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.
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.
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.
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.