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.
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?
Letter to John Blackwood, 26th Jan. 1878.