to go
without saying a word of farewell to you. How sadly little we have
seen each other this winter! It will not be so any more, I hope, will
it?

We are both much in need of the change, for Mr. Lewes has got rather
out of sorts again lately. When we come back I shall ask you to come
and look at us before the bloom is off. I should like to know how you
all are; but you have been so little inspired for note-writing lately
that I am afraid to ask you to send me a line to the post-office at
Torquay. I really deserve nothing of my friends at present.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 22d Mch. 1868.]

I don't know whether you have ever seen Torquay. It is pretty, but not
comparable to Ilfracombe; and, like all other easily accessible
sea-places, it is sadly spoiled by wealth and fashion, which leave no
secluded walks, and tattoo all the hills with ugly patterns of roads
and villa gardens. Our selfishness does not adapt itself well to these
on-comings of the millennium.

I am reading about savages and semi-savages, and think that our
religious oracles would do well to study savage ideas by a method of
comparison with their own. Also, I am studying that semi-savage poem,
the "Iliad." How enviable it is to be a classic. When a verse in the
"Iliad" bears six different meanings, and nobody knows which is the
right, a commentator finds this equivocalness in itself admirable!

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, end of Mch. 1868.]

Mr. Lewes quite agrees with you, that it is desirable to announce the
poem. His suggestion is, that it should be simply announced as "a
poem" first, and then a little later as "The Spanish Gypsy," in order
to give a new detail for observation in the second announcement. I
chose the title, "The Spanish Gypsy," a long time ago, because it is a
little in the fashion of the elder dramatists, with whom I have
perhaps more cousinship than with recent poets. Fedalma might be
mistaken for an Italian name, which would create a definite
expectation of a mistaken kind, and is, on other grounds, less to my
taste than "The Spanish Gypsy."

This place is becoming a little London, or London suburb. Everywhere
houses and streets are being built, and Babbacombe will soon be joined
to Torquay.

I almost envy you the excitement of golf, which helps the fresh air to
exhilarate, and gives variety of exercise. Walking can never be so
good as a game--if one loves the game. But when a friend of Mr.
Lewes's urges him angrily to play rackets for his health, the prospect
seems dreary.

We are afraid of being entangled in excursion trains, or crowds of
Easter holiday-makers, in Easter week, and may possibly be driven back
next Wednesday. But we are loath to have our stay so curtailed.

Mr. Lewes sends his kind regards, and pities all of us who are less
interested in ganglionic cells. He is in a state of beatitude about
the poem.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 4th April, 1868.]

We find a few retired walks, and are the less discontented because the
weather is perfect. I hope you are sharing the delights of sunshine
and moonlight. There are no waves here, as you know; but under such
skies as we are having, sameness is so beautiful that we find no
fault, and there is a particular hill at Babbacombe of the richest
Spanish red. On the whole, we are glad we came here, having avoided
all trouble in journeying and settling. But we should not come again
without special call, for in a few years all the hills will be parts
of a London suburb.

How glorious this weather is for the hard workers who are looking
forward to their Easter holiday! But for ourselves, we are rather
afraid of the railway stations in holiday time. Certainly, we are ill
prepared for what Tennyson calls the "To-be," and it is good that we
shall soon pass from this objective existence.

[Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 6th April, 1868.]

I think Ruskin has not been encouraged about women by his many and
persistent attempts to teach them. He seems to have found them wanting
in real scientific interest--bent on sentimentalizing in everything.

What I should like to be sure of, as a result of higher education for
women--a result that will come to pass over my grave--is their
recognition of the great amount of social unproductive labor which
needs to be done by women, and which is now either not done at all or
done wretchedly. No good can come to women, more than to any class of
male mortals, while each aims at doing the highest kind of work, which
ought rather to be held in sanctity as what only the few can do well.
I believe, and I want it to be well shown, that a more thorough
education will tend to do away with the odious vulgarity of our
notions about functions and employment, and to propagate the true
gospel, that the deepest disgrace is to insist on doing work for which
we are unfit--to do work of any sort badly. There are many points of
this kind that want being urged, but they do not come well from me.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 17th April, 1868.]

Your letter came just at the right time to greet us. Thanks for that
pretty remembrance. We are glad to be at home again with our home
comforts around us, though we became deeply in love with Torquay in
the daily heightening of spring beauties, and the glory of perpetual
blue skies. The eight hours' journey (one hour more than we paid for)
was rather disturbing; and, I think, Mr. Lewes has got more zoological
experience than health from our month's delight--but a delight it
really has been to us to have perfect quiet with the red hills, the
sunshine, and the sea.

I shall be absorbed for the next fortnight, so that I cannot allow
myself the sort of pleasure you kindly project for us; and when May
begins, I want you to come and stay a night with us. I shall be ready
by and by for such holiday-making, and you must be good to me. Will
you give Dr. Congreve my thanks for his pamphlet, which I read at
Torquay with great interest? All protests tell, however slowly and
imperceptibly, and a protest against the doctrine that England is to
keep Ireland under all conditions was what I had wished to be made.
But in this matter he will have much more important concurrence than
mine. I am bearing much in mind the great task of the translation.
When it is completed we shall be able and glad to do what we were not
able to do in the case of the "Discours Préliminaire," namely, to take
our share, if we may, in the expenses of publication.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1868.]

_April 16._--Returned home, bringing Book IV. finished.

_April 18._--Went with Mr. Pigott to see Holman Hunt's great picture,
Isabella and the Pot of Basil.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 21st April, 1868.]

I send you by to-day's post the MS. of Book IV., that it may be at
hand whenever there is opportunity for getting it into print, and
letting me have it in that form for correction. It is desirable to get
as forward as we can, in case of the Americans asking for delay after
their reception of the sheets--if they venture to make any
arrangement. I shall send the MS. of Book V. (the last) as soon as
headache will permit, but that is an uncertain limit. We returned from
Torquay on the 16th, leaving the glorious weather behind us. We were
more in love with the place on a better acquaintance: the weather, and
the spring buds, and the choirs of birds, made it seem more of a
paradise to us every day.

The poem will be less tragic than I threatened: Mr. Lewes has
prevailed on me to return to my original conception, and give up the
additional development, which I determined on subsequently. The poem
is rather shorter in consequence. Don't you think that my artistic
deference and pliability deserve that it should also be better in
consequence? I now end it as I determined to end it when I first
conceived the story.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1868.]

_April 25._--Finished the last dialogue between Silva and Fedalma. Mr.
and Mrs. Burne Jones dined with us.

_April 29._--Finished "The Spanish Gypsy."

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 29th Aug. 1868.]

I send you by to-day's post the conclusion of the poem in MS., and the
eighteen sheets of revise. The last book is brief, but I may truly use
the old epigram--that it would have taken less time to make it longer.
It is a great bore that the name of my heroine is wrongly spelled in
all the earlier sheets. It is a fresh proof of the fallibility of our
impressions as to our own doings, that I would have confidently
affirmed the name to be spelled Fedalma (as it ought to be) in my
manuscript. Yet I suppose I should have affirmed falsely, for the _i_
occurs in the slips constantly.

As I shall not see these paged sheets again, will you charitably
assure me that the alterations are safely made?

     Among my wife's papers were four or five pages of MS. headed,
     "Notes on the Spanish Gypsy and Tragedy in General." There is
     no evidence as to the date at which this fragment was
     written, and it seems to have been left unfinished. But there
     was evidently some care to preserve it; and as I think she
     would not have objected to its presentation, I give it here
     exactly as it stands. It completes the history of the poem.

[Sidenote: Notes on "The Spanish Gypsy."]

The subject of "The Spanish Gypsy" was originally suggested to me by a
picture which hangs in the Scuola di' San Rocco at Venice, over the
door of the large Sala containing Tintoretto's frescoes. It is an
Annunciation, said to be by Titian. Of course I had seen numerous
pictures of this subject before; and the subject had always attracted
me. But in this my second visit to the Scuola di' San Rocco, this
small picture of Titian's, pointed out to me for the first time,
brought a new train of thought. It occurred to me that here was a
great dramatic motive of the same class as those used by the Greek
dramatists, yet specifically differing from them. A young maiden,
believing herself to be on the eve of the chief event of her
life--marriage--about to share in the ordinary lot of womanhood, full
of young hope, has suddenly announced to her that she is chosen to
fulfil a great destiny, entailing a terribly different experience from
that of ordinary womanhood. She is chosen, not by any momentary
arbitrariness, but as a result of foregoing hereditary conditions: she
obeys. "Behold the handmaid of the Lord." Here, I thought, is a
subject grander than that of Iphigenia, and it has never been used. I
came home with this in my mind, meaning to give the motive a clothing
in some suitable set of historical and local conditions. My
reflections brought me nothing that would serve me except that moment
in Spanish history when the struggle with the Moors was attaining its
climax, and when there was the gypsy race present under such
conditions as would enable me to get my heroine and the hereditary
claim on her among the gypsies. I required the opposition of race to
give the need for renouncing the expectation of marriage. I could not
use the Jews or the Moors, because the facts of their history were too
conspicuously opposed to the working-out of my catastrophe. Meanwhile
the subject had become more and more pregnant to me. I saw it might be
taken as a symbol of the part which is played in the general human lot
by hereditary conditions in the largest sense, and of the fact that
what we call duty is entirely made up of such conditions; for even in
cases of just antagonism to the narrow view of hereditary claims, the
whole background of the particular struggle is made up of our
inherited nature. Suppose for a moment that our conduct at great
epochs was determined entirely by reflection, without the immediate
intervention of feeling, which supersedes reflection, our
determination as to the right would consist in an adjustment of our
individual needs to the dire necessities of our lot, partly as to our
natural constitution, partly as sharers of life with our
fellow-beings. Tragedy consists in the terrible difficulty of this
adjustment--

     "The dire strife of poor Humanity's afflicted will,
     Struggling in vain with ruthless destiny."

Looking at individual lots, I seemed to see in each the same story,
wrought out with more or less of tragedy, and I determined the
elements of my drama under the influence of these ideas.

In order to judge properly of the dramatic structure it must not be
considered first in the light of doctrinal symbolism, but in the light
of a tragedy representing some grand collision in the human lot. And
it must be judged accordingly. A good tragic subject must represent a
possible, sufficiently probable, not a common, action; and to be
really tragic, it must represent irreparable collision between the
individual and the general (in differing degrees of generality). It is
the individual with whom we sympathize, and the general of which we
recognize the irresistible power. The truth of this test will be seen
by applying it to the greatest tragedies. The collision of Greek
tragedy is often that between hereditary, entailed Nemesis and the
peculiar individual lot, awakening our sympathy, of the particular man
or woman whom the Nemesis is shown to grasp with terrific force.
Sometimes, as in the Oresteia, there is the clashing of two
irreconcilable requirements, two duties, as we should say in these
times. The murder of the father must be avenged by the murder of the
mother, which must again be avenged. These two tragic relations of the
individual and general, and of two irreconcilable "oughts," may
be--will be--seen to be almost always combined. The Greeks were not
taking an artificial, entirely erroneous standpoint in their art--a
standpoint which disappeared altogether with their religion and their
art. They had the same essential elements of life presented to them as
we have, and their art symbolized these in grand schematic forms. The
Prometheus represents the ineffectual struggle to redeem the small
and miserable race of man, against the stronger adverse ordinances
that govern the frame of things with a triumphant power. Coming to
modern tragedies, what is it that makes Othello a great tragic
subject? A story simply of a jealous husband is elevated into a most
pathetic tragedy by the hereditary conditions of Othello's lot, which
give him a subjective ground for distrust. Faust, Rigoletto (Le Roi
s'Amuse), Brutus. It might be a reasonable ground of objection against
the whole structure of "The Spanish Gypsy" if it were shown that the
action is outrageously improbable--lying outside all that can be
congruously conceived of human actions. It is _not_ a reasonable
ground of objection that they would have done better to act otherwise,
any more than it is a reasonable objection against the Iphigenia that
Agamemnon would have done better not to sacrifice his daughter.

As renunciations coming under the same great class, take the
renunciation of marriage, where marriage cannot take place without
entailing misery on the children.

A tragedy has not to expound why the individual must give way to the
general; it has to show that it is compelled to give way; the tragedy
consisting in the struggle involved, and often in the entirely
calamitous issue in spite of a grand submission. Silva presents the
tragedy of entire rebellion; Fedalma of a grand submission, which is
rendered vain by the effects of Silva's rebellion. Zarca, the struggle
for a great end, rendered vain by the surrounding conditions of life.

Now, what is the fact about our individual lots? A woman, say, finds
herself on the earth with an inherited organization; she may be lame,
she may inherit a disease, or what is tantamount to a disease; she
may be a negress, or have other marks of race repulsive in the
community where she is born, etc. One may go on for a long while
without reaching the limits of the commonest inherited misfortunes. It
is almost a mockery to say to such human beings, "Seek your own
happiness." The utmost approach to well-being that can be made in such
a case is through large resignation and acceptance of the inevitable,
with as much effort to overcome any disadvantage as good sense will
show to be attended with a likelihood of success. Any one may say,
that is the dictate of mere rational reflection. But calm can, in
hardly any human organism, be attained by rational reflection.
Happily, we are not left to that. Love, pity, constituting sympathy,
and generous joy with regard to the lot of our fellow-men comes
in--has been growing since the beginning--enormously enhanced by wider
vision of results, by an imagination actively interested in the lot of
mankind generally; and these feelings become piety--_i.e._, loving,
willing submission and heroic Promethean effort towards high
possibilities, which may result from our individual life.

There is really no moral "sanction" but this inward impulse. The will
of God is the same thing as the will of other men, compelling us to
work and avoid what they have seen to be harmful to social existence.
Disjoined from any perceived good, the divine will is simply so much
as we have ascertained of the facts of existence which compel
obedience at our peril. Any other notion comes from the supposition of
arbitrary revelation.

That favorite view, expressed so often in Clough's poems, of doing
duty in blindness as to the result, is likely to deepen the
substitution of egoistic yearnings for really moral impulses. We
cannot be utterly blind to the results of duty, since that cannot be
duty which is not already judged to be for human good. To say the
contrary is to say that mankind have reached no inductions as to what
is for their good or evil.

The art which leaves the soul in despair is laming to the soul, and is
denounced by the healthy sentiment of an active community. The
consolatory elements in "The Spanish Gypsy" are derived from two
convictions or sentiments which so conspicuously pervade it that they
may be said to be its very warp, on which the whole action is woven.
These are: (1) The importance of individual deeds. (2) The
all-sufficiency of the soul's passions in determining sympathetic
action.

In Silva is presented the claim of fidelity to social pledges. In
Fedalma the claim constituted by an hereditary lot less consciously
shared.

With regard to the supremacy of love: if it were a fact without
exception that man or woman never did renounce the joys of love, there
could never have sprung up a notion that such renunciation could
present itself as a duty. If no parents had ever cared for their
children, how could parental affection have been reckoned among the
elements of life? But what are the facts in relation to this matter?
Will any one say that faithfulness to the marriage tie has never been
regarded as a duty, in spite of the presence of the profoundest
passion experienced after marriage? Is Guinivere's conduct the type of
duty?


[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 7th May, 1868.]

Yes, I am at rest now--only a few pages of revise to look at more. My
chief excitement and pleasure in the work are over: for when I have
once written anything, and it is gone out of my power, I think of it
as little as possible. Next to the doing of the thing, of course, Mr.
Lewes's delight in it is the cream of all sympathy, though I care
enough about the sympathy of others to be very grateful for any they
give me. Don't you imagine how the people who consider writing simply
as a money-getting profession will despise me for choosing a work by
which I could only get hundreds, where for a novel I could get
thousands? I cannot help asking you to admire what my husband is,
compared with many possible husbands--I mean, in urging me to produce
a poem rather than anything in a worldly sense more profitable. I
expect a good deal of disgust to be felt towards me in many quarters
for doing what was not looked for from me, and becoming unreadable to
many who have hitherto found me readable and debatable. Religion and
novels every ignorant person feels competent to give an opinion upon,
but _en fait de poésie_, a large number of them "only read
Shakespeare." But enough of that.

[Sidenote: Letter to Frederic Harrison, 25th May, 1868.]

Before we set off to Germany I want to tell you that a copy of "The
Spanish Gypsy" will be sent to you. If there had been time before our
going away I should have written on the fly-leaf that it was offered
by the author "in grateful remembrance." For I especially desire that
you should understand my reasons for asking you to accept the book to
be retrospective and not prospective.

And I am going out of reach of all letters, so that you are free from
any need to write to me, and may let the book lie till you like to
open it.

I give away my books only by exception, and in venturing to make you
an exceptional person in this matter, I am urged by the strong wish
to express my value for the help and sympathy you gave me two years
ago.

     The manuscript of "The Spanish Gypsy" bears the following
     inscription:

     "To my dear--every day dearer--Husband."

[Sidenote: Letter to Frederic Harrison, 26th (?) May, 1868.]

Yes, indeed, I not only remember your letter, but have always kept it
at hand, and have read it many times. Within these latter months I
have seemed to see in the distance a possible poem shaped on your
idea. But it would be better for you to encourage the growth towards
realization in your own mind, rather than trust to transplantation.

My own faint conception is that of a frankly Utopian construction,
freeing the poet from all local embarrassments. Great epics have
always been more or less of this character--only the construction has
been of the past, not of the future.

Write to me _Poste Restante_, Baden-Baden, within the next fortnight.
My head will have got clearer then.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1868.]

_May 26._--We set out this evening on our journey to Baden, spending
the night at Dover. Our route was by Tournay, Liége, Bonn, and
Frankfort, to Baden, where we stayed nine days; then to Petersthal,
where we stayed three weeks; then to Freiburg, St. Märgen, Basle,
Thun, and Interlaken. From Interlaken we came by Fribourg, Neuchâtel,
Dijon, to Paris and Folkestone.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 7th July, 1868.]

We got your letter yesterday here among the peaceful mountain-tops.
After ascending gradually (in a carriage) for nearly four hours, we
found ourselves in a region of grass, corn, and pine woods, so
beautifully varied that we seem to be walking in a great park laid
out for our special delight. The monks, as usual, found out the
friendly solitude, and this place of St. Märgen was originally nothing
but an Augustinian monastery. About three miles off is another place
of like origin, called St. Peter's, formerly a Benedictine monastery,
and still used as a place of preparation for the Catholic priesthood.
The monks have all vanished, but the people are devout Catholics. At
every half-mile by the roadside is a carefully kept crucifix; and last
night, as we were having our supper in the common room of the inn, we
suddenly heard sounds that seemed to me like those of an accordion.
"Is that a zittern?" said Mr. Lewes to the German lady by his side.
"No--it is prayer." The servants, by themselves--the host and hostess
were in the same room with us--were saying their evening prayers,
men's and women's voices blending in unusually correct harmony. The
same loud prayer is heard at morning, noon, and evening, from the
shepherds and workers in the fields. We suppose that the believers in
Mr. Home and in Madame Rachel would pronounce these people "grossly
superstitious." The land is cultivated by rich peasant proprietors,
and the people here, as in Petersthal, look healthy and contented.
This really adds to one's pleasure in seeing natural beauties. In
North Germany, at Ilmenau, we were constantly pained by meeting
peasants who looked underfed and miserable. Unhappily, the weather is
too cold and damp, and our accommodations are too scanty, under such
circumstances, for us to remain here and enjoy the endless walks and
the sunsets that would make up for other negatives in fine, warm
weather. We return to Freiburg to-morrow, and from thence we shall go
on by easy stages through Switzerland, by Thun and Vevay to Geneva,
where I want to see my old friends once more.

We shall be so constantly on the move that it might be a vain trouble
on your part to shoot another letter after such flying birds.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1868.]

_July 23._--Arrived at home (from Baden journey).

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 24th July, 1868.]

We got home last night--sooner than we expected, because we gave up
the round by Geneva, as too long and exciting. I dare say the three
weeks since we heard from you seem very short to you, passed amid your
usual occupations. To us they seem long, for we have been constantly
changing our scene. Our two months have been spent delightfully in
seeing fresh natural beauties, and with the occasional cheering
influence of kind people. But I think we were hardly ever, except in
Spain, so long ignorant of home sayings and doings, for we have been
chiefly in regions innocent even of _Galignani_. The weather with us
has never been oppressively hot; and storms or quiet rains have been
frequent. But our bit of burned-up lawn is significant of the dryness
here. I believe I did not thank you for the offer of "Kinglake," which
we gratefully accept. And will you kindly order a copy of the poem to
be sent to Gerald Massey, Hemel-Hempstead.

A friendly gentleman at Belfast sends me a list of emendations for
some of my verses, which are very characteristic and amusing.

I hope you have kept well through the heat. We are come back in great
force, for such feeble wretches.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 28th July, 1868.]

As to the reviews, we expected them to be written by omniscient
personages, but we did _not_ expect so bad a review as that Mr. Lewes
found in the _Pall Mall_. I have read no notice except that in the
_Spectator_, which was modest in tone. A very silly gentleman, Mr.
Lewes says, undertakes to admonish me in the _Westminster_; and he
thinks the best _literary_ notice of the poem that has come before him
is in the _Athenæum_. After all, I think there would have been good
reason to doubt that the poem had either novelty or any other
considerable intrinsic reason to justify its being written, if the
periodicals had cried out "Hosanna!" I am sure you appreciate all the
conditions better than I can, after your long experience of the
relations between authors and critics. I am serene, because I only
expected the unfavorable. To-day the heat is so great that it is
hardly possible even to read a book that requires any thought. London
is a bad exchange for the mountains.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 30th July, 1868.]

I enclose a list of corrections for the reprint. I am indebted to my
friendly correspondent from Belfast for pointing out several
oversights, which I am ashamed of, after all the proof-reading. But,
among the well-established truths of which I never doubt, the
fallibility of my own brain stands first.

I suppose Mudie and the other librarians will not part with their
copies of the poems quite as soon as they would part with their more
abundant copies of a novel. And this supposition, if warranted, would
be an encouragement to reprint another moderate edition at the same
price. Perhaps, before a cheaper edition is prepared, I may add to the
corrections, but at present my mind resists strongly the effort to go
back on its old work.

I think I never mentioned to you that the occasional use of irregular
verses, and especially verses of twelve syllables, has been a
principle with me, and is found in all the finest writers of blank
verse. I mention it now because, as you have a certain _solidarité_
with my poetical doings, I would not have your soul vexed by the
detective wisdom of critics. Do you happen to remember that saying of
Balzac's, "When I want the world to praise my novels I write a drama;
when I want them to praise my drama I write a novel"?

On the whole, however, I should think I have more to be grateful for
than to grumble at. Mr. Lewes read me out last night some very
generous passages from the _St. Paul's Magazine_.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1868.]

_August._--Reading 1st book of Lucretius, 6th book of the "Iliad,"
"Samson Agonistes," Warton's "History of English Poetry," Grote, 2d
volume, "Marcus Aurelius," "Vita Nuova," vol. iv. chap. i. of the
"Politique Positive," Guest on "English Rhythms," Maurice's "Lectures
on Casuistry."

_Sept. 19._--We returned from a visit to Yorkshire. On Monday we went
to Leeds, and were received by Dr. Clifford Allbut, with whom we
stayed till the middle of the day on Wednesday. Then we went by train
to Ilkley, and from thence took a carriage to Bolton. The weather had
been gray for two days, but on this evening the sun shone out, and we
had a delightful stroll before dinner, getting our first view of the
Priory. On Thursday we spent the whole day in rambling through the
woods to Barden Tower and back. Our comfortable little inn was the Red
Lion, and we were tempted to lengthen our stay. But on Friday morning
the sky was threatening, so we started for Newark, which we had
visited in old days on our expedition to Gainsborough. At Newark we
found our old inn, the Ram, opposite the ruins of the castle, and then
we went for a stroll along the banks of the Trent, seeing some
charming, quiet landscapes.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 20th Sept. 1868.]

This note comes to greet you on your return home, but it cannot greet
you so sweetly as your letter did me on our arrival from Leeds last
night. I think it gave me a deeper pleasure than any I have had for a
long while. I am very grateful to you for it.

We went to Leeds on Monday, and stayed two days with Dr. Allbut. Dr.
Bridges dined with us one day, and we had a great deal of delightful
chat. But I will tell you everything when we see you. Let that be
soon--will you not? We shall be glad of any arrangement that will give
us the pleasure of seeing you, Dr. Congreve, and Emily, either
separately or all together. Please forgive me if I seem very fussy
about your all coming. I want you to understand that we shall feel it
the greatest kindness in you if you will all choose to come, and also
choose _how_ to come--either to lunch or dinner, and either apart or
together. I hope to find that you are much the better for your
journey--better both in body and soul. One has immense need of
encouragement, but it seems to come more easily from the dead than
from the living.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 24th Sept. 1868.]

Your letter gave an additional gusto to my tea and toast this morning.
The greater confidence of the trade in subscribing for the second
edition is, on several grounds, a satisfactory indication; but, as you
observe, we shall be still better pleased to know that the copies are
not slumbering on the counters, but having an active life in the hands
of readers.

I am now going carefully through the poem for the sake of correction.
I have read it through once, and have at present found some ten or
twelve _small_ alterations to be added to those already made. But I
shall go through it again more than once, for I wish to be able to put
"revised" to the third edition, and to leave nothing that my
conscience is not ready to swear by. I think it will be desirable for
me to see proofs. It is possible, in many closely consecutive
readings, not to see errors which strike one immediately on taking up
the pages after a good long interval.

We are feeling much obliged for a copy of "Kinglake," which I am
reading aloud to Mr. Lewes as a part of our evening's entertainment
and edification, beginning again from the beginning.

This week we have had perfect autumnal days, though last week, when we
were in Yorkshire, we also thought that the time of outside chills and
inside fires was beginning.

We do not often see a place which is a good foil for London, but
certainly Leeds is in a lower circle of the great town--_Inferno_.

[Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 25th Sept. 1868.]

I can imagine how delicious your country home has been under the
glorious skies we have been having--glorious even in London. Yesterday
we had Dr. and Mrs. Congreve, and went with them to the Zoological
Gardens, and on our return, about 5 o'clock, I could not help pausing
and exclaiming at the exquisite beauty of the light on Regent's Park,
exalting it into something that the young Turner would have wanted to
paint.

We went to Leeds last week--saw your favorite, David Cox, and thought
of you the while. Certainly there was nothing finer there in landscape
than that Welsh funeral. Among the figure-painters, Watts and old
Philip are supreme.

We went on from Leeds to Bolton, and spent a day in wandering through
the grand woods on the banks of the Wharfe. Altogether, our visit to
Yorkshire was extremely agreeable. Our host, Dr. Allbut, is a good,
clever, graceful man, enough to enable one to be cheerful under the
horrible smoke of ugly Leeds; and the fine hospital, which, he says,
is admirably fitted for its purpose, is another mitigation. You would
like to see the tasteful, subdued ornamentation in the rooms which are
to be sick wards. Each physician is accumulating ornamental objects
for his own ward--chromo-lithographs, etc.--such as will soothe sick
eyes.

It was quite cold in that northerly region. Your picture keeps a
memory of sunshine on my wall even on this dark morning.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 21st Oct. 1868.]

I have gone through the poem twice for the sake of revision, and have
a crop of small corrections--only in one case extending to the
insertion of a new line. But I wish to see the proof-sheets, so that
"Revised by the Author" may be put in the advertisement and on the
title-page.

Unhappily, my health has been unusually bad since we returned from
abroad, so that the time has been a good deal wasted on the endurance
of _malaise_; but I am brooding over many things, and hope that coming
months will not be barren. As to the criticisms, I suppose that better
poets than I have gone through worse receptions. In spite of my reason
and of my low expectations, I am too susceptible to all discouragement
not to have been depressingly affected by some few things in the shape
of criticism which I have been obliged to know. Yet I am ashamed of
caring about anything that cannot be taken as strict evidence against
the value of my book. So far as I have been able to understand, there
is a striking disagreement among the reviewers as to what is best and
what is worst; and the weight of agreement, even on the latter point,
is considerably diminished by the reflection that three different
reviews may be three different phases of the same gentleman, taking
the opportunity of earning as many guineas as he can by making easy
remarks on George Eliot. But, as dear Scott's characters say, "Let
that fly stick in the wa'--when the dirt's dry, it'll rub out." I
shall look at "Doubles and Quits," as you recommend. I read the two
first numbers of "Madame Amelia," and thought them promising.

I sympathize with your melancholy at the prospect of quitting the
country; though, compared with London, beautiful Edinburgh is country.
Perhaps some good, thick mists will come to reconcile you with the
migration.

We have been using the fine autumn days for flights into Kent between
Sundays. The rich woods about Sevenoaks and Chislehurst are a delight
to the eyes, and the stillness is a rest to every nerve.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1868.]

_Oct. 22._--Received a letter from Blackwood, saying that "The Spanish
Gypsy" must soon go into a third edition. I sent my corrections for
it.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 27th Oct. 1868.]

At last I have spirit enough in me to thank you for your valuable
gift, which Emily kindly brought me in her hand. I am grateful for
it--not only because the medallion[5] is a possession which I shall
always hold precious, but also because you thought of me among those
whom you would choose to be its owners.

I hope you are able to enjoy some walking in these sunshiny mornings.
We had a long drive round by Hendon and Finchley yesterday morning,
and drank so much clear air and joy from the sight of trees and fields
that I am quite a new-old creature.

I think you will not be sorry to hear that the "Spanish Gypsy" is so
nearly out of print again that the publishers are preparing a new,
cheaper edition. The second edition was all bought up (subscribed
for) by the booksellers the first day.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 30th Oct. 1868.]

Your pretty letter is irresistible. May we then be with you on Tuesday
somewhere about twelve, and return home on Wednesday by afternoon
daylight? If the weather should be very cold or wet on Tuesday we must
renounce or defer our pleasure, because we are both too rickety to run
the risk of taking cold. So you see we are very much in need of such
sweet friendliness as yours gives us faith in, to keep us cheerful
under the burden of the flesh.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1868.]

_Nov. 3._--Went to dine and sleep at the Congreves, at Wandsworth.

_Nov. 4._--We set off for Sheffield, where we went over a great iron
and steel factory under the guidance of Mr. Benzon. On Saturday, the
7th, we went to Matlock and stayed till Tuesday. I recognized the
objects which I had seen with my father nearly thirty years
before--the turn of the road at Cromford, the Arkwrights' house, and
the cottages with the stone floors chalked in patterns. The landscape
was still rich with autumn leaves.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, Thursday evening, 12th Nov. 1868.]

We got home last night after delicious days spent at Matlock. I was so
renovated that my head was clearer, and I was more unconscious of my
body than at the best of times for many months. But it seemed suddenly
colder when we were in London, and old uneasy sensations are
revisiting us both to-day.

I wonder whether you will soon want to come to town, and will send me
word that you will come and take shelter with us for the night? The
bed is no softer and no broader; but will you not be tempted by a new
carpet and a new bit of matting for your bath?--perhaps there will
even be a new fender? If you want to shop, I will take you in the
brougham.

I think you will be just able to make out this note, written by a
sudden impulse on my knee over the fire.

[Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 16th Nov. 1868.]

No oracle would dare to predict what will be our next migration. Don't
be surprised if we go to the borders of the White Sea, to escape the
fitful fast and loose, hot and cold, of the London climate.

We enjoyed our journey to the north. It was a great experience to me
to see the stupendous iron-works at Sheffield; and then, for a
variety, we went to the quiet and beauty of Matlock, and I recognized
all the spots I had carried in my memory for more than five-and-twenty
years. I drove through that region with my father when I was a young
grig--not very full of hope about my woman's future. I am one of those
perhaps exceptional people whose early, childish dreams were much less
happy than the real outcome of life.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 20th Nov. 1868.]

I think your birthday comes after mine; but I am determined to write
beforehand to prove to you that I bear you in my thoughts without any
external reminder.

I suppose we are both getting too old to care about being wished
_many_ happy returns of the day. We shall be content to wish each
other as many more years as can carry with them some joy and calm
satisfaction in the sense of living. But there is one definite
prospect for you which I may fairly hope for, as I do most
tenderly--the prospect that this time next year you will be looking
back on your achieved work as a good seed-sowing. Some sadness there
must always be in saying good-bye to a work which is done with love;
but there may--I trust there _will_--be a compensating good in feeling
that the thing you yearned to do is gone safely out of reach of
casualties that might have cut it short.

We have been to Sheffield at the seducing invitation of a friend, who
showed us the miraculous iron-works there; and afterwards we turned
aside to beautiful Matlock, where I found again the spots, the turns
of road, the rows of stone cottages, the rushing river Derwent, and
the Arkwright mills--among which I drove with my father when I was in
my teens. We had glorious weather, and I was quite regenerated by the
bracing air. Our friend Mr. Spencer is growing younger with the years.
He really looks brighter and more enjoying than he ever did before,
since he was in the really young, happy time of fresh discussion and
inquiry. His is a friendship which wears well, because of his
truthfulness. He always asks with sympathetic interest how you are
going on.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1868.]

_Nov. 22._--The return of this St. Cecilia's Day finds me in better
health than has been usual with me in these last six months. But I am
not yet engaged in any work that makes a higher life for me--a life
that is young and grows, though in my other life I am getting old and
decaying. It is a day for resolves and determinations. I am meditating
the subject of Timoleon.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 30th Nov. 1868.]

I like to think of you painting the physiological charts, although
they tire your eyes a little; for you must be sure that the good of
such work is of a kind that goes deep into young lives. "Fearfully and
wonderfully made" are words quite unshaken by any theory as to the
making; and I think a great awe in the contemplation of man's delicate
structure, freighted with terrible destinies, is one of the most
important parts of education. A much-writing acquaintance of ours one
day expressed his alarm for "the masses" at the departure of a
religion which had _terror_ in it. Surely terror is provided for
sufficiently in this life of ours--if only the dread could be directed
towards the really dreadful.

[Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 12th Dec. 1868.]

We have been having a little company, and are rejoicing to think that
our duties of this sort are done for the present. We like our studies
and our dual solitude too well to feel company desirable more than one
day a-week. I wish our affection may be with you as some little
cheering influence through the dark months. We hardly estimate enough
the difference of feeling that would come to us if we did not imagine
friendly souls scattered here and there in places that make the chief
part of the world so far as we have known it.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 16th Dec. 1868.]

Tell Dr. Congreve that the "mass of positivism," in the shape of "The
Spanish Gypsy," is so rapidly finding acceptance with the public that
the second edition, being all sold, the third, just published, has
already been demanded to above 700. Do not think that I am becoming an
egotistical author. The news concerns the doctrine, not the writer.

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, 19th Dec. 1868.]

I am moved to congratulate you on writing against the ballot with such
admirably good sense--having just read your "slip" at the
breakfast-table. It has been a source of amazement to me that men
acquainted with practical life can believe in the suppression of
bribery by the ballot, as if bribery in all its Protean forms could
ever disappear by means of a single external arrangement. They might
as well say that our female vanity would disappear at an order that
women should wear felt hats and cloth dresses. It seems to me that you
have put the main unanswerable arguments against the ballot with
vigorous brevity.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 29th Dec. 1868.]

Thanks for letting me know about the meeting. I shall not be able to
join it bodily, but I am glad always to have the possibility of being
with you in thought. I have a twofold sympathy on the occasion, for I
cannot help entering specially into your own wifely anxieties, and I
shall be glad to be assured that Dr. Congreve has borne the excitement
without being afterwards conscious of an excessive strain.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1868.]

_Dec. 30._--I make to-day the last record that I shall enter of the
old year 1868. It has been as rich in blessings as any preceding year
of our double life, and I enjoy a more and more even cheerfulness and
continually increasing power of dwelling on the good that is given to
me and dismissing the thought of small evils. The chief event of the
year to us has been the publication and friendly reception by the
public of "The Spanish Gypsy." The greatest happiness (after our
growing love) which has sprung and flowed onward during the latter
part of the year is George's interest in his psychological inquiries.
I have, perhaps, gained a little higher ground and firmer footing in
some studies, notwithstanding the yearly loss of retentive power. We
have made some new friendships that cheer us with the sense of new
admiration of actual living beings whom we know in the flesh, and who
are kindly disposed towards us. And we have had no real trouble. I
wish we were not in a minority of our fellow-men! I desire no added
blessing for the coming year but this--that I may do some good,
lasting work, and make both my outward and inward habits less
imperfect--that is, more directly tending to the best uses of life.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 31st Dec. 1868.]

Many thanks for the check, which I received yesterday afternoon. Mr.
Lewes is eminently satisfied with the sales; and, indeed, it does
appear from authoritative testimony that the number sold is unusually
large even for what is called a successful poem.

The cheap edition of the novels is so exceptionally attractive in
print, paper, and binding, for 3_s._ 6_d._, that I cannot help
fretting a little at its not getting a more rapid sale. The fact
rather puzzles me, too, in presence of the various proofs that the
books really are liked. I suppose there is some mystery of reduced
prices accounting for the abundant presentation of certain works and
series on the bookstalls at the railways, and the absence of others,
else surely those pretty volumes would have a good chance of being
bought by the travellers whose taste shrinks from the diabolical
red-and-yellow-pictured series. I am sure you must often be in a state
of wonderment as to how the business of the world gets done so as not
to ruin two thirds of the people concerned in it; for, judging from
the silly propositions and requests sometimes made to me by
bald-headed, experienced men, there must be a very thin allowance of
wisdom to the majority of their transactions.

Mr. Lewes is attracted by the biographical studies of George the
Second's time; but last night, after he had done reading about
Berkeley, I heard him laughing over "Doubles and Quits." It is
agreeable to think that I have that bit of cheerful reading in store.

Our first snow fell yesterday, and melted immediately. This morning
the sun is warm on me as I write. The doctors say that the season has
been horribly unhealthy, and that they have been afraid to perform
some operations from the low state of vitality in the patients, due to
the atmospheric conditions. This looks like very wise writing, and
worthy of Molière's "Médecin."

Mr. Lewes joins me in sincere good wishes to Mr. William Blackwood, as
well as yourself, for the coming year--wishes for general happiness.
The chief, particular wish would be that we should all in common look
back next Christmas on something achieved in which we share each
other's satisfaction.

[Sidenote: Letter to Hon. Robert Lytton (now Lord Lytton). No date.
Probably in 1868.]

I am much obliged to you for mentioning, in your letter to Mr. Lewes,
the two cases of inaccuracy (I fear there may be more) which you
remembered in the "Spanish Gypsy." How I came to write Zincálo instead
of Zíncalo is an instance which may be added to many sadder examples
of that mental infirmity which makes our senses of little use to us in
the presence of a strong prepossession. As soon as I had conceived my
story with its gypsy element, I tried to learn all I could about the
names by which the gypsies called themselves, feeling that I should
occasionally need a musical name, remote from the vulgar English
associations which cling to "gypsy." I rejected Gitana, because I
found that the gypsies themselves held the name to be opprobrious; and
Zíncalo--which, with a fine capacity for being wrong, I at once got
into my head as Zincálo--seemed to be, both in sound and meaning, just
what I wanted. Among the books from which I made notes was "Pott, die
Zigeuner," etc.; and in these notes I find that I have copied the sign
of the tonic accent in Romanó, while in the very same sentence I have
not copied it in Zíncalo, though a renewed reference to Pott shows it
in the one word as well as the other. But "my eyes were held"--by a
demon prepossession--"so that I should not see it." Behold the
fallibility of the human brain, and especially of George Eliot's.

I have been questioned about my use of Andalus for Andalusia, but I
had a sufficient authority for that in the "Mohammedan Dynasties,"
translated by Gayangos.

It may interest you, who are familiar with Spanish literature, to know
that after the first sketch of my book was written I read Cervantes'
novel "La Gitanélla," where the hero turns gypsy for love. The novel
promises well in the earlier part, but falls into sad commonplace
towards the end. I have written my explanation partly to show how much
I value your kind help towards correcting my error, and partly to
prove that I was not careless, but simply stupid. For in authorship I
hold carelessness to be a mortal sin.


_SUMMARY._

JANUARY, 1868, TO DECEMBER, 1868.

     Letter to Mrs. Congreve--Mr. Lewes's return from Bonn--First
     visit to Cambridge--Letter to Mrs. Congreve--Month's visit to
     Torquay--Letter to Miss Hennell--Reading the "Iliad"--Letter
     to John Blackwood--Title of "Spanish Gypsy"--Letter to Madame
     Bodichon--Women's work--Letter to Mrs. Congreve--England and
     Ireland--Translation of the "Politique"--Return to London
     from Torquay--Letter to John Blackwood--Ending of "Spanish
     Gypsy"--The poem finished--George Eliot's "Notes on the
     Spanish Gypsy and Tragedy in general"--Suggestion of the poem
     an Annunciation by Titian, at Venice--Motive--Hereditary
     conditions--Gypsy race--Determination of conduct--Nature of
     tragedy--Collision between the individual and the
     general--Greek tragedy--Hereditary misfortunes--Growth of
     human sympathy--Moral sanction is obedience to facts--Duty
     what tends to human good--Letter to Mrs. Bray on the writing
     of poetry instead of novels--Letter to F. Harrison presenting
     copy of "Spanish Gypsy"--Inscription on MS. of "Spanish
     Gypsy"--Letter to F. Harrison on suggestion of a poem--Six
     weeks' journey to Baden, etc.--Letter to John Blackwood from
     St. Märgen--Catholic worship--Return to London--Letters to
     John Blackwood--_Pall Mall_ review of "Spanish Gypsy"--Saying
     of Balzac--Letter to William
     Blackwood--Versification--Reading Lucretius, Homer, Milton,
     Warton, Marcus Aurelius, Dante, Comte, Guest, Maurice--Visit
     to Dr. Clifford Allbut at Leeds--Visit to Newark--Letter to
     Mrs. Congreve--Letters to John Blackwood--Second edition of
     "Spanish Gypsy"--"Kinglake"--Criticisms on "Spanish
     Gypsy"--Visit to the Congreves--Visit to Sheffield with Mr.
     Benzon--Matlock--Letters to Madame Bodichon and Miss Hennell
     on Sheffield journey--Herbert Spencer--Meditating subject of
     Timoleon--Letter to Mrs. Bray--Physiological charts--Letter
     to Madame Bodichon on influence of friends--Letter to Mrs.
     Congreve--Positivism in "Spanish Gypsy"--Letter to Charles
     Bray on vote by ballot--Retrospect of 1868--Letter to John
     Blackwood--The cheap edition of novels--Letter to the Hon.
     Robert Lytton--Pronunciation in "Spanish Gypsy"--Cervantes'
     "La Gitanélla."

FOOTNOTES:

[4] Visit to Mr. W. G. Clark.

[5] Of Comte.




CHAPTER XVI.


[Sidenote: Journal, 1869.]

_Jan. 1._--I have set myself many tasks for the year--I wonder how
many will be accomplished?--a novel called "Middlemarch," a long poem
on Timoleon, and several minor poems.

_Jan. 23._--Since I wrote last I have finished a little poem on old
Agatha. But the last week or two I have been so disturbed in health
that no work prospers. I have made a little way in constructing my new
tale; have been reading a little on philology; have finished the 24th
Book of the "Iliad," the 1st Book of the "Faery Queene," Clough's
poems, and a little about Etruscan things, in Mrs. Grey and Dennis.
Aloud to G. I have been reading some Italian, Ben Jonson's "Alchemist"
and "Volpone," and Bright's speeches, which I am still reading,
besides the first four cantos of "Don Juan." But the last two or three
days I have seemed to live under a leaden pressure--all movement,
mental or bodily, is grievous to me. In the evening read aloud
Bright's fourth speech on India, and a story in Italian. In the
_Spectator_ some interesting facts about loss of memory and "double
life." In the _Revue des Cours_, a lecture by Sir W. Thomson, of
Edinburgh, on the retardation of the earth's motion round its axis.

_Jan. 27._--The last two days I have been writing a rhymed poem on
Boccaccio's story of "Lisa." Aloud I have read Bright's speeches, and
"I Promessi Sposi." To myself I have read Mommsen's "Rome."

_Feb. 6._--We went to the third concert. Madame Schumann played finely
in Mendelssohn's quintet, and a trio of Beethoven's. As a solo she
played the sonata in D minor. In the evening I read aloud a short
speech of Bright's on Ireland, delivered twenty years ago, in which he
insists that nothing will be a remedy for the woes of that country
unless the Church Establishment be annulled: after the lapse of twenty
years the measure is going to be adopted. Then I read aloud a bit of
the "Promessi Sposi," and afterwards the _Spectator_, in which there
is a deservedly high appreciation of Lowell's poems.

_Feb. 14._--Finished the poem from Boccaccio. We had rather a numerous
gathering of friends to-day, and among the rest came Browning, who
talked and quoted admirably _à propos_ of versification. The Rector of
Lincoln thinks the French have the most perfect system of
versification in these modern times!

_Feb. 15._--I prepared and sent off "How Lisa Loved the King" to
Edinburgh.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 15th Feb. 1869.]

I have looked back to the verses in Browning's poem about Elisha, and
I find no mystery in them. The foregoing context for three pages
describes that function of genius which revivifies the past. Man, says
Browning (I am writing from recollection of his general meaning),
cannot create, but he can restore: the poet gives forth of his own
spirit, and reanimates the forms that lie breathless. His use of
Elisha's story is manifestly symbolical, as his mention of Faust
is--the illustration which he abandons the moment before to take up
that of the Hebrew seer. I presume you did not read the context
yourself, but only had the two concluding verses pointed out or quoted
to you by your friends. It is one of the afflictions of authorship to
know that the brains which should be used in understanding a book are
wasted in discussing the hastiest misconceptions about it; and I am
sure you will sympathize enough in this affliction to set any one
right, when you can, about this quotation from Browning.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1869.]

_Feb. 20._--A glorious concert: Hallé, Joachim, and Piatti winding up
with Schubert's trio.

_Feb. 21._--Mr. Deutsch and Mrs. Pattison lunched with us--he in
farewell before going to the East. A rather pleasant gathering of
friends afterwards.

_Feb. 24._--I am reading about plants, and Helmholtz on music. A new
idea of a poem came to me yesterday.

_March 3._--We started on our fourth visit to Italy, viâ France and
the Cornice.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 4th May, 1869, from Paris.]

I found your letter at Florence on our arrival there (on the 23d); but
until now bodily ease and leisure enough to write to you have never
happened to me in the same moments. Our long journey since we left
home on the 3d March, seen from a point of view which, happily, no one
shares with me, has been a history of ailments. In shunning the
English March, we found one quite as disagreeable, without the
mitigation of home comforts; and though we went even as far as Naples
in search of warmth, we never found it until we settled in Rome, at
the beginning of April. Here we had many days of unbroken sunshine,
and enjoyed what we were never able to enjoy during our month's stay
in 1860--the many glorious views of the city and the mountains. The
chief novelty to us in our long route has been the sight of Assisi and
Ravenna; the rest has been a revisiting of scenes already in our
memories; and to most of them we have probably said our last
good-bye. Enough of us and our travels. The only remarkable thing
people can tell of their doings in these days is that they have stayed
at home.

The _Fortnightly_ lay uncut at Mr. Trollope's, and Mr. Lewes had
nothing more pressing to do than to cut it open at the reply to
Professor Huxley.[6] He presently came to me, and said it was
excellent. It delighted him the more because he had just before, at
Rome, alighted on the _Pall Mall_ account of the article, which
falsely represented it as entirely apologetic. At the first spare
moment I plunged into an easy-chair, and read, with thorough
satisfaction in the admirable temper and the force of the reply. We
intend to start for Calais this evening; and as the rain prevents us
from doing anything agreeable out of doors, I have nothing to hinder
me from sitting, with my knees up to my chin, and scribbling, now that
I am become a little sounder in head and in body generally than
beautiful Italy allowed me to be. As beautiful as ever--more
beautiful--it has looked to me on this last visit; and it is the fault
of my _physique_ if it did not agree with me. Pray offer my warmest
sympathy to Dr. Congreve in the anxieties of his difficult task. What
hard work it seems to go on living sometimes! Blessed are the dead.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1869.]

_May 5._--We reached home after our nine weeks' absence. In that time
we have been through France to Marseilles, along the Cornice to
Spezia, then to Pisa, Florence, Naples, Rome, Assisi, Perugia,
Florence again, Ravenna, Bologna, Verona; across the Brenner Pass to
Munich; then to Paris _viâ_ Strasburg. In such a journey there was
necessarily much interest both in renewing old memories and recording
new; but I never had such continuous bad health in travelling as I
have had during these nine weeks. On our arrival at home I found a
delightful letter from Mrs. H. B. Stowe, whom I have never seen,
addressing me as her "dear friend."

     It was during this journey that I, for the first time, saw my
     future wife, at Rome. My eldest sister had married Mr. W. H.
     Bullock (now Mr. W. H. Hall), of Six-Mile-Bottom,
     Cambridgeshire, and they were on their wedding journey at
     Rome when they happened to meet Mr. and Mrs. Lewes by chance
     in the Pamfili Doria Gardens. They saw a good deal of one
     another, and when I arrived, with my mother and another
     sister, we went by invitation to call at the Hôtel Minerva,
     where Mr. Lewes had found rooms on their first arrival in
     Rome. I have a very vivid recollection of George Eliot
     sitting on a sofa with my mother by her side, entirely
     engrossed with her. Mr. Lewes entertained my sister and me on
     the other side of the room. But I was very anxious to hear
     also the conversation on the sofa, as I was better acquainted
     with George Eliot's books than with any other literature. And
     through the dimness of these fifteen years, and all that has
     happened in them, I still seem to hear, as I first heard
     them, the low, earnest, deep, musical tones of her voice; I
     still seem to see the fine brows, with the abundant
     auburn-brown hair framing them, the long head, broadening at
     the back, the gray-blue eyes, constantly changing in
     expression, but always with a very loving, almost
     deprecating, look at my mother, the finely-formed, thin,
     transparent hands, and a whole _Wesen_ that seemed in
     complete harmony with everything one expected to find in the
     author of "Romola." The next day Mr. and Mrs. Lewes went on
     to Assisi and we to Naples, and we did not meet again till
     the following August at Weybridge.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. H. B. Stowe, 8th May, 1869.]

I value very highly the warrant to call you friend which your letter
has given me. It lay awaiting me on our return, the other night, from
a nine weeks' absence in Italy, and it made me almost wish that you
could have a momentary vision of the discouragement--nay, paralyzing
despondency--in which many days of my writing life have been passed,
in order that you might fully understand the good I find in such
sympathy as yours--in such an assurance as you give me that my work
has been worth doing. But I will not dwell on any mental sickness of
mine. The best joy your words give me is the sense of that sweet,
generous feeling in you which dictated them, and I shall always be the
richer because you have in this way made me know you better. I must
tell you that my first glimpse of you as a woman came through a letter
of yours, and charmed me very much. The letter was addressed to Mrs.
Follen; and one morning when I called on her in London (how many years
ago![7]) she was kind enough to read it to me because it contained a
little history of your life, and a sketch of your domestic
circumstances. I remember thinking that it was very kind of you to
write that long letter in reply to the inquiries of one who was
personally unknown to you; and looking back with my present experience
I think it was still kinder than it then appeared. For at that time
you must have been much oppressed with the immediate results of your
fame. I remember, too, that you wrote of your husband as one who was
richer in Hebrew and Greek than in pounds or shillings; and as the
ardent scholar has always been a character of peculiar interest to me,
I have rarely had your image in my mind without the accompanying image
(more or less erroneous) of such a scholar by your side. I shall
welcome the fruit of his Goethe studies, whenever it comes. In the
meantime let me assure you that whoever else gave you that description
of my husband's "History of Philosophy"--namely, "that it was to solve
and settle all things"--he himself never saw it in that light. The
work has been greatly altered, as well as enlarged, in three
successive editions; and his mind is so far from being a captive to
his own written words that he is now engaged in physiological and
psychological researches which are leading him to issues at variance
in some important respects with the views expressed in some of his
published works. He is one of the few human beings I have known who
will often, in the heat of an argument, see, and straightway confess,
that he is in the wrong, instead of trying to shift his ground or use
any other device of vanity.

I have good hopes that your fears are groundless as to the obstacles
your new book may find here from its thorough American character. Most
readers who are likely to be really influenced by writing above the
common order will find that special aspect an added reason for
interest and study, and I dare say you have long seen, as I am
beginning to see with new clearness, that if a book which has any sort
of exquisiteness happens also to be a popular, widely circulated
book, its power over the social mind for any good is, after all, due
to its reception by a few appreciative natures, and is the slow result
of radiation from that narrow circle. I mean, that you can affect a
few souls, and that each of these in turn may affect a few more, but
that no exquisite book tells properly and directly on a multitude,
however largely it may be spread by type and paper. Witness the things
the multitude will say about it, if one is so unhappy as to be obliged
to hear their sayings. I do not write this cynically, but in pure
sadness and pity. Both travelling abroad, and staying at home among
our English sights and sports, one must continually feel how slowly
the centuries work towards the moral good of men. And that thought
lies very close to what you say as to your wonder or conjecture
concerning my religious point of view. I believe that religion, too,
has to be modified--"developed," according to the dominant phrase--and
that a religion more perfect than any yet prevalent must express less
care for personal consolation, and a more deeply-awing sense of
responsibility to man, springing from sympathy with that which of all
things is most certainly known to us, the difficulty of the human lot.
I do not find my temple in Pantheism, which, whatever might be its
value speculatively, could not yield a practical religion, since it is
an attempt to look at the universe from the outside of our relations
to it (that universe) as human beings. As healthy, sane human beings,
we must love and hate--love what is good for mankind, hate what is
evil for mankind. For years of my youth I dwelt in dreams of a
pantheistic sort, falsely supposing that I was enlarging my sympathy.
But I have travelled far away from that time. Letters are necessarily
narrow and fragmentary, and, when one writes on wide subjects, are
liable to create more misunderstanding than illumination. But I have
little anxiety of that kind in writing to you, dear friend and
fellow-laborer, for you have had longer experience than I as a writer,
and fuller experience as a woman, since you have borne children and
known the mother's history from the beginning. I trust your quick and
long-taught mind as an interpreter little liable to mistake me.

When you say, "We live in an orange grove and are planting many more,"
and when I think that you must have abundant family love to cheer you,
it seems to me that you must have a paradise about you. But no list of
circumstances will make a paradise. Nevertheless, I must believe that
the joyous, tender humor of your books clings about your more
immediate life, and makes some of that sunshine for yourself which you
have given to us.

I see the advertisement of "Old Town Folk," and shall eagerly expect
it.

That and every other new link between us will be reverentially valued.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1869.]

_May 8_ (Saturday).--Poor Thornie arrived from Natal, sadly wasted by
suffering.

_May 24._--Sold "Agatha" to Fields & Osgood, for the _Atlantic
Monthly_, for £300.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 26th May, 1869.]

That "disturbance" in my favorite work, with which you and Dr.
Congreve are good enough to sympathize, is unhappily greater now than
it has been for years before. Our poor Thornie came back to us about
seventeen days ago. We can never rejoice enough that we were already
at home, seeing that we held it impossible for him to set out on his
voyage until at least six weeks later than he did. Since he arrived
our lives have been chiefly absorbed by cares for him; and though we
now have a nurse to attend on him constantly, we spend several hours
of the day by his side. There is joy in the midst of our trouble, from
the tenderness towards the sufferer being altogether unchecked by
anything unlovable in him. Thornie's disposition seems to have become
sweeter than ever with the added six years; and there is nothing that
we discern in his character or habits to cause us grief. Enough of our
troubles. I gather from your welcome letter, received this morning,
that there is a good deal of enjoyment for you in your temporary home,
in spite of bad weather and faceache, which I hope will have passed
away when you read this.

Mr. Beesley[8] wrote to me to tell me of his engagement, and on Sunday
we had the pleasure of shaking him by the hand and seeing him look
very happy. His is one of a group of prospective marriages which we
have had announced to us since we came home. Besides Mr. Harrison's,
there is Dr. Allbut's, our charming friend at Leeds. I told Mr.
Beesley that I thought myself magnanimous in really rejoicing at the
engagements of men friends, because, of course, they will be
comparatively indifferent to their old intimates.

Dear Madame Bodichon is a precious help to us. She comes twice a week
to sit with Thornie, and she is wonderfully clever in talking to young
people. One finds out those who have real practical sympathy in times
of trouble.

[Sidenote: Letter to Frederic Harrison, 9th June, 1869.]

Your letter has fulfilled two wishes of mine. It shows me that you
keep me in your kind thoughts, and that you are very happy. I had been
told by our friends, the Nortons, of your engagement, but I knew
nothing more than that bare fact, and your letter gives me more of a
picture. A very pretty picture--for I like to think of your love
having grown imperceptibly along with sweet family affections. I do
heartily share in your happiness, for however space and time may keep
us asunder, you will never to my mind be lost in the distance, but
will hold a place of marked and valued interest quite apart from those
more public hopes about you which I shall not cease to cherish.

Both Mr. Lewes and I shall be delighted to see you any evening. I
imagine that when you are obliged to stay in town the evening will be
the easiest time for you to get out to us. Any time after eight you
will find us thoroughly glad to shake hands with you. Do come when you
can.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1869.]

_July 3._--Finished my reading in Lucretius. Reading Victor Hugo's
"L'homme qui rit;" also the Frau von Hillern's novel, "Ein Arzt der
Seele." This week G. and I have been to Sevenoaks, but were driven
home again by the cold winds and cloudy skies. "Sonnets on
Childhood"--five--finished.

_July 10._--I wrote to Mrs. Stowe, in answer to a second letter of
hers, accompanied by one from her husband.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. H. B. Stowe, 11th July, 1869.]

I hoped before this to have seen our friend, Mrs. Fields, on her
return from Scotland, and to have begged her to send you word of a
domestic affliction which has prevented me from writing to you since I
received your and your husband's valued letters. Immediately on our
return from Italy, Mr. Lewes's second son, a fine young man of
five-and-twenty, returned to us from Natal, wasted by suffering from
a long-standing spinal injury. This was on the 8th of May, and since
then we have both been absorbed in our duties to this poor child, and
have felt our own health and nervous energy insufficient for our
needful activity of body and mind. He is at present no better, and we
look forward to a long trial. Nothing but a trouble so great as this
would have prevented me from writing again to you, not only to thank
you and Professor Stowe for your letters, but also to tell you that I
have received and read "Old Town Folks." I think few of your many
readers can have felt more interest than I have felt in that picture
of an elder generation; for my interest in it has a double root--one,
in my own love for our old-fashioned provincial life, which had its
affinities with a contemporary life, even all across the Atlantic, and
of which I have gathered glimpses in different phases, from my father
and mother, with their relations; the other is, my experimental
acquaintance with some shades of Calvinistic orthodoxy. I think your
way of presenting the religious convictions which are not your own,
except by indirect fellowship, is a triumph of insight and true
tolerance. A thorough comprehension of the mixed moral influence shed
on society by dogmatic systems is rare even among writers, and one
misses it altogether in English drawing-room talk. I thank you
sincerely for the gift (in every sense) of this book, which, I can
see, has been a labor of love.

Both Mr. Lewes and I are deeply interested in the indications which
the Professor gives of his peculiar psychological experience, and we
should feel it a great privilege to learn much more of it from his
lips. It is a rare thing to have such an opportunity of studying
exceptional experience in the testimony of a truthful and in every
way distinguished mind. He will, I am sure, accept the brief thanks
which I can give in this letter, for all that he has generously
written to me. He says, "I have had no connection with any of the
modern movements, except as father confessor;" and I can well believe
that he must be peculiarly sensitive to the repulsive aspects which
those movements present. Your view as to the cause of that "great wave
of spiritualism" which is rushing over America--namely, that it is a
sort of Rachel-cry of bereavement towards the invisible existence of
the loved ones, is deeply affecting. But so far as "spiritualism" (by
which I mean, of course, spirit-communication, by rapping, guidance of
the pencil, etc.) has come within reach of my judgment on our side of
the water, it has appeared to me either as degrading folly, imbecile
in the estimate of evidence, or else as impudent imposture. So far as
my observation and experience have hitherto gone, it has even seemed
to me an impiety to withdraw from the more assured methods of studying
the open secret of the universe any large amount of attention to
alleged manifestations which are so defiled by low adventurers and
their palpable trickeries, so hopelessly involved in all the
doubtfulness of individual testimonies as to phenomena witnessed,
which testimonies are no more true objectively because they are honest
subjectively, than the Ptolemaic system is true because it seemed to
Tycho Brahé a better explanation of the heavenly movements than the
Copernican. This is a brief statement of my position on the subject,
which your letter shows me to have an aspect much more compulsory on
serious attention in America than I can perceive it to have in
England. I should not be as simply truthful as my deep respect for you
demands, if I did not tell you exactly what is my mental attitude in
relation to the phenomena in question. But whatever you print on the
subject and will send me I shall read with attention, and the idea you
give me of the hold which spiritualism has gained on the public mind
in the United States is already a fact of historic importance.

Forgive me, dear friend, if I write in the scantiest manner,
unworthily responding to letters which have touched me profoundly. You
have known so much of life, both in its more external trials and in
the peculiar struggles of a nature which is made twofold in its
demands by the yearnings of the author as well as of the woman, that I
can count on your indulgence and power of understanding my present
inability to correspond by letter.

May I add my kind remembrances to your daughter to the high regard
which I offer to your husband?

[Sidenote: Journal, 1869.]

_July 14._--Returned from Hatfield, after two days' stay.

_July 15._--Began Nisard's "History of French
Literature"--Villehardouin, Joinville, Froissart, Christine de Pisan,
Philippe de Comines, Villers.

_July 16._--Read the articles Phoenicia and Carthage in "Ancient
Geography." Looked into Jewitt's "Universal History" again for
Carthaginian religion. Looked into Sismondi's "Littérature du Midi"
for Roman de la Rose; and ran through the first chapter about the
formation of the Romance languages. Read about _Thallogens_ and
_Acrogens_ in the "Vegetable World." Read Drayton's "Nymphidia"--a
charming poem--a few pages of his "Polyolbion." Re-read Grote,
v.-vii., on Sicilian affairs, down to rise of Dionysius.

_July 18._--Miss Nannie Smith came, after a long absence from England;
Professor Masson and Dr. Bastian, Madame Bodichon, and Dr. Payne. Some
conversation about Saint-Simonism, _à propos_ of the meeting on
Woman's Suffrage the day before, M. Arles Dufour being uneasy because
Mill did not in his speech recognize what women owed to
Saint-Simonism.

_July 19._--Writing an introduction to "Middlemarch." I have just
re-read the 15th Idyll of Theocritus, and have written three more
sonnets. My head uneasy. We went in the afternoon to the old
water-colors, finding that the exhibition was to close at the end of
the week. Burne-Jones's Circe and St. George affected me, by their
colors, more than any of the other pictures--they are poems. In the
evening read Nisard on Rabelais and Marot.

_July 22._--Read Reybaud's book on "Les Réformateurs Modernes." In the
afternoon Mrs. P. Taylor came and saw Thornie, who has been more
uneasy this week, and unwilling to move or come out on the lawn.

_July 23._--Read Theocritus, Id. 16. Meditated characters for
"Middlemarch." Mrs. F. Malleson came.

_July 24._--Still not quite well and clear-headed, so that little
progress is made. I read aloud Fourier and Owen, and thought of
writing something about Utopists.

_July 25._--Read Plato's "Republic" in various parts. After lunch Miss
Nannie Smith, Miss Blythe, Mr. Burton, and Mr. Deutsch. In the evening
I read Nisard, and Littré on Comte.

_Aug. 1._--Since last Sunday I have had an uncomfortable week from
mental and bodily disturbance. I have finished eleven sonnets on
"Brother and Sister," read Littré, Nisard, part of 22d Idyll of
Theocritus, Sainte-Beuve, aloud to G. two evenings. Monday evening
looked through Dickson's "Fallacies of the Faculty." On Tuesday
afternoon we went to the British Museum to see a new bronze, and I was
enchanted with some fragments of glass in the Slade collection, with
dyes of sunset in them. Yesterday, sitting in Thornie's room, I read
through all Shakespeare's "Sonnets." Poor Thornie has had a miserably
unsatisfactory week, making no progress. After lunch came Miss N.
Smith and Miss Blythe, Mr. Burton, Mr. and Mrs. Burne-Jones, and Mr.
Sanderson.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 1st Aug. 1869.]

My last words to you might appear to imply something laughably opposed
to my real meaning. "Think of me only as an example" meant--an example
to be avoided. It was an allusion in my mind to the servant-girl who,
being arrested for theft, said to her fellow-servant, "Take example by
me, Sally." With the usual caprice of language, we say. "Make an
example of her," in that sense of holding up for a warning, which the
poor girl and I intended.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1869.]

_Aug. 2._--Began "Middlemarch" (the Vincy and Featherstone parts).

_Aug. 5._--Thornie during the last two or three days gives much more
hopeful signs: has been much more lively, with more regular appetite
and quieter nights. This morning I finished the first chapter of
"Middlemarch." I am reading Renouard's "History of Medicine."

_Aug. 31._--We went to Weybridge, walked on St. George's Hill, and
lunched with Mrs. Cross and her family.

     This visit to Weybridge is a very memorable one to me,
     because there my own first intimacy with George Eliot began,
     and the bonds with my family were knitted very much closer.
     Mr. and Mrs. Bullock were staying with us; and my sister, who
     had some gift for music, had set one or two of the songs from
     the "Spanish Gypsy." She sang one of them--"On through the
     woods, the pillared pines"--and it affected George Eliot
     deeply. She moved quickly to the piano, and kissed Mrs.
     Bullock very warmly, in her tears. Mr. and Mrs. Lewes were in
     deep trouble owing to the illness of Thornton Lewes; we were
     also in much anxiety as to the approaching confinement of my
     sister with her first child; and I was on the eve of
     departure for America. Sympathetic feelings were strong
     enough to overleap the barrier (often hard to pass) which
     separates acquaintanceship from friendship. A day did the
     work of years. Our visitors had come to the house as
     acquaintances, they left it as lifelong friends. And the
     sequel of that day greatly intensified the intimacy. For
     within a month my sister had died in childbirth, and her
     death called forth one of the most beautiful of George
     Eliot's letters. A month later Thornton Lewes died.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1869.]

_Sept. 1._--I meditated characters and conditions for "Middlemarch,"
which stands still in the beginning of chapter iii.

_Sept. 2._--We spent the morning in Hatfield Park, arriving at home
again at half-past three.

_Sept. 10._--I have achieved little during the last week, except
reading on medical subjects--Encyclopædia about the "Medical
Colleges," "Cullen's Life," Russell's "Heroes of Medicine," etc. I
have also read Aristophanes' "Ecclesiazusoe," and "Macbeth."

_Sept. 11._--I do not feel very confident that I can make anything
satisfactory of "Middlemarch." I have need to remember that other
things which have been accomplished by me were begun under the same
cloud. G. has been reading "Romola" again, and expresses profound
admiration. This is encouraging.

_Sept. 15._--George and I went to Sevenoaks for a couple of nights,
and had some delicious walks.

_Sept. 21._--Finished studying again Bekker's "Charikles." I am
reading Mandeville's Travels. As to my work, _im Stiche gerathen_.
Mrs. Congreve and Miss Bury came; and I asked Mrs. Congreve to get me
some information about provincial hospitals, which is necessary to my
imagining the conditions of my hero.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 21st Sept. 1869.]

As to the Byron subject, nothing can outweigh to my mind the heavy
social injury of familiarizing young minds with the desecration of
family ties. The discussion of the subject in newspapers, periodicals,
and pamphlets is simply odious to me, and I think it a pestilence
likely to leave very ugly marks. One trembles to think how easily that
moral wealth may be lost which it has been the work of ages to produce
in the refinement and differencing of the affectionate relations. As
to the high-flown stuff which is being reproduced about Byron and his
poetry, I am utterly out of sympathy with it. He seems to me the most
_vulgar-minded_ genius that ever produced a great effect in
literature.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1869.]

_Sept. 22._--We went down to Watford for a change.

_Sept. 24._--Returned home this morning because of the unpromising
weather. It is worth while to record my great depression of spirits,
that I may remember one more resurrection from the pit of melancholy.
And yet what love is given to me! What abundance of good I possess!
All my circumstances are blessed; and the defect is only in my own
organism. Courage and effort!

_Oct. 5._--Ever since the 28th I have been good for little, ailing in
body and disabled in mind. On Sunday an interesting Russian pair came
to see us--M. and Mme. Kovilevsky: she, a pretty creature, with
charming modest voice and speech, who is studying mathematics (by
allowance, through the aid of Kirchhoff) at Heidelberg; he, amiable
and intelligent, studying the concrete sciences apparently--especially
geology; and about to go to Vienna for six months for this purpose,
leaving his wife at Heidelberg!

I have begun a long-meditated poem, "The Legend of Jubal," but have
not written more than twenty or thirty verses.

_Oct. 13._--Yesterday Mr. W. G. Clark of Cambridge came to see us, and
told of his intention to give up his oratorship and renounce his
connection with the Church.

I have read rapidly through Max Müller's "History of Sanskrit
Literature," and am now reading Lecky's "History of Morals." I have
also finished Herbert Spencer's last number of his "Psychology." My
head has been sadly feeble, and my whole body ailing of late. I have
written about one hundred verses of my poem. Poor Thornie seems to us
in a state of growing weakness.

_Oct. 19._--This evening at half-past six our dear Thornie died. He
went quite peacefully. For three days he was not more than fitfully
and imperfectly conscious of the things around him. He went to Natal
on the 17th October, 1863, and came back to us ill on the 8th May,
1869. Through the six months of his illness his frank, impulsive mind
disclosed no trace of evil feeling. He was a sweet-natured boy--still
a boy, though he had lived for twenty-five years and a half. On the
9th of August he had an attack of paraplegia, and although he
partially recovered from it, it made a marked change in him. After
that he lost a great deal of his vivacity, but he suffered less pain.
This death seems to me the beginning of our own.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 15th Dec. 1869.]

The day after our dear boy's funeral we went into the quietest and
most beautiful part of Surrey, four miles and a half from any railway
station. I was very much shaken in mind and body, and nothing but the
deep calm of fields and woods would have had a beneficent effect on
me. We both of us felt, more than ever before, the blessedness of
being in the country, and we are come back much restored. It will
interest you, I think, to know that a friend of ours, Mr. W. G. Clark,
the public orator at Cambridge, laid down his oratorship as a
preparatory step to writing a letter to his bishop renouncing, or,
rather, claiming to be free from, his clerical status, because he no
longer believes what it presupposes him to believe. Two other men whom
we know are about to renounce Cambridge fellowships on the same
ground.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 31st Dec. 1869.]

We shall be delighted to have you on Monday. I hope you will get your
business done early enough to be by a good fire in our drawing-room
before lunch. Mr. Doyle is coming to dine with us, but you will not
mind that. He is a dear man, a good Catholic, full of varied
sympathies and picturesque knowledge.

[Sidenote: Letter to Frederic Harrison, 15th Jan. 1870.]

I am moved to write to you rather by the inclination to remind you of
me than by the sense of having anything to say. On reading "The
Positivist Problem"[9] a second time, I gained a stronger impression
of its general value, and I also felt less jarred by the more personal
part at the close. Mr. Lewes would tell you that I have an
unreasonable aversion to personal statements, and when I come to like
them it is usually by a hard process of _con_-version. But my second
reading gave me a new and very strong sense that the last two or three
pages have the air of an appendix, added at some distance of time from
the original writing of the article. Some more thoroughly explanatory
account of your non-adhesion seems requisite as a nexus--since the
statement of your non-adhesion had to be mentioned after an argument
for the system against the outer Gentile world. However, it is more
important for me to say that I felt the thorough justice of your
words, when, in conversation with me, you said, "I don't see why there
should be any mystification; having come to a resolution after much
inward debate, it is better to state the resolution." Something like
that you said, and I give a hearty "Amen," praying that I may not be
too apt myself to prefer the haze to the clearness. But the fact is, I
shrink from decided "deliverances" on momentous subjects from the
dread of coming to swear by my own "deliverances," and sinking into an
insistent echo of myself. That is a horrible destiny--and one cannot
help seeing that many of the most powerful men fall into it.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 16th Mch. 1870.]

Cara has told me about your republication of the "Inquiry," and I have
a longing to write--not intrusively, I hope--just to say "thank you"
for the good it does me to know of your being engaged in that act of
piety to your brother's memory. I delight in the act itself, and in
the satisfaction which I know you have in performing it. When I
remember my own obligation to the book, I must believe that among the
many new readers a cheap edition will reach there must be minds to
whom it will bring welcome light in studying the New Testament--sober,
serious help towards a conception of the past, instead of stage-lights
and make-ups. And this value is, I think, independent of the opinions
that might be held as to the different degrees of success in the
construction of probabilities or in particular interpretations.
Throughout there is the presence of grave sincerity. I would gladly
have a word or two directly from yourself when you can scribble a note
without feeling me a bore for wanting it. People who write many
letters without being forced to do so are fathomless wonders to me,
but you have a special faculty for writing such letters as one cares
to read, so it is a pity that the accomplishment should lie quite
unused. I wonder if you have read Emerson's new essays. I like them
very much.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 3d April, 1870.]

We shall leave Berlin on Tuesday, so that I must ask you to send me
the much-desired news of you to Vienna, addressed to the Hon. Robert
Lytton, British Embassy. We do not yet know the name of the hotel
where rooms have been taken for us. Our journey has not been
unfortunate hitherto. The weather has been cold and cheerless, but we
expected this, and on the 1st of April the sun began to shine. As for
my _Wenigkeit_, it has never known a day of real bodily comfort since
we got to Berlin: headache, sore throat, and _Schnupfen_ have been
alternately my companions, and have made my enjoyment very languid.
But think of this as all past when you get my letter; for this
morning I have a clearer head, the sun is shining, and the better time
seems to be come for me. Mr. Lewes has had a good deal of satisfaction
in his visits to laboratories and to the _Charité_, where he is just
now gone for the third time to see more varieties of mad people, and
hear more about Psychiatrie from Dr. Westphal, a quiet, unpretending
little man, who seems to have been delighted with George's sympathetic
interest in this (to me) hideous branch of practice. I speak with all
reverence: the world can't do without hideous studies.

People have been very kind to us, and have overwhelmed us with
attentions, but we have felt a little weary in the midst of our
gratitude, and since my cold has become worse we have been obliged to
cut off further invitations.

We have seen many and various men and women, but except Mommsen,
Bunsen, and Du Bois Reymond, hardly any whose names would be known to
you. If I had been in good health I should probably have continued to
be more amused than tired of sitting on a sofa and having one person
after another brought up to bow to me, and pay me the same compliment.
Even as it was, I felt my heart go out to some good women who seemed
really to have an affectionate feeling towards me for the sake of my
books. But the sick animal longs for quiet and darkness.

The other night, at Dr. Westphal's, I saw a young English lady
marvellously like Emily in face, figure, and voice. I made advances to
her on the strength of that external resemblance, and found it carried
out in the quickness of her remarks. But new gentlemen to be introduced
soon divided us. Another elegant, pretty woman there was old Boeckh's
daughter. One enters on all subjects by turns in these evening
parties, which are something like reading the Conversations-Lexicon in
a nightmare. Among lighter entertainments we have been four times to
the opera, being tempted at the very beginning of our stay by Gluck,
Mozart, and an opportunity of hearing Tannhäuser for the second time.
Also we have enjoyed some fine orchestral concerts, which are to be had
for sixpence! Berlin has been growing very fast since our former stay
here, and luxury in all forms has increased so much that one only here
and there gets a glimpse of the old-fashioned German housekeeping. But
though later hours are becoming fashionable, the members of the
Reichstag who have other business than politics complain of having to
begin their sitting at eleven, ending, instead of beginning, at four,
when the solid day is almost gone. We went to the Reichstag one
morning, and were so fortunate as to hear Bismarck speak. But the
question was one of currency, and his speech was merely a brief
winding-up.

Now I shall think that I have earned a letter telling me all about
you. May there be nothing but good to tell of! Pray give my best love
to Emily, and my earnest wishes to Dr. Congreve, that he may have
satisfaction in new work.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 18th May, 1870.]

I gladly and gratefully keep the portrait.[10] For my own part, I
should have said, without hesitation, "Prefix it to the 'Inquiry.'"
One must not be unreasonable about portraits. How can a thing which is
always the same be an adequate representation of a living being who is
always varying--especially of a living being who is sensitive, bright,
many-sided, as your brother was? But I think the impression which this
portrait gives excites interest. I am often sorry for people who lose
half their possible good in the world by being more alive to
deficiencies than to positive merits.

I like to know that you have felt in common with me while you read
"Jubal." Curiously enough, Mr. Lewes, when I first read it to him,
made just the remark you make about the scene of Jubal coming with the
lyre. We laughed at Mr. Bray's sharp criticism. Tell him it is not the
fashion for authors ever to be in the wrong. They have always
justifying reasons. But also it is the fashion for critics to know
everything, so that the authors don't think it needful to tell their
reasons.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1870.]

_May 20._--I am fond of my little old book in which I have recorded so
many changes, and shall take to writing in it again. It will perhaps
last me all through the life that is left to me. Since I wrote in it
last, the day after Thornie's death, the chief epochs have been our
stay at Limpsfield, in Surrey, till near the beginning of December; my
writing of "Jubal," which I finished on the 13th of January; the
publication of the poem in the May number of _Macmillan's Magazine_;
and our journey to Berlin and Vienna, from which we returned on the
6th of this month, after an absence of eight weeks. This is a
fortnight ago, and little has been done by me in the interim. My
health is in an uncomfortable state, and I seem to be all the weaker
for the continual depression produced by cold and sore throat, which
stretched itself all through our long journey. These small bodily
grievances make life less desirable to me, though every one of my best
blessings--my one perfect love, and the sympathy shown towards me for
the sake of my works, and the personal regard of a few friends--have
become much intensified in these latter days. I am not hopeful about
future work. I am languid, and my novel languishes too. But to-morrow
may be better than to-day.

_May 25._--We started for Oxford, where we were to stay with the
Rector of Lincoln and his wife. After luncheon G. and I walked alone
through the town, which, on this first view, was rather disappointing
to me. Presently we turned through Christ Church into the meadows, and
walked along by the river. This was beautiful to my heart's content.
The buttercups and hawthorns were in their glory, the chestnuts still
in sufficiently untarnished bloom, and the grand elms made a border
towards the town. After tea we went with Mrs. Pattison and the rector
to the croquet-ground near the Museum. On our way we saw Sir Benjamin
Brodie, and on the ground Professor Rawlinson, the "narrow-headed
man;" Mrs. Thursfield and her son, who is a Fellow (I think, of
Corpus); Miss Arnold, daughter of Mr. Thomas Arnold, and Professor
Phillips, the geologist. At supper we had Mr. Bywater and Miss Arnold,
and in chat with them the evening was passed.

_May 26._--G. and I went to the Museum, and had an interesting morning
with Dr. Rolleston, who dissected a brain for me. After lunch we went
again to the Museum, and spent the afternoon with Sir Benjamin Brodie,
seeing various objects in his laboratories; among others, the method
by which weighing has been superseded in delicate matters by
_measuring_ in a graduated glass tube. Afterwards Mrs. Pattison took
me a drive in her little pony carriage round by their country refuge,
the Firs, Haddington, and by Littlemore, where I saw J. H. Newman's
little conventual dwelling. Returning, we had a fine view of the
Oxford towers. To supper came Sir Benjamin and Lady Brodie.

_May 27._--In the morning we walked to see the two Martyrs' Memorial,
and then to Sir Benjamin Brodie's pretty place near the river and
bridge. Close by their grounds is the original ford whence the place
took its name. The Miss Gaskells were staying with them, and, after
chatting some time, we two walked with Sir Benjamin to New College,
where we saw the gardens surrounded by the old city wall; the chapel
where William of Wykeham's crosier is kept; and the cloisters, which
are fine, but gloomy, and less beautiful than those of Magdalen, which
we saw in our walk on Thursday before going to the Museum. After lunch
we went to the Bodleian, and then to the Sheldonian Theatre, where
there was a meeting _à propos_ of Palestine Exploration. Captain
Warren, conductor of the Exploration at Jerusalem, read a paper, and
then Mr. Deutsch gave an account of the interpretation, as hitherto
arrived at, of the Moabite Stone. I saw squeezes of this stone for the
first time, with photographs taken from the squeezes. After tea Mrs.
Thursfield kindly took us to see a boat-race. We saw it from the Oriel
barge, under the escort of Mr. Crichton, Fellow of Merton, who, on our
return, took us through the lovely gardens of his college. At supper
were Mr. Jowett, Professor Henry Smith, and Miss Smith, his sister,
Mr. Fowler, author of "Deductive Logic," etc.

_May 28._--After a walk to St. John's College we started by the train
for London, and arrived at home about two o'clock.

_May 29._--Mr. Spencer, Mrs. Burne-Jones, and Mr. Crompton came. I
read aloud No. 3 of "Edwin Drood."

_May 30._--We went to see the autotypes of Michael Angelo's frescoes,
at 36 Rathbone Place. I began Grove on the "Correlation of the
Physical Forces"--needing to read it again--with new interest, after
the lapse of years.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 13th June, 1870.]

Dr. Reynolds advises Mr. Lewes to leave London again, and go to the
bracing air of the Yorkshire coast. I said that we should be here till
the beginning of August, but the internal order proposes and the
external order disposes--if we are to be so priggish as to alter all
our old proverbs into agreement with new formulas! Dickens's death
came as a great shock to us. He lunched with us just before we went
abroad, and was telling us a story of President Lincoln having told
the Council, on the day he was shot, that something remarkable would
happen, because he had just dreamt, for the third time, a dream which
twice before had preceded events momentous to the nation. The dream
was, that he was in a boat on a great river, all alone, and he ended
with the words, "I drift--I drift--I drift." Dickens told this very
finely. I thought him looking dreadfully shattered then. It is
probable that he never recovered from the effect of the terrible
railway accident.

[Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 23d June, 1870, from Cromer.]

We have been driven away from home again by the state of Mr. Lewes's
health. Dr. Reynolds recommended the Yorkshire coast; but we wanted to
know Cromer, and so we came here first, for the sake of variety. To me
the most desirable thing just now seems to be to have one home, and
stay there till death comes to take me away. I get more and more
disinclined to the perpetual makeshifts of a migratory life, and care
more and more for the order and habitual objects of home. However,
there are many in the world whose whole existence is a makeshift, and
perhaps the formula which would fit the largest number of lives is "a
doing without, more or less patiently." The air just now is not very
invigorating anywhere, I imagine, and one begins to be very anxious
about the nation generally, on account of the threatening drought.

[Sidenote: Letter to the Hon. Mrs. Robert Lytton (now Lady Lytton),
8th July, 1870, from Harrogate.]

I did not like to write to you[11] until Mr. Lytton sent word that I
might do so, because I had not the intimate knowledge that would have
enabled me to measure your trouble; and one dreads, of all things, to
speak or write a wrong or unseasonable word when words are the only
signs of interest and sympathy that one has to give. I know now, from
what your dear husband has told us, that your loss is very keenly felt
by you, that it has first made you acquainted with acute grief, and
this makes me think of you very much. For learning to love any one is
like an increase of property--it increases care, and brings many new
fears lest precious things should come to harm. I find myself often
thinking of you with that sort of proprietor's anxiety, wanting you to
have gentle weather all through your life, so that your face may never
look worn and storm-beaten, and wanting your husband to be and do the
very best, lest anything short of that should be disappointment to
you. At present the thought of you is all the more with me because
your trouble has been brought by death; and for nearly a year death
seems to me my most intimate daily companion. I mingle the thought of
it with every other, not sadly, but as one mingles the thought of some
one who is nearest in love and duty with all one's motives. I try to
delight in the sunshine that will be when I shall never see it any
more. And I think it is possible for this sort of impersonal life to
attain great intensity--possible for us to gain much more independence
than is usually believed of the small bundle of facts that make our
own personality. I don't know why I should say this to you, except
that my pen is chatting as my tongue would if you were here. We women
are always in danger of living too exclusively in the affections, and
though our affections are, perhaps, the best gifts we have, we ought
also to have our share of the more independent life--some joy in
things for their own sake. It is piteous to see the helplessness of
some sweet women when their affections are disappointed; because all
their teaching has been that they can only delight in study of any
kind for the sake of a personal love. They have never contemplated an
independent delight in ideas as an experience which they could confess
without being laughed at. Yet surely women need this sort of defence
against passionate affliction even more than men. Just under the
pressure of grief, I do not believe there is any consolation. The word
seems to me to be drapery for falsities. Sorrow must be sorrow, ill
must be ill, till duty and love towards all who remain recover their
rightful predominance. Your life is so full of those claims that you
will not have time for brooding over the unchangeable. Do not spend
any of your valuable time now in writing to me, but be satisfied with
sending me news of you through Mr. Lytton when he has occasion to
write to Mr. Lewes.

I have lately finished reading aloud Mendelssohn's "Letters," which we
had often resolved and failed to read before. They have been quite
cheering to us from the sense they give of communion with an eminently
pure, refined nature, with the most rigorous conscience in art. In
the evening we have always a concert to listen to--a concert of modest
pretensions, but well conducted enough to be agreeable.

I hope this letter of chit-chat will not reach you at a wrong moment.
In any case, forgive all mistakes on the part of one who is always
yours sincerely and affectionately.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1870.]

_Aug. 4._--Two months have been spent since the last record! Their
result is not rich, for we have been sent wandering again by G.'s want
of health. On the 15th June we went to Cromer, on the 30th to
Harrogate, and on the 18th July to Whitby, where Mrs. Burne-Jones also
arrived on the same day. On Monday, August 1, we came home again for a
week only, having arranged to go to Limpsfield next Monday. To-day,
under much depression, I begin a little dramatic poem,[12] the subject
of which engaged my interest at Harrogate.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 12th Aug. 1870.]

We, too, you see, have come back to a well-tried refuge--the same
place that soothed us in our troubles last October--and we especially
delight in this deep country after the fuss which belongs even to
quiet watering-places, such as Cromer, Harrogate, and Whitby, which
are, after all, "alleys where the gentle folks live." We are excited,
even among the still woods and fields, by the vicissitudes of the war,
and chiefly concerned because we cannot succeed in getting the day's
_Times_. We have entered into the period which will be marked in
future historical charts as "The period of German ascendency." But how
saddening to think of the iniquities that the great harvest-moon is
looking down on! I am less grieved for the bloodshed than for the
hateful trust in lies which is continually disclosed. Meanwhile
Jowett's "Translation of Plato" is being prepared for publication, and
he has kindly sent us the sheets of one volume. So I pass from
discussions of French lying and the Nemesis that awaits it to
discussions about rhetorical lying at Athens in the fourth century
before Christ. The translations and introductions to the "Dialogues"
seem to be charmingly done.

[Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 25th Aug. 1870.]

We shall return to town on Monday, various small reasons concurring to
make us resolve on quitting this earthly paradise. I am very sorry for
the sufferings of the French nation; but I think these sufferings are
better for the moral welfare of the people than victory would have
been. The war has been drawn down on them by an iniquitous government;
but in a great proportion of the French people there has been
nourished a wicked glorification of selfish pride, which, like all
other conceit, is a sort of stupidity, excluding any true conception
of what lies outside their own vain wishes. The Germans, it seems,
were expected to stand like toy-soldiers for the French to knock them
down. It is quite true that the war is in some respects the conflict
of two differing forms of civilization. But whatever charm we may see
in the southern Latin races, this ought not to blind us to the great
contributions which the German energies have made in all sorts of ways
to the common treasure of mankind. And who that has any spirit of
justice can help sympathizing with them in their grand repulse of the
French project to invade and divide them? If I were a Frenchwoman,
much as I might wail over French sufferings, I cannot help believing
that I should detest the French talk about the "Prussians." They
wanted to throttle the electric eel for their own purposes.

But I imagine that you and the doctor would not find us in much
disagreement with you in these matters. One thing that is pleasant to
think of is the effort made everywhere to help the wounded.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1870.]

_Oct. 27._--On Monday the 8th August we went to our favorite Surrey
retreat--Limpsfield--and enjoyed three weeks there reading and walking
together. The weather was perfect, and the place seemed more lovely to
us than before. Aloud I read the concluding part of Walter Scott's
Life, which we had begun at Harrogate; two volumes of Froude's
"History of England," and Comte's "Correspondence with Valat." We
returned on Monday the 29th.

During our stay at Limpsfield I wrote the greater part of "Armgart,"
and finished it at intervals during September. Since then I have been
continually suffering from headache and depression, with almost total
despair of future work. I look into this little book now to assure
myself that this is not unprecedented.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 18th Nov. 1870.]

Yesterday, for the first time, we went to hear A. (a popular
preacher). I remembered what you had said about his vulgar, false
emphasis; but there remained the fact of his celebrity. I was glad of
the opportunity. But my impressions fell below the lowest judgment I
ever heard passed upon him. He has the gift of a fine voice, very
flexible and various; he is admirably fluent and clear in his
language, and every now and then his enunciation is effective. But I
never heard any pulpit reading and speaking which in its level tone
was more utterly common and empty of guiding intelligence or emotion;
it was as if the words had been learned by heart and uttered without
comprehension by a man who had no instinct of rhythm or music in his
soul. And the doctrine! It was a libel on Calvinism that it should be
presented in such a form. I never heard any attempt to exhibit the
soul's experience that was more destitute of insight. The sermon was
against fear, in the elect Christian, as being a distrust of God; but
never once did he touch the true ground of fear--the doubt whether the
signs of God's choice are present in the soul. We had plenty of
anecdotes, but they were all poor and pointless--Tract Society
anecdotes of the feeblest kind. It was the most superficial
grocer's-back-parlor view of Calvinistic Christianity; and I was
shocked to find how low the mental pitch of our society must be,
judged by the standard of this man's celebrity.

Mr. Lewes was struck with some of his tones as good actor's tones, and
was not so wroth as I was. But just now, with all Europe stirred by
events that make every conscience tremble after some great principle
as a consolation and guide, it was too exasperating to sit and listen
to doctrine that seemed to look no further than the retail Christian's
tea and muffins. He said "Let us approach the throne of God" very much
as he might have invited you to take a chair; and then followed this
fine touch--"We feel no love to God because he hears the prayers of
others; it is because he hears my prayer that I love him."

You see I am relieving myself by pouring out my disgust to you. Oh,
how short life--how near death--seems to me! But this is not an
uncheerful thought. The only great dread is the protraction of life
into imbecility or the visitation of lingering pain. That seems to me
the insurmountable calamity, though there is an ignorant affectation
in many people of underrating what they call bodily suffering. I
systematically abstain from correspondence, yet the number of
acquaintances and consequent little appeals so constantly increases
that I often find myself inwardly rebelling against the amount of
note-writing that I cannot avoid. Have the great events of these
months interfered with your freedom of spirit in writing? One has to
dwell continually on the permanent, growing influence of ideas in
spite of temporary reactions, however violent, in order to get courage
and perseverance for any work which lies aloof from the immediate
wants of society. You remember Goethe's contempt for the Revolution of
'30 compared with the researches on the Vertebrate Structure of the
Skull? "My good friend, I was not thinking of those people." But the
changes we are seeing cannot be doffed aside in that way.

[Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, Nov. 1870.]

Lying awake early in the morning, according to a bad practice of mine,
I was visited with much compunction and self-disgust that I had ever
said a word to you about the faults of a friend whose good qualities
are made the more sacred by the endurance his lot has in many ways
demanded. I think you may fairly set down a full half of any alleged
grievances to my own susceptibility, and other faults of mine which
necessarily call forth less agreeable manifestations from others than
as many virtues would do, if I had them. I trust to your good sense to
have judged well in spite of my errors in the presentation of any
matter. But I wish to protest against myself, that I may, as much as
possible, cut off the temptation to what I should like utterly to
purify myself from for the few remaining years of my life--the
disposition to dwell for a moment on the faults of a friend.

Tell the flower and fern giver, whoever it may be, that some strength
comes to me this morning from the pretty proof of sympathy.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 2d Dec. 1870.]

I have it on my conscience that I may not have given you a clear
impression of my wishes about the poor pensioner who was in question
between us to-day, so I write at once to secure us both against a
possible misunderstanding. I would rather not apply any more money in
that direction, because I know of other channels[13]--especially a
plan which is being energetically carried out for helping a
considerable group of people without almsgiving, and solely by
inducing them to work--into which I shall be glad to pour a little
more aid. The repugnance to have relief from the parish was a feeling
which it was good to encourage in the old days of contra-encouragement
to sturdy pauperism; but I question whether one ought now to indulge
it, and not rather point out the reasons why, in a case of real
helplessness, there is no indignity in receiving from a public fund.

After you had left me, it rang in my ears that I had spoken of my
greater cheerfulness as due to a reduced anxiety about myself and my
doings, and had not seemed to recognize that the deficit or evil in
other lives could be a cause of depression. I was not really so
ludicrously selfish while dressing myself up in the costume of
unselfishness. But my strong egoism has caused me so much melancholy,
which is traceable simply to a fastidious yet hungry ambition, that I
am relieved by the comparative quietude of personal craving which age
is bringing. That is the utmost I have to boast of, and, really, to be
cheerful in these times could only be a virtue in the sense in which
it was felt to be so by the old Romans when they thanked their general
for not despairing of the republic.

I have been reading aloud to Mr. Lewes this evening Mr. Harrison's
article on "Bismarckism," which made me cry--it is in some passages
movingly eloquent.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1870.]

_Dec. 2._--I am experimenting in a story ("Miss Brooke") which I began
without any very serious intention of carrying it out lengthily. It is
a subject which has been recorded among my possible themes ever since
I began to write fiction, but will probably take new shapes in the
development. I am to-day at p. 44. I am reading Wolf's "Prolegomena to
Homer." In the evening, aloud, "Wilhelm Meister" again!

_Dec. 12._--George's mother died this morning quite peacefully as she
sat in her chair.

_Dec. 17._--Reading "Quintus Fixlein" aloud to G. in the evening.
Grote on Sicilian history.

_Dec. 31._--On Wednesday the 21st we went to Ryde to see Madame
Bodichon at Swanmore Parsonage, a house which she had taken for two
months. We had a pleasant and healthy visit, walking much in the
frosty air. On Christmas Day I went with her to the Ritualist Church
which is attached to the parsonage, and heard some excellent intoning
by the delicate-faced, tenor-voiced clergyman. On Wednesday last, the
28th, Barbara came up to town with us. We found the cold here more
severe than at Ryde; and the papers tell us of still harder weather
about Paris, where our fellow-men are suffering and inflicting
horrors.

Here is the last day of 1870. I have written only one hundred
pages--good printed pages--of a story which I began about the opening
of November, and at present mean to call "Miss Brooke." Poetry halts
just now.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 2d Jan. 1871.]

We spent our Christmas in the Isle of Wight, and on Christmas Day I
went to a Ritualist church and heard some fine intoning of the service
by a clear, strong, tenor voice, sweet singing from boys' throats,
and all sorts of Catholic ceremonial in a miniature way.

It is good to see what our neighbors are doing. To live in seclusion
with one's own thoughts is apt to give one very false notions as to
the possibilities of the present time in the matter of conversion
either to superstition or anti-superstition.

In this cruel time, I no sooner hear of an affliction than I see it
multiplied in some one of the endless forms of suffering created by
this hellish war. In the beginning I could feel entirely with the
Germans, and could say of that calamity called "victory," I am glad.
But now I can be glad of nothing. No people can carry on a long,
fierce war without being brutalized by it, more or less, and it pains
me that the educated voices have not a higher moral tone about
national and international duties and prospects. But, like every one
else, I feel that the war is too much with me, and am rather anxious
to avoid unwise speech about it than to utter what may seem to me to
be wisdom. The pain is that one can _do_ so little.

I have not read "Sir Harry Hotspur," but as to your general question,
I reply that there certainly are some women who love in that way, but
"their sex as well as I may chide them for it." Men are very fond of
glorifying that sort of dog-like attachment. It is one thing to love
because you falsely imagine goodness--that belongs to the finest
natures--and another to go on loving when you have found out your
mistake. But married constancy is a different affair. I have seen a
grandly heroic woman who, out of her view as to the responsibilities
of the married relation, condoned everything, took her drunken husband
to her home again, and at last nursed and watched him into penitence
and decency. But there may be two opinions even about this sort of
endurance--_i.e._, about its ultimate tendency, not about the beauty
of nature which prompts it. This is quite distinct from mere animal
constancy. It is duty and human pity.

[Sidenote: Letter to Colonel Hamley (now General Sir Edward Hamley),
24th Jan. 1871.]

I write to say God bless you for your letter to the _Times_, of this
morning. It contains the best expression of right principle--I was
almost ready to say, the only good, sensible words--that I have yet
seen on the actual state of things between the Germans and the French.

You will not pause, I trust, but go on doing what can be done only by
one who is at once a soldier, a writer, and a clear-headed man of
principle.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1871.]

_March 19_ (Sunday).--It is grievous to me how little, from one cause
or other, chiefly languor and occasionally positive ailments, I manage
to get done. I have written about two hundred and thirty-six pages
(print) of my novel, which I want to get off my hands by next
November. My present fear is that I have too much matter--too many
_momenti_.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 3d April, 1871.]

I happened to-day to be talking to a very sweet-faced woman (the
sister of Dr. Bridges, whom I think you know something of), and she
mentioned, _à propos_ of educating children in the love of animals,
that she had felt the want of some good little book as a help in this
matter. I told her of yours, and when I said that it was written by
Mrs. Bray, the author of "Physiology for Schools," she said, "Oh, I
know that book well." I have made her a present of my copy of "Duty to
Animals," feeling that this was a good quarter in which to plant that
offset. For she had been telling me of her practical interest in the
infant and other schools in Suffolk, where she lives. We have had a
great pleasure to-day in learning that our friend Miss Bury is engaged
to be married to Mr. Geddes, a Scotch gentleman. There is a streak of
sadness for her family in the fact that she is to go to India with
her husband next November, but all else is bright in her prospect. It
is very sweet to see, and think of, the happiness of the young. I am
scribbling with an infirm head, at the end of the day, just for the
sake of letting you know one proof, in addition doubtless to many
others which you have already had, that your pretty little book is
likely to supply a want.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Gilchrist, 19th April, 1871.]

We are very much obliged to you for your kind, methodical
thoughtfulness as to all which is necessary for our accommodation at
Brookbank, and also for your hints about the points of beauty to be
sought for in our walks. That "sense of standing on a round world,"
which you speak of, is precisely what I most care for among
out-of-door delights. The last time I had it fully was at St. Märgen,
near Freiburg, on green hilltops, whence we could see the Rhine and
poor France.

The garden has been, and is being, attended to, and I trust we shall
not find the commissariat unendurable.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 6th June, 1871.]

It seems like a resurrection of a buried-alive friendship once more to
have a letter from you. Welcome back from your absorption in the
Franchise! Somebody else ought to have your share of work now, and you
ought to rest.

Ever since the 1st of May we have been living in this queer cottage,
which belongs to Mrs. Gilchrist, wife of the Gilchrist who wrote the
life of William Blake the artist. We have a ravishing country round
us, and pure air and water; in short, all the conditions of health, if
the east wind were away. We have old prints for our dumb
companions--charming children of Sir Joshua's, and large-hatted ladies
of his and Romney's. I read aloud--almost all the evening--books of
German science, and other gravities. So, you see, we are like two
secluded owls, wise with unfashionable wisdom, and knowing nothing of
pictures and French plays. I confess that I should have gone often to
see Got act if I had been in town, he is so really great as an actor.
And yet one is ashamed of seeking amusement in connection with
anything that belongs to poor, unhappy France. I am saved from the
shame by being safely shut out from the amusement.

[Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 17th June, 1871.]

How about Madame Mohl and her husband? I have been wondering through
all the horrors whether M. Mohl had returned to Paris, and whether
their house, containing, too probably, the results of much studious
work, lies buried among ruins. But I will not further recall the
sorrows in that direction.

I am glad to see the words "very satisfactory" in connection with the
visit to Hitchin and Cambridge. Ely Cathedral I saw last year, but too
cursorily. It has more of the massive grandeur that one adores in Le
Mans and Chartres than most of our English cathedrals, though I am
ready to recall the comparison as preposterous.

I don't know how long we shall stay here; perhaps, more or less, till
the end of August, for I have given up the idea of going to the Scott
Festival at Edinburgh, to which I had accepted an invitation. The
fatigue of the long journey, with the crowd at the end, would be too
much for me.

Let us know beforehand when you are about coming.

George is gloriously well, and studying, writing, walking, eating, and
sleeping with equal vigor. He is enjoying the life here immensely. Our
country could hardly be surpassed in its particular kind of
beauty--perpetual undulation of heath and copse, and clear views of
hurrying water, with here and there a grand pine wood, steep,
wood-clothed promontories, and gleaming pools.

If you want delightful reading get Lowell's "My Study Windows," and
read the essays called "My Garden Acquaintances" and "Winter."

Get the volumes of a very cheap publication--the "Deutscher
Novellenschatz." Some of the tales are remarkably fine. I am reading
aloud the last three volumes, which are even better than the others. I
have just been so deeply interested in one of the stories--"Diethelm
von Buchenberg"--that I want everybody to have the same pleasure who
can read German.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Gilchrist, 3d July, 1871.]

We are greatly obliged to you for the trouble you have so
sympathetically taken on our behalf, and we shall prepare to quit our
quiet shelter on Wednesday, the 2d of August. During the first weeks
of our stay I did not imagine that I should ever be so fond of the
place as I am now. The departure of the bitter winds, some improvement
in my health, and the gradual revelation of fresh and fresh beauties
in the scenery, especially under a hopeful sky such as we have
sometimes had--all these conditions have made me love our little world
here and wish not to quit it until we can settle in our London home. I
have the regret of thinking that it was my original indifference about
it (I hardly ever like things until they are familiar) that hindered
us from securing the cottage until the end of September, for the
chance of coming to it again after a temporary absence. But all
regrets ought to be merged in thankfulness for the agreeable weeks we
have had, and probably shall have till the end of July. And among the
virtues of Brookbank we shall always reckon this, that our
correspondence about it has been with you rather than with any one
else, so that, along with the country, we have had a glimpse of your
ready, quick-thoughted kindness.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 13th July, 1871.]

One word to you in response to Emily's note, which comes to me this
morning, and lets me know that by this time she is probably in the
last hour of her unmarried life. My thoughts and love and tender
anxiety are with her and with all of you. When you receive this she
will, I suppose, be far away, and it is of little consequence that I
can make no new sign to her of my joy in her joy.

For the next few weeks my anxiety will be concentrated on you and
yours at Yarmouth. Pray, when your mind and body are sufficiently free
from absorbing occupation, remember my need of news about you, and
write to me. The other day I seemed to get a glimpse of you through
Mrs. Call, who told me that you looked like a new creature--so much
stronger than you were wont; and she told me of Dr. Congreve's address
at the school, which raised my keenest sympathy, and made me feel
myself a very helpless friend.

Please give my love to the children, and tell Sophy especially that I
think her happy in this--that there is a place made for all the effort
of her young life to fill it with something like the goodness and
brightness which she has known and has just now to part with. I expect
her to be your guardian angel, perhaps in a new way--namely, in saving
you from some fatigue about details.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 15th July, 1871.]

I still feel that I owe you my thanks for your kind letter, although
Mr. Lewes undertook to deliver them in the first instance. You
certainly made a seat at the Commemoration Table[14] look more
tempting to me than it had done before; but I think that prudence
advises me to abstain from the fatigue and excitement of a long
railway journey, with a great gathering at the end of it. If there is
a chance that "Middlemarch" will be good for anything, I don't want to
break down and die without finishing it. And whatever "the tow on my
distaff" may be, my strength to unwind it has not been abundant
lately.

_À propos_ of bodily prosperity, I am sincerely rejoiced to know, by
your postscript this morning, that Mr. Simpson is recovered. I hope he
will not object to my considering him a good friend of mine, though it
is so long since I saw him. The blank that is left when thorough
workers like him are disabled is felt not only near at hand, but a
great way off. I often say--after the fashion of people who are
getting older--that the capacity for good work, of the kind that goes
on without trumpets, is diminishing in the world.

The continuous absence of sunshine is depressing in every way, and
makes one fear for the harvest, and so grave a fear that one is
ashamed of mentioning one's private dreariness. You cannot play golf
in the rain, and I cannot feel hopeful without the sunlight; but I
dare say you work all the more, whereas when my spirits flag my work
flags too.

I should have liked to see Principal Tulloch again, and to have made
the acquaintance of Captain Lockhart, whose writing is so jaunty and
cheery, yet so thoroughly refined in feeling. Perhaps I may still have
this pleasure in town, when he comes up at the same time with you.
Please give my kind regards to Mr. William Blackwood.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 24th July, 1871.]

Thanks for the prompt return of the MS., which arrived this morning.

I don't see how I can leave anything out, because I hope there is
nothing that will be seen to be irrelevant to my design, which is to
show the gradual action of ordinary causes rather than exceptional,
and to show this in some directions which have not been from time
immemorial the beaten path--the Cremorne walks and shows of fiction.
But the best intentions are good for nothing until execution has
justified them. And you know I am always compassed about with fears. I
am in danger in all my designs of parodying dear Goldsmith's satire on
Burke, and think of refining when novel-readers only think of
skipping.

We are obliged to turn out of this queer cottage next week; but we
have been fortunate enough to get the more comfortable house on the
other side of the road, so that we can move without any trouble. Thus
our address will continue to be the same until the end of August.

Tennyson, who is one of the "hill-folk" about here, has found us out.

[Sidenote: Letter to the Hon. Mrs. Robert Lytton[15] (now Lady
Lytton), 25th July, 1871.]

This morning your husband's letter came to us, but if I did not know
that it would be nearly a week before any words of mine could reach
you, I should abstain from writing just yet, feeling that in the first
days of sorrowing it is better to keep silence. For a long while after
a great bereavement our only companionship is with the lost one. Yet I
hope it will not be without good to you to have signs of love from
your friends, and to be reminded that you have a home in their
affections, which is made larger for you by your trouble. For weeks my
thought has been continually going out to you, and the absence of news
has made me so fearful that I have mourned beforehand. I have been
feeling that probably you were undergoing the bitterest grief you had
ever known. But under the heart-stroke, is there anything better than
to grieve? Strength will come back for the duty and the fellowship
which gradually bring new contentments, but at first there is no joy
to be desired that would displace sorrow.

What is better than to love and live with the loved? But that must
sometimes bring us to live with the dead; and this too turns at last
into a very tranquil and sweet tie, safe from change and injury.

You see, I make myself a warrant out of my regard for you, to write as
if we had long been near each other. And I cannot help wishing that we
were physically nearer--that you were not on the other side of Europe.
We shall trust in Mr. Lytton's kindness to let us hear of you by and
by. But you must never write except to satisfy your own longing. May
all true help surround you, dear Mrs. Lytton, and whenever you can
think of me, believe in me as yours with sincere affection.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Mary Cross, 31st July, 1871.]

I read your touching story[16] aloud yesterday to Mr. Lewes, and we
both cried over it. Your brother wrote to me that you had doubts about
giving your name. My faith is, that signature is right in the absence
of weighty special reasons against it.

We think of you all very often, and feel ourselves much the richer for
having a whole dear family to reckon among our friends. We are to stay
here till the end of the month. When the trees are yellow, I hope you
will be coming to see us in St. John's Wood. How little like the
woods we have around us! I suppose Weybridge is more agreeable than
other places at present, if it has any of its extra warmth in this
arctic season.

Our best love, to your dear mother supremely, and then to all.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 2d Aug. 1871.]

I always say that those people are the happiest who have a peremptory
reason for staying in one place rather than another. Else I should be
sorry for you that you are kept in London--by Parliamentary business,
of course.

There is sunshine over our fields now, but the thermometer is only 64°
in the house, and in the warmest part of the day I, having a talent
for being cold, sit shivering, sometimes even with a warm-water bottle
at my feet. I wonder if you went to the French plays to see the
supreme Got? That is a refined pleasure which I enjoyed so much in
Paris a few years ago that I was sorry to be out of reach of it this
spring.

About the Crystal Palace music I remember feeling just what you
mention--the sublime effect of the Handel choruses, and the total
futility of the solos.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 3d Aug. 1871.]

Thanks for your little picture of things. Eminently acceptable in
place of vague conjectures. I am a bitter enemy to make-believe about
the human lot, but I think there is a true alleviation of distress in
thinking of the intense enjoyment which accompanies a spontaneous,
confident, intellectual activity. This may not be a counterpoise to
the existing evils, but it is at least a share of mortal good, and
good of an exquisite kind.

Are you not happy in the long-wished-for sunshine? I have a pretty
lawn before me, with hills in the background. The train rushes by
every now and then to make one more glad of the usual silence.

A good man writes to me from Scotland this morning, asking me if he is
not right in pronouncing Rom[)o]la, in defiance of the world around
him (not a large world, I hope) who _will_ say Rom[=o]la. Such is
correspondence in these days; so that quantity is magnificent _en
gros_ but shabby _en détail_--_i.e._, in single letters like this.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 14th Aug. 1871.]

We shall stay here only till the end of this month--at least, I have
no hope that our _propriétaires_ will be induced to protract their
absence; and if the lingering smell of paint does not drive us away
from the Priory again, we expect to stay there from the first of
September, without projects of travel for many, many months.

We enjoy our roomy house and pretty lawn greatly. Imagine me seated
near a window, opening under a veranda, with flower-beds and lawn and
pretty hills in sight, my feet on a warm-water bottle, and my writing
on my knees. In that attitude my mornings are passed. We dine at two;
and at four, when the tea comes in, I begin to read aloud. About six
or half-past we walk on to the commons and see the great sky over our
head. At eight we are usually in the house again, and fill our evening
with physics, chemistry, or other wisdom if our heads are at par; if
not, we take to folly, in the shape of Alfred de Musset's poems, or
something akin to them.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 29th Oct. 1871.]

Yesterday we returned from Weybridge, where, for a few days, I have
been petted by kind friends (delightful Scotch people), and have had
delicious drives in the pure autumn air. That must be my farewell to
invalidism and holiday making. I am really better--not robust or fat,
but perhaps as well as I am likely to be till death mends me.

Your account of Mr. Main[17] sets my mind at ease about him; for in
this case I would rather have your judgment than any opportunity of
forming my own. The one thing that gave me confidence was his power of
putting his finger on the right passages, and giving emphasis to the
right idea (in relation to the author's feeling and purpose). Apart
from that, enthusiasm would have been of little value.

One feels rather ashamed of authoresses this week after the
correspondence in the _Times_. One hardly knows which letter is in the
worst taste. However, if we are to begin with marvelling at the little
wisdom with which the world is governed, we can hardly expect that
much wisdom will go to the making of novels.

I should think it quite a compliment if the general got through "Miss
Brooke." Mr. Lewes amused himself with the immeasurable contempt that
Mr. Casaubon would be the object of in the general's mind.

I hardly dare hope that the second part will take quite so well as the
first, the effects being more subtile and dispersed; but Mr. Lewes
seems to like the third part better than anything that has gone before
it. But can anything be more uncertain than the reception of a book by
the public? I am glad to see that the "Coming Race" has got into a
fourth edition. Let us hope that the Koom Posh may be at least
mitigated by the sale of a good book or two.

As for me, I get more and more unable to be anything more than a
feeble sceptic about all publishing plans, and am thankful to have so
many good heads at work for me. _Allah illah allah!_

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 22d Nov. 1871.]

We who are getting old together have the tie of common infirmities.
But I don't find that the young troubles seem lighter on looking back.
I prefer my years now to any that have gone before. I wish you could
tell me the same thing about yourself. And, surely, writing your book
is, on the whole, a joy to you--it is a large share in the meagre lot
of mankind. All hail for the morrow! How many sweet laughs, how much
serious pleasure in the great things others have done, you and I have
had together in a past islet of time that remains very sunny in my
remembrance.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1871.]

_Dec. 1._--This day the first part of "Middlemarch" was published. I
ought by this time to have finished the fourth part, but an illness
which began soon after our return from Haslemere has robbed me of two
months.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 15th Dec. 1871.]

If you have not yet fallen in with Dickens's "Life" be on the lookout
for it, because of the interest there is in his boyish experience, and
also in his rapid development during his first travels in America. The
book is ill organized, and stuffed with criticism and other matter
which would be better in limbo; but the information about the
childhood, and the letters from America, make it worth reading. We
have just got a photograph of Dickens, taken when he was writing, or
had just written, "David Copperfield"--satisfactory refutation of that
keepsakey, impossible face which Maclise gave him, and which has been
engraved for the "Life" in all its odious beautification. This
photograph is the young Dickens, corresponding to the older Dickens
whom I knew--the same face, without the unusually severe wear and
tear of years which his latest looks exhibited.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1872.]

_Dec. 20._--My health has become very troublesome during the last
three weeks, and I can get on but tardily. Even now I am only at page
227 of my fourth part. But I have been also retarded by construction,
which, once done, serves as good wheels for progress.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 1st Jan. 1872.]

Your good wishes and pleasant bits of news made the best part of my
breakfast this morning. I am glad to think that, in desiring happiness
for you during the new year, I am only desiring the continuance of
good which you already possess.

I suppose we two, also, are among the happiest of mortals, yet we have
had a rather doleful Christmas, the one great lack, that of health,
having made itself particularly conspicuous in the surrounding fog.
Having no grandchildren to get up a Christmas-tree for, we had nothing
to divert our attention from our headaches.

Mr. Main's book broke the clouds a little, and now the heavens have
altogether cleared, so that we are hoping to come back from a visit of
three days to Weybridge with our strength renewed--if not like the
eagle's, at least like a convalescent tomtit's.

The "Sayings" are set off by delightful paper and print, and a binding
which opens with inviting ease. I am really grateful to every one
concerned in the volume, and am anxious that it should not be in any
way a disappointment. The selections seem to me to be made with an
exquisite sensibility to the various lights and shades of life; and
all Mr. Main's letters show the same quality. It is a great help to me
to have such an indication that there exist careful readers for whom
no subtilest intention is lost.

We have both read the story of the "Megara" with the deepest interest;
indeed, with a quite exceptional enjoyment of its direct,
unexaggerated painting.

The prescription of two days' golfing per week will, I hope, keep up
your condition to the excellent pitch at which it was on your return
from Paris. Good news usually acts as a tonic when one's case is not
too desperate; and I shall be glad if you and we can get it in the
form of more success for "Middlemarch." Dickens's "Life," you see,
finds a large public ready to pay more. But the British mind has long
entertained the purchase of expensive biographies. The proofs lately
given that one's books don't necessarily go out like lucifer matches,
never to be taken up again, make one content with moderate immediate
results, which perhaps are as much as can reasonably be expected for
any writing which does not address itself either to fashions or
corporate interests of an exclusive kind.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 18th Jan. 1872.]

It is like your kindness to write me your encouraging impressions on
reading the third book. I suppose it is my poor health that just now
makes me think my writing duller than usual. For certainly the
reception of the first book by my old readers is quite beyond my most
daring hopes. One of them, who is a great champion of "Adam Bede" and
"Romola," told Mr. Lewes yesterday that he thought "Middlemarch"
surpassed them. All this is very wonderful to me. I am thoroughly
comforted as to the half of the work which is already written; but
there remains the terror about the _un_written. Mr. Lewes is much
satisfied with the fourth book, which opens with the continuation of
the Featherstone drama.

We went yesterday to the Tichborne trial, which was an experience of
great interest to me. We had to come away after the third hour of
Coleridge's speaking; but it was a great enjoyment to me to hear what
I did. Coleridge is a rare orator--not of the declamatory, but of the
argumentative order.

Thanks, not formal, but sincerely felt, for the photographs. This
likeness will always carry me back to the first time I saw you, in our
little Richmond lodging, when I was thinking anxiously of "Adam Bede,"
as I now am of "Middlemarch."

I felt something like a shudder when Sir Henry Maine asked me last
Sunday whether this would not be a very long book; saying, when I told
him it would be four good volumes, that that was what he had
calculated. However, it will not be longer than Thackeray's books, if
so long. And I don't see how the sort of thing I want to do could have
been done briefly.

I have to be grateful for the gift of "Brougham's Life," which will be
a welcome addition to my means of knowing the time "when his ugliness
had not passed its bloom."

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 22d Jan. 1872.]

Your letter seems to pierce the rainy fog with a little sunlight. Cold
and clearness are the reverse of what we are usually having here.
Until the last few days my chief consciousness has been that of
struggling against inward as well as outward fog; but I am now better,
and have only been dragged back into headachiness by a little too much
fatigue from visitors. I give you this account as a preface to my
renunciation of a journey to Dover, which would be very delightful, if
I had not already lost too much time to be warranted in taking a
holiday.

Next Saturday we are going to have a party--six to dine, and a small
rush of people after dinner, for the sake of music. I think it is four
years at least since we undertook anything of that kind.

A great domestic event for us has been the arrival of a new dog, who
has all Ben's virtues, with more intelligence, and a begging attitude
of irresistible charm. He is a dark-brown spaniel. You see what
infantine innocence we live in!

Glad you are reading my demigod Milton! We also are rather
old-fashioned in our light reading just now; for I have rejected
Heyse's German stories, brand new, in favor of dear old Johnson's
"Lives of the Poets," which I read aloud in my old age with a
delicious revival of girlish impressions.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1872.]

_Jan. 29._--It is now the last day but one of January. I have finished
the fourth part--_i.e._, the second volume--of "Middlemarch." The
first part, published on December 1, has been excellently well
received; and the second part will be published the day after
to-morrow. About Christmas a volume of extracts from my works was
published, under the title, "Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings, in Prose
and Verse." It was proposed and executed by Alexander Main, a young
man of thirty, who began a correspondence with me by asking me how to
pronounce Romola, in the summer, when we were at Shottermill.
Blackwood proposed that we should share the profits, but we refused.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 29th Jan. 1872.]

I do lead rather a crawling life under these rainy fogs and low
behavior of the barometer. But I am a little better, on the whole,
though just now overdone with the fatigue of company. We have been to
hear Coleridge addressing the jury on the Tichborne trial--a very
interesting occasion to me. He is a marvellous speaker among
Englishmen; has an exquisitely melodious voice, perfect gesture, and a
power of keeping the thread of his syntax to the end of his sentence,
which makes him delightful to follow. We are going some other day, if
possible, to hear a cross-examination of Ballantyne's. The digest of
the evidence which Coleridge gives is one of the best illustrations of
the value or valuelessness of testimony that could be given. I wonder
if the world, which retails Guppy anecdotes, will be anything the
wiser for it.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 21st Feb. 1872.]

To hear of a friend's illness after he has got well through it is the
least painful way of learning the bad news. I hope that your attack
has been a payment of insurance.

You probably know what it grieved us deeply to learn the other
day--that our excellent friend Mr. William Smith is dangerously ill.
They have been so entirely happy and wrapped up in each other that we
cannot bear to think of Mrs. Smith's grief.

Thanks for the list of sales since February 12th. Things are
encouraging, and the voices that reach us are enthusiastic. But you
can understand how people's interest in the book heightens my anxiety
that the remainder should be up to the mark. It has caused me some
uneasiness that the third part is two sheets less than the first. But
Mr. Lewes insisted that the death of old Featherstone was the right
point to pause at; and he cites your approbation of the part as a
proof that effectiveness is secured in spite of diminished quantity.
Still it irks me to ask 5_s._ for a smaller amount than that already
given at the same price. Perhaps I must regard the value as made up
solely by effectiveness, and certainly the book will be long enough.

I am still below par in strength, and am too much beset with visitors
and kind attentions. I long for the quiet spaces of time and the
absence of social solicitations that one enjoys in the country, out of
everybody's reach.

I am glad to hear of the pleasure "Middlemarch" gives in your
household: that makes quite a little preliminary public for me.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. H. B. Stowe, 4th Mch. 1872.]

I can understand very easily that the two last years have been full
for you of other and more imperative work than the writing of letters
not absolutely demanded either by charity or business. The proof that
you still think of me affectionately is very welcome now it is come,
and all the more cheering because it enables me to think of you as
enjoying your retreat in your orange orchard--your western
Sorrento--the beloved Rabbi still beside you. I am sure it must be a
great blessing to you to bathe in that quietude--as it always is to us
when we go out of reach of London influences, and have the large space
of country days to study, walk, and talk in. Last year we spent our
summer months in Surrey, and did not leave England. Unhappily, the
country was not so favorable to my bodily health as to my spiritual,
and on our return to town I had an illness which was the climax of the
summer's _malaise_. That illness robbed me of two months, and I have
never quite recovered a condition in which the strict duties of the
day are not felt as a weight. But just now we are having some clear
spring days, and I am in hope of prospering better, the sunshine being
to me the greatest visible good of life--what I call the wealth of
life, after love and trust.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. H. B. Stowe, 8th Mch. 1872.]

When I am more at liberty I will certainly read Mr. Owen's books, if
he is good enough to send them to me. I desire on all subjects to keep
an open mind, but hitherto the various phenomena reported or attested
in connection with ideas of spirit-intercourse, "psychion," and so on,
have come before me here in the painful form of the lowest
_charlatanerie_. Take Mr. H. as an example of what I mean. I could not
choose to enter a room where he held a _séance_. He is an object of
moral disgust to me; and nothing of late reported by Mr. Crookes, Lord
Lindsay, and the rest carries conviction to my mind that Mr. H. is not
simply an impostor, whose professedly abnormal manifestations have
varied their fashion in order to create a new market, just as if they
were _papier mâché_ wares or pomades for the idle rich. But apart from
personal contact with people who get money by public exhibitions as
mediums, or with semi-idiots, such as those who make a court for a
Mrs. Guppy or other feminine personage of that kind, I would not
willingly place any barriers between my mind and any possible channel
of truth affecting the human lot.

The spirit in which you have written in the paper you kindly sent me
is likely to teach others--to rouse them, at least, to attention in a
case where you have been deeply impressed.

I write to you quite openly, dear friend, but very imperfectly, for my
letters are always written in shreds of time.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 14th Mch. 1872.]

Thanks for the budget of this morning. The sales, we think, are very
cheering, and we may well be content if they continue in the same
ratio. But the Greek proverb about the beginning being the half of the
whole wants as much defining and excepting from as most other
proverbs.

I have just had sent me a copy of the magazine _Für die Literatur des
Auslander_, containing a review of "Miss Brooke," which will be good
for Asher's edition, and is otherwise satisfactory as an intelligent
appreciation. It mentions at the end the appearance of Mr. Main's
book, "The Sayings." A Frenchman, apparently accomplished, a M.
Landolphe, who has made some important translations, is going to
translate the whole of "Middlemarch;" and one of the contributors to
the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ has written for leave to extract
Dorothea's history.

I fancy we have done a good turn to English authors generally by
setting off Asher's series, for we have heard that Tauchnitz has
raised his offers. There is another way in which benefit might come
that would be still more desirable--namely, to make him more careful
in his selections of books for reprint. But I fear that this effect is
not so certain. You see Franz Duncker, who publishes the German
translation of "Middlemarch," has also begun an English series. This
is really worth while, for the Germans are excellent readers of our
books. I was astonished to find so many in Berlin who really knew
one's books, and did not merely pay compliments after the fashion of
the admirers who made Rousseau savage--running after him to pay him
visits, and not knowing a word of his writing.

You and other good readers have spoiled me, and made me rather shudder
at being read only once; and you may imagine how little satisfaction I
get from people who mean to please me by saying that they shall wait
till "Middlemarch" is finished, and then sit up to read it "at one
go-off."

We are looking for a country retreat not too far from town, so that
we may run up easily. There is nothing wanting to our happiness except
that "Middlemarch" should be well ended without growing signs of its
author's debility.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 17th March, 1872.]

Before I received your letter this morning, I was going to write you a
word of sympathy, knowing how deeply you would be feeling the death of
Mazzini. Such a man leaves behind him a wider good than the loss of
his personal presence can take away.

     "The greatest gift the hero leaves his race
     Is to have been a hero."

I must be excused for quoting my own words, because they are my
_credo_. I enter thoroughly into your sense of wealth in having known
him.

Brighton does not suit Mr. Lewes. But he was near going there for a
night a little while ago to see our friends, Mr. and Mrs. William
Smith. He (the author of "Thorndale," etc.) is, I fear, wasting
fatally with organic disease, and we grieve much at the too-probably
near parting of a husband and wife who have been among the perfectly
happy couples of the world. She is a charming woman, and I wish that
you may happen to know her.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 22d March, 1872.]

Owing to my loss of two months in illness, and my infirm health ever
since, I have not yet finished the writing of "Middlemarch." This
payment of wintry arrears makes one prefer the comforts of a London
home; but we are obliged to see more company than my health is equal
to, and for this reason I dare say we shall soon migrate. To-day we
have been to our last morning concert--or Saturday Pop.--held on a
Friday because of the University boat-race to-morrow. These concerts
are an easy pleasure which we are sorry to part with. This is one of
my bad weeks, owing probably to the change in the weather, and I am
constantly struggling with hemicrania and _malaise_. Even writing this
scrap of a note is the feather too much, and I must leave off. You
have known too much of nervous weakness not to understand this.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1872.]

_May 8._--I have been reposing for more than a week in the hope of
getting stronger, my life having been lately a swamp of illness, with
only here and there a bit of firm walking. In consequence of this
incessant interruption (almost every week having been half nullified
for me so far as my work has been concerned) I have only finished the
fifth book, and have still three books to write--equal to a large
volume and a half.

The reception of the book hitherto has been quite beyond what I could
have believed beforehand, people exalting it above everything else I
have written. Kohn is publishing an English edition in Germany;
Duncker is to publish a translation; and Harpers pay me £1200 for
reprinting it in America.

[Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 4th June, 1872.]

I am glad to know that you are having a time of refreshing in fine
scenery, with entire freedom to paint. I am in a corresponding state
of relief from the noises and small excitements that break up the day
and scatter one's nervous energy in London.

We have been in our hiding-place about twelve days now, and I am
enjoying it more and more--getting more bodily ease and mental
clearness than I have had for the last six months. Our house is not in
the least beautiful, but it is well situated and comfortable,
perfectly still in the middle of a garden surrounded by fields and
meadows, and yet within reach of shops and civilization.

We managed to get to the Academy one day before leaving town. I was
delighted with Walker's picture--were you?--and Mason's unfinished
Reaper, and a few, very few, others.

Also we went twice to the opera in order to save ourselves from any
yearnings after it when we should have settled in the country.

We tell no one our address, and have our letters sent on from the
Priory.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. H. B. Stowe, 4th June, 1872.]

We too are in a country refuge, you see, and this bit of Surrey, as I
dare say you know, is full of beauty of the too garden-like sort for
which you pity us. How different from your lodge in the wilderness! I
have read your description three or four times--it enchants me so
thoroughly--and Mr. Lewes is just as much enamoured of it. We shall
never see it, I imagine, except in the mirror of your loving words;
but thanks, many and warm, dear friend, for saying that our presence
would be welcome. I have always had delight in descriptions of
American forests since the early days when I read "Atala," which I
believe that you would criticise as half unveracious. I dwelt on the
descriptions in "Dred" with much enjoyment.

Pray give my special thanks to the Professor for his letter. His
handwriting, which does really look like Arabic--a very graceful
character, surely--happens to be remarkably legible to me, and I did
not hesitate over a single word. Some of the words, as expressions of
fellowship, were very precious to me, and I hold it very good of him
to write to me that best sort of encouragement. I was much impressed
with the fact--which you had told me--that he was the original of the
"visionary boy" in "Old Town Folk;" and it must be deeply interesting
to talk with him on his experience. Perhaps I am inclined, under the
influence of the facts, physiological and psychological, which have
been gathered of late years, to give larger place to the
interpretation of vision-seeing as _subjective_ than the Professor
would approve. It seems difficult to limit--at least to limit with any
precision--the possibility of confounding sense by impressions,
derived from inward conditions, with those which are directly
dependent on external stimulus. In fact, the division between within
and without in this sense seems to become every year a more subtle and
bewildering problem.

_Your_ experience with the _planchette_ is amazing; but that the words
which you found it to have written were dictated by the spirit of
Charlotte Brontë is to me (whether rightly or not) so enormously
improbable, that I could only accept it if every condition were laid
bare, and every other explanation demonstrated to be impossible. If it
were another spirit aping Charlotte Brontë--if here and there at rare
spots and among people of a certain temperament, or even at many spots
and among people of all temperaments, tricksy spirits are liable to
rise as a sort of earth-bubbles and set furniture in movement, and
tell things which we either know already or should be as well without
knowing--I must frankly confess that I have but a feeble interest in
these doings, feeling my life very short for the supreme and awful
revelations of a more orderly and intelligible kind which I shall die
with an imperfect knowledge of. If there were miserable spirits whom
we could help, then I think we should pause and have patience with
their trivial-mindedness; but otherwise I don't feel bound to study
them more than I am bound to study the special follies of a
particular phase of human society. Others who feel differently, and
are attracted towards this study, are making an experiment for us as
to whether anything better than bewilderment can come of it. At
present it seems to me that to rest any fundamental part of religion
on such a basis is a melancholy misguidance of men's minds from the
true sources of high and pure emotion.

I am comforted to think that you partly agree with me there.

I have not time to write more than this very imperfect fragmentary
sketch of _only one_ aspect which the question of spirit-communications
wears to me at present--being always rather brain-weary after my
morning's work, and called for by my husband to walk with him and read
aloud to him. I spend nearly three hours every day in this exercise of
reading aloud, which, happily, I can carry on without fatigue of lungs.
Yet it takes strength as well as time.

Mr. Lewes is gone into town to-day, so I have an additional hour at
liberty, and have been glad to be able to send you a letter which is
not worth anything, indeed, but which satisfies my need to thank you
and the Professor for your sweet friendliness--very sweet to me, I
assure you. Please accept my entire frankness as a proof of that high
value I set on you. And do not call anything I may have written a
prejudice--it is simply a statement of how certain things appear to my
inward eyesight, which I am ready to have rectified by more light.

About photographs--I have _no_ photograph of myself, having always
avoided having one taken. That makes me seem very selfish in being
particularly glad to get yours.

Mrs. Fields, with the beautiful face and charming manners, sent me a
letter a little while ago, inviting us in the most tempting way to go
to Boston. She said that this pretty action was done at your
prompting, which is just like you as you have always shown yourself to
me.

Dear friend, how much you have lived through, both in the flesh and in
the spirit! My experience has been narrow compared with yours. I
assure you I feel this, so do not misinterpret anything I say to you
as being written in a flippant or critical spirit. One always feels
the want of the voice and eyes to accompany a letter and give it the
right tone.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 4th July, 1872.]

You were very good and dear to want to give me the pleasure of knowing
that the news was good, instead of leaving me to my small stock of
hopefulness. Ask Emily to care a little even now, with baby on her
mind, that her old friends are the better for hearing that she is
well. Four or five months ago it happens that I was writing some
playfulness about a baby and baby's hair, which is now in print, to
appear next month. I am not afraid that Emily should be revolted by my
blasphemy!

Mr. Lewes had "a lovely time" from Saturday to Monday at Weybridge. He
was feeling languid, and yet was tempted to sit at his desk. The
little change has been very serviceable, and he is now bright.

Our first book, read aloud by me after we came down, was Wallace's
"Eastern Archipelago," which, I think, you had spoken well of to Mr.
Lewes. It is delightful. The biography of the infant ourang-outang
alone is worth getting the book for. We are now in the middle of
Tylor's "Primitive Culture," which is worth studying, and useful for
reference on special points, if you happen to want knowledge about
the ideas of the savage tribes.

Our days go by in delicious peace, unbroken except by my little inward
anxieties about all unfinished work.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 19th July, 1872.]

This morning came the joyful news that Gertrude has a fine healthy
baby--a daughter. We have just been saying in our walk that by the end
of this century our one-day-old granddaughter will probably be married
and have children of her own, while we are pretty sure to be at rest.
This obvious kind of wisdom does very well for discourse in the
delicious sunshine, as we wander over a hilly, half fern-clad, half
grassy wilderness called South Park, from which we can overlook two
fertile bosky valleys. We like this bit of country better and better.
As to health, I am not quite so prosperous as I was at first, but to
make amends, Mr. Lewes is in a good average condition, and only now
and then has a morning in which he is forced to wander about instead
of going to his beloved work. We have had much happiness here, much
sympathy in letters from far-off friends unknown in the flesh, and
peaceful enjoyment of our occupations. But we have longed for more
continuous warmth and brightness, and to-day may perhaps be the
beginning of that one wanting condition.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 1st Aug. 1872(?).]

The death of that honored, good creature, Mr. William Smith, touched
us particularly, because of the perfect marriage-bond which had made
the last eleven years of his life unspeakably precious both to him and
his wife. Mr. Lewes offered to go to Brighton to see him; but he was
so reduced, so very feeble in body, though he kept to the last much
brightness of mind, that Mrs. Smith feared for him the excitement of
seeing friends who came, specially, from a distance.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 4th Aug. 1872.]

I like to think that your journey was a success. But I had felt sure,
that unless bad health or bad weather overtook you, both Mrs.
Blackwood and you must have great happiness in taking that bright,
lovely daughter abroad and watching her fresh impressions. I imagine
her laudable indignation at the crushing of the little lizard! Those
little creatures darting about the stones seem part of the happiness
of Italian sunshine, as the small birds hopping after the rain seem
part of the moist happiness at home.

I shall send Part VII. in a few days. Since Mr. Lewes tells me that
the _Spectator_ considers me the most melancholy of authors, it will
perhaps be a welcome assurance to you that there is no unredeemed
tragedy in the solution of the story.

Mr. Lewes examines the newspapers before I see them, and cuts out any
criticisms which refer to me, so as to save me from these spiritual
chills--though, alas! he cannot save me from the physical chills which
retard my work more seriously. I had hoped to have the manuscript well
out of my hands before we left this place at the end of the month, but
the return of my dyspeptic troubles makes me unable to reckon on such
a result.

It will be a good plan, I think, to quicken the publication towards
the end; but we feel convinced that the slow plan of publication has
been of immense advantage to the book in deepening the impression it
produces. Still I shudder a little to think what a long book it will
be--not so long as "Vanity Fair" or "Pendennis," however, according to
my calculation.

How good the articles on French manners and domestic life are in
"Maga." The spirit in which they are written is excellent.

     The manuscript of "Middlemarch" bears the following
     inscription:

"To my dear Husband, George Henry Lewes, in this nineteenth year of
our blessed union."

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Cross, Sept. 1872.]

I am tired of behaving like an ungrateful wretch--making no sign in
answer to affectionate words which have come to me with cheering
effect. And I want to tell you and Mr. Hall (alas! for the dear old
name[18] which had such cherished associations) that I long too much
to see you all at Six-Mile Bottom, to give up utterly the prospect of
that good. We imagine that the place is near Ipswich, which is no more
than an hour and fifty minutes from London. If so, the journey would
be easily managed, and would be worth taking for the sake of one whole
day and two half days with you--just as if you were the hour nearer,
at Weybridge--before we set our faces towards Germany. I am not
hopeless that we might do that in the second week of September, if you
are not quite disgusted with the thought of me as a person who is
always claiming pity for small ailments, and also if Mr. Hall can
secure me against being shot from the other side of the hedge by the
Prince of Wales,[19] while we are discussing plantations.

I dare not count much on fulfilling any project, my life for the last
year having been a sort of nightmare, in which I have been scrambling
on the slippery bank of a pool, just keeping my head above water. But
I shall be the happier for having told you that I delight in the
double invitation for the sake of the love it assures me of, and that
I do want to see you all.

You are all gloriously well, I hope, and Alkie looking more and more
cherubic, and Emily and Florence blooming. My best love to all.
Particular regards to J., and regrets that we were not on his route
from Brindisi. I read his paper on New York with much interest and
satisfaction.

You are often among my imaged companions both in dreaming and waking
hours.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Cross, Oct. 1872, from Homburg.]

It was a delightful surprise to see your handwriting when we went to
inquire at the _Poste Restante_. We had, on the whole, a fortunate
journey, and are especially grateful to Mr. Hall for suggesting the
route by Trèves, where we spent two nights and an exquisite day. I was
continually reminded of Rome when we were wandering in the outskirts
in search of the antiquities, and the river banks are a loveliness
into the bargain which Rome has not. We had even an opportunity of
seeing some dissipation, for there happened to be an excellent circus,
where we spent our evening. The pretty country through which we passed
had an additional interest for us about Libramont.

The air, the waters, the plantations here are all perfect--"only man
is vile." I am not fond of denouncing my fellow-sinners, but gambling
being a vice I have no mind to, it stirs my disgust even more than my
pity. The sight of the dull faces bending round the gaming-tables, the
raking up of the money, and the flinging of the coins towards the
winners by the hard-faced croupiers, the hateful, hideous women
staring at the board like stupid monomaniacs--all this seems to me the
most abject presentation of mortals grasping after something called a
good that can be seen on the face of this little earth. Burglary is
heroic compared with it. I get some satisfaction in looking on, from
the sense that the thing is going to be put down. Hell is the only
right name for such places.

It was cruel to find the bitter cold just set in as we arrived. For
two days we were as cold as in clear winter days at Berlin. There are
no amusements for the evening here, and the pleasure of listening to
the excellent band in the afternoons is diminished by the chillness
which makes one fear to sit down in the open air. But we like being
idle, and the days pass easily.

It is good to have in our memories the two happy days at Six-Mile
Bottom; and the love that surrounded me and took care of me there is
something very precious to believe in among hard-faced strangers. Much
gratitude for the anticipated letter that will come to tell us more
news of you by-and-by.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 4th Oct. 1872.]

At last I begin a letter which is intended not as a payment but as an
acknowledgment of debt. It will have at least the recommendation of
requiring no answer. After some perfect autumnal days we are
languishing with headache from two days' damp and mugginess, and feel
it almost as much work as we are equal to to endure our _malaise_. But
on the whole we are not sorry that we came to this place rather than
any other. On dry days the air is perfect, and the waters are really
an enticing drink. Then there is a wood close by where we can wander
in delicious privacy: which is really better than the company here,
save and except a few friends whom we found at first, and who have now
moved off to Baden. The Kursaal is to me a hell, not only for the
gambling but for the light and heat of the gas, and we have seen
enough of its monstrous hideousness. There is very little dramatic
_Stoff_ to be picked up by watching or listening. The saddest thing to
be witnessed is the play of a young lady, who is only twenty-six
years old, and is completely in the grasp of this mean, money-making
demon. It made me cry to see her young, fresh face among the hags and
brutally stupid men around her. Next year, when the gambling has
vanished, the place will be delightful; there is to be a subvention
from Government to keep up the beautiful grounds; and it is likely
that there will be increase enough in the number of decent visitors to
keep the town tolerably prosperous. One attraction it has above other
German baths that I have seen is the abundance of pleasant apartments
to be had, where one can be as peaceful as the human lot allows in a
world of pianos.

Asher's cheap editions are visible everywhere by the side of
Tauchnitz, but the outside is not, I think, quite equally
recommendable and recommending.

We brought no books with us, but have furnished our table with German
books which we bought at Frankfort, from learned writing about
Menschlich Sprache and Vernunft down to Kotzebue's comedies, so that
we have employment for the rainy hours when once our heads are clear
of aches. The certainty that the weather is everywhere else bad will
help our resolution to stay here till the 12th at least. In the mean
time we hope to have the proof of the finale to "Middlemarch."

I am rejoiced to learn from Mr. William's letter that Mr. Simpson has
returned from his excursion in good condition. That must be a comfort
to you, both for friendship and for work's sake.

We mean to return by Paris, and hope that the weather will not drive
us away from health and pleasure-seeking until the end of the month. I
fear, from the accounts of your Scottish weather, that you will have
enjoyed Strathtyrum less than usual, and will be resigned to Edinburgh
before your proper time. How one talks about the weather! It is
excusable here where there is no grave occupation, and no amusement
for us, who don't gamble, except seeking health in walks and water
drinking.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Cross, 27th Oct. 1872, from Boulogne.]

I had meant to write to you again from Germany, but I was hindered
from doing so by the uncertainty of our plans, which vacillated
between further wanderings in South Germany and the usual dreary
railway journeying by Strasburg to Paris. As it was, we left Homburg
on the 13th and had ten days of delicious autumnal weather and
quietude at Stuttgart and Carlsruhe--ten days which made the heart of
our enjoyment. We still hesitated whether we should go to Augsburg,
and even Munich, making our way home through Germany and Belgium, and
turning our shoulders on Paris. Our evil genius persuaded us to go to
Paris and to make the journey by night--whence came headache and
horrible disgust with the shops of the Rue de la Paix and the
Boulevard. After going to Versailles in the rain, seeing the sad ruins
of the Hotel de Ville, missing the Theatre Français, and getting
"Patrie" in exchange, we rushed away to this place, where we are
trying to recover the sense of benefit from our change, which forsook
us on quitting old Germany. We have an affinity for what the world
calls "dull places," and always prosper best in them. We are sure to
be at home next week, and I hope before long to have some news of you
there--some dear faces coming to bring it. We shall linger here a few
days and take a favorable time for crossing, but our patience will
hardly last beyond Friday.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Wm. Smith, 1st Nov. 1872.]

We returned yesterday evening from six weeks' absence in Germany, and
I found your dear, sad letter among the many awaiting me. I prize very
highly the fact that you like to write to me and bear me in your mind
as one who has a certain fellowship in your sorrow; and I do trust
that this letter may reach you in time to prevent you from thinking,
even for a moment, that I could be indifferent about responding to any
word you send me. I shall address it to the care of Blackwood & Sons,
because I imagine you to be by this time in Edinburgh with that
delightful friend, Mrs. Stirling, whom I had much kindness from many
years ago when I was on a visit to Mr. and Mrs. George Combe. She took
me to hear Dr. Guthrie and Dr. Candlish, and through her I saw
Craigcrook. I like to think of those hours and her pleasant talk.

Mr. Lewes, I am thankful to say, has been getting more robust for the
last two years, and is very bright and active. I think there is hardly
any one left to whom he would so willingly have written or talked
about the subjects which are filling his mind as that dear one who is
gone from your side, but is perpetually present in your consciousness.
To-day I have been reading the memorial article in _Blackwood_, and
have been hoping that there is nothing in it which jars on your
feeling. Everybody will think as I do--that the bits from your pen are
worth all the rest. I have been especially moved, though, by the two
stanzas quoted at the end. Mr. Lewes judges that the writer of the
article did not personally know your husband, and wishes that more
special touches had been given. I know, dear friend, that the sorrow
is irremediable; but the pain--the anguish--will become less sharp and
life will be less difficult. You will think of things to do such as he
would approve of your doing, and every day will be sacred with his
memory--nay, his presence. There is no pretence or visionariness in
saying that he is still part of you. Mr. Lewes sends his affectionate
regards, which you will not reject. We mention your name to each other
with a certain tenderness, as if your sorrow somehow belonged to our
love for each other. But I hardly dare to think of what these words
which I have written mean. Sometimes in the midst of happiness I cry
suddenly at the thought that there must come a parting. Are not you
and I very near to one another? I mean in feeling.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 19th Nov. 1872.]

I found a letter from dear Mrs. William Smith on my return, and I have
had another since in answer to mine. It is inevitable that her sense
of loss should deepen for some time to come. I am hoping that
by-and-by active interests will arise to make her feel that her life
is useful.

The article in _Blackwood_ was chiefly valuable for the extracts it
contained from Mrs. Smith's own memoir. One felt that the writer of
the article had not known Mr. William Smith personally; but her
sketches did something to supply that defect. Mr. Lewes felt a
peculiar attachment to him. He had always been thoroughly sympathetic,
both morally and intellectually, and it was a constant regret to us
that he and Mrs. Smith were so far away. There was no man with whom
Mr. Lewes would have found it so pleasant to discuss questions of
science and philosophy--his culture was so rare and his disposition so
free from littleness: and his wife was worthy of him.

Gertrude's little Blanche is a charming young lady--fat, cooing, and
merry. It is a great comfort to see her with this hope fulfilled--I
mean to see Gertrude with her hope fulfilled, and not Blanche, as the
grammar seemed to imply. That small person's hopes are at present easy
of fulfilment.

We have made but one expedition since our return, and that was to see
the pictures at Bethnal Green--altogether a cheering and delightful
sight. Of course you saw them long ago. The Troyon is my favorite.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 19th Nov. 1872.]

I will impute your total silence towards me for many, many months to
your preoccupation with the work now announced, and will not believe
that a greeting from me at this time of the year will be less welcome
than of old. I remember that last year one of your prettily-expressed
wishes was that I should write another book and--I think you
added--send it to you to read. On the strength of this remembrance,
you will be one of the three exceptional people to whom we order
"Middlemarch" to be sent. But do not write to me about it, because
until a book has quite gone away from me and become entirely of the
_non-ego_--gone thoroughly from the wine-press into the casks--I would
rather not hear or see anything that is said about it.

Cara sent me word that you were looking, as usual, very pretty, and
showing great energy on interesting occasions. But this was two months
ago, and some detailed news from yourself would be a delightful gift.

I am getting stronger, and showing some meagre benefit from being
indulged in all possible ways. Mr. Lewes makes a martyr of himself in
writing all my notes and business letters. Is not that being a sublime
husband? For all the while there are studies of his own being put
aside--studies which are a seventh heaven to him.

Is there any one who does not need patience? For when one's outward
lot is perfect, the sense of inward imperfection is the more pressing.

You are never long without entering into my thoughts, though you may
send nothing fresh to feed them. But I am ashamed of expressing regard
for my friends, since I do no earthly thing for them.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 22d Nov. 1872.]

A kiss to you on your birthday! with gratitude for your delightful
letter, such as only you can write me. How impossible it is to _feel_
that we are as old as we are! Sometimes it seems a little while since
you and I were walking over the Radford fields, with the youth in our
limbs, talking and laughing with that easy companionship which it is
difficult to find in later life. I am busy now reading Mr. Lewes's
manuscript, which has been accumulating fast during my "Middlemarch"
time. Did I tell you that in the last two years he has been mastering
the principles of mathematics? That is an interesting fact,
impersonally, at his age. Old Professor Stowe--Mrs. H. B. Stowe's
husband--sent me this story, which is almost better than Topsy. He
heard a school-master asking a little black girl the usual questions
about creation--who made the earth, the sea, etc. At last came, "And
who made you?" Some deliberation was necessary, after which she said,
"Nobody; _I was so afore_." Expect to be immensely disappointed with
the close of "Middlemarch." But look back to the Prelude. I wish I
could take the wings of the morning every now and then to cheer you
with an hour's chat, such as you feel the need of, and then fly back
on the wings of the wind. I have the most vivid thoughts of you,
almost like a bodily presence; but these do you no good, since you can
only believe that I have them--and you are tired of believing after
your work is done.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 1st Dec. 1872.]

Before your letter came, Mr. Lewes had been expressing to me his
satisfaction (and he is very hard to satisfy with articles on me) in
the genuineness of judgment, wise moderation, and excellent selection
of points in "Maga's" review of "Middlemarch." I have just now been
reading the review myself--Mr. Lewes had meant at first to follow his
rule of not allowing me to see what is written about myself--and I am
pleased to find the right moral note struck everywhere, both in remark
and quotation. Especially I am pleased with the writer's sensibility
to the pathos in Mr. Casaubon's character and position, and with the
discernment he shows about Bulstrode. But it is a perilous matter to
approve the praise which is given to our own doings.

I think that such an article as that which you hint at on the tone of
the Bar is very desirable. We are usually at one on points of feeling.
Is it not time now to insist that ability and not lying is the force
of a barrister--that he has not to make himself a bad actor in order
to put a case well, but to get the clearness and breadth of vision
which will enable him to handle the evidence effectively?
Untruthfulness usually ends by making men foolish. I have never read
"Spiritual Wives," but judging from the extracts which have come
before me, it must be a nasty book. Still, if people will be censors,
let them weigh their words. I mean that the words were unfair by the
disproportionateness of the condemnation which everybody with some
conscience must feel to be one of the great difficulties in denouncing
a particular person. Every unpleasant dog is only one of many, but we
kick him because he comes in our way, and there is always some want of
distributive justice in the kicking.

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.

[Sidenote: 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
building[20] 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.

[Sidenote: 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 _n_^{th} 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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 _in_convenient--what are the figures representing the courage of
"the trade" in the matter of a 42_s._ 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.


_SUMMARY._

JANUARY, 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."

FOOTNOTES:

[6] Dr. Congreve's article, "Mr. Huxley on M. Comte," in _Fortnightly
Review_, April, 1869.

[7] See _ante_, vol. i. p. 220.

[8] Professor Edmund Spenser Beesley, a well-known member of the
Positivist body, who married Miss Crompton, daughter of Mr. Justice
Crompton.

[9] An article by Mr. Frederic Harrison in the _Fortnightly Review_ of
November, 1869.

[10] Portrait of Charles Hennell.

[11] Written after the death of Lord Clarendon, who, Lady Lytton tells
me, had been like a father to her.

[12] "Armgart."

[13] Miss Octavia Hill. Walmer Street Industrial Experiment, tried by
Canon Fremantle under Miss Hill's supervision.

[14] Scott Commemoration.

[15] Written just before the death of Mrs. Lytton's eldest boy.

[16] "Marie of Villefranche." _Macmillan's Magazine_, August, 1871.

[17] The collector of "The Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings of George
Eliot."

[18] Mr. W. H. Bullock--changed his name to Hall.

[19] The Six-Mile Bottom shooting had been let to H. R. H. that year.

[20] A site offered near Shere, in Surrey.




CHAPTER XVII.


[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.'"

[Sidenote: 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!

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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."

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1873.]

_Sept. 4._--Went to Blackbrook, near Bickley.

[Sidenote: 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
trouble[21] 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.

[Sidenote: 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 7_s._ 6_d._--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 3_s._ 6_d._, 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.

[Sidenote: 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."

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

All the great religions of the world, historically considered, are
rightly the objects of deep reverence and sympathy--they are the
record of spiritual struggles, which are the types of our own. This is
to me pre-eminently true of Hebrewism and Christianity, on which my
own youth was nourished. And in this sense I have no antagonism
towards any religious belief, but a strong outflow of sympathy. Every
community met to worship the highest Good (which is understood to be
expressed by God) carries me along in its main current; and if there
were not reasons against my following such an inclination, I should go
to church or chapel constantly for the sake of the delightful emotions
of fellowship which come over me in religious assemblies--the very
nature of such assemblies being the recognition of a binding belief or
spiritual law, which is to lift us into willing obedience and save us
from the slavery of unregulated passion or impulse. And with regard to
other people, it seems to me that those who have no definite
conviction which constitutes a protesting faith may often more
beneficially cherish the good within them and be better members of
society by a conformity, based on the recognized good in the public
belief, than by a nonconformity which has nothing but negatives to
utter. _Not_, of course, if the conformity would be accompanied by a
consciousness of hypocrisy. That is a question for the individual
conscience to settle. But there is enough to be said on the different
points of view from which conformity may be regarded to hinder a ready
judgment against those who continue to conform after ceasing to
believe, in the ordinary sense. But with the utmost largeness of
allowance for the difficulty of deciding in special cases, it must
remain true that the highest lot is to have definite beliefs about
which you feel that "necessity is laid upon you" to declare them, as
something better which you are bound to try and give to those who have
the worse.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 5th Nov. 1873.]

It was a cheerful accompaniment to breakfast this morning to have a
letter from you, with the pretty picture you suggested of Miss
Blackwood's first ball. I am glad that I have seen the "little
fairy," so as to be able to imagine her.

We are both the better for the delicious air and quiet of the country.
We, too, like you, were sorry to quit the woods and fields for the
comparatively disturbed life which even we are obliged to lead in
town. Letters requesting interviews can no longer be made void by
one's absence; and I am much afflicted by these interruptions, which
break up the day without any adequate result of good to any mortal. In
the country the days have broad spaces, and the very stillness seems
to give a delightful roominess to the hours.

Is it not wonderful that the world can absorb so much "Middlemarch" at
a guinea the copy? I shall be glad to hear particulars, which, I
imagine, will lead to the conclusion that the time is coming for the
preparation of a 7_s._ 6_d._ edition. I am not fond of reading proofs,
but I am anxious to correct the sheets of this edition, both in
relation to mistakes already standing, and to prevent the accumulation
of others in the reprinting.

I am slowly simmering towards another big book; but people seem so
bent on giving supremacy to "Middlemarch" that they are sure not to
like any future book so well. I had a letter from Mr. Bancroft (the
American ambassador at Berlin) the other day, in which he says that
everybody in Berlin reads "Middlemarch." He had to buy two copies for
his house; and he found the rector of the university, a stupendous
mathematician, occupied with it in the solid part of the day. I am
entertaining you in this graceful way about myself because you will be
interested to know what are the chances for our literature abroad.

That Ashantee business seems to me hideous. What is more murderous
than stupidity? To have a husband gone on such an expedition is a
trial that passes my imagination of what it is possible to endure in
the way of anxiety.

We are looking forward to the "Inkerman" volume as something for me to
read aloud.

[Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 11th Nov. 1873.]

During the latter part of our stay at Blackbrook we had become very
fond of the neighborhood. The walks and drives round us were
delightfully varied--commons, wooded lanes, wide pastures--and we felt
regretfully that we were hardly likely to find again a country-house
so secluded in a well-inhabited region.

We have seen few people at present. The George Howards are come from a
delicious, lonely _séjour_ in a tower of Bamborough Castle!--and he
has brought many sketches home. That lodging would suit you, wouldn't
it? A castle on a rock washed by the sea seems to me just a paradise
for you.

We have been reading John Mill's "Autobiography," like the rest of the
world. The account of his early education and the presentation of his
father are admirable; but there are some pages in the latter half that
one would have liked to be different.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Cross, 6th Dec. 1873.]

Our wish to see you after all the long months since June, added to
your affectionate invitation, triumphs over our disinclination to
move. So, unless something should occur to make the arrangement
inconvenient to you, we will join the dear party on your hearth in the
afternoon of the 24th, and stay with you till the 26th.

Notwithstanding my trust in your words, I feel a lingering uneasiness
lest we should be excluding some one else from enjoying Christmas with
you.

J.'s friend, Dr. Andrew Clark, has been prescribing for Mr.
Lewes--ordering him to renounce the coffee which has been a chief
charm of life to him, but being otherwise mild in his prohibitions.

I hear with much comfort that you are better, and have recovered your
usual activity. Please keep well till Christmas, and then love and pet
me a little, for that is always very sweet.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 22d Dec. 1873.]

In writing any careful presentation of human feelings, you must count
on that infinite stupidity of readers who are always substituting
their crammed notions of what ought to be felt for any attempt to
recall truly what they themselves have felt under like circumstances.
We are going to spend Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with our friends
at Weybridge.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 28th Dec. 1873.]

We have been spending our Christmas in the country, and it is only on
my return that I got your kind note, with its pretty symbols of
remembrance. Such little signs are very sweet, coming from those whom
one loves well in spite of long separation. I am very glad to have
seen you in your new home, and to be able to imagine you among your
household treasures--especially to imagine both you and your husband
in enjoyable health. We have been invalidish lately, and have put
ourselves under the discipline of Dr. Andrew Clark, who is not one of
the "three meat-meals and alcohol" physicians, but rather one of those
who try to starve out dyspepsia.

We both send our kind regards to Mr. Taylor, and hope that he may
remain robust for his parliamentary campaign. Life, I trust, will deal
gently with you in future, dear friend, and give you years of peace
after your period of anxiety and of parting from old places and
habits.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1874.]

_Jan. 1._--The happy old year, in which we have had constant enjoyment
of life, notwithstanding much bodily _malaise_, is gone from us
forever. More than in any former year of my life love has been poured
forth to me from distant hearts, and in our home we have had that
finish to domestic comfort which only faithful, kind servants can
give. Our children are prosperous and happy--Charles evidently growing
in mental efficiency; we have abundant wealth for more than our actual
needs; and our unspeakable joy in each other has no other alloy than
the sense that it must one day end in parting. My dear husband has a
store of present and prospective good in the long work which is likely
to stretch through the remaining years of his intellectual activity;
and there have not been wanting signs that what he has already
published is being appreciated rightly by capable persons. He is
thinner than ever, but still he shows wonderful elasticity and nervous
energy. I have been for a month rendered almost helpless for
intellectual work by constant headache, but am getting a little more
freedom. Nothing is wanting to my blessings but the uninterrupted
power of work. For as to all my unchangeable imperfections I have
resigned myself.

_Jan. 17._--I received this morning, from Blackwood, the account of
"Middlemarch" and of "The Spanish Gypsy" for 1873. Of the guinea
edition of "Middlemarch," published in the spring, 2434 copies have
been sold. Of "The Spanish Gypsy" 292 copies have been sold during
1873, and the remaining copies are only 197. Thus, out of 4470 which
have been printed, 4273 have been distributed.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Wm. Smith, 12th Feb. 1874.]

We have received the volume--your kind and valuable gift--and I have
read it aloud with Mr. Lewes, all except the later pages, which we
both feel too much to bear reading them in common. You have given a
deeply interesting and, we think, instructive picture, and Mr. Lewes
has expressed his wish that it had not been restricted to a private
circulation. But I understand your shrinking from indiscriminate
publicity, at least in the first instance. Perhaps, if many judges on
whom you rely concur with Mr. Lewes, you will be induced to extend the
possible benefit of the volume. I care so much for the demonstration
of an intense joy in life on the basis of "plain living and high
thinking" in this time of more and more eager scrambling after wealth
and show. And then there are exquisite bits which you have rescued
from that darkness to which his self-depreciation condemned them. I
think I never read a more exquisite little poem than the one called
"Christian Resignation;" and Mr. Lewes, when I read it aloud, at once
exclaimed, "How very fine--read it again!" I am also much impressed
with the wise mingling of moderation with sympathy in that passage,
given in a note, from the article on Greg's "Political Essays."

What must have been the effort which the writing cost you I can--not
fully, but almost--imagine. But believe, dear friend, that in our
judgment you have not poured out these recollections in a cry of
anguish all in vain. I feel roused and admonished by what you have
told, and if I--then others.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 20th Feb. 1874.]

I imagined you absorbed by the political crisis, like the rest of the
world except the Lord Chief-justice, who must naturally have felt his
summing-up deserving of more attention. I, who am no believer in
salvation by ballot, am rather tickled that the first experiment with
it has turned against its adherents.

I have been making what will almost certainly be my last corrections
of the "Spanish Gypsy," and that causes me to look forward with
special satisfaction to the probable exhaustion of the present
edition. The corrections chiefly concern the quantity of the word
Zincálo, which ought to be Zíncalo; but there are some other
emendations; and, altogether, they make a difference to more than
seventy pages. But it would still be worth while to retain the
stereotypes, replacing simply the amended pages, there being about 400
in the whole book. I am sadly vexed that I did not think of having
these corrections ready for the German reprint.

I have been compunctious lately about my having sprinkled cold water
on the proposal suggested by Mr. Simpson, of bringing out my novels in
a cheaper way--on thinner paper and without illustrations. The
compunction was roused by my happening, in looking at old records, to
alight on some letters, one especially, written by a working-man, a
certain E. Hall,[22] more than ten years ago, begging me to bring out
my books in a form cheap enough to let a poor man more easily "get a
read of them." Hence, if you and Mr. Simpson see good to revive the
design in question, I am perfectly in accord.

You did send me a copy of Lord Lytton's "Fables"--many thanks for
doing so. Mr. Lewes had seen several of them in manuscript, and
thought well of their merits. I am reading them gradually. They are
full of graceful fancies and charming verse. So far as cleverness goes
it seems to me he can do almost anything; and the leanings of his mind
are towards the best things. The want I feel is of more definiteness
and more weight. The two stanzas to his wife, placed before "Far and
Near," are perfect.

I think I have never written to you since I wanted to tell you that I
admired very much the just spirit in which the notice of Mill's
"Autobiography" was written in the Magazine. Poor Dickens's latter
years wear a melancholy aspect, do they not? But some of the extracts
from his letters in the last volume have surprisingly more freshness
and naturalness of humor than any of the letters earlier given. Still,
something should be done by dispassionate criticism towards the reform
of our national habits in the matter of literary biography. Is it not
odious that as soon as a man is dead his desk is raked, and every
insignificant memorandum which he never meant for the public is
printed for the gossiping amusement of people too idle to re-read his
books? "He gave the people of his best. His worst he kept, his best he
gave;" but there is a certain set, not a small one, who are titillated
by the worst and indifferent to the best. I think this fashion is a
disgrace to us all. It is something like the uncovering of the dead
Byron's club-foot.

Mr. Lewes is in a more flourishing condition than usual, having been
helped by Dr. Andrew Clark, who ministers to all the brain-workers. I
have been ill lately: weeks of _malaise_ having found their climax in
lumbar-neuralgia, or something of that sort, which gave fits of pain
severe enough to deserve even a finer name.

My writing has not been stimulated as Scott's was under circumstances
of a like sort, and I have nothing to tell you securely.

Please give an expression of my well-founded sympathy to Mr. William
Blackwood. My experience feelingly convinces me of the hardship there
must be in his. I trust I shall hear of the lameness as a departed
evil.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 6th Mch. 1874.]

I send you by this post a small collection of my poems, which Mr.
Lewes wishes me to get published in May.

Such of them as have been already printed in a fugitive form have been
received with many signs of sympathy, and every one of those I now
send you represents an idea which I care for strongly, and wish to
propagate as far as I can. Else I should forbid myself from adding to
the mountainous heap of poetical collections.

The form of volume I have in my eye is a delightful duodecimo edition
of Keats's poems (without the "Endymion") published during his life:
just the volume to slip in the pocket. Mine will be the least bit
thicker.

I should like a darkish green cover, with Roman lettering. But you
will consider the physique and price of the book, and kindly let me
know your thoughts.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 25th Mch. 1874.]

I fear the fatal fact about your story[23] is the absence of God and
hell. "My dear madam, you have not presented motives to the children!"
It is really hideous to find that those who sit in the scribes' seats
have got no further than the appeal to selfishness, which they call
God. The old Talmudists were better teachers. They make Rachel
remonstrate with God for his hardness, and remind him that she was
kinder to her sister Leah than he to his people--thus correcting the
traditional God by human sympathy. However, we must put up with our
contemporaries, since we can neither live with our ancestors nor with
posterity.

It is cheering to see the programme of your new society. There
certainly is an awakening of conscience about animals in general as
our fellow-creatures--even the vogue of Balaam's ass is in that sense
a good sign. A lady wrote to me the other day that when she went to
church in the island of Sark the sermon turned on that remonstrant
hero or heroine.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 27th Mch. 1874.]

I can imagine how great an encouragement you feel from the enthusiasm
generously expressed in Mr. C.'s letter. It is always an admirable
impulse to express deeply felt admiration, but it is also possible
that you have some grateful readers who do not write to you. I have
heard men whose greatest delight is literature, say that they should
never dream of writing to an author on the ground of his books alone.

Poor Mr. Francis Newman must be aged now and rather weary of the world
and explanations of the world. He can hardly be expected to take in
much novelty. I have a sort of affectionate sadness in thinking of the
interest which, in far-off days, I felt in his "Soul" and "Phases of
Faith," and of the awe I had of him as a lecturer on mathematics at
the Ladies' College. How much work he has done in the world which has
left no deep, conspicuous mark, but has probably entered beneficially
into many lives!

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 23d April, 1874.]

How glorious this opening spring is! At this moment even London is so
beautiful that I come home filled with the Park landscapes, and see
them as a background to all my thoughts. Your account of Mr. George
Dawson is rather melancholy. I remember him only as a bright,
vigorous, young man--such as perhaps his sons are now. I imagine it is
his fortune, or, rather, misfortune, to have talked too much and too
early about the greatest things.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Mary Cross, 11th May, 1874.]

I could not dwell on your sweet gift[24] yesterday--I should perhaps
have begun to cry, which would not have been _convenable_ in a
hostess. For I have been in a suffering, depressed condition lately,
so your good, loving deed has come just at the right time--when I need
the helpfulness that love brings me--and my heart turns to you with
grateful blessing this Monday morning.

I have been looking at the little paintings with a treble delight,
because they were done for _me_, because you chose for them subjects
of my "making," and because they are done with a promising charm of
execution (which Mr. Lewes feels as well as I). It gives me special
gladness that you have this sort of work before you. Some skill or
other with the hands is needful for the completeness of the life, and
makes a bridge over times of doubt and despondency.

Perhaps it will please you to know that nineteen years ago, when Mr.
Lewes and I were looking at a print of Goethe's statue by Ritzchl,
which stands on a pedestal ornamented with _bassi relievi_ of his
characters, I said (little believing that my wish would ever be
fulfilled), "How I should like to be surrounded with creatures of my
own making!" And yesterday, when I was looking at your gift, that
little incident recurred to me. Your love seemed to have made me a
miniature pedestal.

I was comforted yesterday that you and J. had at least the pleasure of
hearing Bice Trollope sing, to make some amends for the long, cold
journey. Please do not any of you, forget that we shall only be three
weeks more in this corner of the world, and that we want to see you as
often as you care to come.

Best love to all, the mother being chief among the all.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1874.]

_May 19._--This month has been published a volume of my poems--"Legend
of Jubal, and other Poems." On the 1st of June we go into the country
to the cottage, Earlswood Common, for four months, and I hope there to
get deep shafts sunk in my prose book. My health has been a wretched
drag on me during this last half-year. I have lately written "a
symposium."

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Cross, 14th June, 1874.]

I have so much trust in your love for us that I feel sure you will
like to know of our happiness in the secure peace of the country, and
the good we already experience in soul and body from the sweet breezes
over hill and common, the delicious silence, and the unbroken spaces
of the day. Just now the chill east wind has brought a little check to
our pleasure in our long afternoon drives; and I could wish that Canon
Kingsley and his fellow-worshippers of that harsh divinity could have
it reserved entirely for themselves as a tribal god.

We think the neighborhood so lovely that I must beg you to tell J. we
are in danger of settling here unless he makes haste to find us a
house in your "country-side"--a house with undeniable charms, on high
ground, in a strictly rural neighborhood (water and gas laid on,
nevertheless), to be vacant precisely this autumn!

My philosopher is writing away with double _verve_ in a projecting
window, where he can see a beautiful green slope crowned and studded
with large trees. I, too, have an agreeable corner in another room.
Our house has the essentials of comfort, and we have reason to be
contented with it.

I confess that my chief motive for writing about ourselves is to earn
some news of you, which will not be denied me by one or other of the
dear pairs of hands always ready to do us a kindness.

Our Sunday is really a Sabbath now--a day of thorough peace. But I
shall get hungry for a sight of some of the Sunday visitors before the
end of September.

I include all your family in a spiritual embrace, and am always yours
lovingly.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 16th June, 1874.]

We are revelling in the peace of the country, and have no drawback to
our delight except the cold winds, which have forced us to put on
winter clothing for the last four or five days.

Our wide common is very breezy, and the wind makes mournful music
round our walls. But I should think it is not possible to find a much
healthier region than this round Reigate and Redhill; and it is
prettier than half the places one crosses the Channel to see. We have
been hunting about for a permanent country home in the neighborhood,
but no house is so difficult to get as one which has at once seclusion
and convenience of position, which is neither of the suburban-villa
style nor of the grand hall and castle dimensions.

The restoration of the empire (in France), which is a threatening
possibility, seems to me a degrading issue. In the restoration of the
monarchy I should have found something to rejoice at, but the
traditions of the empire, both first and second, seem to my sentiment
bad. Some form of military despotism must be, as you say, the only
solution where no one political party knows how to behave itself. The
American pattern is certainly being accepted as to senatorial manners.
I dare say you have been to Knebworth and talked over French matters
with Lord Lytton. We are grieved to hear from him but a poor account
of sweet Lady Lytton's health and spirits. She is to me one of the
most charming types of womanliness, and I long for her to have all a
woman's best blessings.

The good news about the small remainder of "Jubal" is very welcome,
and I will write at once to Mr. Simpson to send him my two or three
corrections, and my wishes about the new edition. The price of the
book will well bear a thicker and a handsomely tinted paper,
especially now it has proved movable; and I felt so much the
difference to the eye and touch of the copies on rich tinted paper,
that I was much vexed with myself for having contributed to the shabby
appearance of the current edition by suggesting the thin Keats volume
as a model. People have become used to more luxurious editions; and I
confess to the weakness of being affected by paper and type in
something of the same subtile way I am affected by the odor of a room.

Many thanks for Lord Neaves's pleasant little book, which is a capital
example of your happily planned publication.

I came down here half poisoned by the French theatre, but I am
flourishing now, and am brewing my future big book with more or less
(generally less) belief in the quality of the liquor which will be
drawn off. The secured peacefulness and the pure air of the country
make our time of double worth; and we mean to give no invitations to
London friends desirous of change. We are selfishly bent on dual
solitude.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 1st July, 1874.]

I am so glad to know from your kind letter that you are interesting
yourself, with Madame Belloc, in the poor workhouse girls. You see my
only social work is to rejoice in the labors of others, while I live
in luxurious remoteness from all turmoil. Of course you have seen
Mrs. Senior's report. I read it, and thought it very wise, very
valuable in many ways, and since then she has sent me word how much
she has been worried about it by (as I imagine) obstructive officials.

We are revelling in our country peacefulness, in spite of the chills
and rain, driving about every day that the weather will allow, and
finding in each drive new beauties of this loveliest part of a lovely
country. We are looking out for a house in this neighborhood as a
permanent retreat; not with the idea of giving up our London house, at
least for some years, but simply of having a place to which we may
come for about six months of the year, and perhaps finally shrink into
altogether.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Wm. Smith, 1st July, 1874.]

Only the day before your letter came to me I had been saying, "I
wonder how our dear Mrs. William Smith is?" so that your impulse to
write to me satisfied a need of mine. I cannot help rejoicing that you
are in the midst of lovely scenery again, for I had had a presentiment
that Cambridge was antipathetic to you; and, indeed, I could not have
imagined that you would be in the right place there but for the
promised helpfulness of your presence to a young friend.

You tell me much that is interesting. Your picture of Mr. and Mrs.
Stirling, and what you say of the reasons why one may wish even for
the anguish of being _left_ for the sake of waiting on the beloved one
to the end--all that goes to my heart of hearts. It is what I think of
almost daily. For death seems to me now a close, real experience, like
the approach of autumn or winter, and I am glad to find that advancing
life brings this power of imagining the nearness of death I never had
till of late years. I remember all you told me of your niece's
expected marriage, and your joy in the husband who has chosen her. It
is wealth you have--that of several sweet nieces to whom being with
you is a happiness. You can feel some sympathy in their cheerfulness,
even though sorrow is always your only private good--can you not, dear
friend?--and the time is short at the utmost. The blessed reunion, if
it may come, must be patiently waited for; and such good as you can do
others, by loving looks and words, must seem to you like a closer
companionship with the gentleness and benignity which you justly
worshipped while it was visibly present, and still more, perhaps, now
it is veiled, and is a memory stronger than vision of outward things.
We are revelling in the sweet peace of the country, and shall remain
here till the end of September.

Mr. Lewes sends his affectionate remembrances with mine. I am
scribbling while he holds my bed-candle, so pray forgive any
incoherency.

[Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 17th July, 1874.]

I have two questions to ask of your benevolence. First, was there not
some village near Stonehenge where you stayed the night, nearer to
Stonehenge than Amesbury? Secondly, do you know anything specific
about Holmwood _Common_ as a place of residence? It is ravishingly
beautiful; is it in its higher part thoroughly unobjectionable as a
site for a dwelling?

It seems that they have been having the heat of Tophet in London,
whereas we have never had more than agreeable sunniness, this common
being almost always breezy. And the country around us must, I think,
be the loveliest of its undulating, woody kind in all England.

I remember, when we were driving together last, something was said
about my disposition to melancholy. I ought to have said then, but did
not, that I am no longer one of those whom Dante found in hell border
because they had been sad under the blessed sunlight.[25] I am
uniformly cheerful now--feeling the preciousness of these moments, in
which I still possess love and thought.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones, 3d Aug. 1874.]

It was sweet of you to write me that nice long letter. I was athirst
for some news of you. Life, as you say, is a big thing. No wonder
there comes a season when we cease to look round and say, "How shall I
enjoy?" but, as in a country which has been visited by the sword,
pestilence, and famine, think only how we shall help the wounded, and
how find seed for the next harvest--how till the earth and make a
little time of gladness for those who are being born without their own
asking. I am so glad of what you say about the Latin. Go on conquering
and to conquer a little kingdom for yourself there.

We are, as usual, getting more than our share of peace and other good,
except in the matter of warmth and sunshine. Our common is a sort of
ball-room for the winds, and on the warmest days we have had here we
have found them at their music and dancing. They roar round the
corners of our house in a wintry fashion, while the sun is shining on
the brown grass.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 8th Aug. 1874.]

Thanks for sending me the good news. The sale of "Middlemarch" is
wonderful "out of all whooping," and, considered as manifesting the
impression made by the book, is more valuable than any amount of
immediate distribution. I suppose there will be a new edition of the
"Spanish Gypsy" wanted by Christmas; and I have a carefully corrected
copy by me, containing my final alterations, to which I desire to
have the stereotyped plates adjusted.

As to confidence in the work to be done I am somewhat in the condition
suggested to Armgart, "How will you bear the poise of eminence with
dread of falling?" And the other day, having a bad headache, I did
what I have sometimes done before at intervals of five or six
years--looked into three or four novels to see what the world was
reading. The effect was paralyzing, and certainly justifies me in that
abstinence from novel-reading which, I fear, makes me seem
supercilious or churlish to the many persons who send me their books,
or ask me about their friends' books. To be delivered from all doubts
as to one's justification in writing at this stage of the world, one
should have either a plentiful faith in one's own exceptionalness, or
a plentiful lack of money. Tennyson said to me, "Everybody writes so
well now;" and if the lace is only machine-made, it still pushes out
the hand-made, which has differences only for a fine, fastidious
appreciation. To write indifferently after having written well--that
is, from a true, individual store which makes a special
contribution--is like an eminent clergyman spoiling his reputation by
lapses, and neutralizing all the good he did before. However, this is
superfluous stuff to write to you. It is only a sample of the way in
which depression works upon me. I am not the less grateful for all the
encouragement I get.

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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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 Girls[26] 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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 _oeuvres 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 18th Nov. 1875.]

Your enjoyment of the proofs cheers me greatly; and pray thank Mrs.
Blackwood for her valuable hints on equine matters. I have not only
the satisfaction of using those hints, I allow myself the inference
that where there is no criticism on like points I have made no
mistake.

I should be much obliged to Mr. Simpson--whom I am glad that Gwendolen
has captivated--if he would rate the printers a little about their
want of spacing. I am anxious that my poor heroes and heroines should
have all the advantage that paper and print can give them.

It will perhaps be a little comfort to you to know that poor Gwen is
spiritually saved, but "so as by fire." Don't you see the process
already beginning? I have no doubt you do, for you are a wide-awake
reader.

But what a climate to expect good writing in! Skating in the morning
and splashy roads in the afternoon is just typical of the alternation
from frigid to flaccid in the author's bodily system, likely to give a
corresponding variety to the style.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 20th Nov. 1875.]

I got my head from under the pressure of other matters, like a frog
from under the water, to send you my November greeting. My silence
through the rest of the months makes you esteem me the more, I hope,
seeing that you yourself hate letter-writing--a remarkable exception
to the rule that people like doing what they can do well, if one can
call that a rule of which the reverse seems more frequent--namely,
that they like doing what they do ill.

We stayed till nearly the end of September at the house we had taken
in Hertfordshire. After that we went into Wales for a fortnight, and
were under umbrellas nearly the whole time.

I wonder if you all remember an old governess of mine who used to
visit me at Foleshill--a Miss Lewis? I have found her out. She is
living at Leamington, very poor as well as old, but cheerful, and so
delighted to be remembered with gratitude. How very old we are all
getting! But I hope you don't mind it any more than I do. One sees so
many contemporaries that one is well in the fashion. The approach of
parting is the bitterness of age.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 15th Dec. 1875.]

Your letter is an agreeable tonic, very much needed, for that wretched
hinderance of a cold last week has trailed after it a series of
headaches worse than itself. An additional impression, like Mr.
Langford's, of the two volumes is really valuable, as a sign that I
have not so far failed in relation to a variety of readers. But you
know that in one sense I count nothing done as long as anything
remains to do; and it always seems to me that the worst difficulty is
still to come. In the sanest, soberest judgment, however, I think the
third volume (which I have not yet finished) would be regarded as the
difficult bridge. I will not send you any more MS. until I can send
the whole of vol. iii.

We think that Mr. Simpson has conducted our Australian business
admirably. Remembering that but for his judgment and consequent
activity we might have got no publication at all in that quarter, we
may well be content with £200.

Mr. Lewes has not got the Life of Heine, and will be much pleased and
obliged by your gift.

Major Lockhart's lively letter gives one a longing for the fresh,
breezy life and fine scenery it conjures up. You must let me know when
there is a book of his, because when I have done my own I shall like
to read something else by him. I got much pleasure out of the two
books I did read. But when I am writing, or only thinking of writing,
fiction of my own, I cannot risk the reading of other English fiction.
I was obliged to tell Anthony Trollope so when he sent me the first
part of his "Prime Minister," though this must seem sadly ungracious
to those who don't share my susceptibilities.

Apparently there are wild reports about the subject-matter of
"Deronda"--among the rest, that it represents French life! But that is
hardly more ridiculous than the supposition that after refusing to go
to America, I should undertake to describe society there! It is
wonderful how "Middlemarch" keeps afloat in people's minds. Somebody
told me that Mr. Henry Sidgwick said it was a bold thing to write
another book after "Middlemarch," and we must prepare ourselves for
the incalculableness of the public reception in the first instance. I
think I have heard you say that the chief result of your ample
experience has been to convince you of that incalculableness.

What a blow for Miss Thackeray--the death of that sister to whom she
was so closely bound in affection.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1875.]

_Dec. 25._--After our return from Wales in October I grew better and
wrote with some success. For the last three weeks, however, I have
been suffering from a cold and its effects so as to be unable to make
any progress. Meanwhile the two first volumes of "Daniel Deronda" are
in print, and the first book is to be published on February 1st. I
have thought very poorly of it myself throughout, but George and the
Blackwoods are full of satisfaction in it. Each part as I see it
before me _im werden_ seems less likely to be anything else than a
failure; but I see on looking back this morning--Christmas Day--that I
really was in worse health and suffered equal depression about
"Romola;" and, so far as I have recorded, the same thing seems to be
true of "Middlemarch."

I have finished the fifth book, but am not far on in the sixth, as I
hoped to have been; the oppression under which I have been laboring
having positively suspended my power of writing anything that I could
feel satisfaction in.


_SUMMARY._

JANUARY, 1873, TO DECEMBER, 1875.

     Reception of "Middlemarch"--Letter to John Blackwood--Mr.
     Anthony Trollope--Dutch translation of George Eliot's
     novels--Letter to Mrs. Cross--Evening drives at
     Weybridge--Letter to John Blackwood--German reprint of
     "Spanish Gypsy"--"The Lifted Veil"--"Kenelm
     Chillingly"--Letter to Mrs. William Smith on her Memoir of
     her husband--Pleasure in young life--Letter to John
     Blackwood--Want of a Conservative leader--Letter to Mr.
     Burne-Jones--The function of art--Purpose in art--"Iphigenia
     in Aulis"--Letter to Mrs. Congreve--Welcoming her
     home--Letter to Mrs. William Smith on women at
     Cambridge--Visit to Mr. Frederic Myers at Cambridge--Meets
     Mr. Henry Sidgwick, Mr. Jebb, Mr. Edmund Gurney, Mr. Balfour,
     and Mr. Lyttelton, and Mrs. and Miss Huth--Letter to Mrs.
     Bray--Death of Miss Rebecca Franklin--Visit to the Master of
     Balliol--Meets Mr. and Mrs. Charles Roundell--Professor
     Green--Max Müller--Thomson, the Master of Trinity College,
     Cambridge--Nine-weeks' trip to the Continent--Letter to Mrs.
     Congreve from Homburg--Fontainebleau, Plombières, and
     Luxeuil--Two months' stay at Bickley--Letter to Mrs. Cross on
     journey abroad and Blackbrook--Letter to John Blackwood--New
     edition of "Middlemarch"--A real Lowick in a Midland
     county--Cheap editions--Letter to Mrs. Cross on the pleasures
     of the country and on Mr. Henry Sidgwick--Letter to Mrs.
     Peter Taylor--House in the country--Letter to J. W. Cross on
     conformity--Letter to John Blackwood--Interruptions of town
     life--Simmering towards another book--Berlin reading
     "Middlemarch"--Ashantee war--Letter to Madame Bodichon--The
     George Howards--John Stuart Mill's Autobiography--Letter to
     Mrs. Cross on Christmas invitation--Dr. Andrew Clark--Letter
     to Mrs. Bray on stupidity of readers--Letter to Mrs. Peter
     Taylor--Retrospect of 1873--Sales of "Middlemarch" and
     "Spanish Gypsy"--Letter to Mrs. William Smith--"Plain living
     and high thinking"--Letter to John Blackwood--Conservative
     reaction--Cheaper edition of novels--Lord Lytton's
     "Fables"--Dickens's Life and biography in general--Letter to
     John Blackwood--Volume of poems--Letter to Mrs. Bray--Motives
     for children--Letter to Miss Hennell--Francis Newman--George
     Dawson--"The Legend of Jubal and other Poems"
     published--"Symposium" written--Letter to Miss Mary Cross
     thanking her for a vase--Letter to Mrs. Cross--Delight in
     country--Letter to John Blackwood--Threatened restoration of
     the empire in France--"Brewing" "Deronda"--Letter to Mrs.
     Peter Taylor on Mrs. Nassau Senior's report--Letter to Mrs.
     William Smith on consolations in loss--Letter to Madame
     Bodichon--No disposition to melancholy--Letter to Mrs.
     Burne-Jones--The serious view of life--Letter to John
     Blackwood--Justifications for writing--Dean Liddell--Letter
     to Mrs. Stowe--Goethe's mysticism--Letter to Miss
     Hennell--Visit to Six-Mile Bottom--Paris and the
     Ardennes--Bank of England and Woolwich Arsenal--Letter to
     Mrs. Ponsonby--The idea of God an exaltation of human
     goodness--Vision of others' needs--Ground of moral
     action--Need of altruism--The power of the will--Difficulties
     of thought--Sales of books--Retrospect of 1874--Letter to
     Francis Otter on his engagement--Letter to Mrs. Peter
     Taylor--Note-writing--Home for girls--Letter to Mrs.
     Ponsonby--Value of early religious experience--Limitations of
     scientists--Letter to John Blackwood--Kinglake's
     "Crimea"--Discipline of war--"Rasselas"--Miss
     Thackeray--Anthony Trollope--Letter to Mrs. Ponsonby--Desire
     to know the difficulties of others--Companion in the struggle
     of thought--Mr. Spencer's teaching--The value of
     poets--Emotion blending with thought--Letter to Mrs. William
     Smith--Her memoir--Letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones--The world of
     light and speech--Letter to Mrs. Peter
     Taylor--Rickmansworth--Letter to F. Harrison asking for
     consultation--Letter to J. W. Cross--"The
     Elms"--Depression--Letter to Mrs. Ponsonby--The Brewing
     interest--Conciliation of necessitarianism with will--Innate
     ideas--Death of Herbert Lewes--Trip to Wales--Letter to John
     Blackwood--Not satisfied with "Deronda"--Letter to Mrs. Peter
     Taylor--Mode of publication of books--Letter to John
     Blackwood--Gwendolen--Letter to Miss Hennell--Miss
     Lewis--Letter to John Blackwood--Impressions of
     "Deronda"--Major Lockhart--Depression about "Deronda."

FOOTNOTES:

[21] Death of Mrs. Cross's sister of cholera, at Salzburg.

[22] See _ante_, p. 66.

[23] "Paul Bradley."

[24] A vase with paintings from "Romola" on tiles.

[25]
                               "Tristi fummo
     Nell'aer dolce che dal sol s'allegra."

                             _Inferno_, cant. vii. 121, 122.

[26] Bessborough Gardens.

[27] I had been abroad for six weeks.




CHAPTER XVIII.


[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 17th March, 1876.]

We have just come in from Weybridge, but are going to take refuge
there again on Monday for a few days more of fresh air and long,
breezy afternoon walks. Many thanks for your thoughtfulness in sending
me the cheering account of sales.

Mr. Lewes has not heard any complaints of not understanding Gwendolen,
but a strong partisanship for and against her. My correspondence about
the misquotation of Tennyson has quieted itself since the fifth
letter. But one gentleman has written me a very pretty note, taxing me
with having wanted insight into the technicalities of Newmarket, when
I made Lush say, "I will _take_ odds." He judges that I should have
written, "I will lay odds." On the other hand, another expert contends
that the case is one in which Lush would be more likely to say, "I
will take odds." What do you think? I told my correspondent that I had
a dread of being righteously pelted with mistakes that would make a
cairn above me--a monument and a warning to people who write novels
without being omniscient and infallible.

Mr. Lewes is agitating himself over a fifth reading of revise, Book
VI., and says he finds it more interesting than on any former reading.
It is agreeable to have a home criticism of this kind! But I am deep
in the fourth volume, and cannot any longer care about what is past
and done for--the passion of the moment is as much as I can live in.

We had beautiful skies with our cold, and only now and then a snow
shower. It is grievous to read of the suffering elsewhere from floods.

[Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 30th March, 1876.]

I am well pleased that "Deronda" touches you. I _wanted_ you to prefer
the chapter about Mirah's finding, and I hope you will also like her
history in Part III., which has just been published.

We want very much to get away, but I fear we shall hardly be able to
start till the end of May. At present we think of the Maritime Alps as
a destination for the warm summer--if we have such a season this year;
but we shall wander a little on our way thither, and not feel bound to
accomplish anything in particular. Meanwhile we are hearing some nice
music occasionally, and we are going to see Tennyson's play, which is
to be given on the 15th. The occasion will be very interesting, and I
should be very sorry to miss it.

We have been getting a little refreshment from two flights between
Sundays to Weybridge. But we have had the good a little drained from
us by going out to dinner two days in succession. At Sir James Paget's
I was much interested to find that a gentle-looking, clear-eyed,
neatly-made man was Sir Garnet Wolseley; and I had some talk with him,
which quite confirmed the impression of him as one of those men who
have a power of command by dint of their sweet temper, calm demeanor,
and unswerving resolution. The next subject that has filled our chat
lately has been the Blue Book on Vivisection, which you would like to
look into. There is a great deal of matter for reflection in the
evidence on the subject, and some good points have been lately put in
print, and conversation that I should like to tell you of if I had
time. Professor Clifford told us the other Sunday that Huxley
complained of his sufferings from "the profligate lying of virtuous
women."

[Sidenote: Journal, 1876.]

_April 12._--On February 1st began the publication of "Deronda," and
the interest of the public, strong from the first, appears to have
increased with Book III. The day before yesterday I sent off Book VII.
The success of the work at present is greater than that of
"Middlemarch" up to the corresponding point of publication. What will
be the feeling of the public as the story advances I am entirely
doubtful. The Jewish element seems to me likely to satisfy nobody. I
am in rather better health--having, perhaps, profited by some eight
days' change at Weybridge.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 18th April, 1876.]

Your sympathetic letter is a welcome support to me in the rather
depressed condition which has come upon me from the effect, I imagine,
of a chill taken in the sudden change from mildness to renewed winter.
You can understand how trying it is to have a week of incompetence at
the present stage of affairs. I am rather concerned to see that the
part is nearly a sheet smaller than any of the other parts. But Books
V. and VI. are proportionately thick. It seemed inadmissible to add
anything after the scene with Gwendolen; and to stick anything in not
necessary to development between the foregoing chapters is a form of
"matter in the wrong place" particularly repulsive to my authorship's
sensibility.

People tell us that the book is enormously discussed, and I must share
with you rather a neat coincidence which pleased us last week. Perhaps
you saw what Mr. Lewes told me of--namely, that [a critic] opined that
the scenes between Lush and Grandcourt were not _vraisemblable_--were
of the imperious feminine, not the masculine, character. Just
afterwards Mr. Lewes was chatting with a friend who, without having
read the [criticism] or having the subject in the least led up to by
Mr. Lewes, said that he had been at Lady Waldegraves', where the
subject of discussion had been "Deronda;" and Bernal Osborne,
delivering himself on the book, said that the very best parts were the
scenes between Grandcourt and Lush. Don't you think that Bernal
Osborne has seen more of the Grandcourt and Lush life than that critic
has seen? But several men of experience have put their fingers on
those scenes as having surprising verisimilitude; and I naturally was
peculiarly anxious about such testimony, where my construction was
founded on a less direct knowledge.

We are rather vexed, now it is too late, that I did not carry out a
sort of incipient intention to expunge a motto from Walt Whitman which
I inserted in Book IV. Of course the whole is irrevocable by this
time; but I should have otherwise thought it worth while to have a new
page, not because the motto itself is objectionable to me--it was one
of the finer things which had clung to me from among his writings--but
because, since I quote so few poets, my selection of a motto from Walt
Whitman might be taken as a sign of a special admiration, which I am
very far from feeling. How imperfectly one's mind acts in
proof-reading! Mr. Lewes had taken up Book IV. yesterday to re-read it
for his pleasure merely; and though he had read it several times
before, he never till yesterday made a remark against taking a motto
from Walt Whitman. I, again, had continually had an _appetency_
towards removing the motto, and had never carried it out--perhaps from
that sort of flaccidity which comes over me about what _has been_
done, when I am occupied with what _is being_ done.

People in their eagerness about my characters are quite angry, it
appears, when their own expectations are not fulfilled--angry, for
example, that Gwendolen accepts Grandcourt, etc., etc.

One reader is sure that Mirah is going to die very soon, and, I
suppose, will be disgusted at her remaining alive. Such are the
reproaches to which I make myself liable. However, that you seem to
share Mr. Lewes's strong feeling of Book VII. being no falling off in
intensity makes me brave. Only endings are inevitably the least
satisfactory part of any work in which there is any merit of
development.

I forgot to say that the "tephillin" are the small leather bands or
phylacteries, inscribed with supremely sacred words, which the Jew
binds on his arms and head during prayer.

Any periphrasis which would be generally intelligible would be
undramatic; and I don't much like explanatory foot-notes in a
poem or story. But I must consider what I can do to remedy the
unintelligibility.

The printers have sadly spoiled the beautiful Greek name Kalonymos,
which was the name of a celebrated family of scholarly Jews,
transplanted from Italy into Germany in mediæval times. But my writing
was in fault.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. H. B. Stowe, 6th May, 1876.]

Your letter was one of the best cordials I could have. Is there
anything that cheers and strengthens more than the sense of another's
worth and tenderness? And it was that sense that your letter stirred
in me, not only by the words of fellowship and encouragement you give
directly to me, but by all you tell me of your own feeling under your
late painful experience. I had felt it long since I had heard of your
and the Professor's well being; but I need not say one word to you of
the reasons why I am not active towards my distant friends except in
thought. I _do_ think of them, and have a tenacious memory of every
little sign they have given me. Please offer my reverential love to
the Professor, and tell him I am ruthlessly proud that I kept him out
of his bed. I hope that both you and he will continue to be interested
in my spiritual children. My cares for them are nearly at an end, and
in a few weeks we expect to set out on a Continental journey, as the
sort of relaxation which carries one most thoroughly away from studies
and social claims. You rightly divine that I am a little overdone, but
my fatigue is due not to any excess of work so much as to the
vicissitudes of our long winter, which have affected me severely as
they have done all delicate people. It is true that some nervous wear,
such as you know well, from the excitement of writing, may have made
me more susceptible to knife-like winds and sudden chills.

Though you tenderly forbade me to write in answer to your letter, I
like to do it in these minutes when I happen to be free, lest
hinderances should come in the indefinite future. I am the happier for
thinking that you will have had this little bit of a letter to assure
you that the sweet rain of your affection did not fall on a sandy
place.

I make a delightful picture of your life in your orange-grove--taken
care of by dear daughters. Climate enters into _my_ life with an
influence the reverse of what I like to think of in yours. Sunlight
and sweet air make a new creature of me. But we cannot bear now to
exile ourselves from our own country, which holds the roots of our
moral and social life. One fears to become selfish and emotionally
withered by living abroad, and giving up the numerous connections with
fellow countrymen and women whom one can further a little towards both
public and private good.

I wonder whether you ever suffered much from false writing (about your
biography and motives) in the newspapers. I dare say that pro-slavery
prints did not spare you. But I should be glad to think that there was
less impudent romancing about you as a _citoyenne_ of the States than
there appears to be about me as a stranger. But it is difficult for us
English, who have not spent any time in the United States, to know the
rank that is given to the various newspapers; and we may make the
mistake of giving emphasis to some American journalism which is with
you as unknown to respectable minds as any low-class newspaper with
us.

When we come back from our journeying, I shall be interesting myself
in the MS. and proofs of my husband's third volume of his Problems,
which will then go to press, and shall plunge myself into the
mysteries of our nervous tissue as the Professor has been doing into
the mysteries of the Middle Ages. I have a cousinship with him in that
taste--but how to find space in one's life for all the subjects that
solicit one? My studies have lately kept me away from the track of my
husband's researches, and I feel behindhand in my wifely sympathies.
You know the pleasure of such interchange--husband and wife each
keeping to their own work, but loving to have cognizance of the
other's course.

God bless you, dear friend. Beg the Professor to accept my
affectionate respect, and believe me always yours with love.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1876.]

_June 3._--Book V. published a week ago. Growing interest in the
public, and growing sale, which has from the beginning exceeded that
of "Middlemarch;" the Jewish part apparently creating strong interest.

[Sidenote: Letter to J. W. Cross, 3d June, 1876.]

The useful "companion," which your loving care has had marked with my
initials, will go with me, and be a constant sign of the giver's
precious affection, which you have expressed in words such as I most
value.

Even success needs its consolations. Wide effects are rarely other
than superficial, and would breed a miserable scepticism about one's
work if it were not now and then for an earnest assurance such as you
give me that there are lives in which the work has done something "to
strengthen the good and mitigate the evil."

I am pursued to the last with some bodily trouble--this week it has
been sore throat. But I am emerging, and you may think of me next week
as raising my "Ebenezer."

Love and blessings to you all.

     The manuscript of "Daniel Deronda" bears the following
     inscription:

"To my dear Husband, George Henry Lewes.

     "Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
       *  *  *  *  *
     Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
     With what I most enjoy contented least;
     Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising
     Haply I think on thee--and then my state
     Like to the lark at break of day arising
     From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;
     For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings,
     That then I scorn to change my state with kings."

[Sidenote: Journal, 1876.]

_June 10._--We set off on our journey, intending to go to San Martino
Lantosc in the Maritime Alps. But I was ill at Aix, where the heat had
become oppressive, and we turned northwards after making a pilgrimage
to Les Charmettes--stayed a few days at Lausanne, then at Vevey, where
again I was ill; then by Berne and Zurich to Ragatz, where we were
both set up sufficiently to enjoy our life. After Ragatz to
Heidelberg, the Klönthal, Schaffhausen, St. Blasien in the Black
Forest, and then home by Strasburg, Nancy, and Amiens, arriving
September 1.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 6th July, 1876, from Ragatz.]

After much travelling we seem to have reached the right place for our
health and comfort, and as we hope to stay here for at least a
fortnight, I have begun to entertain selfish thoughts about you and
the possibility of having news from you. Our month's absence seems
long to us--filled with various scenes and various ailments--but to
you, I dare say, the request for a letter to tell us what has happened
will seem to have come before there is anything particular to tell.

On our arriving at Aix the effect of railway travelling and heat on me
warned us to renounce our project of going to the Maritime Alps and to
turn northward; so after resting at Aix we went to Chambéry, just to
make a pilgrimage to Les Charmettes, and then set our faces northward,
staying at beautiful Lausanne and Vevey for a week, and then coming on
by easy stages to this nook in the mountains. In spite of illness we
have had much enjoyment of the lovely scenery we have been dwelling in
ever since we entered Savoy, where one gets what I most delight
in--the combination of rich, well-cultivated land, friendly to man,
and the grand outline and atmospheric effect of mountains near and
distant.

This place seems to be one of the quietest baths possible. Such
fashion as there is, is of a German, unimposing kind; and the King of
Saxony, who is at the twin hotel with this, is, I imagine, a much
quieter kind of eminence than a London stock-broker. At present the
company seems to be almost exclusively Swiss and German, but all the
appliances for living and carrying on the "cure" are thoroughly
generous and agreeable. We rose at five this morning, drank our
glasses of warm water, and walked till a quarter to seven, then
breakfasted; and from half-past eight to eleven walked to Bad Pfeffers
and back again, along a magnificent ravine where the Tamine boils down
beneath a tremendous wall of rock, and where it is interesting to see
the electric telegraph leaping from the summit, crossing the gulf, and
then quietly running by the roadside till it leaps upward again to the
opposite summit.

You may consider us as generally ill-informed, and as ready to make
much of a little news as any old provincial folk in the days when the
stage-coach brought a single London paper to the village Crown or Red
Lion. We have known that Servia has declared war against Turkey, and
that Harriet Martineau is dead as well as George Sand.

Our weather has been uniformly splendid since we left Paris, with the
exception of some storms, which have conveniently laid the dust.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 2d Sept. 1876.]

We reached home only last night, and had scarcely taken our
much-needed dinner before a parcel was brought in which proved to be
"Daniel Deronda" in the four bound volumes, and various letters with
other "missiles"--as an acquaintance of mine once quite naively called
his own favors to his correspondents--which have at present only gone
to swell a heap that I mean to make acquaintance with very slowly. Mr.
Lewes, however, is more eager than I, and he has just brought up to me
a letter which has certainly gratified me more than anything else of
the sort I ever received. It is from Dr. Hermann Adler, the Chief
Rabbi here, expressing his "warm appreciation of the fidelity with
which some of the best traits of the Jewish character have been
depicted by" etc., etc. I think this will gratify you.

We are both the better for our journey, and I consider myself in as
good case as I can ever reasonably expect. We can't be made young
again, and must not be surprised that infirmities recur in spite of
mineral waters and air 3000 feet above the sea-level. After Ragatz, we
stayed at Stachelberg and Klönthal--two lovely places, where an
English face is seldom seen. Another delicious spot, where the air is
fit for the gods of Epicurus, is St. Blasien, in the Schwarzwald,
where also we saw no English or American visitors, except such as
_übernachten_ there and pass on. We have done exploits in walking,
usually taking four or five hours of it daily.

I hope that you and yours have kept well and have enjoyed the heat
rather than suffered from it. I confess myself glad to think that this
planet has not become hopelessly chilly. Draughts and chills are my
enemies, and but for them I should hardly ever be ailing.

The four volumes look very handsome on the outside. Please thank Mr.
William Blackwood for many kind notes he wrote me in the days of MS.
and proofs--not one of which I ever answered or took notice of except
for my own behoof.

[Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 6th Sept. 1876.]

We got home again last Friday, much strengthened by our journey,
notwithstanding vicissitudes. I suppose you will not be in town for
ages to come, but I let you know that I am here in case you have
anything to say to me by letter--about "objects."

After leaving Ragatz we still kept in eastern Switzerland, in high
valleys unvisited by the English; and in our homeward line of travel
we paused in the Schwarzwald at St. Blasien, which is a _Luft-kur_,
all green hills and pines, with their tops as still as if it were the
abode of the gods.

But imagine how we enjoy being at home again in our own chairs, with
the familiar faces giving us smiles which are not expecting change in
franc pieces!

We are both pretty well, but of course not cured of all infirmities.
Death is the only physician, the shadow of his valley the only
journeying that will cure us of age and the gathering fatigue of
years. Still we are thoroughly lively and "spry."

I hope that the hot summer has passed agreeably for you and not been
unfavorable to your health or comfort. Of course a little news of you
will be welcome, even if you don't particularly want to say anything
to me.

[Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 2d Oct. 1876.]

My blessing on you for your sweet letter, which I count among the
blessings given to me. Yes. Women can do much for the other women (and
men) to come. My impression of the good there is in all unselfish
efforts is continually strengthened. Doubtless many a ship is drowned
on expeditions of discovery or rescue, and precious freights lie
buried. But there was the good of manning and furnishing the ship with
a great purpose before it set out.

We are going into Cambridgeshire this week, and are watching the
weather with private views.[28]

I have had some very interesting letters both from Jews and from
Christians about "Deronda." Part of the scene at the club is
translated into Hebrew in a German-Jewish newspaper. On the other
hand, a Christian (highly accomplished) thanks me for embodying the
principles by which Christ wrought and will conquer. This is better
than the laudation of readers who cut the book up into scraps, and
talk of nothing in it but Gwendolen. I meant everything in the book to
be related to everything else there.

I quite enter into Miss Jekyll's view of negative beauty. Life tends
to accumulate "messes" about one, and it is hard to rid one's self of
them because of the associations attached. I get impatient sometimes,
and long, as Andrew Fairservice would say, to "kaim off the fleas," as
one does in a cathedral spoiled by monuments out of keeping with the
pillars and walls.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Wm. Smith, 14th Oct. 1876.]

I had felt it long before you let me have some news of you. How could
you repeat deliberately that bad dream of your having made yourself
"objectionable?" I will answer for it that you were never
objectionable to any creature except perhaps to your own self--a too
modest and shrinking self. I trusted in your understanding last spring
that I was glad to hear from my friends without having to make the
effort of answering, when answering was not demanded for practical
purposes. My health was not good, and I was absorbed as to my working
power, though not as to my interest and sympathy.

You have been in my mind of late, not only on your own account but in
affectionate association with our dear Mrs. Ruck, whose acquaintance I
owe to you.

On my return from abroad I found among my heap of letters a delightful
one from her, written, I think, at the end of June, as bright and
cheering as the hills under the summer sky. And only a day or two
after we saw that sad news in the _Times_. I think of her beautiful,
open face, with the marks of grief upon it. Why did you write me such
a brief letter, telling me nothing about your own life? I am a poor
correspondent, and have to answer many letters from people less
interesting to me than you are. Will you not indulge me by writing
more to me than you expect me to write to you? That would be generous.
We both came back the better for our three months' journeying, though
I was so ill after we had got to the south that we thought of
returning, and went northward in that expectation. But Ragatz set me
up, so far as I expect to be set up, and we greatly enjoyed our fresh
glimpses of Swiss scenery.

Mr. Lewes is now printing his third volume of "Problems of Life and
Mind," and is, as usual, very happy over his work. He shares my
interest in everything that relates to you; and be assured--will you
not?--that such interest will always be warm in us. I shall not, while
I live, cease to be yours affectionately.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1876.]

_Oct. 20._--Looking into accounts _apropos_ of an offer from Blackwood
for another ten years of copyright, I find that before last Christmas
there had been distributed 24,577 copies of "Middlemarch."

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. H. B. Stowe,[29] 29th Oct. 1876.]

"Evermore thanks" for your last letter, full of generous sympathy that
can afford to be frank. The lovely photograph of the grandson will be
carefully preserved. It has the sort of beauty which seems to be
peculiarly abundant in America, at once rounded and delicate in form.

I do hope you will be able to carry out your wish to visit your son at
Bonn, notwithstanding that heavy crown of years that your dear Rabbi
has to carry. If the sea voyage could be borne without much
disturbance, the land journey might be made easy by taking it in short
stages--the plan we always pursue in travelling. You see I have an
interested motive in wishing you to come to Europe again, since I
can't go to America. But I enter thoroughly into the disinclination to
move when there are studies that make each day too short. If we were
neighbors, I should be in danger of getting troublesome to the revered
Orientalist, with all kinds of questions.

As to the Jewish element in "Deronda," I expected from first to last,
in writing it, that it would create much stronger resistance, and even
repulsion, than it has actually met with. But precisely because I felt
that the usual attitude of Christians towards Jews is--I hardly know
whether to say more impious or more stupid when viewed in the light of
their professed principles, I therefore felt urged to treat Jews with
such sympathy and understanding as my nature and knowledge could
attain to. Moreover, not only towards the Jews, but towards all
Oriental peoples with whom we English come in contact, a spirit of
arrogance and contemptuous dictatorialness is observable which has
become a national disgrace to us. There is nothing I should care more
to do, if it were possible, than to rouse the imagination of men and
women to a vision of human claims in those races of their fellow-men
who most differ from them in customs and beliefs. But towards the
Hebrews we western people, who have been reared in Christianity, have
a peculiar debt, and, whether we acknowledge it or not, a peculiar
thoroughness of fellowship in religious and moral sentiment. Can
anything be more disgusting than to hear people called "educated"
making small jokes about eating ham, and showing themselves empty of
any real knowledge as to the relation of their own social and
religious life to the history of the people they think themselves
witty in insulting? They hardly know that Christ was a Jew. And I find
men, educated, supposing that Christ spoke Greek. To my feeling, this
deadness to the history which has prepared half our world for us, this
inability to find interest in any form of life that is not clad in the
same coat-tails and flounces as our own, lies very close to the worst
kind of irreligion. The best that can be said of it is, that it is a
sign of the intellectual narrowness--in plain English, the
stupidity--which is still the average mark of our culture.

Yes, I expected more aversion than I have found. But I was happily
independent in material things, and felt no temptation to accommodate
my writing to any standard except that of trying to do my best in
what seemed to me most needful to be done, and I sum up with the
writer of the Book of Maccabees--"If I have done well and as befits
the subject, it is what I desired; and if I have done ill, it is what
I could attain unto."

You are in the middle of a more glorious autumn than ours, but we,
too, are having now and then a little sunshine on the changing woods.
I hope that I am right in putting the address from which you wrote to
me on the 25th September, so that my note may not linger away from
you, and leave you to imagine me indifferent or negligent.

Please offer my reverent regard to Mr. Stowe.

We spent three months in East Switzerland, and are the better for it.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 22d Nov. 1876.]

Any one who knows from experience what bodily infirmity is--how it
spoils life even for those who have no other trouble--gets a little
impatient of healthy complainants, strong enough for extra work and
ignorant of indigestion. I at least should be inclined to scold the
discontented young people who tell me in one breath that they never
have anything the matter with them, and that life is not worth having,
if I did not remember my own young discontent. It is remarkable to me
that I have entirely lost my _personal_ melancholy. I often, of
course, have melancholy thoughts about the destinies of my fellow
creatures, but I am never in that _mood_ of sadness which used to be
my frequent visitant even in the midst of external happiness; and
this, notwithstanding a very vivid sense that life is declining and
death close at hand. We are waiting with some expectation for Miss
Martineau's Autobiography, which, I fancy, will be charming so far as
her younger and less renowned life extends. All biography diminishes
in interest when the subject has won celebrity--or some reputation
that hardly comes up to celebrity. But autobiography at least saves a
man or woman that the world is curious about from the publication of a
string of mistakes called "Memoirs." It would be nice if we could be a
trio--I mean you, Cara, and I--chatting together for an hour as we
used to do when I had walked over the hill to see you. But that
pleasure belongs to "the days that are no more." Will you believe that
an accomplished man some years ago said to me that he saw no place for
the exercise of _resignation_ when there was no personal divine will
contemplated as ordaining sorrow or privation? He is not yet aware
that he is getting old and needing that unembittered compliance of
soul with the inevitable which seems to me a full enough meaning for
the word "resignation."

[Sidenote: Journal, 1876.]

_Dec. 1._--Since we came home at the beginning of September I have
been made aware of much repugnance or else indifference towards the
Jewish part of "Deronda," and of some hostile as well as adverse
reviewing. On the other hand, there have been the strongest
expressions of interest, some persons adhering to the opinion, started
during the early numbers, that the book is my best. Delightful letters
have here and there been sent to me; and the sale both in America and
in England has been an unmistakable guarantee that the public has been
touched. Words of gratitude have come from Jews and Jewesses, and
these are certain signs that I may have contributed my mite to a good
result. The sale hitherto has exceeded that of "Middlemarch," as to
the £2 2_s._ four-volume form, but we do not expect an equal success
for the guinea edition which has lately been issued.

_Dec. 11._--We have just bought a house in Surrey, and think of it as
making a serious change in our life--namely, that we shall finally
settle there and give up town.

     This was a charming house--The Heights, Witley, near
     Godalming. It stands on a gentle hill overlooking a lovely
     bit of characteristic English scenery. In the foreground
     green fields, prettily timbered, undulate up to the high
     ground of Haslemere in front, with Blackdown (where Tennyson
     lives) on the left hand, and Hind Head on the right--"Heights
     that laugh with corn in August, or lift the plough-team
     against the sky in September." Below, the white steam-pennon
     flies along in the hollow. The walks and drives in the
     neighborhood are enchanting. A land of pine-woods and copses,
     village greens and heather-covered hills, with the most
     delicious old red or gray brick, timbered cottages nestling
     among creeping roses; the sober-colored tiles of their roofs,
     covered with lichen, offering a perpetual harmony to the eye.
     The only want in the landscape is the want of flowing water.
     About the house there are some eight or nine acres of
     pleasure ground and gardens. It quite fulfilled all
     expectations, as regards beauty and convenience of situation,
     though I am not quite sure that it was bracing enough for
     health.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1876.]

_Dec. 15._--At the beginning of this week I had deep satisfaction from
reading in the _Times_ the report of a lecture on "Daniel Deronda,"
delivered by Dr. Hermann Adler to the Jewish working-men--a lecture
showing much insight and implying an expectation of serious benefit.
Since then I have had a delightful letter from the Jewish Theological
Seminary at Breslau, written by an American Jew named Isaacs, who
excuses himself for expressing his feeling of gratitude on reading
"Deronda," and assures me of his belief that it has even already had
an elevating effect on the minds of some among his people--predicting
that the effect will spread.

I have also had a request from Signor Bartolommeo Aquarone, of Siena,
for leave to translate "Romola," and declaring that as one who has
given special study to the history of San Marco, and has written a
life of Fra Jeronimo Savonarola, he cares that "Romola" should be
known to his countrymen, for their good. _Magnificat anima mea!_ And
last night I had a letter from Dr. Benisch, editor of the _Jewish
Chronicle_, announcing a copy of the paper containing an article
written by himself on reading "Deronda" (there have long ago been two
articles in the same journal reviewing the book), and using strong
words as to the effect the book is producing. I record these signs,
that I may look back on them if they come to be confirmed.

_Dec. 31._--We have spent the Christmas with our friends at Weybridge,
but the greater part of the time I was not well enough to enjoy
greatly the pleasures their affection prepared for us.

Farewell 1876.

[Illustration: The Heights, Witley. From a Sketch by Mrs. Allingham.]

[Sidenote: Journal, 1877.]

_Jan. 1._--The year opens with public anxieties. First, about the
threatening war in the East; and next, about the calamities consequent
on the continued rains. As to our private life, all is happiness,
perfect love, and undiminished intellectual interest. G.'s third
volume is about half-way in print.

[Sidenote: Letter to James Sully, 19th Jan. 1877.]

I don't know that I ever heard anybody use the word "meliorist" except
myself. But I begin to think that there is no good invention or
discovery that has not been made by more than one person.

The only good reason for referring to the "source" would be that you
found it useful for the doctrine of meliorism to cite one
unfashionable confessor of it in the face of the fashionable extremes.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 30th Jan. 1877.]

What are we to do about "Romola?" It ought to range with the cheap
edition of my books--which, _exceptis excipiendis_, is a beautiful
edition--as well as with any handsomer series which the world's
affairs may encourage us to publish. The only difficulty lies in the
illustrations required for uniformity. The illustrations in the other
volumes are, as Mr. Lewes says, not queerer than those which amuse us
in Scott and Miss Austin, with one exception--namely, that where Adam
is making love to Dinah, which really enrages me with its
unctuousness. I would gladly pay something to be rid of it. The next
worst is that of Adam in the wood with Arthur Donnithorne. The rest
are endurable to a mind well accustomed to resignation. And the
vignettes on the title-pages are charming. But if an illustrator is
wanted, I know one whose work is exquisite--Mrs. Allingham.

This is not a moment for new ventures, but it will take some time to
prepare "Romola." I should like to see proofs, feeling bound to take
care of my text; and I have lately been glancing into a book on
Italian things, where almost every citation I alighted on was
incorrectly printed. I have just read through the cheap edition of
"Romola," and though I have only made a few alterations of an
unimportant kind--the printing being unusually correct--it would be
well for me to send this copy to be printed from. I think it must be
nearly ten years since I read the book before, but there is no book of
mine about which I more thoroughly feel that I could swear by every
sentence as having been written with my best blood, such as it is, and
with the most ardent care for veracity of which my nature is capable.
It has made me often sob with a sort of painful joy as I have read the
sentences which had faded from my memory. This helps one to bear false
representations with patience; for I really don't love any gentleman
who undertakes to state my opinions well enough to desire that I
should find myself all wrong in order to justify his statement.

I wish, whenever it is expedient, to add "The Lifted Veil" and
"Brother Jacob," and so fatten the volume containing "Silas Marner,"
which would thus become about 100 pages thicker.

[Sidenote: Letter to William Allingham, 8th March, 1877.]

Mr. Lewes feels himself innocent of dialect in general, and of Midland
dialect in especial. Hence I presume to take your reference on the
subject as if it had been addressed to me. I was born and bred in
Warwickshire, and heard the Leicestershire, North Staffordshire, and
Derbyshire dialects during visits made in my childhood and youth.
These last are represented (mildly) in "Adam Bede." The Warwickshire
talk is broader, and has characteristics which it shares with other
Mercian districts. Moreover, dialect, like other living things, tends
to become mongrel, especially in a central, fertile, and manufacturing
region, attractive of migration; and hence the Midland talk presents
less interesting relics of elder grammar than the more northerly
dialects.

Perhaps, unless a poet has a dialect ringing in his ears, so as to
shape his metre and rhymes according to it at one jet, it is better to
be content with a few suggestive touches; and, I fear, that the stupid
public is not half grateful for studies in dialect beyond such
suggestions.

I have made a few notes, which may perhaps be not unacceptable to you
in the absence of more accomplished aid:

1. The vowel always a double sound, the _y_ sometimes present,
sometimes not; either _aäl_ or _yaäl_. _Hither_ not heard except in
_c'moother_, addressed to horses.

2. _Thou_ never heard. In general, the 2d person singular not used in
Warwickshire except occasionally to young members of a family, and
then always in the form of _thee_--_i.e._, _'ee_. For the _emphatic_
nominative, _yo_, like the Lancashire. For the accusative, _yer_,
without any sound of the _r_. The demonstrative _those_ never heard
among the common people (unless when caught by infection from the
parson, etc.). _Self_ pronounced _sen_. The _f_ never heard in _of_,
nor the _n_ in _in_.

3. Not year but 'ear. On the other hand, with the usual
"compensation," head is pronounced _y_ead.

4. "A gallows little chap as e'er ye see."

5. Here's _to_ you, maäster.
   Saäm to yo.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 20th March, 1877.]

You must read Harriet Martineau's "Autobiography." The account of her
childhood and early youth is most pathetic and interesting; but as in
all books of the kind, the charm departs as the life advances, and the
writer has to tell of her own triumphs. One regrets continually that
she felt it necessary not only to tell of her intercourse with many
more or less distinguished persons--which would have been quite
pleasant to everybody--but also to pronounce upon their entire merits
and demerits, especially when, if she had died as soon as she
expected, these persons would nearly all have been living to read her
gratuitous rudenesses. Still I hope the book will do more good than
harm. Many of the most interesting little stories in it about herself
and others she had told me (and Mr. Atkinson) when I was staying with
her, almost in the very same words. But they were all the better for
being told in her silvery voice. She was a charming talker, and a
perfect lady in her manners as a hostess.

We are only going to bivouac in our Surrey home for a few months, to
try what alterations are necessary. We shall come back to this corner
in the autumn. We don't think of giving up London altogether at
present, but we may have to give up life before we come to any
decision on that minor point.

[Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 15th May, 1877.]

Pray bring Madame Mario to see us again. But bear in mind that on
Sunday the 27th--which probably will be our last Sunday in
London--Holmes the violinist is coming to play, with Mrs. Vernon
Lushington to accompany him. Don't mention to any one else that they
are coming, lest the audience should be larger than he wishes.

We are working a little too hard at "pleasure" just now. This morning
we are going for the third time to a Wagner rehearsal at 10 o'clock.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 15th May, 1877.]

I have not read, and do not mean to read, Mrs. Chapman's volume, so
that I can judge of it only by report. You seem to me to make a very
good case for removing the weight of blame from her shoulders and
transferring it to the already burdened back of Harriet Martineau. But
I confess that the more I think of the book and all connected with
it, the more it deepens my repugnance--or, rather, creates a new
repugnance in me--to autobiography, unless it can be so written as to
involve neither self-glorification nor impeachment of others. I like
that the "He, being dead, yet speaketh," should have quite another
meaning than that. But however the blame may be distributed, it
remains a grievously pitiable thing to me that man, or woman, who has
cared about a future life in the minds of a coming generation or
generations, should have deliberately, persistently mingled with that
prospect the ignoble desire to perpetuate personal animosities, which
can never be rightly judged by those immediately engaged in them. And
Harriet Martineau, according to the witness of those well acquainted
with facts which she represents in her Autobiography, was quite
remarkably apt to have a false view of her relations with others. In
some cases she gives a ridiculously inaccurate account of the tenor or
bearing of correspondence held with her. One would not for a moment
want to dwell on the weakness of a character on the whole valuable and
beneficent, if it were not made needful by the ready harshness with
which she has inflicted pain on others.

No; I did not agree with you about the Byron case. I understand by the
teaching of my own egoism--and therefore I can sympathize with--any
act of self-vindicating or vindictive rage under the immediate
infliction of what is felt to be a wrong or injustice. But I have no
sympathy with self-vindication, or the becoming a proxy in
vindication, deliberately bought at such a price as that of vitiating
revelations--which may even possibly be false. To write a letter in a
rage is very pardonable--even a letter full of gall and bitterness,
meant as a sort of poisoned dagger. We poor mortals can hardly escape
these sins of passion. But I have no pity to spare for the rancor that
corrects its proofs and revises, and lays it by chuckling with the
sense of its future publicity.

[Sidenote: Letter to Professor Dr. David Kaufmann, 31st May, 1877.]

Hardly, since I became an author, have I had a deeper satisfaction--I
may say, a more heartfelt joy--than you have given me in your estimate
of "Daniel Deronda."

I must tell you that it is my rule, very strictly observed, not to
read the criticisms on my writings. For years I have found this
abstinence necessary to preserve me from that discouragement as an
artist which ill-judged praise, no less than ill-judged blame, tends
to produce in me. For far worse than any verdict as to the proportion
of good and evil in our work, is the painful impression that we write
for a public which has no discernment of good and evil.

Certainly if I had been asked to choose _what_ should be written about
my books, and _who_ should write it, I should have sketched--well, not
anything so good as what you have written, but an article which must
be written by a Jew who showed not merely a sympathy with the best
aspirations of his race, but a remarkable insight into the nature of
art and the processes of the artistic mind.

Believe me, I should not have cared to devour even ardent praise if it
had not come from one who showed the discriminating sensibility, the
perfect response to the artist's intention, which must make the
fullest, rarest joy to one who works from inward conviction and not in
compliance with current fashions.

Such a response holds for an author not only what is best in "the life
that now is," but the promise of "that which is to come." I mean that
the usual approximative narrow perception of what one has been
intending and profoundly feeling in one's work, impresses one with the
sense that it must be poor perishable stuff, without roots to take any
lasting hold in the minds of men; while any instance of complete
comprehension encourages one to hope that the creative prompting has
foreshadowed and will continue to satisfy a need in other minds.

Excuse me that I write but imperfectly, and perhaps dimly, what I have
felt in reading your article. It has affected me deeply, and though
the prejudice and ignorant obtuseness which has met my effort to
contribute something towards the ennobling of Judaism in the
conceptions of the Christian community, and in the consciousness of
the Jewish community, has never for a moment made me repent my choice,
but rather has been added proof that the effort was needed--yet I
confess that I had an unsatisfied hunger for certain signs of
sympathetic discernment which you only have given.

I may mention as one instance your clear perception of the relation
between the presentation of the Jewish elements and those of English
social life.

I write under the pressure of small hurries; for we are just moving
into the country for the summer, and all things are in a vagrant
condition around me. But I wished not to defer answering your letter
to an uncertain opportunity.

[Sidenote: Letter to Frederic Harrison, 14th June, 1877.]

I am greatly indebted to you for your letter. It has done something
towards rousing me from what I will not call self-despair but
resignation to being of no use.

I wonder whether you at all imagine the terrible pressure of disbelief
in my own {duty/right} to speak to the public, which is apt with me to
make all beginnings of work like a rowing against tide. Not that I am
without more than my fair ounce of self-conceit and confidence that I
know better than the critics, whom I don't take the trouble to read,
but who seem to fill the air as with the smoke of bad tobacco.

But I will not dwell on my antithetic experiences. I only mention them
to show why your letter has done me a service, and also to help in the
explanation of my mental attitude towards your requests or
suggestions.

I do not quite understand whether you have in your mind any plan of
straightway constructing a liturgy to which you wish me to contribute
in a direct way. That form of contribution would hardly be within my
powers. But your words of trust in me as possibly an organ of feelings
which have not yet found their due expression is as likely as any
external call could be to prompt such perfectly unfettered productions
as that which you say has been found acceptable.

I wasted some time, three years ago, in writing (what I do not mean to
print) a poetic dialogue embodying or rather shadowing very
imperfectly the actual contest of ideas. Perhaps what you have written
to me may promote and influence a different kind of presentation. At
any rate all the words of your letter will be borne in mind, and will
enter into my motives.

We are tolerably settled now in our camping, experimental fashion.
Perhaps, before the summer is far advanced, you may be in our
neighborhood, and come to look at us. I trust that Mrs. Harrison is
by this time in her usual health. Please give my love to her, and
believe me always, with many grateful memories, yours sincerely.

[Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 2d July, 1877.]

It was a draught of real comfort and pleasure to have a letter written
by your own hand, and one altogether cheerful.[30] I trust that you
will by-and-by be able to write me word of continued progress. Hardly
any bit of the kingdom, I fancy, would suit your taste better than
your neighborhood of the Land's End. You are not fond of bushy
midland-fashioned scenery. We are enjoying the mixture of wildness and
culture extremely, and so far as landscape and air go we would not
choose a different home from this. But we have not yet made up our
minds whether we shall keep our house or sell it.

Some London friends are also occasional dwellers in these parts. The
day before yesterday we had Mr. and Mrs. Frederic Harrison, whose
parents have a fine old Tudor house--Sutton Place--some three miles
beyond Guildford. And do you remember Edmund Gurney? He and his
graceful bride lunched with us the other day. And Miss Thackeray is
married to-day to young Ritchie. I saw him at Cambridge, and felt that
the nearly twenty years' difference between them was bridged hopefully
by his solidity and gravity. This is one of several instances that I
have known of lately, showing that young men with even brilliant
advantages will often choose as their life's companion a woman whose
attractions are chiefly of the spiritual order.

I often see you enjoying your sunsets and the wayside flowers.

[Sidenote: Letter to William Allingham, 26th Aug. 1877.]

I hope that this letter may be sent on to you in some delicious nook
where your dear wife is by your side preparing to make us all richer
with store of new sketches. I almost fear that I am implying
unbecoming claims in asking you to send me a word or two of news about
your twofold, nay, fourfold self. But you must excuse in me a
presumption which is simply a feeling of spiritual kinship, bred by
reading in the volume you gave me before we left town.

That tremendous tramp--"Life, Death; Life, Death"[31]--makes me care
the more, as age makes it the more audible to me, for those younger
ones who are keeping step behind me.

[Sidenote: Letter to Professor Kaufmann, 12th Oct. 1877.]

I trust it will not be otherwise than gratifying to you to know that
your stirring article on "Daniel Deronda" is now translated into
English by a son of Professor Ferrier, who was a philosophical writer
of considerable mark. It will be issued in a handsomer form than that
of the pamphlet, and will appear within this autumnal publishing
season, Messrs. Blackwood having already advertised it. Whenever a
copy is ready we shall have the pleasure of sending it to you. There
is often something to be borne with in reading one's own writing in a
translation, but I hope that in this case you will not be made to
wince severely.

In waiting to send you this news, I seem to have deferred too long the
expression of my warm thanks for your kindness in sending me the
Hebrew translations of Lessing and the collection of Hebrew poems--a
kindness which I felt myself rather presumptuous in asking for, since
your time must be well filled with more important demands. Yet I must
further beg you, when you have an opportunity, to assure Herr Bacher
that I was most gratefully touched by the sympathetic verses with
which he enriched the gift of his work.

I see by your last letter that your Theological Seminary was to open
on the 4th of this month, so that this too retrospective letter of
mine will reach you when you are in the midst of your new duties. I
trust that this new institution will be a great good to professor and
students, and that your position is of a kind that you contemplate as
permanent. To teach the young personally has always seemed to me the
most satisfactory supplement to teaching the world through books; and
I have often wished that I had such a means of having fresh, living
spiritual children within sight.

One can hardly turn one's thought towards Eastern Europe just now
without a mingling of pain and dread, but we mass together distant
scenes and events in an unreal way, and one would like to believe that
the present troubles will not at any time press on you in Hungary with
more external misfortune than on us in England.

Mr. Lewes is happily occupied in his psychological studies. We both
look forward to the reception of the work you kindly promised us, and
he begs me to offer you his best regards.

[Sidenote: Letter to the Hon. Mrs. Ponsonby, 17th Oct. 1877.]

I like to know that you have been thinking of me and that you care to
write to me, and though I will not disobey your considerate
prohibition so far as to try to answer your letter fully, I must
content my soul by telling you that we shall be settled in the old
place by the end of the first week in November, and that I shall be
delighted to see you then. There are many subjects that I shall have a
special pleasure in talking of with you.

Let me say now that the passage quoted from your friend's letter is
one that I am most glad to find falling in with your own attitude of
mind. The view is what I have endeavored to represent in a little poem
called "Stradivarius," which you may not have happened to read.

     I say, not God Himself can make man's best
     Without best men to help Him.

And next: I think direct personal portraiture--or caricature--is a
bastard kind of satire that I am not disposed to think the better of
because Aristophanes used it in relation to Socrates. Do you know that
pretty story about Bishop Thirlwall? When somebody wanted to bring to
him Forchhammer as a distinguished German writer, he replied, "No; I
will never receive into my house the man who justified the death of
Socrates!"

"O that we were all of one mind, and that mind good!" is an
impossible-to-be-realized wish: and I don't wish it at all in its full
extent. But I think it would be possible that men should differ
speculatively as much as they do now, and yet be "of one mind" in the
desire to avoid giving unnecessary pain, in the desire to do an honest
part towards the general well-being, which has made a comfortable
_nidus_ for themselves, in the resolve not to sacrifice another to
their own egoistic promptings. Pity and fairness--two little words
which, carried out, would embrace the utmost delicacies of the moral
life--seem to me not to rest on an unverifiable hypothesis but on
facts quite as irreversible as the perception that a pyramid will not
stand on its apex.

I am so glad you have been enjoying Ireland in quiet. We love our bit
of country and are bent on keeping it as a summer refuge.

[Sidenote: Letter to J. W. Cross, 6th Nov. 1877, from the Priory.]

_Apropos_ of authorship, I was a little uneasy on Sunday because I had
seemed in the unmanageable current of talk to echo a too slight way of
speaking about a great poet. I did not mean to say Amen when the
"Idylls of the King" seemed to be judged rather _de haut en bas_. I
only meant that I should value for my own mind "In Memoriam" as the
chief of the larger works; and that while I feel exquisite beauty in
passages scattered through the "Idylls," I must judge some smaller
wholes among the lyrics as the works most decisive of Tennyson's high
place among the immortals.

Not that my deliverance on this matter is of any moment, but that I
cannot bear to fall in with the sickening fashion of people who talk
much about writers whom they read little, and pronounce on a great
man's powers with only half his work in their mind, while if they
remembered the other half they would find their judgments as to his
limits flatly contradicted. Then, again, I think Tennyson's dramas
such as the world should be glad of--and would be, if there had been
no prejudgment that he could not write a drama.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 10th Nov. 1877.]

Never augur ill because you do not hear from me. It is, you know, my
profession _not_ to write letters. Happily I can meet your kind
anxiety by contraries. I have for two months and more been in better
health than I have known for several years. This pleasant effect is
due to the delicious air of the breezy Surrey hills; and, further, to
a friend's insistence on my practising lawn-tennis as a daily
exercise.

We are in love with our Surrey house, and only regret that it hardly
promises to be snug enough for us chilly people through the winter, so
that we dare not think of doing without the warmer nest in town.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1877.]

_Nov. 10._--We went to the Heights, Witley, at the beginning of June,
after a delightful visit to Cambridge, and returned to this old home
on the 29th October. We are at last in love with our Surrey house, and
mean to keep it. The air and abundant exercise have quite renovated my
health, and I am in more bodily comfort than I have known for several
years. But my dear husband's condition is less satisfactory, his
headaches still tormenting him.

Since the year began several little epochs have marked themselves.
Blackwood offered for another ten years' copyright of my works, the
previous agreement for ten years having expired. I declined, choosing
to have a royalty. G.'s third volume has been well received, and has
sold satisfactorily for a book so little in the popular taste. A
pleasant correspondence has been opened with Professor Kaufmann, now
Principal of the Jewish Theological Seminary at Pesth; and his
"Attempt at an Appreciation of 'Daniel Deronda'" has been translated
into English by young Ferrier, son of Professor Ferrier.

A new Cabinet edition of my works, including "Romola," has been
decided on, and is being prepared; and there have been multiplied
signs that the spiritual effect of "Deronda" is growing. In America
the book is placed above all my previous writings.

Our third little Hampstead granddaughter has been born, and was
christened Saturday--the 3d--Elinor.

Yesterday Mr. Macmillan came to ask me if I would undertake to write
the volume on Shakespeare, in a series to be issued under the title
"Men of Letters." I have declined.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 16th Nov. 1877.]

Having a more secure freedom than I may have next week, I satisfy my
eagerness to tell you that I am longing for the news of you which you
have accustomed me to trust in as sure to come at this time of the
year. You will give me, will you not, something more than an
affectionate greeting? You will tell me how and where you have been,
and what is the actual state of your health and spirits--whether you
can still interest yourself in writing on great subjects without too
much fatigue, and what companionship is now the most precious to you?
We returned from our country home (with which we are much in love) at
the beginning of this month, leaving it earlier than we wished because
of the need to get workmen into it. Our bit of Surrey has the beauties
of Scotland wedded to those of Warwickshire. During the last two
months of our stay there I was conscious of more health and strength
than I have known for several years. Imagine me playing at lawn-tennis
by the hour together! The world I live in is chiefly one that has
grown around me in these later years, since we have seen so little of
each other. Doubtless we are both greatly changed in spiritual as well
as bodily matters, but I think we are unchanged in the friendship
founded on early memories. I, for my part, feel increasing gratitude
for the cheering and stimulus your companionship gave me, and only
think with pain that I might have profited more by it if my mind had
been more open to good influences.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1877.]

_Nov. 26._--The other day we saw in the _Times_ that G.'s name had
been proposed for the Rectorship of St. Andrews. Blackwood writes me
that in less than a month they have sold off all but 400 of the 5250
printed; and in October were sold 495 of the 3_s._ 6_d._ edition of
"Adam Bede."

Our friend Dr. Allbut came to see us last week, after we had missed
each other for three or four years.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones, 3d Dec. 1877.]

I have been made rather unhappy by my husband's impulsive proposal
about Christmas. We are dull old persons, and your two sweet young
ones ought to find each Christmas a new bright bead to string on their
memory, whereas to spend the time with us would be to string on a
dark, shrivelled berry. They ought to have a group of young creatures
to be joyful with. Our own children always spend their Christmas with
Gertrude's family, and we have usually taken our sober merry-making
with friends out of town. Illness among these will break our custom
this year; and thus _mein Mann_, feeling that our Christmas was free,
considered how very much he liked being with you, omitting the other
side of the question--namely, our total lack of means to make a
suitably joyous meeting, a real festival, for Phil and Margaret. I was
conscious of this lack in the very moment of the proposal, and the
consciousness has been pressing on me more and more painfully ever
since. Even my husband's affectionate hopefulness cannot withstand my
melancholy demonstration.

So pray consider the kill-joy proposition as entirely retracted, and
give us something of yourselves, only on simple black-letter days
when the Herald Angels have not been raising expectations early in the
morning.

I am not afraid of your misunderstanding one word. You know that it is
not a little love with which I am yours ever.

[Sidenote: Letter to J. W. Cross, 13th Dec. 1877.]

Your note yesterday gave me much comfort, and I thank you for sparing
the time to write it.

The world cannot seem quite the same to me as long as you are all in
anxiety about her who is most precious to you[32]--in immediate urgent
anxiety that is. For love is never without its shadow of anxiety. We
have this treasure in earthen vessels.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1877.]

_Dec. 31._--To-day I say a final farewell to this little book, which
is the only record I have made of my personal life for sixteen years
and more. I have often been helped, in looking back in it, to compare
former with actual states of despondency, from bad health or other
apparent causes. In this way a past despondency has turned to present
hopefulness. But of course, as the years advance, there is a new
rational ground for the expectation that my life may become less
fruitful. The difficulty is to decide how far resolution should set in
the direction of activity rather than in the acceptance of a more
negative state. Many conceptions of work to be carried out present
themselves, but confidence in my own fitness to complete them worthily
is all the more wanting because it is reasonable to argue that I must
have already done my best. In fact, my mind is embarrassed by the
number and wide variety of subjects that attract me, and the enlarging
vista that each brings with it.

I shall record no more in this book, because I am going to keep a more
business-like diary. Here ends 1877.

[Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 17th Jan. 1878.]

Yes, it is a comfort to me, in the midst of so many dispiriting
European signs, that France has come so far through her struggle. And
no doubt you are rejoicing too that London University has opened all
its degrees to women.

I think we know no reading more amusing than the _Times_ just now. We
are deep among the gravities. I have been reading aloud Green's first
volume of his new, larger "History of the English People;" and this
evening have begun Lecky's "History of England in the Eighteenth
Century"--in fact, we are dull old fogies, who are ill-informed about
anything that is going on of an amusing kind. On Monday we took a
youth to the pantomime, but I found it a melancholy business. The dear
old story of Puss in Boots was mis-handled in an exasperating way, and
every incident as well as pretence of a character turned into a motive
for the most vulgar kind of dancing. I came away with a headache, from
which I am only to-day recovered. It is too cruel that one can't get
anything innocent as a spectacle for the children!

Mr. Lewes sends his best love, but is quite barren of suggestions
about books--buried in pink and lilac periodicals of a physiological
sort, and preoccupied with the case of a man who has an artificial
larynx, with which he talks very well.

What do you say to the phonograph, which can report gentlemen's bad
speeches with all their stammering?

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 26th Jan. 1878.]

I like to think of you and Mrs. Blackwood taking your daughter to
Rome. It will be a delightful way of reviving memories, to mingle and
compare them with her fresh impressions, and in a spiritual sense to
have what Shakespeare says is the joy of having offspring--"to see
your blood warm while you feel it cold." I wish that and all other
prospects were not marred by the threat of widening war.

Last night I finished reading Principal Tulloch's small but full
volume on "Pascal"--a present for which I am much obliged. It is
admirably fair and dispassionate, and I should think will be an
acceptable piece of instruction to many readers. The brief and graphic
way in which he has made present and intelligible the position of the
Port Royalists is an example of just what is needed in such a series
as the Foreign Classics. But of course they are the most fortunate
contributors who have to write about the authors, less commonly
treated of, and especially when they are prepared to write by an early
liking and long familiarity--as in the present case. I have read every
line of appreciation with interest. My first acquaintance with Pascal
came from his "Pensées" being given to me, as a school prize, when I
was fourteen; and I am continually turning to them now to revive my
sense of their deep though broken wisdom. It is a pity that "La
Bruyère" cannot be done justice to by any merely English presentation.
There is a sentence of his which touches with the finest point the
diseased spot in the literary culture of our time--"Le plaisir de la
critique nous ôté celui d'être vivement touchés de tres belles
choses." We see that our present fashions are old, but there is this
difference, that they are followed by a greater multitude.

You may be sure I was very much cheered by your last despatch--the
solid unmistakable proof that my books are not yet superfluous.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones, 23d March, 1878.]

As to my enjoyment of the "Two Grenadiers," it would have been
impossible but for the complete reduction of it to symbolism in my own
mind, and my belief that it really touches nobody now, as enthusiasm
for the execrable Napoleon I. But I feel that the devotion of the
common soldier to his leader (the sign for him of hard duty) is the
type of all higher devotedness, and is full of promise to other and
better generations.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 7th June, 1878.]

The royalties did themselves much credit.[33] The Crown Prince is
really a grand-looking man, whose name you would ask for with
expectation, if you imagined him no royalty. He is like a grand
antique bust--cordial and simple in manners withal, shaking hands, and
insisting that I should let him know when we next came to Berlin, just
as if he had been a Professor Gruppe, living _au troisième_. _She_ is
equally good-natured and unpretending, liking best to talk of nursing
soldiers, and of what her father's taste was in literature. She opened
the talk by saying, "You know my sister Louise"--just as any other
slightly embarrassed mortal might have done. We had a picked party to
dinner--Dean of Westminster, Bishop of Peterborough, Lord and Lady
Ripon, Dr. Lyon Playfair, Kinglake (you remember "Eothen"--the old
gentleman is a good friend of mine), Froude, Mrs. Ponsonby (Lord
Grey's granddaughter), and two or three more "illustrations;" then a
small detachment coming in after dinner. It was really an interesting
occasion.

We go to Oxford to-morrow (to the Master of Balliol).

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 27th June, 1878, from Witley.]

I hope we are not wrong in imagining you settled at Strathtyrum, with
a fresh power of enjoying the old scenes after your exile, in spite of
the abstinence from work--the chief sweetness of life. Mr. Lewes, too,
is under a regimen for gout, which casts its threatening shadow in the
form of nightly cramps and inward _malaise_. He wants me to tell you
something amusing--a bit of Baboo English, from an Indian journal sent
us by Lord Lytton. _Apropos_ of Sir G. Campbell's rash statement that
India was no good to England, the accomplished writer says, "But
British House of Commons stripped him to pieces, and exposed his _cui
bono_ in all its naked hideousness!" After all, I think the cultivated
Hindoo writing what he calls English, is about on a par with the
authors of leading articles on this side of the globe writing what
_they_ call English--accusing or laudatory epithets and phrases,
adjusted to some dim standard of effect quite aloof from any knowledge
or belief of their own.

Letter-writing, I imagine, is counted as "work" from which you must
abstain; and I scribble this letter simply from the self-satisfied
notion that you will like to hear from me. You see I have asked no
questions, which are the torture-screws of correspondence, hence you
have nothing to answer. How glad I shall be of an announcement that
"No further bulletins will be sent, Mr. Blackwood having gone to golf
again."

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 18th July, 1878.]

I thought you understood that I have grave reasons for not speaking on
certain public topics. No request from the best friend in the
world--even from my own husband--ought to induce me to speak when I
judge it my duty to be silent. If I had taken a contrary decision, I
should not have remained silent till now. My function is that of the
_æsthetic_, not the doctrinal teacher--the rousing of the nobler
emotions, which make mankind desire the social right, not the
prescribing of special measures, concerning which the artistic mind,
however strongly moved by social sympathy, is often not the best
judge. It is one thing to feel keenly for one's fellow-beings; another
to say, "This step, and this alone, will be the best to take for the
removal of particular calamities."

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 30th July, 1878.]

I did hope that by the time your military evolutions were over, we
might see our way to enjoying the kind welcome which you and Mrs.
Blackwood have offered us. No expedition attracts us more than the
projected visit to Strathtyrum. Unhappily, Mr. Lewes continues to be
troubled and depressed by symptoms that, with the recollection upon us
of the crippling gout which once followed them, quite rob us of the
courage to leave home. The journey and the excitement, which would be
part of his pleasure if he were tolerably well, seem to him now
dangerous to encounter--and I am not myself robust enough to venture
on a risk of illness to him; so that I cannot supply the daring he
needs. We begin to think that we shall be obliged to defer our
pleasure of seeing you in your own home--so promising of walks and
talks, such as we can never have a chance of in London--until we have
the disadvantage of counting ourselves a year older. I am very sorry.
But it is better to know that you are getting well, and we unable to
see you, than to think of you as an invalid, unable to receive us. We
must satisfy ourselves with the good we have--including the peace, and
the promise of an abundant wheat harvest.

Please ask Mrs. and Miss Blackwood to accept my best regards, and
assure them that I counted much on a longer, quieter intercourse with
them in a few sunny days away from hotels and callers.

Do not write when writing seems a task. Otherwise you know how well I
like to have a letter from you.

[Sidenote: Letter to William Blackwood, 15th Aug. 1878.]

We have certainly to pay for all our other happiness, which is a
Benjamin's share, by many small bodily miseries. Mr. Lewes continues
ailing, and I am keeping him company with headache. "Rejoice, O young
man, in the days of thy youth," and keep a reserve of strength for the
more evil days. Especially avoid breaking your neck in hunting. Mr.
Lewes did once try horseback, some years ago, but found the exercise
too violent for him. I think a Highland sheltie would be the suitable
nag, only he is very fond of walking; and between that and lawn-tennis
he tires himself sufficiently.

I shall hope by and by to hear more good news about your uncle's
health.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones, 26th Aug. 1878.]

Shall you mind the trouble of writing me a few words of news about you
and yours? just to let me know how things are with you, and deliver me
from evil dreams.

We have been so ailing in the midst of our country joys that I need to
hear of my friends being well as a ground for cheerfulness--a bit of
sugar in the cup of resignation. Perhaps this fine summer has been
altogether delightful to you. Let me know this good, and satisfy the
thirsty sponge of my affection. If you object to my phrase, please to
observe that it is Dantesque--which will oblige you to find it
admirable.

[Sidenote: Letter to J. W. Cross, 26th Aug. 1878.]

You remember the case of the old woman of whom her murderers confessed
that they had beaten her to death, "partly with crowbars and partly
with their fists." Well, I have been beaten into silence since your
kind letter, partly by visitors and partly by continual headache. I am
a shade or two better this morning, and my soul has half awaked to run
its daily stage of duty. Happily I was temporarily relieved from
headache during our friends' (the Tom Trollopes') visit. We took them
to see Tennyson, and they were delighted with the reading which he
very amiably gave us. Then the Du Mauriers came to dine with us on the
Thursday, and so the time was not, I hope, too languid for our
visitors.

Mr. Lewes continues to show improvement in health, so that the balance
of good is not much altered by my deficit.

We shall be pleased to have any news of you, whether by post or
person.

     At this time I was in the habit of going over occasionally
     from Weybridge on Sundays. The shadow of trouble was on both
     our houses. My mother was in her last illness, and Mr. Lewes
     was constantly ailing, though none of us then thought that he
     would be taken first. But the sharing of a common anxiety
     contributed to make our friendship much more intimate. In our
     drives in the neighborhood of Witley, Mr. Lewes used
     sometimes to be suddenly seized with severe cramping pains. I
     think he was himself aware that something was far wrong, but
     the moment the pain ceased the extraordinary buoyancy of his
     spirits returned. Nothing but death could quench that bright
     flame. Even on his worst days he had always a good story to
     tell; and I remember on one occasion, between two bouts of
     pain, he sang through, with great _brio_, though without much
     voice, the greater portion of the tenor part in the "Barber
     of Seville"--George Eliot playing his accompaniment, and
     both of them thoroughly enjoying the fun.

     They led a very secluded life at Witley--as always in their
     country retreats--but enjoyed the society of some of their
     neighbors. Sir Henry and Lady Holland, who lived next door;
     charming Mrs. Thellusson and her daughter, Mrs. Greville, who
     lived between Witley and Godalming, were especial friends.
     The Tennysons, too, and the Du Mauriers and Allinghams, were
     all within easy visiting distance. George Eliot's dislike of
     London life continued to increase with the increasing number
     of her acquaintance, and consequent demands on time. The
     Sunday receptions, confined to a small number of intimate
     friends in 1867, had gradually extended themselves to a great
     variety of interesting people.

     These receptions have been so often and so well described
     that they have hitherto occupied rather a disproportionate
     place in the accounts of George Eliot's life. It will have
     been noticed that there is very little allusion to them in
     the letters; but, owing to the seclusion of her life, it
     happened that the large majority of people who knew George
     Eliot as an author never met her elsewhere. Her _salon_ was
     important as a meeting-place for many friends whom she cared
     greatly to see, but it was not otherwise important in her own
     life. For she was eminently _not_ a typical mistress of a
     _salon_. It was difficult for her, mentally, to move from one
     person to another. Playing around many disconnected subjects,
     in talk, neither interested her nor amused her much. She took
     things too seriously, and seldom found the effort of
     entertaining compensated by the gain. Fortunately Mr. Lewes
     supplied any qualities lacking in the hostess. A brilliant
     talker, a delightful _raconteur_, versatile, full of resource
     in the social difficulties of amalgamating diverse groups,
     and bridging over awkward pauses, he managed to secure for
     these gatherings most of the social success which they
     obtained. Many of the _réunions_ were exceedingly agreeable
     and interesting, especially when they were not too crowded,
     when general conversation could be maintained. But the larger
     the company grew the more difficult it was to manage. The
     English character does not easily accommodate itself to the
     exigencies of a _salon_. There is a fatal tendency to break
     up into small groups. The entertainment was frequently varied
     by music when any good performer happened to be present. I
     think, however, that the majority of visitors delighted
     chiefly to come for the chance of a few words with George
     Eliot alone. When the drawing-room door of the Priory opened,
     a first glance revealed her always in the same low arm-chair
     on the left-hand side of the fire. On entering, a visitor's
     eye was at once arrested by the massive head. The abundant
     hair, streaked with gray now, was draped with lace, arranged
     mantilla-fashion, coming to a point at the top of the
     forehead. If she were engaged in conversation her body was
     usually bent forward with eager, anxious desire to get as
     close as possible to the person with whom she talked. She had
     a great dislike to raising her voice, and often became so
     wholly absorbed in conversation that the announcement of an
     incoming visitor sometimes failed to attract her attention;
     but the moment the eyes were lifted up, and recognized a
     friend, they smiled a rare welcome--sincere, cordial,
     grave--a welcome that was felt to come straight from the
     heart, not graduated according to any social distinction.
     Early in the afternoon, with only one or two guests, the talk
     was always general and delightful. Mr. Lewes was quite as
     good in a company of three as in a company of thirty. In
     fact, he was better, for his _verve_ was not in the least
     dependent on the number of his audience, and the flow was
     less interrupted. Conversation was no effort to him; nor was
     it to her so long as the numbers engaged were not too many,
     and the topics were interesting enough to sustain discussion.
     But her talk, I think, was always most enjoyable _à deux_. It
     was not produced for effect, nor from the lip, but welled up
     from a heart and mind intent on the one person with whom she
     happened to be speaking. She was never weary of giving of her
     best so far as the wish to give was concerned. In addition to
     the Sundays "at home" the Priory doors were open to a small
     circle of very intimate friends on other days of the week. Of
     evening entertainments there were very few, I think, after
     1870. I remember some charming little dinners--never
     exceeding six persons--and one notable evening when the Poet
     Laureate read aloud "Maud," "The Northern Farmer," and parts
     of other poems. It was very interesting on this occasion to
     see the two most widely known representatives of contemporary
     English literature sitting side by side. George Eliot would
     have enjoyed much in her London life if she had been stronger
     in health, but, with her susceptible organization, the
     _atmosphere_ oppressed her both physically and mentally. She
     always rejoiced to escape to the country. The autumn days
     were beginning to close in now on the beautiful Surrey
     landscape, not without some dim, half-recognized presage to
     her anxious mind of impending trouble.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 24th Sept. 1878.]

I am not inclined to let you rest any longer without asking you to
send me some account of yourself, for it is long since I got my last
news from Edinburgh. I should like to know that you have continued to
gather strength, and that you have all been consequently more and more
enjoying your life at Strathtyrum. It is an ugly theory that happiness
wants the contrast of illness and anxiety, but I know that Mrs.
Blackwood must have a new comfort in seeing you once more with your
usual strength.

We have had "a bad time" in point of health, and it is only quite
lately that we have both been feeling a little better. The fault is
all in our own frames, not in our air or other circumstances; for we
like our house and neighborhood better and better. The general
testimony and all other arguments are in favor of this district being
thoroughly healthy. But we both look very haggard in the midst of our
blessings.

Are you not disturbed by yesterday's Indian news? One's hopes for the
world's getting a little rest from war are continually checked. Every
day, after reading the _Times_, I feel as if all one's writing were
miserably trivial stuff in the presence of this daily history. Do you
think there are persons who admire Russia's "mission" in Asia as they
did the mission in Europe?

Please write me anything that comes easily to the end of your pen, and
make your world seem nearer to me. Good Mr. Simpson, I hope, lets you
know that he is prospering in his pursuit of pleasure without
work--which seems a strange paradox in association with my idea of
him.

[Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 15th Oct. 1878.]

The days pass by without my finding time to tell you what I want to
tell you--how delighted I was to have a good account of you. But every
bright day, and we have had many such, has made me think the more of
you, and hope that you were drawing in strength from the clear, sweet
air. I miss so much the hope that I used always to have of seeing you
in London and talking over everything just as we used to do--in the
way that will never exactly come with any one else. How unspeakably
the lengthening of memories in common endears our old friends! The new
are comparatively foreigners, with whom one's talk is hemmed in by
mutual ignorance. The one cannot express, the other cannot divine.

We are intensely happy in our bit of country, as happy as the cloudy
aspect of public affairs will allow any one who cares for them to be,
with the daily reading of the _Times_.

A neighbor of ours was reciting to me yesterday some delicious bits of
dialogue with a quaint Surrey woman; _e.g._, "O ma'am, what I have
gone through with my husband! He is so uneddicated--he never had a
tail-coat in his life!"

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 23d Nov. 1878, from the Priory.]

When Mr. Lewes sent you my MS.[34] the other morning he was in that
state of exhilarated activity which often comes with the sense of ease
after an attack of illness which had been very painful. In the
afternoon he imprudently drove out, and undertook, with his usual
eagerness, to get through numerous details of business, over-fatigued
himself, and took cold. The effect has been a sad amount of suffering
from feverishness and headache, and I have been in deep anxiety, am
still very unhappy, and only comforted by Sir James Paget's assurances
that the actual trouble will be soon allayed.

I have been telling the patient about your letter and suggestion that
he should send a form of slip as advertisement for the Magazine. He
says--and the answer seems to have been a matter of premeditation with
him--that it will be better not to announce the book in this way at
once--"the Americans and Germans will be down on us." I cannot
question him further at present, but I have no doubt he has been
thinking about the matter, and we must not cross his wish in any way.

I have thought that a good form of advertisement, to save people from
disappointment in a book of mine not being a story, would be to print
the list of contents, which, with the title, would give all but the
very stupid a notion to what form of writing the work belongs. But
this is a later consideration. I am glad you were pleased with the
opening.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Sunday evening, 24th Nov.
1878.]

For the last week I have been in deep trouble. Mr. Lewes has been
alarmingly ill. To-day Sir James Paget and Dr. Quain pronounce him in
all respects better, and I am for the first time comforted. You will
not wonder now at my silence. Thanks for your affectionate
remembrances.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 25th Nov. 1878.]

Mr. Lewes continues sadly ill, and I am absorbed in nursing him. When
he wrote about Parliament meeting, he was thinking that it would be
called together at the usual time--perhaps February. The book can be
deferred without mischief. I wish to add a good deal, but, of course,
I can finish nothing now, until Mr. Lewes is better. The doctors
pronounced him in every respect better yesterday, and he had a quiet
night, but since five o'clock this morning he has had a recurrence of
trouble. You can feel for him and me, having so lately known what
severe illness is.


     Mr. Lewes died on the 28th November, 1878.


_SUMMARY._

MARCH, 1876, TO NOVEMBER, 1878.

     Letter to John Blackwood--Visit to Weybridge--"Daniel
     Deronda"--Letter to Mme. Bodichon--Meets Sir Garnet
     Wolseley--Vivisection--Letter to John Blackwood--Public
     discussion of "Deronda"--Motto from Walt Whitman--Inscription
     on the MS. of "Deronda"--Letter to Mrs. Stowe--Thanks for
     sympathy--Drawbacks to going too much abroad--Mr. Lewes's
     "Problems"--Letter to J. W. Cross on the effect of her
     writing--Three-months' trip to Continent--Letter to John
     Blackwood--Visit to Chambéry and Les Charmettes--Lausanne and
     Vevey--Ragatz--Return to London--Letter to John
     Blackwood--Dr. Hermann Adler--Letter to Mme. Bodichon--St.
     Blasien--Women's work--Visit to Six-Mile Bottom--Meets
     Turguenieff--Jewish appreciation of "Deronda"--Letter to Mrs.
     William Smith--Mrs. Ruck--Letter to Mrs. Stowe--Jewish
     element in "Deronda"--Letter to Miss Hennell--Miss
     Martineau's "Autobiography," and biography in
     general--Resignation--Gratitude of Jews for
     "Deronda"--Purchase of house at Witley, near Godalming--Dr.
     Hermann Adler's lectures on "Daniel Deronda"--Application to
     translate "Romola" into Italian--Christmas at
     Weybridge--Opening of year 1877--Letter to James Sully--The
     word "meliorism"--Letter to John Blackwood--Illustrations of
     cheap editions--"Romola"--Letter to William
     Allingham--Warwickshire dialect--Letter to Mrs. Bray--Harriet
     Martineau's "Autobiography"--Letter to Mme. Bodichon--Holmes
     and Mrs. Vernon Lushington playing--Letter to Miss
     Hennell--Mrs. Chapman on Harriet Martineau--Mrs. Stowe and
     the Byron case--Letter to Professor Kaufmann--Gratitude for
     his estimate of "Deronda"--Letter to F. Harrison--Sympathy
     incentive to production--Letter to Mme. Bodichon--Miss
     Thackeray's marriage--Letter to W. Allingham on his
     poems--Letter to Professor Kaufmann--Translation of his
     article by Mr. Ferrier--Letter to Mrs. Ponsonby--Reference to
     Stradivarius--Pity and fairness--Letter to J. W.
     Cross--Appreciation of Tennyson's poems and dramas--Letter to
     Mrs. Peter Taylor--Improvement in health at Witley--Proposal
     to write on Shakespeare for "Men of Letters" series--Letter
     to Miss Hennell--Gain of health and strength at
     Witley--Letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones--Christmas plans--Farewell
     to Journal and to year 1877--Letter to Mme. Bodichon--State
     of France--London University opening degrees to
     women--Reading Green's "History of the English People" and
     Lecky--The phonograph--Letter to John
     Blackwood--"Pascal"--"La Bruyère"--Letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones
     on the "Two Grenadiers"--Letter to Mrs. Bray--Meeting with
     Crown Prince and Princess of Germany at Mr. Goschen's--Visit
     to Oxford to the Master of Balliol--Letter to John
     Blackwood--Indian story of Lord Lytton's--Letter to Mrs.
     Peter Taylor--Function the æsthetic not the doctrinal
     teacher--Letter to John Blackwood--Mr. Lewes's
     ill-health--Letter to William Blackwood--Letter to Mrs.
     Burne-Jones complaining of health--Letter to J. W. Cross--Mr.
     Lewes's continued illness--Life at Witley--Effect of
     receptions at the Priory--Description of receptions--Letter
     to John Blackwood--Complaining of health--Letter to Mme.
     Bodichon--Delight in old friends--Letters to John
     Blackwood--MS. of "Theophrastus Such"--Mr. Lewes's last
     illness--Postponement of publication of "Theophrastus"--Mr.
     Lewes's death.

FOOTNOTES:

[28] This was a visit to Six-Mile Bottom, where M. Turguenieff, who
was a very highly valued friend of Mr. and Mrs. Lewes, had come to
compare his experiences of Russian and English sport. I remember
George Eliot telling me that she had never met any literary man whose
society she enjoyed so thoroughly and so unrestrainedly as she did
that of M. Turguenieff. They had innumerable bonds of sympathy.

[29] This letter is in acknowledgment of a letter from Mrs. Beecher
Stowe on "Daniel Deronda."

[30] Mme. Bodichon had been dangerously ill.

[31] Refers to a poem by W. Allingham, "The General Chorus," with a
burden:

     "Life, Death; Life, Death;
     Such is the song of human breath."


[32] The beginning of my mother's last illness.

[33] Dinner at Mr. Goschen's.

[34] "The Impressions of Theophrastus Such."




CHAPTER XIX.


     For many weeks after Mr. Lewes's death, George Eliot saw no
     one except Mr. Charles Lewes, and the very few persons she
     was obliged to receive on necessary business. She read no
     letters, and wrote none, but at once began to occupy herself
     busily with Mr. Lewes's unfinished MSS., in which work Mr.
     Charles Lewes was able to assist her in the arrangement. The
     only entry in her diary on the 1st January, 1879, is "Here I
     and sorrow sit." At the end of two months this desolation had
     told terribly on her health and spirits; and on the last day
     of January she was greatly comforted by a visit from Sir
     James Paget--a friend for whom she had always had the highest
     and most cordial regard during the many years she had known
     him. Meantime she had begun to write a few short notes, and
     she mentions in her journal of 2d January, "A kind letter
     from Professor Michael Foster, of Cambridge, offering to help
     me on any physiological point;" and on the 19th January,
     "Ruminating on the founding of some educational
     instrumentality as a memorial to be called by his name."
     There are the following letters in January and February.

[Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 7th Jan. 1879.]

I bless you for all your goodness to me, but I am a bruised creature,
and shrink even from the tenderest touch. As soon as I feel able to
see anybody I will see _you_. Please give my love to Bessie[35] and
thank her for me--I mean, for her sweet letter. I was a long while
before I read any letters, but tell her I shall read hers again and
again.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 13th Jan. 1879.]

It was a long while before I read any letters, and as yet I have
written none, except such as business required of me. You will believe
that this has not been for want of gratitude to all my friends for
their goodness to me. I can trust to your understanding of a sorrow
which has broken my life. I write now because I ought not to allow any
disproportionate expense to be incurred about my printed sheets.

To me, now, the writing seems all trivial stuff, but since he wished
it to be printed, and you seem to concur, I will correct the sheets
(if you will send me the remainder) gradually as I am able, and they
can be struck off and laid by for a future time. I submit this
proposition to your judgment, not knowing what may be most expedient
for your printing-office.

Thank you for all your kind words.

[Sidenote: Letter to J. W. Cross, 22d Jan. 1879.]

Sometime, if I live, I shall be able to see you--perhaps sooner than
any one else--but not yet. Life seems to get harder instead of easier.

[Sidenote: Letter to J. W. Cross, 30th Jan. 1879.]

When I said "sometime" I meant still a distant time. I want to live a
little time that I may do certain things for his sake. So I try to
keep up my strength, and I work as much as I can to save my mind from
imbecility. But that is all at present. I can go through anything that
is mere business. But what used to be joy is joy no longer, and what
is pain is easier because he has not to bear it.

I bless my friends for all their goodness to me. Please say so to all
of them that you know, especially Mr. Hall. Tell him I have read his
letter again and again.

If you feel prompted to say anything, write it to me.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones, 4th Feb. 1879.]

Do not believe that your love is lost upon me, dear. I bless you for
all your goodness to me, and keep every sign of it in my memory.

I have been rather ill lately, but my head is clearer this morning.
The world's winter is going, I hope, but my everlasting winter has set
in. You know that and will be patient with me.

[Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 6th Feb. 1879.]

Bless you for your loving thought. But for all reasons, bodily and
mental, I am unable to move. I am entirely occupied with his
manuscripts, and must be on this spot among all the books. Then, I am
in a very ailing condition of body--cannot count on myself from day to
day--and am not fit to undertake any sort of journey. I have never yet
been outside the gate. Even if I were otherwise able, I could not bear
to go out of sight of the things he used and looked on.

Bless you once more. If I could go away with _anybody_ I could go away
with you.

[Sidenote: Letter to J. W. Cross, 7th Feb. 1879.]

I do need your affection. Every sign of care for me from the beings I
respect and love is a help to me. In a week or two I think I shall
want to see you. Sometimes, even now, I have a longing, but it is
immediately counteracted by a fear. The perpetual mourner--the grief
that can never be healed--is innocently enough felt to be wearisome by
the rest of the world. And my sense of desolation increases. Each day
seems a new beginning--a new acquaintance with grief.

[Sidenote: Letter to J. W. Cross, Saturday, 22d Feb. 1879.]

If you happen to be at liberty to-morrow, or the following Friday, or
to-morrow week, I hope I shall be well enough to see you. Let me know
which day.

     On Sunday, the 23d February, I saw her for the first time,
     and there is the following letter next day.

[Sidenote: Letter to J. W. Cross, 24th Feb. 1879.]

A transient absence of mind yesterday made me speak as if it were
possible for me to entertain your thoughtful, kind proposal that I
should move to Weybridge for a short time. But I cannot leave this
house for the next two months--if for no other reason, I should be
chained here by the need of having all the books I want to refer to.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 25th Feb. 1879.]

Pray do not announce "Theophrastus" in any way. It would be
intolerable to my feelings to have a book of my writing brought out
for a long while to come. What I wish to do is, to correct the sheets
thoroughly, and then have them struck off and laid by till the time of
publication comes. One reason which prompted me to set about the
proofs--in addition to my scruples about occupying the type--was that
I was feeling so ill, I thought there was no time to be lost in
getting done everything which no one else would do if I left it
undone. But I am getting better, I think; and my doctors say there is
nothing the matter with me to urge more haste than the common
uncertainty of life urges on us all.

There is a great movement now among the Jews towards colonizing
Palestine, and bringing out the resources of the soil. Probably Mr.
Oliphant is interested in the work, and will find his experience in
the West not without applicability in the East.

It is a satisfaction to you, I hope, that your son is about to be
initiated in George Street. I trust he will one day carry on the good
traditions of the name "John Blackwood."

[Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 5th Mch. 1879.]

Your letter, which tells me that you are benefiting by the clear,
sunny air, is very welcome. Yes, here too the weather is more
merciful, and I drive out most days. I am better bodily, but I never
feel thoroughly comfortable in that material sense, and I am
incredibly thin. As to my mind, I am full of occupation, but the
sorrow deepens down instead of diminishing. I mean to go to Witley in
a few months, that I may look again on the spots that he enjoyed, and
that we enjoyed together, but I cannot tell beforehand whether I shall
care to go again afterwards.

Everybody is very kind to me, and by and by I shall begin to see a few
intimate friends. I can do or go through anything that is business or
duty, but time and strength seem lacking for everything else. You must
excuse my weakness, remembering that for nearly twenty-five years I
have been used to find my happiness in his. I can find it nowhere
else. But we can live and be helpful without happiness, and I have had
more than myriads who were and are better fitted for it.

I am really very busy, and have been sadly delayed by want of health.
One project I have entered on is to found a studentship, which will be
called after his name. I am getting help from experienced men.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 5th Mch. 1879.]

I send the corrected sheets of "Theophrastus," and shall be much
obliged if you will order a complete revise to be sent me before they
are struck off. Whenever the book is published (I cannot contemplate
its appearing before June, and if that is a bad time it must stand
over till the autumn season) I beg you kindly to write for me a
notice, to be printed on the fly-leaf, that the MS. was placed in your
hands last November, or simply last year.

I think you will enter into my feeling when I say that to create a
notion on the part of the public of my having been occupied in writing
"Theophrastus" would be repugnant to me. And I shrink from putting
myself forward in any way.

I hope you are benefiting by the milder weather. I drive out a little
now, but you must be prepared to see me a much changed creature. I
think I should hardly know myself.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1879.]

_March 8._--Gertrude[36] and the children came to tea.

_March 9._--Mr. Henry Sidgwick came to discuss the plan of the
studentship.

_March 13._--Professor Michael Foster came to discuss the studentship,
and we arrived at a satisfactory clearness as to the conditions. He
mentioned as men whom he thought of as suitable trustees, Huxley, Pye
Smith, Thiselton Dyer, Francis Balfour, and Henry Sidgwick.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones, 20th Mch. 1879.]

DEAR FRIEND,--When you have time to come to me about six o'clock I
shall love to see you.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1879.]

_March 22._--Mrs. Congreve came again. Mrs. Burne-Jones came.

[Sidenote: Letter to William Blackwood, 25th Mch. 1879.]

I am so dissatisfied with "Theophrastus" on reading the revise that I
have proposed to suppress it in this original form, and regenerate it
whenever--if ever--I recover the power to do so. You see the cruel
weather has travelled after you. It makes one feel every grievance
more grievously in some respects, though to me the sunshine is in one
sense sadder.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1879.]

_March 30._--Mr. Bowen (now Lord Justice Bowen) came, Mr. Spencer, and
J.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 5th April, 1879.]

After weighing what you have said, I agree to the publication of
"Theophrastus" in May. If you had at all suspected that the book would
injure my influence, you would not have wished me to give it forth in
its present form, and in the uncertainty of one's inner and outer life
it is not well to depend on future capabilities. There are some
things in it which I want to get said, and if the book turned out to
be effective in proportion to my other things, the form would lend
itself to a "second series"--supposing I lived and kept my faculties.

As to the price for the right of translating, you will judge. If you
will kindly undertake these negotiations for me, I shall be thankful.
And pray remember that I don't _want_ the book to be translated, so
that it will be well to wait for the application, and to ask a
sufficient sum to put the publisher on his guard as to the selection
of a translator. But, of course, this little book cannot be paid for
according to the difficulty of translation.

You see, I have been so used to have all trouble spared me that I am
ready to cast it on any willing shoulders. But I am obliged now to
think of business in many ways.

I am so glad to know that Mrs. Blackwood has the comfort of a good
report about you from the doctors. Perhaps it may seem to you the
wrong order of sympathy to be glad for your sake in the _second_
place.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1879.]

_April 8._--Mrs. Stuart came.

     Mrs. Stuart was a devoted friend whose acquaintance had been
     formed some years before through the presentation of some
     beautiful wood-carving which she had executed as an offering
     to George Eliot.

[Sidenote: Letter to Frederic Harrison, 8th April, 1879.]

DEAR FRIENDS,--Will you come to see me some day? I am always in from
my drive and at liberty by half-past four. Please do not say to any
one that I am receiving visitors generally. Though I have been so long
without making any sign, my heart has been continually moved with
gratitude towards you.

[Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 8th April, 1879.]

Your letter was very welcome this morning, for I do not like to be
very long without having some picture of you, and your words of
affection are always sweet.

The studentship I mention is to supply an income to a young man who is
qualified and eager to carry on physiological research, and would not
otherwise have the means of doing so. Mr. H. Sidgwick, Michael Foster,
and other men of kindred mind are helping me in settling the scheme. I
have been determined in my choice of the studentship by the idea of
what would be a sort of prolongation of _his_ life. That there should
always, in consequence of his having lived, be a young man working in
the way he would have liked to work, is a memorial of him that comes
nearest my feeling. It is to be at Cambridge to begin with, and we
thought at first of affiliating it to the university; but now the
notion is that it will be well to keep it free, so that the trustees
may move it where and when they will. But the scheme is not yet
drafted.

I am going to bring out one of "The Problems" in a separate volume at
the beginning of May, and am now correcting the proofs.

My going to Witley is an experiment. I don't know how I shall bear
being there, but I hope there will be nothing to hinder my _having
you_ there if you will undertake the troublous journey for my sake.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 9th April, 1879.]

I enclose the proof of title-page and motto. Whether the motto (which
is singularly apt and good) should be on the title-page or fly-leaf I
leave you to judge. Certainly, everybody who does not read Latin will
be offended by its claiming notice, and will consider that only the
deepest-dyed pedantry could have found the motive for it. But I will
not leave it out altogether.

I have had such various letters from time to time, asking me to
reprint or write essays, that, perhaps, some of the public will not be
disappointed that the volume is not a story. But that must be as it
may; and if you think the acceptance dubious, it is much the better
plan not to stereotype.

What energy there is in Mr. Kinglake in spite of the somewhat
shattered health that his _Wesen_ gives one the impression of! Among
incidents of war that one can dwell on with anything like gladness,
that account of the rescue of the colors at Isandlana is memorable, is
it not?

I go out every day, drive beyond the ranks of hideous houses in the
Kilburn outskirts, and get to lanes where I can walk, in perfect
privacy, among the fields and budding hedgerows.

I hope Mr. Julian Sturgis will take care of his writing and do
something lasting. He seems to me to have a strain above the common in
him; and he is not writing for his bread, or even his butter. I don't
know why I say this just now, except that I had it in my mind to say
long ago, and it has just come upper-most as I was thinking of the
Magazine.

[Sidenote: Letter to Professor Kaufmann, 17th April, 1879.]

Your kind letter has touched me very deeply. I confess that my mind
had, more than once, gone out to you as one from whom I should like to
have some sign of sympathy with my loss. But you were rightly inspired
in waiting till now, for during many weeks I was unable even to listen
to the letters which my generous friends were continually sending me.
Now, at last, I am eagerly interested in every communication that
springs out of an acquaintance with my husband and his works.

I thank you for telling me about the Hungarian translation of his
"History of Philosophy;" but what would I not have given if the
volumes could have come, even only a few days, before his death! For
his mind was perfectly clear, and he would have felt some joy in that
sign of his work being effective.

I do not know whether you will enter into the comfort I feel that he
never knew he was dying, and fell gently asleep after ten days of
illness, in which the suffering was comparatively mild.

One of the last things he did at his desk was to despatch a manuscript
of mine to the publishers. The book (not a story, and not bulky) is to
appear near the end of May, and, as it contains some words I wanted to
say about the Jews, I will order a copy to be sent to you.

I hope that your labors have gone on uninterruptedly for the benefit
of others, in spite of public troubles. The aspect of affairs with us
is grievous--industry languishing, and the best part of our nation
indignant at our having been betrayed into an unjustifiable war in
South Africa.

I have been occupied in editing my husband's MSS., so far as they are
left in sufficient completeness to be prepared for publication without
the obtrusion of another mind instead of his. A brief volume on "The
Study of Psychology" will appear immediately, and a further volume of
psychological studies will follow in the autumn. But his work was cut
short while he still thought of it as the happy occupation of
far-stretching months. Once more let me thank you for remembering me
in my sorrow.

[Sidenote: Letter to J. W. Cross, 22d April, 1879.]

I am in dreadful need of your counsel. Pray come to me when you
can--morning, afternoon, or evening.

     From this time forward I saw George Eliot constantly. My
     mother had died in the beginning of the previous December, a
     week after Mr. Lewes; and, as my life had been very much
     bound up with hers, I was trying to find some fresh interest
     in taking up a new pursuit. Knowing very little Italian, I
     began Dante's "Inferno" with Carlyle's translation. The first
     time I saw George Eliot afterwards, she asked me what I was
     doing, and, when I told her, exclaimed, "Oh, I must read that
     with you." And so it was. In the following twelve months we
     read through the "Inferno" and the "Purgatorio" together; not
     in a _dilettante_ way, but with minute and careful
     examination of the construction of every sentence. The
     prodigious stimulus of such a teacher (_cotanto maestro_)
     made the reading a real labor of love. Her sympathetic
     delight in stimulating my newly awakened enthusiasm for Dante
     did something to distract her mind from sorrowful memories.
     The divine poet took us into a new world. It was a renovation
     of life. At the end of May I induced her to play on the piano
     at Witley for the first time; and she played regularly after
     that whenever I was there, which was generally once or twice
     a week, as I was living at Weybridge, within easy distance.

     Besides Dante, we read at this time a great many of
     Sainte-Beuve's "Causeries," and much of Chaucer, Shakespeare,
     and Wordsworth. But I am anticipating. We will return to the
     correspondence in its order.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 22d April, 1879.]

When I shall be able to get to Witley is altogether uncertain. The
cold winds make one less hungry for the country, but still it will be
a relief to me, in some respects, to get away from town. I am much
stronger than I was, and am again finding interest in this wonderful
life of ours. But I am obliged to keep my doors closed against all but
the few until I go away. You, however, I shall hope to see. I am
founding a studentship of Physiology, to be called "The George Henry
Lewes Studentship." It will be placed, in the first instance, at
Cambridge, where there is the best physiological school in the
kingdom. But the trustees (with my consent during my life) will have
the power of moving it where they judge best. This idea, which I early
conceived, has been a great stay to me. But I have plenty to think of,
plenty of creatures depending on me, to make my time seem of some
value. And there are so many in the world who have to live without any
great enjoyment.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1879.]

_April 26._--Mr. and Mrs. Hall came.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones, 3d May, 1879.]

If you can come to me next week for a parting word, will you try to
learn beforehand whether and when your husband can give me half an
hour at the end of his working-day? I should like to see him before I
go, which I hope to do soon after the 13th.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1879.]

_May 6._--Mr. and Mrs. Call, Eleanor and Florence (Cross) came.

_May 8._--Mr. Burne-Jones came.

_May 10._--Edith Simcox and Mr. Pigott came.

_May 13._--Dr. Andrew Clark came and gave me important suggestions
about the studentship.

_May 21._--Saw Mr. Anthony Trollope.

_May 22._--Came down to Witley--lovely mild day.

[Sidenote: Letter to James Sully, 28th May, 1879.]

Mr. Lewes always wrote the dramatic criticisms in the _Leader_, and
for a year or two he occasionally wrote such criticisms in the _Pall
Mall_. Of the latter, the chief were reprinted in the little book on
"Actors, and the Art of Acting." What was written in the
_Fortnightly_ (1865-66) is marked by signature. The most
characteristic contributions to the _Cornhill_ (1864-65) were "The
Mental Condition of Babies," "Dangers and Delights of Tobacco," "Was
Nero a Monster?" "Shakespeare in France," and "Miseries of a Dramatic
Author."

But after 1866 his contributions to any periodical were very
scanty--confined to a few articles in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, one on
"The Reign of Law," in the _Fortnightly_, and the series on Darwin,
now incorporated in "The Physical Basis of Mind." After these, his
sole contributions were an article on Dickens (1872), two on
"Spiritualism" and "Mesmerism" (1876), and one on "The Dread and
Dislike of Science" (1878).

Charles, I think, mentioned to you my desire that you should do me the
valuable service of looking over the proofs of the remaining volume of
"Problems," and you were so generous as to express your willingness to
undertake that labor. The printing will not begin till after the
16th--Dr. Michael Foster, who has also kindly offered to help me in
the same way, not being sufficiently at leisure till after that date.

I have been rather ill again lately, but am hoping to benefit by the
country quietude. You, too, I am sorry to hear, are not over strong.
This will make your loan of mind and eyesight all the more appreciated
by me.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones, 3d June, 1879.]

Your letter, full of details--just the sort of letter I like to
have--has been among my comforts in these last damp, chill days. The
first week I was not well, and had a troublesome attack of pain, but I
am better, and try to make life interesting by always having something
to do.

I am wishing Margaret many happy returns of this day, and am making a
picture of you all keeping the little _fête_. A young birthday, when
the young creature is promising, is really a happy time; one can hope
reasonably; and the elder ones may be content that gladness has passed
onward from them into newer vessels. I should like to see the
blue-eyed maid with her bangles on her arms.

Please give my love to all and sundry who make any sign of love for
me; and any amount you like is ready for you to draw upon.

[Sidenote: Letter to Frederic Harrison, 10th June, 1879.]

I am greatly obliged to you for sending me the paper you are to read
to-day; and I appreciate it the more highly because your diligence is
in contrast with the general sluggishness of readers about any but
idle reading. It is melancholy enough that to most of our polite
readers the social factor in psychology would be a dull subject; for
it is certainly no conceit of ours which pronounces it to be the
supremely interesting element in the thinking of our time.

I confess the word factor has always been distasteful to me as the
name for the grandest of forces. If it were only mathematical I should
not mind, but it has many other associated flavors which spoil it for
me.

Once more--ever more--thanks.

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles L. Lewes, 10th June, 1879.]

You will like to know that Mr. Frederic Harrison has sent me a brief
paper, which is to be read to-day at the Metaphysical Society, on the
"Social Factor in Psychology," opening with a quotation from the
"Study of Psychology," and marking throughout his high appreciation of
your father's work. Also the Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, kindly
sent (with his initials only) to Trübner four errata which he had
found in reading the "Study of Psychology." Trübner did not know who
was the kind corrector, and very properly sent the paper to me,
offering to have the corrections made on the plates if I wished it. I
said, "By all means," and have written to thank the Rector. What a
blessing to find a man who really reads a book!

I have received the enclosed letter, with other papers (about country
lodgings at Sevenoaks for poor children). Will you look out a single
copy of as many of my books (poems included) as you can find, and send
them in a parcel, saying that they come from me for the Free Library?
Please not to mind this trouble, as it is for the _impecunious_
readers. (You know I am nothing if not "sesquipedalian" and
scientific; and a word of five syllables will do for both qualities.)

I wish you could see Coquelin in Tabourin. He is a wonderful actor,
when he gets the right part for him. He has a penetrating personality
that one cannot be indifferent to, though possibly it may be
unpleasant to some people.

[Sidenote: Letter to William Blackwood, 12th June, 1879.]

I was beginning, with my usual apprehensiveness, to fear that you had
no good news to tell me, since I did not hear from you, and I should
have gone on fearing till to-morrow morning if I had not happened to
drive to Godalming and ask for the second post. We only get one post a
day at the benighted Witley, so that if you want me to get a letter
quickly it must be posted early at Edinburgh.

I am heartily glad to know that the invalid is going on well, and I
trust that the softer air we are having now will help him forward.

"Theophrastus" seems to be really welcomed by the public. Mr.
Blackwood will be amused to hear that one gentleman told Charles, or
implied, that "Theophrastus" was a higher order of book, and _more
difficult to write_ than a novel. Wait long enough, and every form of
opinion will turn up. However, poor "Theophrastus" is certainly not
composed of "chips" any more than my other books.

Another amusing bit of news is, that the other day Mrs. Pattison sent
me an extract from the _livret_ of the Paris _Salon_, describing a
picture painted by a French artist from "The Lifted Veil," and
representing the moment when the resuscitated woman, fixing her eyes
on her mistress, accuses her of having poisoned her husband. I call
this amusing--I ought rather to have said typical of the relation my
books generally have with the French mind.

Thank you for sending me the list of orders. It does interest me to
see the various country demands. I hope the movement will continue to
cheer us all, and you are sure to let me know everything that is
pleasant, so I do not need to ask for that kindness.

The weather is decidedly warmer, and Tuesday was a perfectly glorious
day. But rain and storm have never let us rest long together. I am not
very bright, and am ready to interpret everything in the saddest
sense, but I have no definite ailment.

My best regards to the convalescent, who, I have no doubt, will write
to me when he is able to do so. But I am only one of many who will be
glad to hear from him.

[Sidenote: Letter from Madame Bodichon to Miss Bonham-Carter, 12th
June, 1879.]

     "I spent an hour with Marian (5th June). She was more
     delightful than I can say, and left me in good spirits for
     her--though she is wretchedly thin, and looks, in her long,
     loose, black dress, like the black shadow of herself. She
     said she had so much to do that she must keep well--'the
     world was so _intensely interesting_.' She said she would
     come _next year_ to see me. We both agreed in the great love
     we had for life. In fact, I think she will do more for us
     than ever."

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 20th June, 1879.]

I have been having my turn of illness of rather a sharp kind.
Yesterday, when your letter came, I was in more acute pain than I have
ever known in my life before, but before the morning was over I was
sufficiently relieved to read your pleasant news. I am writing in bed,
but am in that most keenly conscious ease which comes after unusual
suffering. The way in which the public takes "Theophrastus" is really
a comfort to me. I have had some letters, not of the complimentary,
but of the grateful kind, which are an encouragement to believe in the
use of writing. But you would be screamingly amused with one,
twenty-three pages long (from an Edinburgh man, by-the-bye), who has
not read the book, but has read of it, and thinks that his own case is
still more worthy of presentation than Merman's.

I think a valuable series (or couple of volumes) might be made up from
"Maga" of articles written _hot_ by travellers and military men, and
not otherwise republished--chronicles and descriptions by
eye-witnesses--which might be material for historians.

What a comfort that the Afghan war is concluded! But on the back of it
comes the black dog of Indian finance, which means, alas! a great deal
of hardship to poor Hindûs. Let me hear more news of you before long.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones, 29th June, 1879.]

Your description of the effects you feel from the restless, tormenting
winds would serve well to represent my experience too. It seems
something incredible written in my memory that when I was a little
girl I loved the wind--used to like to walk about when it was blowing
great guns. And now the wind is to me what it was to early peoples--a
demon-god, cruelly demanding all sorts of human sacrifices. Thank you,
dear, for caring whether I have any human angels to guard me. None are
permanently here except my servants, but Sir James Paget has been down
to see me, I have a very comfortable country practitioner to watch
over me from day to day, and there is a devoted friend who is backward
and forward continually to see that I lack nothing.

It is a satisfaction to me that you felt the need for "Debasing the
Moral Currency" to be written. I was determined to do it, though it
might make me a stone of stumbling and rock of offence to all the
comic tribe.

Do not rate my illness too high in the scale of mortal misery. I am
prone to make much of my ailments, and am among the worst at enduring
pain.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 29th June, 1879.]

Thank you for sending me the pretty little book.[37] I am deeply
touched by the account of its origin, and I remember well everything
you said to me of Mr. Brown in old days when he was still with you. I
had only cut a very little way into the volume when a friend came and
carried it off, but my eyes had already been arrested by some remarks
on the character of Harold Transome, which seemed to me more
penetrating and finely felt than almost anything I have read in the
way of printed comment on my own writing. When my friend brings back
the volume I shall read it reverentially, and most probably with a
sense of being usefully admonished. For praise and sympathy arouse
much more self-suspicion and sense of shortcoming than all the blame
and depreciation of all the Pepins.

I am better, and I hope on the way to complete recovery, but I am
still at some distance from that goal. Perhaps if the winds would give
one some rest from their tormenting importunity, both you and I should
get on faster.

I am looking forward to reading the "Recollections of Ekowe" in
"Maga," which came to me yesterday, with its list of my own doings and
misdoings on the cover.

Does not this Zulu war seem to you a horribly bad business?

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles L. Lewes, 30th June, 1879.]

Sir Henry Maine has sent me the one letter that has rejoiced my heart
about the "Study of Psychology." He says: "In this branch of Mr.
Lewes's studies I am almost as one of the ignorant, but I think I have
understood every sentence in the book, and I believe I have gained
great knowledge from it. It has been the most satisfactory piece of
work I have done for a long time." I have written to tell him that he
has rescued me from my scepticism as to any one's reading a serious
book except the author or editor.

[Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 2d July, 1879.]

The sight of your handwriting on the pamphlet sent me urges me to do
the sooner what I should have already done but for a rather sharp
illness, which has kept me chiefly in bed for nearly a fortnight, and
from which I am not yet quite free.

I enclose a copy of Michael Foster's draft of conditions for the
studentship, which I put into the lawyer's hands some ten or twelve
days ago, and which is now come to me drawn up in legal form. You said
it would interest you to see the draft, and I have been bearing this
in mind, but have not been able to go to the desk where the copy lay.

I hope to hear that you have been going on well despite the cruel,
restless winds and sad intermittence of sunshine. On the 12th I am
going to have two daughters-in-law, _five_ grandchildren, and servant
for a week--if I can get well enough, as I have good hope now that I
shall. The strawberries will be ripe then, and as I don't eat any
myself it would be dolorous not to be able to have the children, and
see them enjoy the juicy blessing.

[Sidenote: Letter to John Blackwood, 16th July, 1879.]

I was beginning to want some news of you, and was almost ready to ask
for it. It is the more welcome for having had time to ripen into a
decidedly good report of your condition. About myself I have a very
poor story to tell, being now in the fifth week of a troublesome
illness, in which, like you, I have been partly fed on "poisonous
decoctions." To-day, however, happens to show a considerable
improvement in my symptoms, and I have been walking in the warmer air
with more ease than hitherto. Driving I have not been able to manage
for some time, the motion of the carriage shaking me too much. The
best of care has been taken of me. I have an excellent country doctor
(Mr. Parsons of Godalming) who watches me daily; and Sir James Paget
and Dr. Andrew Clark have been down to add their supervision. I begin
to think that if I can avoid any evil condition, such as a chill that
would bring on a relapse, I may soon be pretty well again. The point
to be achieved is to stop the wasting of my not too solid flesh.

I am glad to hear that the third edition of "Theophrastus" has had so
lively a movement. If the remainder should be sold off I think it
would be well just to print a small number of copies to carry on, and
avoid bringing out a cheaper edition too soon after people have been
paying for the expensive one.

I have been always able to write my letters and read my proofs,
usually in bed before the fatigue of dressing, but the rest of my time
has been very unprofitable--spent chiefly in pain and languor. I am
feeling easy now, and you will well understand that after undergoing
pain this ease is opening paradise. Invalids must be excused for being
eloquent about themselves.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones, 22d July, 1879.]

I feel a perhaps too selfish need to tell you that things have gone
ill with me since I last wrote to you. Why do I want to let you know
this not agreeable news about myself? Chiefly because I want you to be
quite clear that if I do not write to say, "When can you come to me?"
it is not from indifference, but from misfortune of another sort.
Meanwhile it will do me good to have little items of news from you,
when you can find half an hour for the kind deed of writing me a
letter. What helps me most is to be told things about others, and your
letters are just of the sort I like to have.

I am just now in one of my easier hours, and the demon wind has
abated. He seems to enter into my pains with hideous rejoicing.

[Sidenote: Letter to James Sully, 7th Aug. 1879.]

Thank you for your kind note. There are to be more than as many proofs
as you have already had, for which I must crave the valuable aid of
your reading.

You will understand all the better how much comfort it is to me to
have your help as well as Professor Foster's, when I tell you that for
the last eight weeks I have been seriously out of health, and have
often been suffering much pain--a state which I imagine you know by
experience to heighten all real anxieties, and usually to create
unreal.

It cheers me to be told by you that you think the volume interesting.
In reading the MS. again and again I had got into a state of tremor
about it which deprived me of judgment--just as if it were writing of
my own, which I could not trust myself to pronounce upon.

I hope that your own health, and Mrs. Sully's too, will have been
benefited by your change from south to north.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones, 11th Aug. 1879.]

I think that I am really getting better, and shall have to stay among
the minority in this world a little longer than I had expected.

Will you send me word how long you shall be at liberty, and whether
you would think it worth while to come down to me one morning and stay
till the afternoon of the following day? Your letter is delightful to
me. Several spiritual kisses for it.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 19th Aug. 1879.]

Thank you for your sweet affection. I have had rather a trying
illness, which lasted, without great relief, for nearly eight weeks.
But I hope that I am now out of it--that is, so far established that I
may go on without a relapse. The cold weather was against me, as it
was and is against much more important matters. The days of warmth and
sunlight which have now and then blessed us have been my best
medicine, though I acknowledge the benefit of pepsin and steel, and
many other drugs. The gray skies and recurring rain are peculiarly
dispiriting to me, and one seems to feel their influence all the more
for the wide, beautiful view of field and hill which they sadden and
half conceal. In town one thinks less of the sky.

If you are ever writing to our dear Mrs. William Smith do give my love
to her, and tell her I am very grateful to her for the letter she
wrote me with the postmark _Ventnor_ upon it. With her usual delicacy
of feeling she did not send her address, so that I could not write in
return.

[Sidenote: Letter to William Blackwood, 3d Sept. 1879.]

I am much obliged to you for writing me your letter of pleasant news.

It is wonderful how "Theophrastus" goes on selling in these bad times,
and I have only to hope in addition that the buyers will be the better
for it. Apparently we shall get through this last edition before
Christmas, and then perhaps you will think of adding the volume to the
Cabinet Edition. I am especially rejoiced to hear that your uncle is
better again, and I trust that Strathtyrum is sharing our sunshine,
which will be the best cure for him as for me. I am getting strong,
and also am gaining flesh on my moderate scale. It really makes a
difference to one's spirits to think that the harvest may now possibly
be got in without utter ruin to the produce and unhappy producers. But
this year will certainly prove a serious epoch, and initiate many
changes in relation to farming. I fear, from what I have read, that
the rich Lothians will have to be called compassionately the poor
Lothians. By the way, if you happen to want any translation done from
the French, and have not just the right person to do it, I think I can
recommend a Miss Bradley Jenkins, of 50 Cornwall Road, Wesbourne Park,
as one who has an unusually competent knowledge of French. We sat side
by side on the same form translating Miss Edgeworth into French when
we were girls.

I have not seen her for many years, but I know that she has been
engaged in a high order of teaching, and I have lately heard from her
that she is anxious to get work of the kind in question. She already
spoke French well when we were pupils together, and she has since been
an unintermitting student.

I wonder, talking of translators, how the young Mr. Ferrier is going
on, who translated Kaufmann's pamphlet on "Deronda." What Mr.
Blackwood told me of him interested me about his future.

Oblige us all by not falling into another accident when the next
hunting season comes.

[Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 3d Sept. 1879.]

Before I received your letter the other day I was intending to write
to you to ask whether, now that I am stronger and the fine weather
shows some signs of permanence, you feel any revival of the
inclination to come and see me for a couple of days. I hardly like to
propose your taking the journey, now that you are not being brought
near me by other visits--for the railway from you to us is, I think,
rather tiresome. But if your inclination really lies towards coming
you will be affectionately welcomed.

About the sea-side I am hopeless. The latter part of October is likely
to be too cold for me to move about without risk of chills; and I hope
to be back in town before the end of the month. I am not very fond of
the sea-side, and this year it is likely to be crowded with people who
have been hindered by the bad weather from going earlier. I prefer the
Surrey hills and the security from draughts in one's own home. The one
attraction of a coast place to me is a great breadth of sand to pace
on when it is in its fresh firmness after the fall of the tide. But
the sea itself is melancholy to me, only a little less so under warm
sunlight, with plenty of fishing-smacks changing their shadows. All
this is to let you know why I do not yield to the attraction of being
with you, where we could chat as much or as little as we liked. I feel
very much your affectionateness in wishing to have me near you.

Write me word soon whether you feel able to come as far as this for my
sake.

[Sidenote: Letter to James Sully, 10th Sept. 1879.]

I have read the article[38] with very grateful feelings. I think that
he would himself have regarded it as a generally just estimate. And I
am much obliged to you for sending it to me in proof.

Your selection of subjects for remark, and the remarks themselves, are
in accordance with my feeling to a comforting extent; and I shall
always remain your debtor for writing the article.

I trust you will not be forced to omit anything about his scientific
and philosophical work, because that is the part of his life's labor
which he most valued.

Perhaps you a little underrate the (original) effect of his "Life of
Goethe in Germany." It was received with enthusiasm, and an immense
number of copies, in both the English and German form, have been sold
in Germany since its appearance in 1854.

I wish you were allowed to put your name to the article.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 17th Sept. 1879.]

I am getting strong now after a long spell of medical discipline. All
these long months I have been occupied with my husband's manuscripts:
also with the foundation of a Physiological Studentship, which is my
monument to his memory, and which is now all settled, as you may
perhaps have seen by advertisements.[39] But I am not yet through the
proof-reading of the final volume of "Problems of Life and Mind,"
which will contain the last sheets he ever wrote.

I hear very good accounts of Madame Bodichon, who is coming to me for
a couple of days on the 29th.

You are wonderful for life and energy, in spite of your delicate
looks. May you have all the strength you need for your sympathetic
tasks!

[Sidenote: Letter to James Sully, 7th Oct. 1879.]

I have not yet thanked you--and I do so now very gratefully--for the
help you have given me in my sad and anxious task. Your eyes have been
a most precious aid, not only as a matter of fact, but as a ground of
confidence. For I am not at all a good proof-reader, and have a
thorough distrust of myself.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones, 18th Oct. 1879.]

I cannot wish not to have been cheered by your triple letter, even
though I have caused you to rise earlier in the morning, and to feel a
disproportionate remorse. "Maggior difetto men vergogna lava," as says
Virgil to the blushing Dante. And you have given me the fuller measure
because I had to wait a little.

Your legend of "Fair Women" interests me very much. I feel a citizen
of the world again, knowing all the news. But the core of good news
in your letter is that your husband is well again, and again happy in
his work. Your collapse is what I feared for you; and you must call
the getting change of air and scene--I was going to say "a duty," but
are you one of those wonderful beings who find everything easier under
that name? But at least one prefers doing a hard duty to grimacing
with a pretence of pleasure in things that are no pleasure.

I am greatly comforted this morning by the fact that the (apparently)
right man is found for the George Henry Lewes Studentship--an ardent
worker, who could not have carried on his pursuit without this help. I
know you are not unmindful of what touches me deeply.

Go on your visit, dear, and come back well--then show yourself without
unnecessary delay to your loving friend.

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles L. Lewes, Saturday, 20th Oct. 1879.]

I have had a delightful bit of news from Dr. Foster this morning. He
had mentioned to me before that there was an Edinburgh student whom he
had in his mind as the right one to elect. This morning he writes:
"The trustees meet to-morrow to receive my nomination. I have chosen
Dr. Charles Roy, an Edinburgh man, and Scotchman--not one of my own
pupils. He is, I think, the most promising--by far the most
promising--of our young physiologists, putting aside those who do not
need the pecuniary assistance of the studentship. And the help comes
to him just when it is most needed--he is in full swing of work, and
was casting about for some means of supporting himself which would
least interfere with his work, when I called his attention to the
studentship. I feel myself very gratified that I can, at the very
outset, recommend just the man, as it appears to me, for the post."

This is a thing your father would have chosen as a result of his life.

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles L. Lewes, Tuesday, 27th Oct. 1879.]

I have just had some news that grieves me. Mr. Blackwood is
dangerously ill, and I fear, from Mr. William's letter, that there is
little hope of recovery. He will be a heavy loss to me. He has been
bound up with what I most cared for in my life for more than twenty
years; and his good qualities have made many things easy to me that,
without him, would often have been difficult.[40]

I wrote to Mr. Trübner to tell him that the printing of the "Problems"
being finished, I should be glad if he would arrange with you about
the conditions of publication. Bear in mind your father's wish that
the volumes should not be made dearer than necessary.

I am going to Weybridge on Friday, and I intend to be at the Priory by
Saturday before dusk. But it is _just possible_ I may be detained till
Monday morning. So if you have any good occupation for Sunday you had
better call on your way home on Monday.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Eleanor Cross, 29th Oct. 1879.]

Your affectionate note would quite have determined me to do what, when
your brother kindly proposed it, raised a certain longing in me. I
thought that I should like to see you all in the remembered home
again. But I have had a little check in health, and I am feeling so
depressed that I shrink from making any engagement which involves
others.

A visitor to-day and my own languor threatens to throw me backward in
my arrangements for leaving, and I have a sense of impossibility
about everything that, under other conditions, would be a pleasure. I
am afraid lest a fit of sadness should make me an oppression to you
all; and my conclusion this morning is that I must give up the few
hours' happiness of feeling your family love around me as I used to
do, and simply go straight up to town with my servants.

But if Friday morning brings me better hopes I will telegraph to you,
since you allow me to wait till the eleventh hour. If you receive no
telegram you will understand that I am still too downhearted to
venture on a visit even to those who are among the best-loved of my
friends. In that case you must all make me amends for my loss by
coming to see me in the old place in town.

     Came to Weybridge on 31st October, and returned to the Priory
     on 1st November.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones, 8th Nov. 1879.]

I came here just a week ago, and I had a superstition that you would
come to me yesterday. But I used no enchantments--and so you didn't
come.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 22d Nov. 1879, from the
Priory.]

I am very grateful to you for your kind letter. News about you all had
been much desired by me; but I have now so many business letters to
write that I am apt to defer such as are not absolutely necessary. The
careful index is a sign of your effective industry, and I have no
doubt that it will be a great help to yourself as well as to your
readers. One very often needs an index to one's own writing. My chief
objects are quite completed now. The Dr. Roy appointed to the
studentship is held by competent persons to be the most hopeful of our
young physiologists: and there is a volume of 501 pages (the last) of
"Problems of Life and Mind" ready to appear next month. I am quite
recovered from the ailment which made me good for little in the
summer, and indeed am stronger than I ever expected to be again.
People are very good to me, and I am exceptionally blessed in many
ways; but more blessed are the dead who rest from their labors, and
have not to dread a barren, useless survival.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 6th Dec. 1879, from the
Priory.]

I am very well, dear kind friend, all things considered. One cannot
help getting occasional chills and headaches in this hard, wintry
time.

Oh, yes, I read the _Times_ with great interest, and am much concerned
to know what my contemporaries are doing. My time is very fully
occupied, for I have now to write a great many letters, such as used
to be written for me, and I would willingly spend the time thus taken
up in another sort of reading and writing.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 5th Jan. 1880.]

Thank you a thousand times, my dear friend, for your tender New Year's
greeting and inquiries. I have passed well from "under the saws and
harrows" of the severe cold, and am better, both in apparent organic
soundness and in strength for all occupation, than I once thought was
possible for me.

Our dear Barbara is painting in water colors again from her
window--just as of old. I know you will be glad to hear of this. And I
am now seeing many other friends, who interest me and bring me reports
of their several worlds. The great public calamities of the past year
have helped to quiet one's murmuring spirit in relation to private
sorrows, and the prospect for the future is not yet very bright. One
thinks of mothers like Mrs. Ruck, whose best-loved sons are in
Afghanistan. But we must live as much as we can for human joy,
dwelling on sorrow and pain only so far as the consciousness of it may
help us in striving to remedy them.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones, 19th Jan. 1880.]

Life has seemed worse without my glimpses of you. And now I have not
the amends of thinking that you are out of our Egyptian darkness and
getting health in the country. I must drive over to ask about you as
soon as I can.

     As the year went on, George Eliot began to see all her old
     friends again. But her life was nevertheless a life of
     heart-loneliness. Accustomed as she had been for so many
     years to solitude _à deux_, the want of close companionship
     continued to be very bitterly felt. She was in the habit of
     going with me very frequently to the National Gallery, and to
     other exhibitions of pictures, to the British Museum
     sculptures, and to South Kensington. This constant
     association engrossed me completely, and was a new interest
     to her. A bond of mutual dependence had been formed between
     us. On the 28th March she came down to Weybridge and stayed
     till the 30th; and on the 9th April it was finally decided
     that our marriage should take place as soon, and as
     privately, as might be found practicable.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Eleanor Cross, 13th April, 1880.]

You can hardly think how sweet the name sister is to me, that I have
not been called by for so many, many years.

Without your tenderness I do not believe it would have been possible
for me to accept this wonderful renewal of my life. Nothing less than
the prospect of being loved and welcomed by you all could have
sustained me. But now I cherish the thought that the family life will
be the richer and not the poorer through your brother's great gift of
love to me.

Yet I quail a little in facing what has to be gone through--the
hurting of many whom I care for. You are doing everything you can to
help me, and I am full of gratitude to you all for his sake as well as
my own. The springs of affection are reopened in me, and it will make
me better to be among you--more loving and trustful.

I valued Florence's little visit very much. You and she will come
again--will you not?--to your sister.

[Sidenote: Letter to Frederic Harrison, 19th April, 1880.]

I have found the spot in "The Prelude" where the passage I mentioned
occurs. It is in book viii., "The Retrospect," towards the end:

     "The human nature unto which I felt
     That I belonged, and reverenced with love,
     Was not a punctual presence, but a spirit
     Diffused through time and space, with aid derived
     Of evidence from monuments, erect,
     Prostrate, or leaning towards their common rest
     In earth, the widely scattered wreck sublime
     Of vanished nations."

The bit of brickwork in the rock is

     "With aid derived from evidence."

I think you would find much to suit your purpose in "The Prelude,"
such as--

                             "There is
     One great society alone on earth:
     The noble Living and the noble Dead."

Except for travelling, and for popular distribution, I prefer Moxon's
one-volumed edition of Wordsworth to any selection. No selection gives
you the perfect gems to be found in single lines, or in half a dozen
lines which are to be found in the "dull" poems.

I am sorry Matthew Arnold has not included the sonnet beginning--

     "I griev'd for Buonaparté with a vain
     And an unthinking grief--"

and which has these precious lines,

     "'Tis not in battles that from youth we train
     The governor who must be wise and good,
     And temper with the sternness of the brain
     Thoughts motherly, and meek as womanhood.
     _Wisdom doth live with children round her knees._"

Has he the magnificent sonnet on Toussaint l'Ouverture? I don't know
where there is anything finer than the last eight lines of it.

Please don't acknowledge this note, else you will neutralize my
pleasure in sending it by making me feel that I have given you
trouble.

[Sidenote: Letter to the Hon. Lady Lytton, 24th April, 1880.]

The beautiful photograph has reached me safely, and I am very grateful
to you for your kindness in sending it to me. In comparing it with the
photograph which you gave me seven or eight years ago I see the effect
of a saddening experience which the years must bring to us all, but,
to my feeling, the face is the more endearing because of that effect.

You have been very often in my thoughts, because I have associated you
with public affairs, and have imagined sympathetically how they must
have affected your private life. I am sure that this momentous
experience in India has been a hard discipline both for you and for
Lord Lytton. I can imagine he has often been sick at heart with the
near vision, which his post forces on him, of human meanness and
rancor. You, too, must have gathered some melancholy knowledge of that
sort, which has perhaps changed a little the curves of the mouth and
the glance of the eyes since those Vienna days, when the delightful M.
de Villers helped to make the hours pleasant to us.

I saw the photographs of your daughters, which gave me an idea how
fast the dramatic authoress has developed physically as well as
mentally. When I first saw her at Vienna she was the prettiest little
rosebud.

Mrs. Strachey called the other day when I was out, and among other
reasons for my being sorry not to have seen her, was the having missed
some authentic news about your probable movements. What happens to you
will always have interest for me, since I have long been, with sincere
regard, yours most truly.

     On the 24th April George Eliot came down to Weybridge, and
     stayed till the 26th.

[Sidenote: Letter to James Sully, 26th April, 1880.]

I am deeply obliged to you for the care with which you have treated
the final volume of "The Problems" in the _Academy_, which you have
kindly sent me. I think you could hardly have written more effectively
towards exciting an interest in the work in the minds of the
comparatively few who really care for the study of psychology. You
have added one more to the obligations which will make me always yours
gratefully.

[Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 5th May, 1880.]

I have something to tell you which will doubtless be a great surprise
to you; but since I have found that other friends, less acquainted with
me and my life than you are, have given me their sympathy, I think that
I can count on yours. I am going to do what not very long ago I should
myself have pronounced impossible for me, and therefore I should not
wonder at any one else who found my action incomprehensible. By the
time you receive this letter I shall (so far as the future can be
matter of assertion) have been married to Mr. J. W. Cross, who, you
know, is a friend of years, a friend much loved and trusted by Mr.
Lewes, and who, now that I am alone, sees his happiness in the
dedication of his life to me. This change in my position will make no
change in my care for Mr. Lewes's family, and in the ultimate
disposition of my property. Mr. Cross has a sufficient fortune of his
own. We are going abroad for a few months, and I shall not return to
live at this house. Mr. Cross has taken the lease of a house, No. 4
Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, where we shall spend the winter and early spring,
making Witley our summer home.

I indulge the hope that you will some day look at the river from the
windows of our Chelsea house, which is rather quaint and picturesque.

Please tell Bessie[41] for me, with my love to her. I cannot write to
more than two or three persons.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 5th May, 1880.]

A great, momentous change is going to take place in my life. My
indisposition last week and several other subsequent circumstances
have hindered me from communicating it to you, and the time has been
but short since the decision was come to. But with your permission
Charles will call on you and tell you what he can on Saturday.

Yours and Emily's ever, with unchanging love.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1880.]

_May 6._--Married this day at 10.15 to John Walter Cross, at St.
George's, Hanover Square. Present, Charles, who gave me away, Mr. and
Mrs. Druce, Mr. Hall, William, Mary, Eleanor, and Florence Cross. We
went back to the Priory, where we signed our wills. Then we started
for Dover and arrived there a little after five o'clock.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Eleanor Cross, 9th May, 1880.]

Your letter was a sweet greeting to us on our arrival here yesterday.

We had a millennial cabin on the deck of the Calais-Douvres, and
floated over the strait as easily as the saints float upward to heaven
(in the pictures). At Amiens we were very comfortably housed, and paid
two enraptured visits, evening and morning, to the cathedral. I was
delighted with J.'s delight in it. And we read our dear old cantos of
the "Inferno" that we were reading a year ago, declining afterwards on
"Eugénie Grandet." The nice woman who waited on us made herself very
memorable to me by her sketch of her own life. She went to England
when she was nineteen as a lady's maid--had been much _ennuyée de sa
mère_, detested _les plaisirs_, liked only her regular every-day work
and _la paix_.

Here we have a very fair _appartement_, and plenty of sunlight, _au
premier_. Before dinner we walked up to the Arc de l'Étoile and back
again, enjoying the lovely greenth and blossoms of the horse-chestnuts,
which are in their first glory, innocent of dust or of one withered
petal. This morning at twelve o'clock we are going to the Russian
church, where J. has never been, and where I hope we shall hear the
wonderful intoning and singing as I heard it years ago.

This is the chronicle of our happy married life, three days long--all
its happiness conscious of a dear background in those who are loving
us at Weybridge, at Thornhill, and at Ranby.

You are all inwoven into the pattern of my thoughts, which would have
a sad lack without you. I like to go over again in imagination all the
scene in the church and in the vestry, and to feel every loving look
from the eyes of those who were rejoicing for us. Besides Professor
Sellar's letter, which touched J. with grateful surprise, we have had
one to him from Mr. Frederic Harrison, saying everything affectionate,
and two very finely felt letters from Edith Simcox--one to him
enclosing the one to me. Certainly, she has a rare generosity and
elevation which find their easy channel in writing. My love to Henry
and to the gentle Berthe,[42] who was an invisible presence at our
wedding.

I think I must thank Florence, too, for her letter to J.; for we
accept to the full the principle of "what is mine is thine" on each
side. What most comforted him this morning was a letter from Albert
Druce about the Chelsea house. His usual exclamation over anything
from Albert is that his brother-in-law is the most satisfactory of
men!

Write us word about everything, and consider yourselves all very much
loved and spiritually petted by your loving sister.

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles L. Lewes, 21st May, 1880, from Grenoble.]

This place is so magnificently situated, in a smiling valley, with the
Isère flowing through it, and surrounded by grand and various lines of
mountains, and we were so enraptured by our expedition yesterday to
the Grande Chartreuse that we congratulate ourselves greatly on our
choice of route. I think it unlikely that we shall want to wander
beyond the second week in July. We shall begin to long for home just
when the rest of the London world are longing for travel. We are
seeing nature in her happiest moment now--the foliage on all the
tremendous heights, the soft slopes, and the richly clad valleys on
the way to the Chartreuse is all fresh and tender, shone through by a
sunlight which cherishes and does not burn us. I had but one regret in
seeing the sublime beauty of the Grande Chartreuse. It was that the
Pater had not seen it. I would still give up my own life willingly if
he could have the happiness instead of me. But marriage has seemed to
restore me to my old self. I was getting hard, and if I had decided
differently, I think I should have become very selfish. To feel daily
the loveliness of a nature close to me, and to feel grateful for it,
is the fountain of tenderness and strength to endure.

Glorious weather always, and I am very well--quite amazingly able to
go through fatigue.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Florence Cross, 25th May, 1880.]

Our life since we wrote to you has been a chapter of
delights--Grenoble--Grande Chartreuse--Chambéry--paradisiacal walk to
Les Charmettes--roses gathered in Jean Jacques' garden--Mont Cenis
Tunnel and emergence into Italian sunshine. Milan, comfortable
_appartement_, delicious privacy, and great minds condescending to
relax themselves! We got here yesterday, and of course our first walk
was to the post, where we found your delightful budget and other
letters, which we took to a _café_ in the grand _galleria_ and read at
our ease to the accompaniment of tea.

Two of my letters yesterday touched me very gratefully. One was from
"Brother Jimmy"--the prettiest letter possible. The other letter that
moved me was one from my own brother. Then J. had a graceful letter of
congratulation from Mr. Henry James, who is still at Florence. I think
you did not send that letter of Mr. Edmund Gurney's which you mention.
I am fond of seeing the letters which put my friends in an amiable
light for my imagination. And now that I have had that charming letter
from my new brother in America, I feel that my family initiation is
complete. No woman was ever more sweetly received by brothers and
sisters than I have been; and it is a happy, new longing in my life
that I may return into their bosoms some of the gladness they have
poured into mine.

I have been uninterruptedly well, and feel quite strong with all sorts
of strength except strong-mindedness. We are going to hear the music
in the Duomo at eleven, and after that we intend to pay our first
visit to the Brera gallery. It is our present plan to stay here for
some days, and we enjoy the thought of a little stationary life such
as we have not had since we left Paris. We often talk of our sisters,
oftener think of them. You are our children, you know.

[Sidenote: Letter to Isaac P. Evans, 26th May, 1880.]

Your letter was forwarded to me here, and it was a great joy to me to
have your kind words of sympathy, for our long silence has never
broken the affection for you which began when we were little ones. My
husband, too, was much pleased to read your letter. I have known his
family for eleven years, and they have received me among them very
lovingly. The only point to be regretted in our marriage is that I am
much older than he; but his affection has made him choose this lot of
caring for me rather than any other of the various lots open to him.

Emily Clarke has lately sent me rather a sad account of Sarah's[43]
health. I trust that it is now better, for I think it is her lungs
that chiefly trouble her, and summer may act beneficently on them.
Please give my love to her, and tell her that I like the assurance of
her share in the good wishes you send me.

I have often heard of Frederick[44] through the admiration of those
who have heard him preach; and it has been a happy thought to me that
you and Sarah must feel it a great comfort to have him as well as
Walter settled near you.

Edith is the only one of your children whom I have seen since they
have been grown up, and I thought her a noble-looking woman.

We are going to remain abroad until some time in July, and shall then
return to the Heights, Witley, Surrey. Our home in London will be 4
Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, looking on a very picturesque bit of the river.

I hope that your own health is quite good now, and that you are able
to enjoy the active life which I know you are fond of. Always your
affectionate sister.

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles L. Lewes, 28th May, 1880.]

Many thanks for your delightful letter, which came to me yesterday,
with a loving though brief letter from Mrs. Congreve to keep it
company in making the day agreeable.

We arrived here on Monday, and have been induced by a nice quiet
apartment and pleasant attendance to carry out our plan of resting
here and deliberately seeing what is to be seen in this cheerful,
prosperous city. I am glad to find that the Luini pictures come up to
my remembrance, and that J. is much impressed by his introduction to
them. I continue remarkably well, and am every day surprising myself
by the amount of walking, standing, and looking that I can go through.
To-morrow or the next day we intend to go on to Verona, then, after a
sufficient pause to enjoy that glorious place, we shall move on to
Padua and Venice, where it will be best for you to send anything you
may have to send. I like to see the letters. They make one realize the
fact of one's home and little world there amid the dreaminess of
foreign travel. We take our meals in our own apartment and see nothing
of our fellow-guests in the hotel--only hear their British and
American voices when they air themselves in the _cortile_ after their
dinner.

The weather has hitherto been delicious, not excessively warm, always
with a pleasant movement in the air; but this morning there is a
decided advance in heat, and we shall both have our theory of great
heat being the best thing for us well tested in the next month.

[Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 29th May and 1st June, 1880,
from Verona.]

The change I make in the date of this letter is a sign of the
difficulty you well know that one finds in writing all the letters one
wants to write while travelling. Ever since Charles forwarded to me
your dear letter while I was in Paris I have been meaning to write to
you. That letter was doubly sweet to me because it was written before
you received mine, _intended_ to inform you of my marriage before it
appeared in the newspapers. Charles says that my friends are chiefly
hurt because I did not tell them of the approaching change in my life.
But I really did not finally, absolutely, decide--I was in a state of
doubt and struggle--until only a fortnight before the event took
place, so that at last everything was done in the utmost haste.
However, there were four or five friends, of whom you were one, to
whom I was resolved to write, so that they should at least get my
letter on the morning of the 6th.

I had more than once said to Mr. Cross that you were that one of my
friends who required the least explanation on the subject--who would
spontaneously understand our marriage. But Charles sends me word that
my friends in general are very sympathetic, and I should like to
mention to you that Bessie[45] is one whose very kind words he has
sent to me, for you may have an opportunity of giving my love to her,
and telling her that it is very sweet to me to feel that her affection
is constant to me in this as it was in other crises of my life. I
wish, since you can no longer come in and out among us as you used to
do, that you already knew my husband better. His family welcome me
with the uttermost tenderness. All this is wonderful blessing falling
to me beyond my share, after I had thought that my life was ended, and
that, so to speak, my coffin was ready for me in the next room. Deep
down below there is a hidden river of sadness, but this must always be
with those who have lived long--and I am able to enjoy my newly
reopened life. I shall be a better, more loving creature than I could
have been in solitude. To be constantly, lovingly grateful for the
gift of a perfect love is the best illumination of one's mind to all
the possible good there may be in store for man on this troublous
little planet.

We leave Verona to-day, and stay a little at Padua on our way to
Venice. Hitherto we have had delightful weather, and just the
temperature we rejoice in. We are both fond of warmth, and could bear
more heat than we have the prospect of at present.

Yesterday we had a drive on the skirting heights of Verona, and saw
the vast fertile plain around, with the Euganean hills, blue in the
distance, and the Apennines just dimly visible on the clear margin of
the horizon. I am always made happier by seeing well-cultivated land.

We came into Italy by way of Grenoble (seeing the Grande Chartreuse),
Chambéry, and the Mont Cenis Tunnel; since then we have been staying
at Milan and enjoying the Luini frescoes and a few other great things
there. The great things are always by comparison few, and there is
much everywhere one would like to help seeing, after it has once
served to give one a notion of historical progression.

We shall stay at Venice for ten days or a fortnight; so if you have a
scribe, or would write yourself, to tell me that all is going on well
with you, the letter would not, as the Scotch say, "go amissing."

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles L. Lewes, 9th June, 1880, from Venice.]

We both enjoyed reading your letter on the morning after our arrival
at this enchanting city, where the glorious light, with comparative
stillness and total absence of dust, makes a paradise much more
desirable than that painted by Tintoretto on the wall of the Consiglio
Maggiore. Nothing but the advent of mosquitoes would make it easy for
us to tear ourselves away from this place, where every prospect
pleases, but also where one is obliged to admit that man is somewhat
vile. I am sadly disappointed in the aspect of the Venetian populace.
Even physically they look less endowed than I thought them when we
were here under the Austrian dominion. We have hardly seen a sweet or
noble woman's face since we arrived; but the men are not quite so
ill-looking as the women. The singing here (by itinerant performers in
gondolas) is disgraceful to Venice and to Italy. Coarse voices, much
out of tune, make one shudder when they strike suddenly under the
window.

Our days here are passed quite deliciously. We see a few beautiful
pictures or other objects of interest, and dwell on them sufficiently
every morning, not hurrying ourselves to do much; and afterwards we
have a _giro_ in our gondola, enjoying the air and the sight of
marvellous Venice from various points of view and under various
aspects. Hitherto we have had no _heat_, only warmth, with a light
breeze. To-day, for the first time, one thinks that violent exercise
must be terribly trying for our red-skinned fellow-mortals at work on
the gondolas and the barges. But for us it is only pleasant to find
the air warm enough for sitting out in the evening. We shall not soon
run away from Venice unless some plague--_e.g._, mosquitoes--should
arise to drive us. We edify ourselves with what Ruskin has written
about Venice, in an agreeable pamphlet shape, using his knowledge
gratefully, and shutting our ears to his wrathful innuendoes against
the whole modern world. And we are now nearly at the end of Alfieri's
autobiography, which is a deeply interesting study of character.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 10th June, 1880.]

It may well seem incredible to you, for it is hardly credible to
myself, that while I have been longing to write to you ever since I
received your dear letter, I have not found the time to satisfy my
longing. Perhaps you are more able than most people to conceive the
difficulty of getting a clear half-hour between the business of
travelling and the attention to little details of packing and toilet,
over and above the companionship of talk and reading. Certainly I have
thought of you all the more, but you have not known that, and I have
lost my claim to hear about you--a use and wont which I would not
willingly part with.

I wonder whether you have imagined--I believe that you are quick to
imagine for the benefit of others--all the reasons why it was left at
last to Charles to tell you of the great, once undreamed-of change in
my life. The momentous decision, in fact, was not made till scarcely
more than a fortnight before my marriage; and even if opportunity had
lent itself to my confiding everything to you, I think I could hardly
have done it at a time when your presence filled me rather with a
sense of your and Emily's trouble[46] than with my own affairs.
Perhaps Charles will have told you that the marriage deprives no one
of any good I felt bound to render before--it only gives me a more
strenuous position, in which I cannot sink into the self-absorption
and laziness I was in danger of before. The whole history is something
like a miracle-legend. But instead of any former affection being
displaced in my mind, I seem to have recovered the loving sympathy
that I was in danger of losing. I mean, that I had been conscious of a
certain drying-up of tenderness in me, and that now the spring seems
to have risen again. Who could take your place within me or make me
amends for the loss of you? And yet I should not take it bitterly if
you felt some alienation from me. Such alienation is very natural
where a friend does not fulfil expectations of long standing.

We have already been ten days at Venice, but we hope to remain as long
again, not fearing the heat, which has hitherto been only a false
alarm in the minds of English travellers. If you could find time to
send me word how you all are--yourself, Dr. Congreve after his
holiday, and Emily, with all her cares about removal--a letter sent to
the _Poste Restante_ here would reach me, even if we had left before
the next ten days were over. We shall hardly be at Witley before the
middle of July: but the sense of neighborhood to you at Witley is
sadly ended now.

     We thought too little of the heat, and rather laughed at
     English people's dread of the sun. But the mode of life at
     Venice has its peculiar dangers. It is one thing to enjoy
     heat when leading an active life, getting plenty of exercise
     in riding or rowing in the evenings; it is another thing to
     spend all one's days in a gondola--a delicious, dreamy
     existence--going from one church to another--from palaces to
     picture-galleries--sight-seeing of the most exhaustively
     interesting kind--traversing constantly the _piccoli rei_,
     which are nothing more than drains, and with bedroom-windows
     always open on the great drain of the Grand Canal. The effect
     of this continual bad air, and the complete and sudden
     deprivation of all bodily exercise, made me thoroughly ill.
     As soon as I could be moved we left Venice, on the 23d of
     June, and went to Innspruck, where we stayed for a week, and
     in the change to the pure, sweet, mountain air I soon
     regained strength.

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles L. Lewes, 7th July, 1880, from
Stuttgart.]

I was made very glad by Gertrude's letter, which assured me that
Witley had been enjoyed by you and the little ones. We stayed six days
at Innspruck, finding it more and more beautiful under the sunshine
which had been wanting to it during our first two days. Then we went
on to Munich, and yesterday we arrived here, as a temporary
resting-place on our way to Wildbad, which, we hope, will put the
finishing-touch to J.'s recovery of his usual health.

I wish I had been able to let you know in time that you could have
remained a little longer at Witley, as I think we shall hardly be at
home before the 20th if we find Wildbad what we want. Your _Mutter_ is
marvellously well and strong. It seems more natural to her to have
anxiety than to be free from it. Let us hope that she will not run
down like a jelly-fish now that her anxiety is over.

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles L. Lewes, 13th July, 1880, from Wildbad.]

I received your welcome letter yesterday morning, and felt inclined to
answer it the next minute. J. is quite well again, but is inclined to
linger a little in the sweet air of the Schwarzwald, which comes to
one on gently stirred wings, laden with the scent of the pine
forests. We mean to drive from here to Baden, which is within easy
distance.

Yesterday we sallied forth for a walk over the mountain, to a place
where we could rest and lunch, returning in the afternoon. The sky was
brilliant. But in half an hour the clouds gathered and threatened a
storm. We were prudent enough to turn back, and by the time we were in
the hotel again the thunder was rolling and the rain pouring down.
This continued till about two o'clock, and then again the sky became
clear. I never saw so incalculable a state of weather as we have in
this valley. One quarter of an hour the blue sky is only flecked by
lightest cirrus clouds, the next it is almost hidden by dark rain
clouds. But we are going to start on our promised expedition this
morning, the sunshine flattering us that it is quite confirmed.

I think you had better address your next letter _Poste Restante_,
Strasburg, as I am uncertain how long we shall rest at Baden.

     Left Wildbad on the 17th July, and had a delightful drive
     through the Black Forest by Herrenalb to Baden, and thence by
     Strasburg, Metz, Luxemburg, and Brussels, arriving at Witley
     on Monday the 26th of July.

[Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 1st Aug. 1880.]

We arrived here in all safety last Monday, and if I had not had your
welcome little note this morning I think I should soon have written to
you without any such extra stimulus.

Mr. Cross had a sharp but brief attack at Venice, due to the
unsanitary influences of that wondrous city in the later weeks of
June. We stayed a little too long there, with a continuous sirocco
blowing, and bad smells under the windows of the hotel; and these
conditions found him a little below par from long protracted anxiety
before our marriage. But ever since we left Venice (on the 23d of
June) he has been getting strong again, and we have enjoyed a
leisurely journey through Germany in constant warmth and sunshine,
save for an occasional thunderstorm. The climate in this beloved
country of ours is a sad exchange, and makes one think of a second bad
harvest, with all its consequences. Still, it is a delight to be at
home and enjoy perfect stillness, after the noisiness of foreign bells
and foreign voices indoors and out. It would be very pretty to pay you
a visit next April, if we are all alive, and I think Mr. Cross would
like it very much. He sends you, hoping you will accept them, his best
remembrances, which have been kept up by our often talking about you.
I have been amazingly well through all the exertion of our travels,
and in the latter half of the time have done a great deal of walking.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Peter Taylor, 2d Aug. 1880.]

How sweet of you to write me a little welcome as soon as you knew that
I was at home again.

Yes, we are both well now, and _glad_ to be at home again, though the
change of climate is not of the exhilarating sort. One is so sorry for
all the holiday-makers, whose best enjoyment of these three days would
have been in the clear air and sunshine.

Do not reproach me for not telling you of my marriage beforehand. It
is difficult to speak of what surprises ourselves, and the decision
was sudden, though not the friendship which led to the decision.

My heart thoroughly responds to your remembrance of our long--our
thirty-years' relation to each other. Let me tell you this once what I
have said to others--that I value you as one of the purest-minded,
gentlest-hearted women I have ever known, and where such a feeling
exists, friendship can live without much aid from sight.

We shall probably not be in town again till the beginning of November.
Our address then will be 4 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, where we shall have
an outlook on the river and meadows beyond. Just now we have the
prospect of going on family visits to married sisters, which prevents
us from feeling quite settled.

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles L. Lewes, 12th Aug. 1880.]

I expected your letter, and expected, too, just the sort of letter I
have received, telling me everything delightfully. I can follow you
everywhere in your journeying except to Ober Wesel. I hope you will
have enjoyed St. Blasien and some of the walks there consecrated by
the beloved Pater's footsteps. We reversed your drive and went to
Freiburg, so that I can enter into your enjoyment of the Höllenthal. I
am glad that your weather has been temperate. Here we have now had
four sunny and really hot days, and this morning promises to be the
fifth. That is consolatory as to the harvest, and is very agreeable as
to our private life. The last two evenings we have walked in the
garden after eight o'clock--the first time by starlight, the second
under a vapory sky, with the red moon setting. The air was perfectly
still and warm, and I felt no need of extra clothing.

Our life has had no more important events than calls from neighbors
and our calls in return. To-morrow we pay our visit to the Druces at
Sevenoaks, where, you may remember, Mr. Druce has built a beautiful
house. At the beginning of September we are to visit Mr. and Mrs.
Otter at Ranby, and after that we shall go to Six-Mile Bottom for a
day or two. Then our wanderings will be over.

I went to the Priory the other day, and found a treatise on Blood
Pressure, by Dr. Roy, which he had sent me there, and which he has
published as the "George Henry Lewes Student." I imagine that he has
come to pursue his studies in England, as he intended to do. Delbeuf's
article on the last volume of the "Problems" (in the Belgian
_Athenæum_) is very nicely done. He has read the book.

I am pretty well, but find myself more languid than I was when abroad.
I think the cause is perhaps the moisture of the climate. There is
something languorous in this climate, or, rather, in its effects. J.
gets a little better every day, and so each day is more enjoyable.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones, 9th Sept. 1880.]

We have just come home after paying family visits in Lincolnshire and
Cambridgeshire, else I should have answered your letter earlier. The
former one reached me in Venice, when I was in great trouble on
account of Mr. Cross's illness. I had had reason to believe that my
letters, ordered to be posted on the 5th of May, had not been
delivered; so I asked Charles to inquire about the letter I wrote to
you--not because it demanded an answer, but because I wished you to
know that I had written.

I am so glad to know that you have been enjoying our brief English
summer. The good harvest makes the country everywhere cheerful, and we
have been in great, even districts where the fields, full of sheaves
or studded with ricks, stretch wide as a prairie. Now, we hope not to
leave this place again till November, when we intend to go to Chelsea
for the winter and earliest spring.

I almost envy you the opportunity of seeing Wombwell's Menagerie. I
suppose I got more delight out of that itinerant institution when I
was nine or ten years old than I have ever got out of the Zoological
Gardens. The smells and the sawdust mingled themselves with my
rapture. Everything was good.

It was very dear of you to write to me before you finished your
holiday. My love attends you all.

[Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 14th Sept. 1880.]

Your letter this morning is a welcome assurance about you. We have
been away in Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire, paying visits to the
Otters and the Halls. The weather, which is now broken, was glorious
through all our wandering, which we made very interesting by pausing
to see Ely, Peterborough, and Lincoln cathedrals. The Otters have a
very pretty, happy household. He is a country gentleman now, acting as
a magistrate, and glancing towards Parliament. But he keeps up his
reading, and is delightful to talk to. Emily looks very pretty in her
matronly position, with three little children. The Halls, too, are
very pleasant to behold in their home life. He has done wonders in
building nice cottages and schools, and sinking wells where they were
wanted, and founding a co-operative store--and, in general, doing
whatever opportunity allows towards slowly improving this confused
world. We saw (at Six-Mile Bottom) Mr. and Mrs. Sidgwick. Perhaps you
know that they have had, and have, the admirable public spirit to let
their house and arrange to live for a year in the new Newnham House,
in order to facilitate matters for the double institution.

We are very well. Mr. Cross gets stronger and brighter every day. We
often mention you, because you are associated with so many of my
memories.

Our only bugbear--it is a very little one--is the having to make
preliminary arrangements towards settling ourselves in the new house
(4 Cheyne Walk). It is a quaint house; and a Mr. Armitage of
Manchester, of whom you may have heard, has been superintending the
decoration and furnishing, but not to the exclusion of old things,
which we must carry and stow, especially wallings of books. I am
become so lazy that I shrink from all such practical work.

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles L. Lewes, 23d Sept. 1880.]

I have been and am suffering under an attack of a comparatively mild
sort, but I expect to be well in two or three days, and am just going
to drive to Godalming to meet my husband. Hence I write this
hurriedly. We should like to see you and Gertrude from Saturday to
Monday some week next month if it would be pleasant to you.

     This attack was a recurrence of the renal disorder of the
     previous year. On the 29th September we went for ten days to
     Brighton as the most accessible place for a bracing change.
     The first effects of the sea breezes were encouraging, but
     the improvement was not maintained. Shortly after our return
     to Witley Dr. Andrew Clark,[47] "the beloved physician," came
     down to consult with Mr. Parsons of Godalming--on 22d
     October. From that time there was gradual but slow
     improvement, and, during November, a decided recovery of
     strength. But an English autumn was not favorable to the
     invalid. Her sensibility to climatic influences was extreme.
     It will have been noticed in the preceding letters how
     constantly change of air and scene was required. I had never
     seen my wife out of England, previous to our marriage, except
     the first time at Rome, when she was suffering. My general
     impression, therefore, had been that her health was always
     very low, and that she was almost constantly ailing.
     Moreover, I had been with her very frequently during her
     long, severe illness at Witley in 1879. I was the more
     surprised, after our marriage, to find that from the day she
     set her foot on Continental soil till the day she returned to
     Witley she was never ill--never even unwell. She began at
     once to look many years younger. During the eleven years of
     our acquaintance I had never seen her so strong in health.
     The greater dryness and lightness of the atmosphere seemed to
     have a magical effect. At Paris we spent our mornings at the
     Louvre or the Luxembourg, looking at pictures or sculpture,
     or seeing other sights--always fatiguing work. In the
     afternoons we took long walks in the Bois, and very often
     went to the theatre in the evening. Reading and writing
     filled in all the interstices of time; yet there was no
     consciousness of fatigue. And we had the same experience at
     all the places we stayed at in Italy. On our way home she was
     able to take a great deal of walking exercise at Wildbad and
     Baden. Decrease of physical strength coincided exactly with
     the time of our return to the damper climate of England. The
     specific form of illness did not declare itself until two
     months later, but her health was never again the same as it
     had been on the Continent. Towards the middle of October she
     was obliged to keep her bed, but without restriction as to
     amount of reading and talking, which she was always able to
     enjoy, except in moments of acute pain.

     During her illness I read aloud, among other books, Comte's
     "Discours Préliminaire," translated by Dr. Bridges. This
     volume was one of her especial favorites, and she delighted
     in making me acquainted with it. For all Comte's writing she
     had a feeling of high admiration, intense interest, and very
     deep sympathy. I do not think I ever heard her speak of any
     writer with a more grateful sense of obligation for
     enlightenment. Her great debt to him was always thankfully
     acknowledged. But the appreciation was thoroughly selective,
     so far as I was able to judge. Parts of his teaching were
     accepted and other parts rejected. Her attitude towards him,
     as the founder of a new religion, may be gathered from the
     references and allusions in the foregoing correspondence, and
     from the fact that for many years, and up to the time of her
     death, she subscribed to the Comtist Fund, but never, so far
     as I am aware, more directly associated herself with the
     members of the Positivist Church. It was a limited adherence.

     We generally began our reading at Witley with some chapters
     of the Bible, which was a very precious and sacred book to
     her, not only from early associations, but also from the
     profound conviction of its importance in the development of
     the religious life of man. She particularly enjoyed reading
     aloud some of the finest chapters of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and
     St. Paul's Epistles. With a naturally rich, deep voice,
     rendered completely flexible by constant practice; with the
     keenest perception of the requirements of emphasis, and with
     the most subtile modulations of tone, her reading threw a
     glamour over indifferent writing, and gave to the greatest
     writing fresh meanings and beauty. The Bible and our elder
     English poets best suited the organ-like tones of her voice,
     which required, for their full effect, a certain solemnity
     and majesty of rhythm. Her reading of Milton was especially
     fine; and I shall never forget four great lines of the
     "Samson Agonistes" to which it did perfect justice--

          "But what more oft in nations grown corrupt,
          And by their vices brought to servitude,
          Than to love bondage more than liberty,
          Bondage with ease than strenuous liberty."

     The delighted conviction of justice in the thought--the sense
     of perfect accord between thought, language, and
     rhythm--stimulated the voice of the reader to find the
     exactly right tone. Such reading requires for its perfection
     a rare union of intellectual, moral, and physical qualities.
     It cannot be imitated. It is an art, like singing--a personal
     possession that dies with the possessor, and leaves nothing
     behind except a memory. Immediately before her illness we had
     read, together, the first part of "Faust." Reading the poem
     in the original with such an interpreter was the opening of a
     new world to me. Nothing in all literature moved her more
     than the pathetic situation and the whole character of
     Gretchen. It touched her more than anything in Shakespeare.
     During the time that we were reading the "Faust" we were also
     constantly reading, together, Shakespeare, Milton, and
     Wordsworth: some of Scott's novels and Lamb's essays too, in
     which she greatly delighted. For graver study we read through
     Professor Sayce's "Introduction to the Science of Language."
     Philology was a subject in which she was most deeply
     interested; and this was my first experience of what seemed
     to me a limitless persistency in application. I had noticed
     the persistency before, while looking at pictures, or while
     hearing her play difficult music; for it was characteristic
     of her nature that she took just as great pains to play her
     very best to a single unlearned listener as most performers
     would do to a room full of critical _cognoscenti_. Professor
     Sayce's book was the first which we had read together
     requiring very sustained attention ("The Divina Commedia" we
     had read in very short bits at a time), and it revealed to me
     more clearly the depth of George Eliot's mental
     concentration. Continuous thought did not fatigue her. She
     could keep her mind on the stretch hour after hour: the body
     might give way, but the brain remained unwearied.

     Her memory held securely her great stores of reading. Even of
     light books her recollections were always crisp, definite,
     and vivid. On our way home from Venice, after my illness, we
     were reading French novels of Cherbuliez, Alphonse Daudet,
     Gustave Droz, George Sand. Most of these books she had read
     years before, and I was astonished to find what clear-cut,
     accurate impressions had been retained, not only of all the
     principal characters, but also of all the subsidiary
     personages--even their names were generally remembered. But,
     on the other hand, her verbal memory was not always to be
     depended on. She never could trust herself to write a
     quotation without verifying it.

     In foreign languages George Eliot had an experience more
     unusual among women than among men. With a complete literary
     and scholarly knowledge of French, German, Italian, and
     Spanish, she _spoke_ all four languages with difficulty,
     though accurately and grammatically; but the mimetic power of
     catching intonation and accent was wanting. Greek and Latin
     she could read with thorough delight to herself; and Hebrew
     was a favorite study to the end of her life. In her younger
     days, especially at Geneva, inspired by Professor de la
     Rive's lectures, she had been greatly interested in
     mathematical studies. At one time she applied herself
     heartily and with keen enjoyment to geometry, and she thought
     that she might have attained to some excellence in that
     branch if she had been able to pursue it. In later days the
     map of the heavens lay constantly on her table at Witley, and
     she longed for deeper astronomical knowledge. She had a
     passion for the stars; and one of the things to which we
     looked forward on returning to London was a possible visit to
     Greenwich Observatory, as she had never looked through a
     great telescope of the first class. Her knowledge of
     wild-flowers gave a fresh interest each day to our walks in
     the Surrey lanes, as every hedgerow is full of wonders--to
     "those who know;" but she would, I think, have disclaimed for
     herself real botanical knowledge, except of an elementary
     sort.

     This wide and varied culture was accompanied with an
     unaffected distrust of her own knowledge, with the sense of
     how little she really knew, compared with what it was
     possible for her to have known, in the world. Her standard
     was always abnormally high--it was the standard of an expert;
     and she believed in the aphorism that to know any subject
     well we must know the details of it.

     During our short married life our time was so much divided
     between travelling and illness that George Eliot wrote very
     little, so that I have but slight personal experience of how
     the creative effort affected her. But she told me that, in
     all that she considered her best writing, there was a "not
     herself," which took possession of her, and that she felt her
     own personality to be merely the instrument through which
     this spirit, as it were, was acting. Particularly she dwelt
     on this in regard to the scene in "Middlemarch" between
     Dorothea and Rosamond, saying that, although she always knew
     they had, sooner or later, to come together, she kept the
     idea resolutely out of her mind until Dorothea was in
     Rosamond's drawing-room. Then, abandoning herself to the
     inspiration of the moment, she wrote the whole scene exactly
     as it stands, without alteration or erasure, in an intense
     state of excitement and agitation, feeling herself entirely
     possessed by the feelings of the two women. Of all the
     characters she had attempted she found Rosamond's the most
     difficult to sustain. With this sense of "possession" it is
     easy to imagine what the cost to the author must have been of
     writing books, each of which has its tragedy. We have seen
     the suffering alluded to in the letters on the "Mill on the
     Floss," "Felix Holt," and "Romola."

     For those who would know the length and the breadth of George
     Eliot's intellectual capacity she has written her books. Here
     I am only putting down some of my own personal impressions
     or recollections, which must be taken for what they are
     worth. In doing this I should like to dwell on the
     catholicity of her judgment. Singularly free from the spirit
     of detraction, either in respect of her contemporaries or her
     predecessors, she was always anxious to see the best and the
     most noble qualities of human beings or of books, in cases
     where she felt some general sympathy notwithstanding
     particular disagreements. And it was this wide sympathy, this
     understanding of so many points of view, that gained for her
     the passionate devotion not only of personal friends, but
     also of literary admirers, from the most widely sundered
     sections of society. Probably few people have ever received
     so many intimate confidences from confidants of such diverse
     habits of thought.

     This many-sidedness, however, makes it exceedingly difficult
     to ascertain, either from her books or from the closest
     personal intimacy, what her exact relation was to any
     existing religious creed or to any political party. Yet
     George Eliot's was emphatically a religious mind. My own
     impression is that her whole soul was so imbued with, and her
     imagination was so fired by, the scientific spirit of the
     age--by the constant rapid development of ideas in the
     Western world--that she could not conceive that there was, as
     yet, any religious formula sufficient nor any known political
     system likely to be final. She had great hope for the future,
     in the improvement of human nature by the gradual development
     of the affections and the sympathetic emotions, and "by the
     slow, stupendous teaching of the world's events," rather than
     by means of legislative enactments. Party measures and party
     men afforded her no great interest. Representative
     government, by numerical majorities, did not appeal to her as
     the last word of political wisdom. Generally speaking, she
     had little patience with talk about practical politics, which
     seemed to her under our present system to be too often very
     unpractically handled by ignorant amateurs. The amateur was
     always a "stone of stumbling, and a rock of offence." Her
     wrath used often to be roused, in late years, by the
     increased bitterness in the language of parties, and by the
     growing habit of attributing, for political effect, the most
     shameful motives to distinguished statesmen.

     She was keenly anxious to redress injustices to women, and to
     raise their general status in the community. This, she
     thought, could best be effected by women improving their
     work--ceasing to be amateurs. But it was one of the most
     distinctly marked traits in her character that she
     particularly disliked everything generally associated with
     the idea of a "masculine woman." She was, and as a woman she
     wished to be, above all things, feminine--"so delicate with
     her needle, and an admirable musician." She was proud, too,
     of being an excellent housekeeper--an excellence attained
     from knowing how things ought to be done, from her early
     training, and from an inborn habit of extreme orderliness.
     Nothing offended her more than the idea that because a woman
     had exceptional intellectual powers therefore it was right
     that she should absolve herself, or be absolved, from her
     ordinary household duties.

     It will have been seen from the letters that George Eliot was
     deeply interested in the higher education of women, and that
     she was among the earliest contributors to Girton College.
     After meeting Mr. and Mrs. Henry Sidgwick, in September,
     1880, when they had gone to reside at the new hall of Newnham
     College for a time, she was anxious to be associated in that
     work also, but she did not live to carry out the plan
     herself. The danger she was alive to in the system of
     collegiate education was the possible weakening of the bonds
     of family affection and family duties. In her view, the
     family life holds the roots of all that is best in our mortal
     lot; and she always felt that it is far too ruthlessly
     sacrificed in the case of English _men_ by their public
     school and university education, and that much more is such a
     result to be deprecated in the case of women. But, the
     absolute good being unattainable in our mixed condition of
     things, those women especially who are obliged to earn their
     own living must do their best with the opportunities at their
     command, as "they cannot live with posterity," when a more
     perfect system may prevail. Therefore, George Eliot wished
     God-speed to the women's colleges. It was often in her mind
     and on her lips that the only worthy end of all learning, of
     all science, of all life, in fact, is, that human beings
     should love one another better. Culture merely for culture's
     sake can never be anything but a sapless root, capable of
     producing at best a shrivelled branch.

     In her general attitude towards life George Eliot was neither
     optimist nor pessimist. She held to the middle term, which
     she invented for herself, of "meliorist." She was cheered by
     the hope and by the belief in gradual improvement of the
     mass; for in her view each individual must find the better
     part of happiness in helping another. She often thought it
     wisest not to raise too ambitious an ideal, especially for
     young people, but to impress on ordinary natures the immense
     possibilities of making a small home circle brighter and
     better. Few are born to do the great work of the world, but
     all are born to this. And to the natures capable of the
     larger effort the field of usefulness will constantly widen.

     In her personal bearing George Eliot was seldom moved by the
     hurry which mars all dignity in action. Her commanding brows
     and deep, penetrating eyes were seconded by the sweet,
     restrained, impressive speech, which claimed something like
     an awed attention from strangers. But to those very near to
     her there was another side of her nature, scarcely suspected
     by outside friends and acquaintances. No one could be more
     capable of enjoying and of communicating genuine, loving,
     hearty, uncontrollable laughter. It was a deep-seated wish,
     expressed in the poem of "Agatha"--"I would have young things
     merry." And I remember, many years ago, at the time of our
     first acquaintance, how deeply it pained her when, in reply
     to a direct question, I was obliged to admit that, with all
     my admiration for her books, I found them, on the whole,
     profoundly sad. But sadness was certainly not the note of her
     intimate converse. For she had the distinctively feminine
     qualities which lend a rhythm to the movement of life. The
     quick sympathy that understands without words; the capacity
     for creating a complete atmosphere of loving interest; the
     detachment from outside influences; the delight in
     everything worthy--even the smallest thing--for its own sake;
     the readiness to receive as well as to give impressions; the
     disciplined mental habit which can hold in check and conquer
     the natural egoism of a massive, powerful personality; the
     versatility of mind; the varied accomplishments--these are
     characteristics to be found more highly developed among
     gifted women than among gifted men. Add to these the crowning
     gift of genius, and, in such companionship, we may possess
     the world without belonging to it.

     The November days had come now--cold and clear. My wife was
     able again to enjoy the daily drives and walks on which she
     was very dependent for health. The letters continue.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 3d Nov. 1880.]

Since I wrote to you I have been much more ill, and have only, during
the last few days, begun to feel myself recovering strength. But I
have been cared for with something much better than angelic
tenderness. The fine, clear air, if it lasts, will induce us to linger
in the country; and, indeed, I am not yet quite fit to move; for,
though I appear to be quite cured of my main ailment, half my bodily
self has vanished. We are having deliciously clear days here, and I
get out for short drives and walks. I really have nothing to complain
of now except a little lack of strength. I play on the piano again,
and walk with perfect ease. There is a long chapter about myself!

[Sidenote: Letter to Madame Bodichon, 7th Nov. 1880.]

Three weeks ago I had a rather troublesome attack, but I am getting
well now, though still reduced and comparatively weak. We shall
probably linger here till near the end of the month, for the autumnal
landscape is very beautiful, and I am not yet quite fit for the
exertion of moving. It is a comfort to think that you can be very
snug through the winter in your nice house. What a pity we are not
within an easy driving distance from you!

Mr. Hall is here to-day. He gave a lecture on Leclaire, the
house-painter in Paris who initiated an excellent plan of co-operative
sharing for his workmen. It has been printed, and when I have another
copy I will send it you. Leclaire is mentioned by John S. Mill in the
notes to his "Political Economy," but had not been otherwise taken
much notice of. Still, you may know all about him.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Burne-Jones, 18th Nov. 1880.]

Thanks for your loving remembrance of me. We have been kept in the
country by two sufficient causes: I have been ill, and the house at
Cheyne Walk has not been ready to receive us. I suppose we shall not
be there till the end of the month instead of the beginning. One of
the good things I look forward to is the sight of your dear face
again. You will see little more than half of me, for nearly half has
been consumed. But I have been nursed with supreme tenderness, and am
daily gaining some strength. Much love to both.

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles L. Lewes, 23d Nov. 1880.]

We are lingering here for three reasons: the beauty of the weather,
the unreadiness of the house, and my unfitness to bear the hurry of
moving. I am getting better, but have not yet been able to bear much
exertion.

Thanks for your pretty letter. I do not think I shall have many
returns of Novembers, but there is every prospect that such as remain
to me will be as happy as they can be made by the devoted tenderness
which watches over me. Your years will probably be many, and it is
cheering to me to think that you have many springs of happiness in
your lot that are likely to grow fuller with advancing time.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Bray, 28th Nov. 1880.]

I have thought of you all the more because I have not even heard
anything of you for several months. You will wonder less why I have
not written, as a consequence of those thoughts, when I tell you that
I have been ill, and not allowed to do anything but indulge myself and
receive indulgence. I am very well now, and am every day consciously
gathering strength, so that, if I could like giving trouble, I should
look back on my illness as a great opportunity of enjoying the
tenderest watching and nursing. I kept my bed only about a week, and
have always been equal, except at short intervals, to much reading and
talking, so that there is no fair cause for any grumbling on my part.
It has not been so bad an illness as that of last summer. You see we
are not yet at Cheyne Walk, but we are to be settled there by the end
of next week. I have had no trouble, but have remained here on my
cushions while Mr. Cross has gone early for several mornings running
to superintend the removal. It is difficult to give you materials for
imagining my "world." Think of me as surrounded and cherished by
family love; by brothers and sisters whose characters are admirable to
me, and who have for years been my friends. But there is no excessive
visiting among us, and the life of my own hearth is chiefly that of
dual companionship. If it is any good for me that my life has been
prolonged till now, I believe it is owing to this miraculous affection
which has chosen to watch over me.

[Sidenote: Journal, 1880.]

_Dec. 3._--Came to 4 Cheyne Walk.

_Dec. 4._--Went to Popular Concert at St. James's Hall. Heard Madame
Neruda, Piatti, and Miss Zimmermann.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Congreve, 6th Dec. 1880.]

Only on Friday evening did we get into this new house, and I had
deferred writing to you till I could say "Come and see me." I can say
so now, but on reflection I have come to the conclusion that you would
like yourself to fix a time beforehand, the journey here being rather
long. Perhaps you will like to choose a day on which you could go to
Emily also, her house being less formidably distant--across the park
and down Sloane Street would be an easy way to us. This week we shall
be much engaged in household matters, such as the reduction to order
of the chaos which still reigns in certain places least obvious to
visitors, and the procuring of small objects, either necessary or
desirable. But after this week I shall be most glad if you and Dr.
Congreve will come to see us just _as_ and _when_ you would find the
least inconvenience in doing so--either at lunch-time (half-past one)
or at a later hour.

I find myself in a new climate here--the London air and this
particular house being so warm compared with Witley. I hope that you
too find the air mild, for I know that suits you best.

     Dr. and Mrs. Congreve paid their promised visit the week
     after this letter was written; and Madame Belloc lunched with
     us the following day. Order was beginning to reign in the new
     house. The books had all been arranged as nearly as possible
     in the same order that they had occupied at the Priory, Mr.
     Radermacher of the Pantechnicon having given his personal
     attention to this arrangement of some thousands of volumes,
     for which George Eliot was particularly grateful.
     Notwithstanding all this care, however, there were many
     unforeseen details of furnishing still to be completed, which
     caused a considerable expenditure of time. We continued
     reading aloud Max Müller's "Lectures on the Science of
     Language," and Duffield's translation of "Don Quixote;" we
     were also reading "Hermann and Dorothea," Tennyson's last
     volume of poems, just published, and Mr. Frederic Myers's
     volume on Wordsworth. In the evenings we had always a little
     feast of music, and were becoming in every way reconciled to
     town life, notwithstanding the loss of country quiet, light,
     and beauty. On the afternoon of Friday, the 17th December, we
     went to see the "Agamemnon" performed in Greek by Oxford
     undergraduates. The representation was a great enjoyment--an
     exciting stimulus--and my wife proposed that during the
     winter we should read together some of the great Greek
     dramas. The following afternoon we went to the Saturday
     Popular Concert at St. James's Hall. It was a cold day. The
     air in the hall was overheated, and George Eliot allowed a
     fur cloak which she wore to slip from her shoulders. I was
     conscious of a draught, and was afraid of it for her, as she
     was very sensitive to cold. I begged her to resume the cloak,
     but, smiling, she whispered that the room was really too hot.
     In the evening she played through several of the pieces that
     we had heard at the concert, with all her accustomed
     enjoyment of the piano, and with a touch as true and as
     delicate as ever. On Sunday there was very slight trouble in
     the throat, but not sufficient to prevent her from coming
     down-stairs to breakfast as usual. In the afternoon she was
     well enough to receive visits from Mr. Herbert Spencer and
     one or two other friends. Afterwards she began the following
     letter to Mrs. Strachey. It was left unfinished in her
     writing-case, and is printed as it stands.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Strachey, 19th Dec. 1880.]

I have been thinking so much of Lady Colvile, and yet I shrank from
troubling even your more indirect sympathetic sorrow with a letter. I
am wondering how far her health is in a state to endure this loss--a
loss which extends even to me, who only occasionally saw, but was
always cheered by, the expression of a wise and sweet nature, which
clearly shone in Sir James Colvile's manner and conversation. One
great comfort I believe she has--that of a sister's affection.

     Here the letter is broken off. The pen which had delighted
     and comforted so many minds and hearts here made its last
     mark. The spring, which had broadened out into so wide a
     river of speech, ceased to flow.

     Little more remains to be told. On Monday the doctor treated
     the case as one of laryngeal sore throat; and when Dr. Andrew
     Clark came for consultation on Wednesday evening the
     pericardium was found to be seriously affected. While the
     doctors were at her bedside she had just time to whisper to
     me, "Tell them I have great pain in the left side," before
     she became unconscious. Her long illness in the autumn had
     left her no power to rally. She passed away, about ten
     o'clock at night, on the 22d December, 1880.

     She died, as she would herself have chosen to die, without
     protracted pain, and with every faculty brightly vigorous.

     Her body rests in Highgate Cemetery, in the grave next to Mr.
     Lewes. In sleet and snow, on a bitter day--the 29th
     December--very many whom she knew, very many whom she did not
     know, pressed to her grave-side with tributes of tears and
     flowers.

     Her spirit joined that choir invisible "whose music is the
     gladness of the world."

FOOTNOTES:

[35] Madame Belloc.

[36] Mrs. Charles Lewes.

[37] "The Ethics of George Eliot's Works," by J. C. Brown. Blackwood:
1879.

[38] Article on G. H. Lewes.--_New Quarterly Review_, Oct. 1879.

[39] "George Henry Lewes Studentship."--This studentship has been
founded in memory of Mr. George Henry Lewes, for the purpose of
enabling the holder for the time being to devote himself wholly to the
prosecution of original research in physiology. The studentship, the
value of which is slightly under £200 per annum, paid quarterly in
advance, is tenable for three years, during which time the student is
required to carry on, under the guidance of a director, physiological
investigations, to the complete exclusion of all other professional
occupations. No person will be elected as a "George Henry Lewes
Student" who does not satisfy the trustees and director, first, as to
the promise of success in physiological inquiry; and, second, as to
the need of pecuniary assistance. Otherwise all persons of both sexes
are eligible. Applications, together with such information concerning
ability and circumstances as the candidate may think proper, should be
sent to the present director, Dr. Michael Foster, New Museums,
Cambridge, not later than October 15, 1879. The appointment will be
made and duly advertised as soon as possible after that date.

[40] Mr. John Blackwood died on 29th October, 1879.

[41] Madame Belloc.

[42] Mrs. Hall.

[43] Mrs. Isaac Evans (since deceased).

[44] Rev. Frederick Evans, Rector of Bedworth.

[45] Madame Belloc.

[46] Mr. Geddes's death.

[47] Now Sir Andrew Clark.




INDEX.


     "Abode of Snow," by Andrew Wilson, iii. 190.

     A breezy common, iii. 108.

     "Adam Bede," progress of, i. 338;
       second volume finished in Dresden, ii. 42;
       £800 offered for copyright for four years, 47;
       its history, 48-52;
       author's love of, 51;
       subscription to, 59;
       cheap edition suggested by working man, 66;
       sale increasing, 67, 68;
       quoted in House of Commons, 69;
       French translation proposed, 73;
       additional £400 from publishers, 80;
       fourth edition (5000) sold in a fortnight, 88;
       sixth edition, 96;
       seventh edition (2000), 101;
       Blackwoods propose to pay £800 above agreed price, 101;
       16,000 copies sold in one year, 105;
       copyright conceded, 111;
       third volume written in six weeks, 113.

     "Adam Bede, Junior," a sequel, advertised, ii. 104.

     "Address to the Working Men," by Felix Holt, iii. 18.

     Adler, Dr. Hermann, appreciation of Jewish character in "Deronda,"
           iii. 207;
       lecture on "Deronda" by, 215.

     Æsthetic teaching the highest of all teaching, ii. 318.

     Æsthetic, the, not a doctrinal teacher, iii. 237.

     Afghanistan, effect of the sad news from, iii. 278.

     "Agatha" sold to Fields & Osgood for _Atlantic Monthly_, iii. 63.

     Aix to Vevey, journey to, iii. 205.

     Allbut, Dr. Clifford, Leeds, iii. 41, 42.

     Allingham, William, letter to, on Midland dialect, iii. 218;
       on his poems, 226.

     Altruism, the need of, iii. 178, 179.

     Amalfi, grand drive, ii. 153.

     America, interest in, i. 219;
       the war in, anxiety regarding, ii. 242;
       delight in descriptions of, iii. 115;
       invited to visit, 118.

     Amsterdam, Jewish synagogues in, ii. 317.

     "An Inquiry concerning the Origin of Christianity," by Charles
           Hennell, influence of, on George Eliot, i. 68;
       read again with admiration, 119.

     Anders, Mr., apologizes for the Liggins business, ii. 78.

     Antwerp, pictures at, i. 239, 240.

     Apennines, across the, ii. 168.

     Application, persistence in, iii. 304.

     Appreciation of Dickens's letter, ii. 6.

     Ardennes, journey to the, iii. 176.

     "Aristotle," by G. H. Lewes, ii. 271.

     "Armgart," a dramatic poem, iii. 85.

     Art, the function of, iii. 144;
       purpose in, 144.

     Articles written by Mr. Lewes, iii. 260, 261;
       by military men, 265.

     Ashantee War, the, iii. 157.

     Asher's cheap editions of "George Eliot," iii. 124.

     Atkinson, Mr., i. 193.

     Australia, proposed visit to, i. 221.

     Authors and booksellers, meeting of, i. 201.

     Authorship acknowledged to the Brays and Miss Hennell, ii. 83.

     Autobiography, repugnance to, iii. 221.

     Autumn, love for, i. 67; ii. 263, 264.

     "A Word for the Germans," ii. 288.

     Aytoun, Professor, admiration of "Gilfil's Love-Story," i. 326;
       on "Adam Bede," ii. 81.


     Bâle, a morning in, ii. 87.

     Ballot, dislike of the, iii. 49;
       the first experiment of the, 161.

     Balzac, a saying of, iii, 41.

     Bancroft, American Minister, Berlin, on "Middlemarch," iii. 157.

     Bank of England visited, iii. 176.

     "Beata," by T. A. Trollope, ii. 239.

     Bedworth, country about, i. 5-7.

     Beesley, Professor Edmund Spencer, iii. 64.

     Bellagio and the Splügen Pass, ii. 181.

     Benisch, Dr., editor of _Jewish Chronicle_, iii. 216.

     Berlin, popularity of "Middlemarch" in, iii. 157.

     Berlin, visit to the _Charité_, iii. 77;
       society and music at, 77;
       increase in luxury in, 78.

     Berlin recollections: meets Varnhagen, i. 251, 252;
       impressions of the city, 251;
       new acquaintances, 253;
       portrait of Kleist, 253;
       Fräulein Solmar's _salon_, 253;
       General Pfuhl, 254;
       Baron Sternberg, 254;
       "Lisez les Chroniques," 254;
       Professor Gruppe, 255, 263;
       Waagen on Goethe, 256;
       Edward Magnus, 257;
       celebrities, 258;
       Professor Stahr, 258, 263;
       Schiller's portrait, 258;
       Rauch the sculptor, 258;
       his atelier, 259, 260;
       Dessoir the actor, 260;
       "Nathan der Weise," 261;
       Johanna Wagner, 261;
       Gluck's "Orpheus," 261;
       Roger and Arabella Goddard, 264;
       Vivier anecdotes, 264, 265;
       works of art, 265;
       evenings in, 266;
       _table d'hôte_, reading between the courses, 266;
       work at and books read, 268;
       translating Spinoza's "Ethics," 268;
       remarks on books read, 270;
       return to England, 271.

     Bethnal Green, pictures at, iii. 128.

     Biarritz, its natural beauties, iii. 2;
       the Chambre de l'Amour, 2;
       journey to Barcelona from, 4.

     Bible and the Liturgy of the English Church, ii. 226.

     Bible reading, iii. 302.

     Bickley, country-house at, iii. 152.

     Birthday greetings, iii. 47.

     Bishop Steignton, visit to, i. 185.

     Blackie, Professor, Edinburgh, letter of sympathy from, ii. 111, 113.

     _Blackwood's Magazine_ on "Adam Bede," ii. 70.

     Blackwood, John, his favorable opinion of "Amos Barton," i. 302;
       accepts it for "Maga," 304;
       receives kind letter from author, 307;
       cautions regarding "huddling up stories," 319;
       not enthusiastic about "Janet's Repentance," 326;
       calls on Lewes, and George Eliot reveals herself, ii. 10;
       letter from George Eliot on artistic combination, 31;
       offers £800 for copyright of "Adam Bede" for four years, 47;
       letter to, regarding Liggins, 73;
       his liberal treatment of George Eliot, 102;
       proposals for "Mill on the Floss," 110;
       concedes copyright of "Adam Bede," 111;
       suggests title of "Mill on the Floss," 112;
       letter from author on finishing "Mill on the Floss," 114;
       letter to, from George Eliot at Berne, 182, 183;
       do. from Florence, 218;
       offers £5000 for "Felix Holt," 308;
       letters to, about "Spanish Gypsy," iii. 16, 26;
       about Scott Commemoration, 97;
       "Middlemarch," 103;
       his favorable impressions of "Middlemarch," 106;
       letter to, from Homburg, 123;
       New Year's greetings from George Eliot, 138;
       letter on "Middlemarch," 153;
       on another book simmering in her head, 157;
       on corrected edition of "Spanish Gypsy," 161, 162;
       letter to, with volume of poems, 164;
       on printing of "Deronda," 190, 191, 197;
       on re-reading "Romola," 217, 218;
       offers for second ten-years' copyright, 230;
       letter to, declining invitation to Strathtyrum, 237;
       on her continued ill-health, 244;
       his death, 276.

     Blackwood, Major, his opinion of "Amos Barton," i. 306;
       hopeful about the "Scenes," 342;
       calls on Lewes, and suspects identity of George Eliot, 342;
       letter regarding the Liggins affair, ii. 81;
       letter from author on "Mill on the Floss," 167.

     Blackwood, William, his favorable news of "Clerical Life," ii. 116;
       letter to, on Mr. Lewes's illness, iii. 239;
       on "Theophrastus Such," 254, 263, 271.

     Blanc, Louis, anecdote of, i. 195.

     Bodichon, Madame, discovers author of "Adam Bede," ii. 77;
       letters to: on artistic combinations, 93;
       on Mrs. Gaskell's letter, 107;
       the rewards of the artist, 107;
       on settling in London, 198;
       on religious forms and ceremonies, 205;
       on the necessity of sympathy, 268;
       on her Spanish tour, iii. 4;
       on cheerfulness, 172;
       on "Deronda," 198;
       on woman's work, 208;
       on her illness, 225;
       on improvement in health, 252;
       letter regarding "Lewes Studentship," 267;
       letter announcing her marriage, 283;
       on sympathy with marriage, 289.

     Bohn, Madame, visit from, ii. 293.

     Bologna, its pictures and churches, ii. 169;
       the leaning towers, 170.

     Bonham-Carter, Miss, letter to, from Madame Bodichon, iii. 264.

     Bonheur, Rosa, her pictures, i. 333.

     Books belong to successive mental phases, ii. 211.

     Books read at Malvern, 1861, ii. 228-230, 234-236.

     Books read, with remarks on, i. 268-271, 322, 341, 344; ii. 58, 299;
           iii. 25, 41, 68, 71, 72.

     Booksellers and authors, meeting of, i. 201.

     Bookstalls, literary taste at, iii. 51.

     Brabant, Miss, i. 85.

     Bracebridge, Mr., and Liggins, ii. 99.

     Bray, Charles, his work, "The Philosophy of Necessity," i. 67;
       influence of his opinions, 68;
       words of affection in time of depression, 135;
       letter to, on rumors of authorship, ii. 13.

     Bray, Mrs., letters to: on favorite books, i. 86;
       reading and music, 87;
       poetry of Christianity, 93;
       chameleon-like nature, 158;
       orthodox friends, 162;
       anxiety for letters, 164;
       need of encouragement, 165;
       life in Geneva, 169, 170;
       Christmas wishes, 174;
       severe winter, 175;
       yearning for friends at home, 175;
       a singular advertisement, 195;
       _Westminster_ reviewers, 199;
       love for music, 202;
       feels well and "plucky," 207;
       in Edinburgh again, 211;
       pleasant travelling, 213;
       a Saturday's work, 214;
       work in the Strand, 215;
       domestic grievances, 229;
       view of union with Mr. Lewes, 235;
       on careless cooking, 316;
       on the charms of Richmond Park, 326;
       unbelief in others' love, 337;
       authorship acknowledged to, ii. 83;
       recollections of journey of 1849, 191;
       asking for music, 241;
       on her "Physiology for Schools," 267;
       on writing poetry instead of novels, iii. 31;
       on happiness in recovery, 313.

     Bremer, Frederica, i. 188, 190.

     Brewing interest in Parliament, the, iii. 188, 189.

     Brewster, Sir David, i. 190.

     Bridges, Dr., Leeds, iii. 42.

     Bright on Ireland, iii. 56.

     Brittany, trip to, ii. 296.

     Broadstairs, delight with, i. 205.

     Brodie, Sir Benjamin, iii. 80.

     Brontë, Charlotte, life of, i. 317.

     Brooks, Shirley, delighted with "Adam Bede," ii. 70.

     "Brother Jacob" written, ii. 199.

     "Brother and Sister," sonnets, iii. 70.

     Brougham, Lord, a delicious _non sequitur_, i. 214.

     Brown, Dr. John, sends "Rab and his Friends" to author of "Adam
           Bede," ii. 60;
       kindly letter in reply, 60.

     Brown, J. C., "Ethics of George Eliot's Works," iii. 266.

     Browne, Dr., chemist, Edinburgh, i. 195.

     Browning, first visit from, ii. 249;
       "Elisha," iii. 56.

     Browning, Mrs., her "Casa Guidi Windows", ii. 243.

     Buchanan, Robert, his "David Grey," ii. 273.

     Buckle, personal dislike to, ii. 47.

     Buckle's "History of Civilization," i. 341, 345.

     Buckle's ideal not George Eliot's, ii. 220.

     Bulstrode, new view of, iii. 133.

     Bunyan, reading again with pleasure, ii. 105.

     Burne-Jones, Edward, letter to, on the function of art, iii. 144.

     Burne-Jones, Mrs., iii. 29;
       letter to, on the serious view of life, 172;
       on her illness, 185;
       on Christmas plans, 232;
       on her sense of depression, 239.

     Burton, Mr., wishes to take portrait, ii. 273;
       his picture of a knight in armor, 277.

     Burton, Sir Frederick, Director of the National Gallery, ii. 240.

     Byron, a vulgar-minded genius, iii. 72.


     Call, Mr., author of "Reverberations and other Poems," i. 335.

     Calvinism, a libel on, iii. 88.

     Camaldoli, expedition to, ii. 221.

     Cambridge, a visit to, iii. 147;
       a group of "Trinity" men, 147.

     Cambridgeshire, visit to, iii. 299.

     Caricature, a bastard kind of satire, iii. 228.

     _Caritas_, the highest love, ii. 252.

     Carlyle, Mrs., pleasant letter from, ii. 7;
       her conception of George Eliot, 8.

     Carlyle, on the Glasgow artisan, i. 55;
       eulogium on Emerson, 140;
       "Life of Sterling," 189;
       anecdotes of, 190, 257;
       his denunciation of the opera, 192;
       letter to George Eliot on "Frederic," 343;
       G. A. anxious he should read her novels, ii. 63.

     "Carlyle's Memoirs," ii. 208.

     Catholicity of judgment, iii. 307.

     Cavour, Count, ii. 122, 143.

     Cerebellum, function of the, i. 210.

     Chapman, Mrs., on Harriet Martineau, iii. 220.

     Charade party, failure of, ii. 287.

     Charity of the Apostle Paul, the, ii. 251.

     Chart of Ecclesiastical History, i. 45.

     Cheap books, opinion of, iii. 154.

     Cheap edition of "Adam Bede" suggested by working man, ii. 66.

     Cheap editions of novels, arrangements for, iii. 10.

     Cheap music in England, ii. 81.

     Cheerful, now uniformly, iii. 172.

     Chiem See, journey by, ii. 34.

     Childhood's real feelings, i. 91.

     Child's idea of God, a, i. 153, 154.

     Chills, spiritual and physical, iii. 120.

     Chioggia, journey to, ii. 177.

     "Christianity and Infidelity," Baillie Prize Essay, i. 311.

     Chronological order in writing, ii. 211.

     Church-going resumed, i. 82.

     Clark, Sir James, pleasant evening with, i. 222;
       meeting with, 226, 230.

     Clark, W. G., late public orator at Cambridge, ii. 240;
       visit to, at Cambridge, iii. 24;
       resigns his oratorship, 74.

     "Clerical Tutor," discouraged to proceed with, i. 336.

     Club criticism of "Amos Barton," i. 308.

     Coaching days, i. 7.

     Cobbe, Miss, her introduction to Theodore Parker, ii. 253.

     Cobden, disappointed with, i. 196.

     Cologne, journey to, i. 267.

     Colossians, Epistle to the, i. 51.

     Combe, George, friendship with, i. 186;
       on the _Westminster_, 204;
       visit to, in Edinburgh, 211.

     Comprehensive Church, one, iii. 175.

     Comte and his critics, ii. 224;
       admiration of, 224;
       delight in his "Politique," iii. 2.

     Comte's "Discours Préliminaire," ii. 264.

     Comte's works, reading, iii. 302.

     Conceptions of new work, iii. 233.

     Confidence, desire for, i. 128.

     Conformity, letter to J. W. Cross on, iii. 155.

     Congreve, Mrs., letters to, ii. 82, 84, 141;
       visits George Eliot in London, 232;
       letter to, on Thornton Lewes's illness, iii. 63;
       leaves for India, 132;
       returns to Europe, 145;
       letter to, after marriage with Mr. Cross, 292;
       invited to Cheyne Walk, 314.

     Congreve, Richard, ii. 62, 67, 73;
       friendship of Mr. and Mrs., 76, 80;
       Christmas Day with, 110;
       his lectures on Positivism, iii. 12;
       his article Huxley on Comte, 58.

     Conolly, Dr., i. 233.

     Conscience in work, iii. 27.

     Conservative reaction, on the, iii. 143.

     Contemporary fiction, iii. 183.

     Continent, start for, visiting Fontainebleau, Plombières, iii. 149;
       three months' trip to the, 205.

     Continental tour, six weeks' journey to Baden, etc., iii. 37;
       St. Märgen, 37;
       peasant proprietors in the Black Forest, 38.

     Continental trip with the Brays, i. 150.

     Coquelin's acting, iii. 263.

     Correggio's Madonnas, ii. 43.

     Correspondence, views on, i. 134.

     Country, delight in the, iii. 154.

     Country districts, remoteness of, i. 5.

     Country-house, visions of a, ii. 61.

     Country life, monotony of, i. 25;
       enjoyment of, ii. 275.

     Country quiet, the benefits of, iii. 110.

     Critical attitude, the, iii. 79.

     Criticism, sensibility to, ii. 63.

     Critics, indifference to opinions of, iii. 224.

     Cross, J. W., first meeting at Rome with George Eliot, iii. 59;
       meet again at Weybridge, 71;
       letter to, on buying a house, 131;
       on conformity, 155;
       on depression, 187;
       on effect of her writing, 204;
       on Tennyson, 229;
       letters to, after Lewes's death, 250-252;
       his engagement, 279;
       his marriage, 282;
       illness in Venice, 294.

     Cross, Miss Eleanor, letter to, iii. 276;
       on her engagement to Mr. Cross, 279;
       on her marriage tour, 283.

     Cross, Miss Elizabeth D., "An Old Story and other Poems," iii. 15.

     Cross, Miss Florence, letter to from Milan on the enjoyment of
           travel, iii. 286.

     Cross, Miss Mary, her "Marie of Villefranche," iii. 100;
       letter to, on gift of a vase, 166.

     Cross, Mrs., letters to, accepting invitation to Six-Mile Bottom,
           iii. 121;
       letter to, from Homburg, 122;
       on return home, 125;
       on journey abroad, and country-house at Bickley, 152;
       on the pleasures of the country, 154;
       on Christmas invitation, 158;
       on silence of the country, 167.

     Crown Prince and Princess of Prussia, dinner with, iii. 236;
       their simple manner, 236;
       guests at table, 236.

     Cruikshank, George, i. 202.

     Cumming, article on, in the _Westminster_, i. 277.


     D'Albert, M. and Mme. _See_ Durade.

     Dallas, Mr., an admirer of "Adam Bede," ii. 64.

     Daniel, the prophecies of, i. 122.

     "Daniel Deronda," writing, iii. 180;
       fear for MS. being burned, 190;
       anticipations of, 193, 194;
       public interest in, 199, 214;
       finished, 204;
       Jewish element in, 211.

     Darwin's "Origin of Species," ii. 104, 105, 108.

     Dawson, Mr. George, lecturer, i. 129; ii. 233; iii. 165.

     Dean Ramsay, letter from, with his "Reminiscences of Scottish
           Life," ii. 320.

     Death, imagining the nearness of, iii. 170.

     "Debasing the Moral Currency," iii. 266.

     Delight in the country, iii. 154;
       in old friends, 245.

     Depression from damp, iii. 187.

     Derbyshire, memories of, iii. 47.

     Deutsch, his article on the Talmud, iii. 18.

     "Deutscher Novellenschatz," iii. 96.

     "Development of Industries," effect of, ii. 281.

     Development of religion, iii. 62.

     Dialect in "Adam Bede," ii. 72; iii. 219.

     Dickens, Charles, meeting with, i. 201;
       letter from, ii. 2;
       recognizes woman's hand in "Clerical Life," 3;
       dines at Wandsworth, 102;
       asks for a story for "All the Year Round," 104;
       his death, iii. 82;
       his "Life" by Forster, 104.

     Dinah Morris, the character of, ii. 49.

     Dinner at Greenwich, with Blackwood, Colonel Stewart, Colonel
           Hamley, and Mr. Skene, ii. 222.

     Discontent of the young, iii. 213.

     Discouraged with her writings, ii. 86.

     D'Israeli's "Tancred," i. 118, 123;
       his theory of races, 124;
       funeral oration on the Duke of Wellington, 215.

     Distrust of her own knowledge, iii. 305.

     "Divina Commedia," reading the, with Mr. Cross, iii. 259.

     Dorking, fourth visit to, ii. 254.

     Doyle, Mr., iii. 74.

     Drama, trying a, ii. 280.

     Drawbacks to living abroad, iii. 203.

     Drawings from "Romola," iii. 166.

     Dresden: end of vol. ii. of "Adam Bede" written, ii. 42;
       Holbein's "Madonna," 42;
       the "Sistine Madonna," 43;
       the Correggios, 43;
       Murillo's "St. Rodriguez," 43;
       Dutch and Flemish pictures, 44;
       Veronese, 44;
       the theatres and concerts, 45.

     Druce, Mr., visit to, at Sevenoaks, iii. 297.

     Dulwich Picture-gallery, ii. 79.

     Durade, M. d'Albert, i. 164;
       residence with, 165;
       their household, 166;
       affection to, 173;
       paints her portrait, 178;
       visits England, 181;
       wished to translate the "Scenes," ii. 109;
       two days with, 186;
       translates the "Scenes," 187.

     Dürer, Albert, his paintings, ii. 24.

     Dutch translation of George Eliot's novels, iii. 139.

     Dutch and Flemish pictures in Dresden, ii. 44.

     Dwelling on faults, abstention from, iii. 89.

     Dying in harness, on, iii. 141.

     Dyspeptic troubles and their cure, ii. 288.


     Early death, thoughts on, ii. 290.

     Edinburgh criticisms more favorable than London, ii. 64.

     Edinburgh, enjoyment of, i. 211;
       visit to Craigcrook, 212.

     Editor's life, i. 215, 221.

     Education of Women, iii. 27;
       the higher, 146.

     Effect of talking of her own books, ii. 85.

     Effect of writing, the, iii. 306.

     Egotism, cure for, i. 128.

     "Elijah," delight in hearing, i. 112, 118.

     Ellis, Mr. and Mrs., i. 191.

     Emerson, first meeting with, i. 139;
       Carlyle's eulogium on, 140;
       his "Man the Reformer," ii. 196.

     Empire in France, the, iii. 168.

     Englefield Green, delightful week at, ii. 244.

     English, attitude of the, towards Orientals, iii. 212;
       ignorance of the Jews, 212.

     English domestic life _versus_ German, i. 271.

     English and French working classes, difference between, i. 131.

     "Englishwoman's Journal" on the Infant Seamstresses, ii. 97.

     Enjoying the thought of work, ii. 219.

     Enriched with new ideas after journey to Italy, ii. 182.

     "Ethics of George Eliot's Works," by J. C. Brown, iii. 266.

     Evans, Christiana (sister), married to Mr. Edward Clark, surgeon,
           i. 22;
       relations between the sisters, 22, 23;
       her husband's death, 216;
       plans for her family, 217;
       letter to her brother Isaac regarding, 318;
       visit to her sister, ii. 96.

     Evans, Isaac (brother), recollections of his sister, i. 11;
       her susceptibility to terror, 12;
       their happy childhood, 12;
       his marriage, 61;
       renewed correspondence with his sister on her marriage with Mr.
           Cross, iii. 287;
       notice of his family, 287.

     Evans, J. C., offers £1000 for a story for American periodical,
           ii. 94.

     Evans, Mrs. Samuel (aunt), the Dinah Morris of "Adam Bede," i. 33.

     Evans, Robert (father), his career, i. 1, 2;
       removed to Griff, 2;
       influence of his ideas on his daughter, 4;
       his position, 8;
       his wife, partly represented in Mrs. Poyser, 10;
       her death, 22;
       removal to Foleshill Road, Coventry, 61;
       strong disapproval of his daughter's religious views, 75;
       she visits her brother at Griff, 79;
       regrets her impetuosity, and returns to Foleshill, 81;
       his illness, 100;
       visits Dover with his daughter, 107;
       trip to Isle of Wight, 120;
       illness increases, and visits St. Leonards, 135;
       returns to Coventry, 139;
       his death, 148.

     Evidence, the value of, iii. 109.

     Evil-speaking, contrition for, i. 141.


     "Fables," by Lord Lytton, iii. 162.

     Fairness and pity, where necessary, iii. 228.

     Fame in dreams, ii. 89.

     Family reunion, iii. 268; joys, iii. 286.

     Faraday, letter from, acknowledging presentation copy of "Clerical
           Life," ii. 9.

     Farming, an epoch in, iii. 271.

     Faucit, Helen, admiration of, i. 222.

     Faults, abstention from dwelling on, iii. 89.

     "Faust," reading in the original, iii. 303.

     Faux, David, Confectioner (Brother Jacob), written, ii. 199.

     Fawcett, Henry, articles on Strikes by, ii. 194.

     "Fawn of Sertorius," i. 108.

     Fechter in "Hamlet," ii. 225;
       his "Othello," 232.

     Feeling old for her years, ii. 193.

     "Felix Holt," writing commenced, ii. 290;
       reading for, 292;
       Blackwood offers £5000 for, 308;
       pains taken with, 309;
       finished in excitement, 311;
       final instalment received from Blackwood, iii. 13;
       payment for copyright, 13.

     Feminine characteristics, iii. 310, 311.

     Ferrier, Mr., translates Kaufmann's article on "Deronda," iii. 216.

     Feuerbach, translation of, published; first and only time her real
           name appeared in print, i. 233.

     Fiction, contemporary, iii. 183.

     Fiction-reading condemned, i. 36.

     Fiction-writing, first mention of, i. 296;
       how I came to write, 298-300.

     First authorship, i. 42.

     First novel, i. 298;
       title of, 299.

     Flemish and Dutch pictures in Dresden, ii. 44.

     Florence: view from Fiesole and Bellasguardo, ii. 155;
       the Duomo and Campanile, 156;
       the palaces and libraries, 157;
       the Loggia di Lanza, 158;
       Santa Maria Novella, 158;
       Santa Croce and the Carmine, 159;
       the frescoes, 159; S. Maria Novella, 160;
       San Michele, the shrine, 160;
       the Uffizi Gallery, 161;
       and pictures, 162;
       Pitti pictures, 162;
       paintings at the Accademia, 163;
       Galileo's tower, 164;
       Michael Angelo's house, 165, 166.

     Flower, Mr., i. 191.

     Fontainebleau, visit to, iii. 150.

     Forster, W. E., his article on Slavery, i. 218;
       "Life of Dickens," iii. 104.

     Foster, Professor Michael, his draught of conditions for Lewes
           scholar studentship, iii. 267, 269.

     France, the Empire in, iii. 168.

     Franco-German war, iii. 86, 92.

     Franklin, Miss Rebecca, her school at Coventry, i. 17;
       her death, iii. 149.

     Freethinkers, little sympathy with, as a class, ii. 249.

     French and English working classes, difference between, i. 131.

     French revolution of 1848, i. 129.

     Froude's "Shadows of the Clouds," i. 146.

     Fuller, Margaret, her Journal, i. 198.

     Function of art, the, iii. 144.

     Furnishing, on troubles of, ii. 267.

     "Futile Lying," letter on, ii. 290.


     Gambler, a girl, iii. 124.

     Garibaldi at the Crystal Palace, ii. 276.

     Gaskell, Mrs., suspected to have written "Adam Bede," ii. 82;
       letter from, 102;
       expresses admiration of "Scenes" and "Adam Bede," 107.

     Gaskell's, Mrs., "Ruth," i. 219.

     Geneva, life at Campagne Plongeon, i. 151-157;
       Genevese preachers, 153, 154;
       _Fête_ of Navigation, 157;
       effect of change of life, 159;
       plans for lessons, 160;
       Baronne de Ludwigsdorff, 161;
       home remembrances, 170;
       beauty of scenery, 171;
       delight in town life, 171;
       the Juras, 178;
       last days in, 179.

     Genevese preachers, i. 153, 154.

     Genoa, the cathedral, ii. 124.

     George Eliot.--1819-37:
         Birth at Arbury farm, i. 1;
         removal to Griff, 2;
         anecdotes of father, 9;
         character of mother, 10;
         at Dame's school, 10;
         at Miss Lathom's school at Attleboro, 11;
         happy childhood, 12;
         first books read, 13;
         first journey to Staffordshire, 15;
         Miss Wallington's school at Nuneaton, 15;
         writes out "Waverley," 16;
         favorite books, 17;
         charade-acting, 17;
         riot at Nuneaton, 20;
         first letter to Miss Lewis, 21;
         mother's illness and death, 22;
         housekeeper at Griff, 24;
         life and studies there, 24.
       1838-41:
         First visit to London, i. 28;
         religious asceticism, 29;
         nineteenth birthday, 32;
         religious objections to music, 32;
         religious reflections, 34;
         besetting sin, ambition, 35;
         objections to fiction-reading, 36;
         first poem, 42;
         books read and studies pursued, 44;
         German lessons begun, 45;
         chart of ecclesiastical history, 46;
         Italian studies, 49;
         dislike to housekeeping work, 50;
         reads Isaac Taylor, 51;
         visits Birmingham to hear "Messiah," 53;
         translates German poem, 54;
         her reading, 57;
         removal to Foleshill Road, Coventry, 59.
       1841-46: Coventry life, i. 61;
         mental depression, 64;
         friendship with Mr. and Mrs. Bray, 67;
         reads Charles Hennell's "Inquiry," 67, 68;
         effect of this book, 74;
         gives up going to church, 75;
         family difficulties, 79;
         regrets her impetuosity, 81;
         resumes going to church, 82;
         intimacy with Miss Sara Hennell and Mr. and Mrs. Bray, 83;
         attitude towards immortality, 84;
         excursion to Stratford and Malvern, 85;
         meets Robert Owen, 86;
         studies German and music, 86, 87;
         opinion in regard to conformity, 89;
         translation of Strauss's "Leben Jesu," 90;
         despair about publication of Strauss, 94;
         trip to the Highlands, 97.
       1846-49:
         Strauss translation published, i. 107;
         classical books wanted, 108;
         suspected of novel-writing, 108;
         reading Foster's life, 109;
         thoughts on Jesus at Emmaus, 110;
         a child's idea of God, 111, 112;
         visits London and hears "Elijah," 112;
         re-reading Hennell's "Inquiry," 119;
         visit to Isle of Wight with father, 120;
         admiration of Richardson, 121;
         delight in George Sand's "Lettres d'un Voyageur," 122;
         dislike to Jews, 125;
         supremacy of Hebrew poetry, 125;
         admiration of Roberts and Creswick, 127;
         opinion of Mr. Dawson the lecturer, 129;
         sympathy with revolution, 130;
         France and England contrasted, 131;
         sympathy with nonconformity, 133;
         visit to St. Leonards, 135;
         father's illness, 135;
         mental depression, 136;
         how to be overcome, 136;
         admiration of Louis Blanc, 137;
         recovery from depression, 138;
         opinion of "Jane Eyre," 138;
         meets Emerson, 138;
         again suffering from depression, 141;
         contrition for evil-speaking, 141;
         reading Macaulay's "History," 142;
         bodily suffering, 143;
         on the influence of Sand's and Rousseau's writings, 143, 144;
         writes review of the "Nemesis of Faith," 145;
         translates Spinoza's "Tractatus Theologico-Politicus," 147;
         father's death, 148.
       1849-50:
         Goes abroad with Mr. and Mrs. Bray, 150;
         Geneva, life at Campagne Plongeon, 151,152;
         prophetic anticipation of position seven years later, 158;
         effect of change of life, 159;
         plans for lessons, 160;
         finds apartments in Geneva, 164;
         enjoyment of society, 165;
         need of encouragement, 165;
         life in Geneva, 169, 170;
         yearning for friends at home, 170;
         remarks on translations of Spinoza, 172;
         desire for a woman's duty, 173;
         portrait by M. d'Albert, 178;
         remarks on education of children, 179;
         leaving Geneva, 180.
       1850-54: Return to England, 181;
         reviews Mackay's "Progress of the Intellect" in _Westminster_,
             184;
         assistant editor of _Westminster Review_, 186;
         introduced to Mr. Lewes, 189;
         intimacy begins, 192;
         help in despondency, 198;
         growing intimacy with Mr. Herbert Spencer, 201;
         dislike of scrap-work, 203;
         visit to Edinburgh, 211;
         an editor's life, 214, 215;
         ill with rheumatism, 218;
         interest in America, 219;
         growing intimacy with Mr. Lewes, 221, 232;
         contemplates publishing "The Idea of a Future Life," 229;
         union with Mr. Lewes, 234, 235;
         letter to Mrs. Bray, 235, 236.
       1854-55:
         Visits Antwerp with Mr. Lewes, i. 239;
         extracts from journal, 239 _et seq._;
         Weimar, i. 240-251;
         Berlin recollections, 251-268;
         work at Weimar and Berlin, 268;
         remarks on books read, 268-271;
         return to England, 271.
       1855-57:
         Articles written, i. 275;
         effect of article on Cumming, 278;
         reading on physiology, 279;
         miscellaneous writing, 280;
         Spinoza's "Ethics," translation finished, 281;
         wishes not to be known as translator, 283;
         articles on Young and Riehl, 286;
         tendency to scientific accuracy, 287;
         naturalistic experiences, 288;
         first mention of fiction-writing, 296;
         "how I came to write fiction," 298;
         correspondence about "Amos Barton," 300;
         "Mr. Gilfil's Love-story" begun, 305;
         Blackwood's high admiration of the story, 307;
         name of George Eliot assumed, 309;
         artistic bent, 310;
         Caterina and the dagger scene, 313;
         trip to the Scilly Isles, 313;
         social life at St. Mary's, 316;
         on conclusions of stories, 319;
         Jersey recollections, 319-322;
         Mr. Liggins, 323;
         opinions of "Mr. Gilfil's Love-story," 324, 325;
         happiness in her life, 328;
         Blackwood's opinion of "Janet's Repentance," 329;
         haunted by new story, 334;
         "Adam Bede" begun, 337;
         receives £120 for first edition of "Clerical Life," 337;
         unbelief in others' love, 337;
         sympathy with individuals, 339;
         objection to theism, 339;
         evening studies, 342;
         Major Blackwood suspects identity of George Eliot, 324;
         review of the year 1857.
       1858:
         The _Times_ reviews of "Scenes of Clerical Life," ii. 1;
         letter from Charles Dickens, recognizing woman's hand, 3;
         from Froude, 3;
         from Mrs. Carlyle, 7;
         reveals herself to John Blackwood, 10;
         visit to Germany, 14-46;
         progress with "Adam Bede," 32;
         latter half written, 42;
         description of life at Dresden, 45;
         history of "Adam Bede," 48-52;
         retrospect of year, 55.
       1859-60:
         Reading up for "Mill on the Floss," ii. 58;
         letter to John Blackwood on "Adam Bede," 58;
         wishes Carlyle to read her novels, 63;
         awakening to fame, 68;
         Mr. Liggins said to be author of "Adam Bede," 71;
         finished the "Lifted Veil," 75;
         reveals herself to Brays as author of "Adam Bede," 83;
         trip to Switzerland, 87;
         fourth edition (5000) of "Adam Bede" sold in a fortnight, 88;
         receives £800 beyond bargain for success, 102;
         16,000 sold in one year, 107;
         Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, 115;
         "Mill on the Floss" finished, 116;
         start for Italy, 116.
       1860:
         First journey to Italy, ii. 120;
         Rome, first sight of, 126;
         description of Naples, 144, 145;
         visit to Pompeii, 148;
         Florence, 155;
         first mention of Italian novel, 168;
         Venice, 172;
         home by Berne and Geneva, 181;
         enriched with new ideas, 182.
       1860-61:
         "Mill on the Floss" success, ii. 185;
         sitting to Lawrence for portrait, 194;
         independence secured, 203;
         the queen's admiration of "Mill on the Floss," 203;
         success of "Silas Marner," 214;
         second journey to Italy, 216;
         hopeful about future work, 220;
         began "Romola," 230;
         studying for, 235, 236.
       1862-65:
         Begins "Romola" again, ii. 238;
         offered £10,000 for "Romola" for the _Cornhill_, but idea given
             up, 244;
         £7000 accepted under new terms, 245;
         the effect of writing "Romola," 255;
         continued ill-health, 256, 258;
         letter from Frederick Maurice, 259;
         third visit to Italy, 278;
         trying a drama, 280;
         retrospect of year 1864, 282;
         "A Word for the Germans" written, 288;
         "Felix Holt" begun, 290;
         readings, 292;
         expedition to Brittany, 296;
         retrospect of 1865, 299.
       1866:
         Mr. Harrison's legal help in "Felix Holt," ii. 303, 304, 310;
         offered £5000 for "Felix Holt" by Blackwood, 308;
         visit to Holland and Germany, 312;
         "The Spanish Gypsy" taken up again, 317;
         reading for, 321;
         start for Spain, 324.
       1867:
         Journey to Spain, iii. 1;
         learning Spanish, 3;
         letters from Spain, 4-9;
         return to the Priory, 9;
         two months' visit to North Germany, 14;
         acquaintance with Mrs. Cross and family, 15;
          "Address to the Working Men," 19.
       1868:
         Month's visit to Torquay, iii. 25;
         "Spanish Gypsy" finished, 29;
         notes on the "Spanish Gypsy," 30;
         on the writing of poetry instead of novels, 36;
         six weeks' journey to Baden, 37;
         meditating subject of Timoleon, 49;
         retrospect of the year, 50;
         cheap edition of novels, 51.
       1869-72:
         Poem on "Agatha," iii. 55;
         writing "How Lisa Loved the King," 56;
         fourth visit to Italy, 57;
         religion of the future, 62;
         "Sonnets on Childhood" finished, 65;
         the phenomena of spiritualism, 67;
         the Byron scandal, 72;
         "Legend of Jubal" begun, 73;
         letter on the Positivist problem, 75;
         visit to Germany, 76;
         three days' visit to Oxford, 80;
         growing dislike of migratory life, 82;
         "Armgart" begun, 85;
         industrial schemes, 90;
         visit to Petersfield, 94;
         visit from Tennyson, 99;
         delight in intellectual activity, 101;
         reception of "Middlemarch," 103;
         Foster's "Life of Dickens," 104;
         "Middlemarch" finished, 121;
         a month's visit to Homburg, 122;
         a girl gambler, 124;
         memorial article on author of "Thorndale," 126;
         "Maga" on "Middlemarch," 130.
       1873-75:
         Reception of "Middlemarch," iii. 138;
         Dutch translation of novels, 139;
         German reprints, 140;
         visit to Cambridge, 147;
         visit to the Master of Balliol, 149;
         nine weeks' trip to the Continent, 150;
         another book simmering in her thoughts, 157;
         retrospect of 1873, 160;
         cheaper edition of novels, 162;
         "Legend of Jubal" published, 167;
         journey to the Ardennes, 176;
         sales of her books, 180;
         value of early religious experience, 182;
         not satisfied with "Deronda," 193;
         depression in finishing, 194.
       1876-78:
         Public interest in "Deronda," iii. 199;
         Mrs. Stowe's admiration of "Deronda," 202;
         letter to J. W. Cross, 204;
         trip to the Continent, 205;
         Jewish appreciation of "Deronda," 209;
         Dr. Adler's lecture on, 216;
         Mrs. Stowe and the Byron case, 221;
         appreciation of Tennyson, 229;
         gaining strength at Witley, 231;
         meets Crown Prince and Princess of Germany, 236;
         visit to Oxford, 236;
         Mr. Lewes's ill-health, 239;
         reception at the Priory, 241;
         Mr. Lewes's last illness and death, 245-247.
       1879-80:
         First weeks of loneliness, iii. 249;
         announcement of "Theophrastus Such" delayed, 252;
         project of Physiological Studentship, 254;
         dissatisfied with "Theophrastus," 254;
         letter to J. W. Cross asking counsel, 258;
         reception of "Theophrastus" by the public, 263, 264;
         serious renal attack, 265;
         conditions for the studentship, 267;
         renewed interest in social news, 270;
         Dr. Roy appointed to studentship, 275;
         death of John Blackwood, 276;
         engagement to Mr. Cross, 279;
         married at St. George's, Hanover Square, 283;
         left for the Continent, 283;
         letters from France and Italy, 284-294;
         Mr. Cross's illness in Venice, 294;
         arrival in England, 295;
         recurrence of illness, 300;
         recovery of strength, 313;
         settled in Cheyne Walk, 313;
         first appearance of sore throat, 315;
         letter to Mrs. Strachey (unfinished), 316;
         sudden death, 316.

     German editions of "Middlemarch," iii. 114.

     German poem, translation of, i. 54.

     German reading, iii. 124.

     German Revolution of '48 caused by real oppression, i. 258.

     German translation of "Adam Bede," ii. 116;
       first volume received, 116.

     Germans, Vivier's anecdotes of, i. 264, 265;
       domestic life of, 271.

     Germany, North, journey to, iii. 14;
       places revisited and new scenes, 15.

     Germany, second visit to, 1854:
       Munich, ii. 14-34;
       Ischl, 37;
       Vienna, 38;
       Prague, 40;
       Dresden, 45;
       Leipzig, 46.

     Germany, visit to, in 1854;
       extracts from journal: Weimar, i. 240;
       Berlin, 251, 252.

     Gift of a vase from Miss Mary Cross, iii. 166.

     Girl gambler, a, iii. 124.

     Girton College scheme, iii. 18.

     Goethe on Spinoza, ii. 298.

     Goschen, Mr., dinner with, iii. 236;
       meets Crown Prince and Princess of Prussia, 236.

     Got's acting, iii. 101.

     Granada, the Alhambra, iii. 7;
       view from, 8.

     Grand Chartreuse, expedition to the, iii. 285.

     Grandcourt and Lush, iii. 200.

     Grandison, Sir Charles, i. 121.

     Green, Professor T., iii. 149.

     Ground of moral action, iii. 178.

     Gurney, Mr. Edmund, iii. 147.

     Gurney, Rev. Archer, on "Scenes of Clerical Life," i. 324.

     Guthrie, Dr., address by, i. 230.


     Hamilton, Sir William, valuable contributions, i. 278.

     Hamley, Colonel (now General Sir Edward Hamley), impressions of,
           ii. 315;
       thanks for letter to the _Times_, iii. 93.

     Handel Festival, the, ii. 82.

     Hannay, Mr., on "Romola," ii. 252.

     Happiness in recovery of health, iii. 313.

     Hare, Mrs. Julius, ii. 263;
       her death, 273.

     Harrison, Frederic, letter to, on industrial co-operation, ii. 303;
       his legal advice in "Felix Holt," 303;
       more consultations with, 305, 306;
       letter to, on æsthetic teaching, etc., 318;
       receives a copy of "Spanish Gypsy," iii. 36;
       consultation with, 186.

     Harrogate, its lovely walks, ii. 281.

     Haughton, Mrs., letters to:
       on contrition for evil-speaking, i. 141;
       on friends at home, 159;
       on the bondage of luxuries, 177;
       on her proof-reading, 231.

     Haunted by new story, i. 334.

     Hawthorne, admiration of, i. 208.

     Heine, article on, in _Westminster_, i. 279.

     Helps, Arthur, dinner with, i. 230;
       incident in Spain, 242;
       on "Clerical Life," ii. 2.

     Hemans's "The Forest Sanctuary," i. 57.

     Hennell, Charles, analysis of "An Inquiry Concerning the Origin of
           Christianity," i. 68-74;
       his marriage, 85.

     Hennell, Miss Mary, author of "An Outline of the various Social
           Systems founded on the Principle of Co-operation," her death,
           i. 84.

     Hennell, Miss Sara, first meeting with, i. 82;
       letters to, on mental characteristics, 84;
       dangers of nonconformity, 89, 90;
       translating Strauss, 92;
       Strauss difficulties, 96;
       title of translation, 98;
       finishing translation, 101;
       longing for idleness, 102;
       thankfulness for help in translation, 103;
       visit to Mrs. Hennell, 107;
       desire for classics, 108;
       relief from work, 109;
       admiration of "Heliados," 111;
       philosophy and religion, 121;
       "Live and teach," 122;
       "sweet uses" of adversity, 135;
       depression by father's illness, 136;
       the "Romanticist," 139;
       a longing for sympathy, 141;
       bodily suffering, 143;
       return to England, 180, 181;
       Mr. Chapman's soirées, 190;
       delight with change of life, 206;
       letter from Berlin, 262;
       on essay "Christianity and Infidelity," 311;
       peacefully busy, 334;
       delight in Mr. Lewes's books, ii. 11;
       on the death of a mother, 12;
       admiration of Liebig, 25;
       sympathy with, on her mother's death, 32;
       letter from Dresden, 45;
       about Mrs. Clarke, 66, 67;
       recollections of Mr. Liggins, 72;
       authorship acknowledged to, 83;
       "expecting disappointments," 201, 202;
       settled in new house, 204, 205;
       on the blessings of good health, 229;
       old remembrances, 233;
       on her low health, 306;
       a birthday letter, iii. 129.

     Hereditary misfortunes, iii. 34.

     Hereford, Dean of, i. 227.

     Herts, country-house in, iii. 186.

     Higher education of women, iii. 13, 146.

     History of "Adam Bede," ii. 48-52.

     "History of Europe," Alison's, i. 282.

     History reading, iii. 234.

     Holbein's Madonna, ii. 42.

     Holland and Germany, journey to, ii. 312;
       the route taken, 315.

     Holland, Sir Henry, visit from, ii. 321.

     Holmwood Common, iii. 174.

     Homburg, the gaming-tables, iii. 122.

     Home, enjoyment of, iii. 208.

     Home for Girls, iii. 181.

     Home life, i. 13; iii. 107, 108.

     "Horsedealer in Syria," ii. 101.

     Housekeeping work, dislike of, i. 50.

     How I came to write fiction, i. 298-300.

     Hungarian, "Adam Bede" translated into, ii. 115.

     Hunt, Leigh, his "The Religion of the Heart," i. 226.

     Huth, Mrs. and Miss, iii. 147.

     Hutton, R. H., letter to, on "Romola," ii. 261.

     "Huxley on M. Comte," Dr. Congreve's article on, iii. 58.

     Huxley, Mr., an agreeable evening with, i. 220.

     Hyrtl, the German anatomist, ii. 39.


     "Idea of a Future Life," contemplates publishing, i. 229.

     Ilfracombe recollections: journey to, i. 285;
       naturalistic experiences, 288;
       zoological expeditions, 289;
       Devonshire lanes, 289;
       Rev. Mr. Tugwell, 290;
       the scientific spirit, 291;
       leave for Tenby, 292.

     Illness a partial death, iii. 155.

     Illustrations in cheap edition, not _queerer_ than in other books,
           iii. 217.

     Impetuosity regretted, i. 81.

     "Impossibility of marrying," dangers of speaking of, ii. 212.

     Incentive to production, iii. 224.

     Independence of external good, i. 81.

     Indian newspaper-writing, iii. 237.

     Individual versus the general, the, iii. 33.

     Industrious poor, helping the, iii. 90.

     Inkermann, battle of, a mere brave blundering, iii. 182.

     Inman, Dr., Liverpool, ii. 114.

     Innspruck and Wildbad, iii. 294, 295.

     Intellectual activity, enjoyment of, iii. 101.

     Intellectual superciliousness, ii. 255.

     "Introduction to the Science of Language," iii. 303.

     "Iphigenia in Aulis," iii. 145.

     Irregular verses, the use of, iii. 40.

     Ischl, the Gmunden See, ii. 37;
       voyage down the Danube, 38.

     Isle of Wight, trip to the, ii. 72, 256.

     Italian novel, first mention of, ii. 168.

     Italian studies, i. 49.

     Italy, first journey to, 1860:
         Turin, ii. 122;
         Genoa, 123;
         Leghorn, 124;
         Pisa, 125;
         Rome, 126-144;
         Naples, 144;
         Salerno, 151;
         Pæstum, 152;
         Amalfi, 153;
         Sorrento, 153, 154;
         Florence, 155;
         Bologna, 168;
          Padua, 170;
         Venice, 172;
         Verona, 179;
         Milan, 179-181.

     Italy, second journey to, ii. 216;
         stay at Florence, 217;
         renewed delight in, 219;
         work during the visit, 221.

     Italy, third visit to, ii. 277;
         Mr. Burton's companionship, 278;
         the Alps by the St. Gothard, 278.

     Italy, fourth visit to, iii. 57;
         places visited, 58.

     Italy, fifth visit to: Milan, iii. 288;
         Verona, 289;
         Venice, 291.


     "Jane Eyre," opinion of, i. 138.

     Jansa, Herr, takes lessons from, ii. 271.

     Jersey recollections, 1857:
       scenery, i. 319;
       inland walks, 320, 321;
       coast beauties, 321;
       books read, 322.

     Jesus at Emmaus, thoughts on, i. 110.

     Jewish appreciation of "Deronda," iii. 207, 216.

     Jews, dislike of, i. 125;
       English ignorance of the, iii. 212.

     Jones, Mr. Owen, decorates the new house, ii. 265, 266.

     Journal, 1855:
         Third book of "Ethics," preface written, i. 273;
         _Westminster Review_, 274;
         wrote for the _Leader_, 275.
       1856:
         Working at Spinoza, i. 281;
         first mention of fiction-writing, 296;
         "Mr. Gilfil's Love-story" begun, 305.
       1857:
         Pleasant letters regarding "Gilfil," i. 323, 324;
         finished "Janet's Repentance," 336;
         began "Adam Bede," 336;
         books read, 342;
         the year's work, 344.
       1858:
         News from the city regarding "Clerical Life," ii. 12;
         visit to Germany, 14-46;
         "Adam Bede" finished, 48.
       1859:
         A trip to Lucerne, ii. 87;
         return to England, 88;
         declined American offer for new story, 94;
         anxiety and doubt about new novel, 97.
       1860:
         Seeing friends, ii. 114;
         first journey to Italy, 120-182.
       1861:
         Second journey, ii. 216;
         struggling constantly with depression, 227;
         continued ill-health, 243-245;
         despondency, 279.
       1868:
         Books, reading, iii. 25;
         retrospect of year, 50.
       1869:
         Work in prospect, iii. 55;
         beginning "Middlemarch," 69;
         "Legend of Jubal" begun, 73.
       1870:
         In languid health, iii. 79.
       1871:
        First part of "Middlemarch" published, iii. 104.
       1873:
         Success of "Middlemarch," iii. 138;
         retrospect of year, 159.
       1875:
          Sales of books, iii. 180.
       1876:
         Depression in writing "Deronda," iii. 194.
       1877:
         Cabinet edition decided on, iii. 230;
         declined to renew copyright agreement, 230;
         close of her journal, 233.
       1879:
         Seeing visitors, iii. 260.
      1880:
         Her marriage with Mr. Cross, iii. 283;
         came to 4 Cheyne Walk, 311.

     Jowett, Mr., Master of Balliol, visit to, iii. 149.

     Julian the Apostate, Strauss's pamphlet on, i. 139.

     Justification in writing, iii. 173.


     Kaufmann, Dr. David, letter to, on his estimate of "Daniel
           Deronda," iii. 222;
       on the function of the teacher, 226;
       on Lewes's death, 257.

     Kenelm Chillingly, iii. 141.

     Knight, Charles, i. 202.


     La Bruyère's wisdom, iii. 235.

     Lamartine as a poet, i. 130.

     Languages, her knowledge of, iii. 305.

     La Vernia, description of, ii. 223.

     Lawrence wishes to take her portrait, ii. 115;
       sits for it, 194.

     Lecky's "History of Rationalism," ii. 291.

     Lecture on "Daniel Deronda," by Dr. Adler, iii. 216.

     Leeds, the horrible smoke of, iii. 43;
       its fine hospital, 44.

     "Legend of Jubal," some verses written, iii. 73;
       published as "Legend of Jubal, and other Poems," 167;
       new edition of, 169.

     Leghorn, the Jewish synagogue, ii. 125;
       to Civita Vecchia, 125;
       a pleasant companion, 126.

     Leipzig, two days at, ii. 45;
       its picture-gallery, 45.

     Leroux, Pierre, his theories, i. 194.

     Letters to her friends almost all destroyed, ii. 207.

     "Letter to Berthelot," Renan's, ii. 269.

     Lewes, Charles, first letter to, ii. 91;
       on musical parties, 98;
       on liking for algebra, 106;
       returns from Hofwyl, 185;
       receives appointment in Post-office, 194;
       letters from Florence to, 216, 219, 221;
       from Isle of Wight, 257;
       his engagement, 278;
       letters to, on Harrison's paper, iii. 262;
       on printing the "Problems," 276;
       from Grenoble, 285;
       from Milan, 288; from Venice, 291;
       from Stuttgart and Wildbad, 294, 295;
       on his visit to St. Blasien, 297;
       on recurrence of illness, 300.

     Lewes, George H., i. 188;
       first introduction to Miss Evans, 189;
       meet at the theatre, 192;
       article on "Julia von Krüdener," 192;
       his Comte papers, 209;
       growing intimacy, 221;
       his "History of Philosophy," 227;
       illness, 231;
       intimate relations with Miss Evans, 232;
       their union, 235;
       completed life of Goethe at Weimar, 267;
       estimation of George Eliot, 277;
       necessity for hard work, 277;
       proposes sending boys to Hofwyl, 284;
       goes to Switzerland with them, 297;
       highly pleased with "Amos Barton," 300;
       letter to John Blackwood with MS. of "Scenes of Clerical Life," 300;
       George Eliot revealed to John Blackwood, ii. 10;
       suggestions in "Adam Bede," 49, 50;
       extract from Journal, 55;
       "Physiology of Common Life," 92;
       "Studies in Animal Life," 113;
       dispassionate judgment, 202;
       delicate health, 223;
       busy with Aristotle, 233;
       "History of Science" begun, 243;
       views of Bible-reading, 251;
       buoyant nature, 290;
       walking expedition with Mr. Spencer, iii. 15;
       acquaintance with Mrs. Cross, 15;
       visits Bonn, 20;
       death of his mother, 91;
       proposed for Rectorship of St. Andrews, 232;
       continued illness, 240;
       his death, 247.

     Lewes, Herbert, his death, iii. 189.

     Lewes Studentship proposed, iii. 253;
       plans for, and trustees, 254.

     Lewes, Thornton, leaves for Natal, ii. 264;
       returns, iii. 63;
       his death, 73.

     Lewis, Miss, Leamington, iii. 192.

     Lewis, Miss, letters to:
       On first visit to London, i. 28;
       on living for eternity, 30;
       emulation of Wilberforce, 31;
       oratorios, 32;
       bad effect of novels, 37;
       religious controversies, 39;
       first authorship, 42;
       studies pursued, 44;
       Italian studies, 49;
       Mrs. Somerville's "Connection of the Physical Sciences," 50;
       opinions of Isaac Taylor, 51;
       German translation, 54;
       a walled-in world, 55;
       sensitiveness, 57;
       war's purgations, 59;
       satisfaction with new life, 62;
       depression of mind, 64;
       mind requiring rest, 65;
       desire for brain waves, 66;
       religious doubts and difficulties, 74, 75;
       on self-denial, 78.

     Lichfield, recollections of, ii. 96.

     Liddell, Dean, Oxford, iii. 173.

     Liebig, Professor, ii. 23;
       admiration of, 25, 29.

     "Life of Goethe," i. 275.

     "Lifted Veil," finished April, 1859, ii. 75;
       the idea of the story, iii. 141.

     Liggins, Mr., first mention of, i. 323;
       calls himself George Eliot, ii. 71;
       some recollections of, 72;
       Mr. Anders's apology, 78;
       Mr. Bracebridge's letter regarding, 99.

     Limitations of scientists, iii. 182.

     Lincoln, President, anecdote of, iii. 82.

     Lincoln, the Rector of, iii. 81.

     Lincolnshire, visits to, iii. 288.

     "Lisa," writing rhymed poem on, iii. 55.

     Literary biography, iii. 163.

     Literary taste at bookstalls, iii. 51.

     Littlehampton, trip to, ii. 247.

     Liturgy of the English Church and the Bible, ii. 226.

     Living abroad, drawbacks to, iii. 203.

     Lockhart, Captain, his writings, iii. 98, 193.

     Lonely days: "here I and sorrow sit," iii. 249.

     Louis Blanc, admiration of, i. 138.

     Louis Philippe and his sons, i. 130.

     Lowell's "My Study Windows," iii. 96.

     Lucerne, a trip to, ii. 87;
       visit from Mrs. Congreve, 87.

     Lush and Grandcourt, iii. 200.

     Lushington, Mrs. Vernon, iii. 220.

     Lyrics for "Spanish Gypsy," iii. 16.

     Lytton, Hon. Mrs. Robert (now Lady Lytton), letter of sympathy to,
           iii. 83;
       on thoughts of death, 99, 100;
       on Lord Lytton's Indian experiences, 281.

     Lytton, Hon. Robert (now Lord Lytton), on pronunciation in "Spanish
           Gypsy," iii. 52;
       explanation of errors, 52.

     Lytton, Sir Edward Bulwer, letter from, thanking author of "Adam
           Bede," ii. 74, 75;
       visit from, 115;
       criticises "Adam Bede," 115;
       his criticisms of "Maggie," 190.


     Macaulay, interest in, i. 142.

     Mackay's "Progress of the Intellect" reviewed, i. 183;
       extracts from, 183-185, 190.

     "Macmillan," article on "The Mill on the Floss" in, ii. 212.

     Macmillan, Mr., his proposal for volume on Shakespeare, iii. 231.

     Madrid, the Gallery, iii. 9.

     Madonna di San Sisto, first impression of, ii. 43.

     Main, Mr., collector of "The Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings of
           George Eliot," iii. 103;
       opinions of, 105.

     Maine, Sir Henry, on Lewes's "Physiology," iii. 267.

     Malvern, trip to, ii. 228;
       improved health from, 230, 231.

     "Man's Nature and Development," i. 187.

     "Marie of Villefranche," by Miss Mary Cross, iii. 100.

     Marriage, possibilities in, iii. 181.

     Marriage, the ideal, iii. 142.

     Martineau, Harriet, "The Crofton Boys," i. 93;
       meeting with, 94, 193;
       invitation from, 197;
       article on "Niebuhr," 203;
       visit to, at Ambleside, 212;
       respect for her, ii. 103;
       her autobiography, iii. 214, 219.

     Martineau, James, i. 192;
       critique of Kingsley's "Phaethon," 219;
       on Sir William Hamilton, 223;
       invitation from, 54; "Comte," 55.

     Martineau, Maria, her death, ii. 274.

     "Masculine woman," dislike of the, iii. 308.

     Masson, Mr., on Recent Philosophy, ii. 298.

     Mathematics, her love for, iii. 305.

     Matlock, recollections of, iii. 47.

     Maurice, Frederick, generous tribute from, ii. 259.

     Mazzini, asked to write on "Freedom _v._ Despotism," i. 194;
       his speeches, 198.

     Mazzini Fund, the, ii. 294.

     Mazzini's death, iii. 113.

     "Meliorist," the word, iii. 217.

     Memorial article on author of "Thorndale," iii. 126.

     Mendelssohn's "Letters," iii. 84.

     Mental characteristics described, i. 84.

     "Middlemarch," writing introduction, iii. 69;
       reading for, 71, 72;
       the design of, 99;
       anticipations of, 103;
       first part published, 104;
       French and German interest in, 112;
       delayed by ill-health, 113;
       £1200 from Harpers for reprint, 114;
       finished, 121;
       reviewed in _Blackwood's Magazine_, 130;
       new edition called for, 153;
       number sold in 1873, 160;
       December, 1874, 20,000 sold, 180.

     Milan, the Ambrosian Library, ii. 180;
       the "Brera," 180;
       Church of San Ambrogio, 181;
       the "Luini" pictures, iii. 288.

     Military men, articles by, iii. 265.

     Mill, John Stuart, his "Autobiography," iii. 158.

     "Mill on the Floss," first volume finished as "Sister Maggie,"
           ii. 101;
       Blackwood's proposals for, 110;
       discussions as to title, 111;
       Blackwood's suggestion adopted, 112;
       Harpers, New York, give £300 for American edition, 115;
       third volume finished, 116;
       inscription on, 116;
       sad at finishing, 117;
       first and second editions (6000) sold, 185.

     Miracle play at Antwerp, the, ii. 316.

     Miscellaneous writing, i. 280.

     Misconception of others, on, ii. 197.

     "Miss Brooke," experimenting on, iii. 91.

     Mixed marriages in Germany, ii. 28.

     Modern German art, ii. 27.

     Mohl, Madame, dinner with, iii. 1.

     Moleschott, of Zurich, ii. 182.

     Molière's "Misanthrope," ii. 108.

     Mommsen's "History of Rome," ii. 264.

     Mont Cenis, passage of, ii. 120.

     Moral action, ground of, iii. 178.

     Moral sanction is obedience to facts, iii. 34.

     Morality with the "Bible shut," i. 230.

     More, Mrs. Hannah, her letters, i. 123.

     Müller, Max, ii. 239; iii. 149.

     Munich, the opera, ii. 18;
       Samson and Delilah, 18;
       Schwanthaler's "Bavaria," 19;
       appreciation of Rubens, 20;
       Catholic and Protestant worship, 21;
       the Glyptothek and Pinnacothek, 21;
       Kaulbach, Bodenstedt, and Genelli, 22, 23;
       Professor Wagner, 23;
       Professor Martius, 23;
       Liebig, 23, 25;
       Heyse and Geibel, 23;
       music of the "Faust," 24;
       Professor Löher, 24;
       Albert Dürer's paintings, 24;
       Bluntschli and Melchior Meyr, 25;
       the _Tafel-rund_, 26;
       the Siebolds, 26, 33;
       Kaulbach's pictures, 27;
       mixed marriages, 28;
       porcelain-painting, 30;
       Madame Bodenstedt, 30;
       visit to Grosshesselohe, 31;
       Lewes leaves for Switzerland, 33;
       leaves for Dresden, 33.

     Murillo's St. Rodriguez, ii. 43.

     Music, cheap, inconveniences connected with, in England, ii. 81.

     Musical evenings with Mr. Pigott and Mr. Redford, ii. 227, 229, 230.

     Musical parties, ii. 99.

     Myers, Mr. Frederick, Cambridge, iii. 147.

     "My Vegetarian Friend," written, ii. 285.


     Nancy, the Germans at, iii. 151.

     Naples: first impressions, ii. 144;
       visits to Baiæ, Avernus, and Misena, 145;
       to Pozzuoli and Capo di Monte, 146;
       the Cemetery, 147;
       Museo Borbonico, 147;
       Pompeii, 148;
       its remains, 149;
       beauty of, 150;
       the pictures at, 151;
       Giotto's frescoes, 151;
       leave for Florence, 154.

     Nearness of death, imagining the, iii. 170.

     Negative attitude unsatisfactory, iii. 156.

     "Nemesis of Faith," reviews the, i. 145;
       note from Froude, 145.

     New house, enjoyment of, ii. 269, 270.

     Newman, Francis, i. 140; iii. 165.

     Newman's "Apologia," ii. 280.

     Newman's, J. H., "Lectures on the Position of Catholics," i. 192.

     New misery in writing, i. 227.

     New Year's wishes, iii. 139.

     Nichol's "Architecture of the Heavens," i. 65.

     Nightingale, Miss Florence, note from, i. 206; ii. 61.

     Noel, Mr., i. 191.

     Nonconformity, effect of, i. 79;
       dangers of, 90.

     Normandy, trip to, ii. 296.

     _North British_, favorable review, ii. 199.

     Notes on the "Spanish Gypsy," iii. 30, 31.

     Novel-writing, suspected of, i. 108.

     Nuneaton, riot at, i. 20.

     Nürnberg, description of, ii. 14;
       its roofs and balconies, 15;
       the Frauen-Kirche, 16;
       effect of Catholic "Function," 17;
       Albert Dürer's house, 17.


     Old people's judgments, i. 118.

     "Old Town Folks," appreciation of, iii. 66.

     Oliphant, Lawrence, and the colonizing of Palestine, iii. 252.

     Oliphant, Mrs., the novelist, ii. 11.

     _Once a Week_, a story requested for, ii. 104, 106.

     Oratorios at Birmingham, i. 53.

     Oratorios condemned, i. 32.

     Orientals, English attitude towards, iii. 211.

     Osborne, Bernal, on "Deronda," iii. 200.

     Otter, Francis, letter to, on his engagement, iii. 180, 181.

     Owen, Professor, i. 202;
       on the cerebellum, 210;
       sends his "Palæontology," ii. 116.

     Owen, Robert, i. 86.

     Oxford, first visit to, iii. 80;
       people met with, 80.

     Oxford Tracts and Christian Year, i. 48.


     Padua, Church of San Antonio, ii. 170;
       the Arena Chapel, 171;
       Giotto's painting, 171.

     Pæstum, the Temple of Neptune, ii. 152.

     Paris, visit to Comte's apartment, ii. 286.

     Parkes, Miss (Madame Belloc), friendship with, i. 195; iii. 289.

     "Pascal," by Principal Tulloch, iii. 235.

     Passionate affliction, defence against, iii. 84.

     Patience, the need of, iii. 128.

     "Paul Bradley," by Mrs. Bray, iii. 164.

     Pays no visits in London, ii. 215.

     Peabody, George, his magnificent gift, ii. 245.

     Pears, Mrs., letters to: on religious difficulties, i. 76;
       on desire for truth, 77;
       on her impetuosity, 81;
       her friendship with Mr. Robert Evans, 147.

     Penmaenmawr, ii. 96.

     Permanent influence of ideas, the, iii. 89.

     Persistence in application, iii. 304.

     Personal bearing, her, iii. 310.

     Personal portraiture objected to, iii. 228.

     Personality, independence of our, iii. 84.

     Phenomena of spiritualism, the, iii. 67.

     Philosophical Club, first meeting of, ii. 248;
       dissolution of, 253.

     "Philosophy of Necessity," the, i. 339.

     Phrenological indications, i. 78.

     Phrenology, the position of, i. 340.

     Physiological reading, i. 279.

     Physiological Studentship, the purpose of, iii. 256.

     "Physiology for Schools," Mrs. Bray's, ii. 267.

     Pigott, Mr. Edward Smith, i. 293.

     Pisa, description of, ii. 125;
       the cathedral, 125.

     Pity and fairness, where requisite, iii. 228.

     Plain living and high thinking, iii. 161.

     Plombières and the Vosges, iii. 150.

     Poem in _Christian Observer_, i. 43.

     Poetry instead of novels, on writing, iii. 36.

     Poetry of Christianity, i. 93; ii. 251.

     Poets, the value of, iii. 184.

     Political and religious standpoint, iii. 308.

     Pompeii and its remains, ii. 149, 150, 154.

     Ponsonby, Hon. Mrs. (now Lady Ponsonby), letter to, on the idea
           of God an exaltation of human goodness, etc., iii. 176;
       on the desire to know the difficulties of others, 184;
       on excess of public-houses, 188;
       on pity and fairness, 228.

     Poor, helping industrious, iii. 90.

     "Popular author," characteristics of the, ii. 59.

     Popular Concerts, Monday, ii. 204, 248.

     Popular judgment of books, iii. 62.

     Popular preacher, a, iii. 87.

     Positivism in "The Spanish Gypsy," iii. 49.

     Positivism regarded as one-sided, ii. 224.

     Possession, the sense of, iii. 306.

     Power of the will, the, iii. 179.

     Poyser, Mrs., her dialogue, ii. 54;
       quoted in House of Commons, 69.

     Prague: the Jewish burial-ground, ii. 40;
       impressive view, 41.

     Preacher, a popular, criticised, iii. 87.

     Presentation copies never sent, ii. 216.

     Press notices of "Adam Bede," ii. 60.

     "Pretended comforts," ii. 296.

     Prince Albert, admiration of, i. 202.

     Printed rancor, on, iii. 221.

     Priory, receptions at the, iii. 241.

     Private correspondence almost all destroyed, ii. 207.

     Private theatricals, i. 176, 178.

     "Problems of Life and Mind," by G. H. Lewes, iii. 203, 210.

     _Prospective Review_, i. 219;
       on Goethe, 224.

     Psychical troubles, i. 232.

     Public-houses, excess of, iii. 188.

     Public interest in "Deronda," iii. 199.

     Public school and University education, iii. 309.

     Publishing books, on different methods of, iii. 190, 191.

     "Pug," letter to John Blackwood on, ii. 91.


     Quackery of infidelity, i. 89.

     _Quarterly_ on "The Mill on the Floss," ii. 201.

     Queen's admiration of "The Mill on the Floss," ii. 203.

     Quiet joy in success, ii. 72.

     Quirk, Mr., finally renounces Liggins, ii. 96.


     Race characteristics, i. 125.

     Ragatz, "The Cure" at, iii. 206;
       gain in health from, 210.

     Rancor, on printed, iii. 221.

     Rawlinson, Professor, iii. 80.

     Reade, Charles, on "Adam Bede," ii. 70.

     Reading aloud, the effect of her, iii. 302, 303.

     Reading world very narrow, iii. 131.

     Reeves, Sims, singing "Adelaide," ii. 205.

     Religion and art, i. 126;
       the development of, iii. 62.

     Religious controversies, i. 39, 47;
       aspirations, 63;
       doubts and difficulties, 74, 76;
       forms and ceremonies, ii. 205;
       assemblies, the need of, iii. 156;
       and political standpoint, 308.

     Renan, estimate of, ii. 269;
       his appearance, iii. 3.

     Renan's "Vie de Jésus," ii. 260.

     Renunciation, on, iii. 35.

     Repugnance to autobiography, iii. 221.

     Responsibility of authorship, ii. 89.

     Retrospect of year 1819, i. 4, 5;
       of 1857, 346;
       of 1858, ii. 55;
       of 1864, 285;
       of 1865, 300;
       of 1868, iii. 50;
       of year 1873, 159.

     Reviews, effect of, ii. 192;
       abstains from reading, 193.

     Reviews of "Spanish Gypsy," iii. 40, 44.

     Revolution, sympathy with, i. 130.

     Revolutionary spirit, i. 138.

     "Revue des Deux Mondes," review of "Adam Bede," ii. 105;
       Lewes accepts editorship of periodical on plan of, ii. 287.

     Rewards of the artist, the, ii. 107.

     Richmond Park, the charms of, i. 326;
       sunset effects, 341.

     Riehl's "Die Familie," i. 344.

     Ritualistic services at Ryde, iii. 91.

     Rive, M. le Professeur de la, his lectures, i. 175, 177.

     Romance in real life, a, ii. 258, 259.

     Rome: from Civita Vecchia to, ii. 126;
       first sight of, 126;
       disappointed with, 127;
       view from the Capitol, 128;
       the Sabine and Alban hills, 128;
       the temples and palaces, 129;
       the arches and columns, 129, 130;
       the Coliseum and baths, 130;
       the Lateran and Vatican sculptures, 131;
       St. Peter's, 132;
       mediæval churches, 133;
       Sistine chapel, 133;
       palaces, 133, 134;
       illumination of St. Peter's, 134;
       the Quirinal, 134;
       San Pietro in Vincoli, 134;
       Michael Angelo's "Moses," 135;
       modern artists, 135;
       Riedel and Overbeck, 136;
       Pamfili Doria gardens, 137;
       Villa Albani and Frascati, 137;
       Tivoli, 138;
       pictures at the Capitol, 139;
       the Lateran Museum, 139;
       Shelley's and Keats's graves, 140;
       removal to apartments, 142;
       the French occupation, 143;
       beautiful mothers and children, 143;
       the Pope's blessing, 144.

     "Romola," first conception of, ii. 197;
       began the first chapter, 230;
       studying for, 234;
       begins it again, 238;
       Smith offers £10,000 for it to appear in the _Cornhill_, 244;
       £7000 accepted, 245;
       slow progress in writing, 246, 250;
       opinions of, 252;
       strain of writing, 255;
       finished Part XIII., 255;
       completion of, 256;
       application to translate into Italian, iii. 216.

     Rosehill, visit to, i. 193.

     Roundell, Mr. and Mrs. Charles, iii. 149.

     Roy, Dr. Charles, elected Lewes Physiological student, iii. 275;
       his treatise on "Blood Pressure," 298.

     Rubens, appreciation of, ii. 20.

     Rumors of authorship, ii. 13.

     Ruskin and Alfieri, reading, iii. 292.

     Ruskin's Works, opinion of, ii. 5.

     Ryde, visit to, iii. 91;
       ritualistic service at, 91.


     Salerno, visit to, ii. 151.

     Salzburg, description of scenery, ii. 36.

     Sand's, George, "Lettres d'un Voyageur," i. 122.

     Saragossa, the old cathedral, iii. 5.

     Saturday Popular Concerts, last visit to, iii. 315.

     _Saturday Review_, the, i. 281.

     Saveney on "La Physique Moderne," iii. 3.

     Scarborough, visit to, ii. 281.

     "Scenes of Clerical Life:" "Sad Fortunes of Amos Barton," i. 299;
       offered to Blackwood, 300;
       accepted, 304;
       sensitiveness of author, 304;
       "Mr. Gilfil's Love-story" begun, 305;
       "Amos Barton," published in January (1856) Magazine, 305;
       opinions regarding authorship, 308, 309;
       assumes the name of George Eliot, 310;
       Caterina and the dagger scene, 313;
       "Mr. Gilfil" finished, 319;
       epilogue to, 319;
       opinions of, 324;
       "Janet's Repentance" begun, 326;
       Blackwood's opinion of, 328;
       increased circulation, 342;
       favorable opinions of, ii. 10.

     Scherer, Professor, Geneva, iii. 8.

     School-fellows, excels her, i, 19.

     Schwalbach, description of, ii. 312.

     Scientists, limitations of, iii. 182.

     Scilly Islands, recollections of: St. Mary's, i. 314;
       Beauties of the coast, 314;
       sunlight on the waves, 315;
       social life, 316.

     Scotch Reign of Terror, disbelief in a, i. 132.

     Scotland, trip to, i. 97; visit to, ii. 275.

     Scott Commemoration, afraid of journey to, iii. 97, 98.

     Scott, Life of Sir Walter, ii. 61.

     Scrap-work, dislike of, i. 203.

     Sculpture and painting, i. 127.

     Sensibility to criticism, ii. 63.

     Sequel to "Adam Bede" proposed, ii. 100.

     Shakespeare's "Passionate Pilgrim," i. 273.

     Shakespeare, the acting preferred to the reading, ii. 109.

     Shakespeare, volume on, requested by Macmillan, iii. 231.

     Sheffield, visit to, iii. 46; early recollections of, 46.

     Shelley's "Cloud," i. 53.

     Shottermill, life at, iii. 94.

     Sibree, John, letters to, i. 123;
       on "Tancred" and D'Israeli, 123, 124;
       race characteristics, 125;
       religion and art, 126;
       painting and sculpture, 127;
        sympathy with him, 128;
       necessity of utterance, 132;
       desire for a change, 133.

     Sibree, Miss Mary (Mrs. John Cash), her recollections of Miss Evans
           at Coventry, i. 113-116;
       letter to, 327.

     Sidgwick, Mr. Henry, iii. 147.

     Siebold the anatomist, ii. 26.

     Siena, expedition to, ii. 164;
       the Cathedral, 164, 165;
       its paintings, 165.

     "Silas Marner, the Weaver of Raveloe," a sudden inspiration, ii. 204;
       story begun, 207;
       its sombre character, 210;
       subscription to, 5500, 212.

     Silence of the country, iii. 107.

     "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists," article on, finished, i. 297.

     Simpson, Mr. George, Edinburgh, letter to, iii. 135;
       proposed a yet cheaper edition of novels, 162;
       author's regret at not adopting the plan, 162.

     "Small upper room" 1866 years ago, comparison with, ii. 285.

     Smith, Albert, on "Amos Barton," i. 308.

     Smith, Barbara (Madame Bodichon), i. 205, 295.
       _See_ Madame Bodichon.

     Smith, Mr. George, offers £10,000 for "Romola," to appear in the
           _Cornhill_, ii. 244;
       accepted for £7000, 245.

     Smith, Mrs. William, letters to, on the Memoir of her husband,
           iii. 126, 142;
       on the higher education of women, 146;
       on her poems, 160.

     Smith, Sydney, anecdote of, ii. 299.

     Smith, William, author of "Thorndale," ii. 5, 212;
       his illness, iii. 109;
       his death, 119;
       memoir of, 185.

     Social dangers, i. 56.

     Somerville's, Mrs., "Connection of the Physical Sciences," i. 50.

     "Sonnets on Childhood," iii. 65.

     Sorrento, visit to, ii. 153;
       its neighborhood, Vico, and the Syren Isles, 154.

     Spain, set off on journey to, ii. 324;
       return home, iii. 9.

     "Spanish Gypsy," reading for, ii. 280;
       first act finished, 283;
       taken up again, 317;
       reading for, 321;
       recommenced in new form, 321;
       reading for, iii. 15;
       Mr. Lewes's opinion of, 22;
       shortening of, 29;
       finished, 29;
       notes on, 30;
       the _motif_ of the poem, 30;
       reviews of, 39, 40;
       second and third editions, 42, 45;
       reprinted in Germany, 140;
       number sold in 1873, 160;
       fifth edition published, 180.

     Spanish grammar, studying, ii. 282.

     Spanish, new system of learning, iii. 3;
       scenery, 4;
       travelling, 6.

     Speke, Captain, the African traveller, ii. 95, 101.

     Spencer, Herbert, first meeting with, i. 187;
       intimacy with, 201, 203;
       "Universal Postulate," 225;
       "Genesis of Science," 234;
       Essays, 371;
       his influence on Lewes, ii. 55, 56;
       enthusiastic letter from, 89;
       his new work, 206;
       visit from, 276;
       introduces Lewes to Mrs. Cross, iii. 15;
       his teaching, 184;
       last visit from, 315.

     Spencer, Mr., senior, teacher, ii. 272.

     Spinoza's "Ethics," desires not to be known as translator, i. 283.

     Spinoza's "Tractatus Theologico-Politicus," i. 147, 172.

     Spiritualistic evidence, iii. 111;
       phenomena, 116.

     "Spiritual Wives," a nasty book, iii. 130.

     Spiritualism, the phenomena of, iii. 67;
       one aspect of, 117.

     Splügen Pass, journey across, ii. 181.

     Springs of affection reopened, iii. 280.

     Stachelberg and Klönthal, iii. 207.

     Staffordshire, first journey to, i. 15.

     Stanley, Lord, his opinion of the "Scenes," i. 325.

     _Statesman_ review of "Clerical Life," ii. 6.

     Stella Collas in "Juliet," ii. 259.

     Stephenson, George, one of her heroes, ii. 241.

     St. Blasien, in the Schwarz Wald, iii. 207.

     St. Leonards, visit to, i. 223.

     St. Paul's, charity children singing, i. 203.

     Stories, on conclusions of, i. 319.

     Stowe, Mrs., Miss Cobbe's rejoinder to, ii. 253;
       letters to, iii. 60;
       on early memories of, 60;
       the popular judgment of books, 61;
       the development of religion, 62;
       a woman's experience, 63;
       on appreciation of "Old Town Folks," 66;
       Professor Stowe's psychological experience, 67;
       phenomena of spiritualism, 67;
       on the benefits of country quiet, 110;
       on spiritualistic phenomena, 116;
       on Goethe, 175;
       on her admiration for "Deronda," 202;
       on the Jewish element in "Deronda," 211.

     Stowe, Mrs., letter to Mrs. Follen, i. 220.

     Stowe, Professor, his psychological experience, iii. 66;
       a story by, iii. 129.

     Strachey, Mrs., letter to (unfinished), iii. 315.

     "Stradivarius," referred to, iii. 228.

     Strain of writing "Romola," ii. 255.

     Strauss, translation of, i. 90, 94;
       delay in publication, 95;
       difficulties, 96;
       title, 98;
       finishing translation, 101;
       Miss Hennell's help in translation, 103;
       review of, 109;
       interview with, 240;
       renewed acquaintance with, ii. 46.

     Strength while abroad, iii. 301.

     Stuart, Mrs., visit from, iii. 255.

     Study, enjoyment of, ii. 322.

     Studying for "Romola," ii. 234, 240, 246, 249, 250.

     Sturgis, Julian, high opinion of, iii. 257.

     Sully, James, letter to, on Mr. Lewes's articles, iii. 260, 269, 273;
       thanking him for proof-reading, 274.

     "Sunshine through the Clouds," i. 233.

     Surrey, enjoyment, iii. 170.

     Surrey hills preferred to the sea-side, iii. 272.

     Swansea, cockle-women at, i. 292.

     Swayne, Rev. Mr., his delight with "Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story," i. 311.

     Switzerland, letters during residence in 1849, i. 151-179.

     Sympathy, with other women, iii. 100;
       the necessity of, ii. 269;
       recovery of, iii. 293.


     Tauchnitz offers for "Clerical Life," ii. 52;
       offers £100 for German reprint of "Adam Bede," 115.

     Taylor, Isaac, influence of, i. 51.

     Taylor, Mrs. Peter, i. 196;
       sympathy with, 197;
       letters to, 218, 219;
       generous letter from, with reply, 293, 294;
       on her domestic position, ii. 213, 214;
       letter to, on Christmas at Weybridge, iii. 159;
       on difficulties of note writing, 181;
       on the Lewes Studentship, 273.

     Taylor, Professor Tom, i. 201.

     Tenby, zoological delights, i. 293;
       St. Catherine's Rock, 295;
       work done here, 295;
       Mr. Pigott's visit, 296;
       leave and return to Richmond, 297.

     Tennyson, appreciation of, iii. 229.

     "Terror" in religious education, iii. 48.

     Thackeray, Miss, "The Story of Elizabeth," ii. 299;
       her marriage, iii. 225.

     Thackeray's "Esmond," i. 214;
       opinion of "Gilfil's Love-Story," 323;
       favorable opinion of "Clerical Life," ii. 10.

     "The Impressions of Theophrastus Such," MS. sent to publishers,
           iii. 245;
       publication postponed, 252;
       third edition about sold out, 268.

     Theism, objection to, i. 339, 340.

     Thirlwall, Bishop, story of, iii. 228.

     Thompson, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, iii. 149.

     Thorns in actual fame, ii. 90.

     Thorwaldsen's Christ scourged, i. 126.

     "Thoughts in Aid of Faith," by Miss Hennell, ii. 186, 188, 195;
       favorable view of, by Miss Nightingale and Miss Julia Smith, 190.

     "Thoughts in Aid of Faith," ii. 73.

     Thoughts on death, iii. 100;
       on early death, ii. 290.

     Tichborne trial, the, iii. 106;
       Coleridge's address, 107.

     _Times_ reviews "Adam Bede," ii. 73;
       letter to, denying Liggin's authorship, 74.

     Titian's paintings, ii. 43, 45.

     "Too good to be true," i. 140.

     Torquay, visit to, iii. 25.

     Toulon to Nice, drive from, ii. 216, 217.

     Town life, depression of, ii. 203.

     Tragedy, notes on, iii. 32.

     Translator's difficulties, a, i. 99.

     Traunstein, our fellow-travellers at, ii. 35.

     Trèves, a visit to, iii. 122.

     Trollope, Anthony, his "Orley Farm," delightful letter from, ii. 246.

     Truth, desire for, i. 77.

     Truth of feeling a bond of union, i. 88.

     Tryan, Rev. Mr., an ideal character, i. 332.

     Tulloch, Principal, his "Pascal," iii. 235.

     Turguenieff, M., iii. 209.

     Turin: Count Cavour, ii. 122;
       Prince de Carignan, 122.

     Tylor's "Primitive Culture," iii. 118.

     Tyndall, Professor, "On the Constitution of the Universe," ii. 299.


     University and public school education, iii. 309.

     Use of irregular verses, iii. 40.

     "Utopias," poem on, ii. 286.


     Venice: the Grand Canal by moonlight, ii. 172;
       San Marco and Doge's Palace, 173;
       pictures in the palace, 173;
       interior of St. Mark's, 174;
       "Death of Peter the Martyr," 175;
       the Scuola di San Rocco, 176;
       Tintoretto and Titian, 176;
       Giovanni Bellini and Palma Vecchio, 177;
       sunset on the Lagoon, 177;
       Piazza of San Marco, 178;
       a remarkable picture, 178.

     Verona, the church of San Zenone, ii. 179;
       the tombs of the Scaligers, 179.

     Veronese, his "Finding of Moses," etc., ii. 44.

     Via Mala, its grand scenery, ii. 182.

     Vienna: Belvedere pictures, ii. 39;
       the Liechtenstein collection, 39;
       Hyrtl, the anatomist, 39;
       journey to Prague, 40.

     "Villette," i. 220.

     Vision of others' needs, iii. 177.

     Vision-seeing subjective, iii. 116.

     "Visiting my Relations," a volume of poetry from the authoress of,
           ii. 97.


     Wales, visit to, iii. 189.

     Wallace's "Eastern Archipelago," iii. 118.

     Wallington, Miss, her school at Nuneaton, i. 15.

     Walt Whitman, motto from, iii. 200.

     Wandsworth, takes new house at, ii. 59.

     Warwickshire magistrate, correspondence with, ii. 97.

     "Waverley," writes out, i. 16.

     Weimar recollections: interview with Strauss, i. 240;
       the Dichter Zimmer, 240;
       Scholl, 240;
       excursion to Ettersburg, 241;
       Arthur Helps, 242;
       Goethe's beech, 242;
       expedition to Ilmenau, 242;
       Wagner's operas, 243;
       "Der Freischütz," 243;
       Schiller's house, 244;
       Goethe's house, 244; his study, 245;
       the _Gartenhaus_, 246;
       the _Webicht_, 247;
       Marquis de Ferrière, 247;
       Liszt on Spontoni, 248;
       breakfast with, 249;
       his playing, 250;
       his trophies, 250;
       our expenses, 251;
       work at and books read, 268-271;
       wrote article on "Madame de Sablé," 268;
       remarks on books read, 269-271;
       return to England, 271.

     _Westminster_, the, on "Essays and Reviews," ii. 200.

     _Westminster Review_, assistant editor of, i. 186;
       heavy work, 193;
       its difficulties, 227;
       wishes to give up editorship, 229.

     _Westminster_ reviewers, i. 199, 200, 205, 210.

     Weybridge, Christmas visit to, iii. 71, 140, 159.

     Wharton's "Summary of the Laws relating to Women," i. 220.

     Whitby, visit to, iii. 85.

     Wicksteed's review of Strauss's translation in "Prospective," i. 109.

     Wilberforce, emulation of, i. 31.

     Wildbad to Brussels, iii. 295.

     Will, power of the, iii. 179.

     Wilson, Andrew, the "Abode of Snow," iii. 190.

     Witley, house bought at, iii. 215;
       life at, 240;
       Sunday receptions, 241.

     Wolseley, Sir Garnet, iii. 198.

     Woman's duty, yearning for a, i. 173;
       earnings, 282;
       full experience, iii. 63;
       constancy, on, 92, 93.

     Womanhood, her ideal of, iii. 308.

     Women's Colleges, iii. 309.

     Woolwich Arsenal, a visit to, iii. 176.

     Wordsworth's Poems, i. 45.

     Wordsworth's Thoughts on Humanity, iii. 280.

     Work at Weimar and Berlin, i. 268.

     World of light and speech, iii. 185.

     Writing under difficulties, ii. 307.


     Young, discontent of the, iii. 213.

     Young Englandism, no sympathy with, i. 124.

     Young men, desire to influence, iii. 18.

     Yorkshire, visit to, iii. 41.


     Zoological Gardens, pleasure in, ii. 209;
       friendship with the Shoebill, 209.


THE END.




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