Chapter III (1)

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.]