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.
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.