It was very dear of you to write to me before you finished your holiday. My love attends you all.
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.
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.
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!