He is busy now correcting the proofs of his second volume. I wonder whether you have headaches and are rickety as we are, or whether you have a glorious immunity from those ills of the flesh. Your husband's photograph looks worthy to represent one of those wondrous Greeks who wrote grand dramas at eighty or ninety.
I am decidedly among the correspondents who may exercise their friends in the virtue of giving and hoping for nothing again. Otherwise I am unprofitable. Yet believe me, dear friend, I am always with lively memories of you, yours affectionately.
Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 20th Nov. 1874.
We have spent this year in much happiness, and are sorry to part with it. From the beginning of June to the end of September we had a house in Surrey, and enjoyed delicious quiet with daily walks and drives in the lovely scenery round Reigate and Dorking. October we spent in a country visit to friends (Six-Mile Bottom) and in a journey to Paris, and through the Ardennes homeward, finishing off our travels by some excursions in our own country, which we are ready to say we will never quit again—it is so much better worth knowing than most places one travels abroad to see. We make ourselves amends for being in London by going to museums to see the wonderful works of men; and the other day I was taken over the Bank of England and to Woolwich Arsenal—getting object-lessons in my old age, you perceive. Mr. Lewes is half through the proof-correcting of his second volume; and it will be matter of rejoicing when the other half is done, for we both hate proof-correcting (do you?)—the writing always seems worse than it really is when one reads it in patches, looking out for mistakes.
Letter to the Hon. Mrs. Ponsonby (now Lady Ponsonby), 10th Dec. 1874.
My books have for their main bearing a conclusion the opposite of that in which your studies seem to have painfully imprisoned you—a conclusion without which I could not have cared to write any representation of human life—namely, that the fellowship between man and man which has been the principle of development, social and moral, is not dependent on conceptions of what is not man: and that the idea of God, so far as it has been a high spiritual influence, is the ideal of a goodness entirely human (i.e., an exaltation of the human).
Have you quite fairly represented yourself in saying that you have ceased to pity your suffering fellow-men, because you can no longer think of them as individualities of immortal duration, in some other state of existence than this of which you know the pains and the pleasures?—that you feel less for them now you regard them as more miserable? And, on a closer examination of your feelings, should you find that you had lost all sense of quality in actions, all possibility of admiration that yearns to imitate, all keen sense of what is cruel and injurious, all belief that your conduct (and therefore the conduct of others) can have any difference of effect on the well-being of those immediately about you (and therefore on those afar off), whether you carelessly follow your selfish moods, or encourage that vision of others' needs which is the source of justice, tenderness, sympathy in the fullest sense—I cannot believe that your strong intellect will continue to see, in the conditions of man's appearance on this planet, a destructive relation to your sympathy. This seems to me equivalent to saying that you care no longer for color, now you know the laws of the spectrum.
As to the necessary combinations through which life is manifested, and which seem to present themselves to you as a hideous fatalism, which ought logically to petrify your volition, have they, in fact, any such influence on your ordinary course of action in the primary affairs of your existence as a human, social, domestic creature? And if they don't hinder you from taking measures for a bath, without which you know that you cannot secure the delicate cleanliness which is your second nature, why should they hinder you from a line of resolve in a higher strain of duty to your ideal, both for yourself and others? But the consideration of molecular physics is not the direct ground of human love and moral action any more than it is the direct means of composing a noble picture or of enjoying great music. One might as well hope to dissect one's own body and be merry in doing it, as take molecular physics (in which you must banish from your field of view what is specifically human) to be your dominant guide, your determiner of motives, in what is solely human. That every study has its bearing on every other is true; but pain and relief, love and sorrow, have their peculiar history, which make an experience and knowledge over and above the swing of atoms.
The teaching you quote as George Sand's would, I think, deserve to be called nonsensical if it did not deserve to be called wicked. What sort of "culture of the intellect" is that which, instead of widening the mind to a fuller and fuller response to all the elements of our existence, isolates it in a moral stupidity?—which flatters egoism with the possibility that a complex and refined human society can continue, wherein relations have no sacredness beyond the inclination of changing moods?—or figures to itself an æsthetic human life that one may compare to that of the fabled grasshoppers who were once men, but having heard the song of the Muses could do nothing but sing, and starved themselves so till they died and had a fit resurrection as grasshoppers? "And this," says Socrates, "was the return the Muses made them."
With regard to the pains and limitations of one's personal lot, I suppose there is not a single man or woman who has not more or less need of that stoical resignation which is often a hidden heroism, or who, in considering his or her past history, is not aware that it has been cruelly affected by the ignorant or selfish action of some fellow-being in a more or less close relation of life. And to my mind there can be no stronger motive than this perception, to an energetic effort that the lives nearest to us shall not suffer in a like manner from us.