M.E. LEWES.
By the way, Mr. Lewes tells me that you ascribe to me a hatred of blue eyes—which is amusing, since my own eyes are blue-gray. I am not in any sense one of the "good haters;" on the contrary, my weaknesses all verge toward an excessive tolerance and a tendency to melt off the outlines of things.
THE PRIORY, 21 North Bank, Regent's Park, Jan. 16, '73.
[Footnote: From The Critic of December 31, 1881. This letter was addressed to Miss Alice Wellington, now Mrs. Rollins.]
Her sensitiveness was great, and contact with an unappreciative and unsympathetic public depressing to a large degree. It was a part of that shrinking away from the world which kept her out of society, and away from all but a select few whose tastes and sympathies were largely in accordance with her own. Besides, she distrusted that common form of criticism which presumes to tell an author how he ought to have written, and assumes to itself an insight and knowledge greater than that possessed by genius itself. Concerning the value of such criticism she wrote these pertinent words:
I get confirmed in my impression that the criticism of any new writing is shifting and untrustworthy. I hardly think that any critic can have so keen a sense of the shortcomings in my works as that I groan under in the course of writing them, and I cannot imagine any edification coming to an author from a sort of reviewing which consists in attributing to him or her unexpressed opinions, and in imagining circumstances which may be alleged as petty private motives for the treatment of subjects which ought to be of general human interest.
To the same correspondent she used even stronger words concerning her dislike of ordinary criticism.
Do not expect "criticism" from me. I hate "sitting in the seat of judgment," and I would rather try to impress the public generally with the sense that they may get the best result from a book without necessarily forming an "opinion" about it, than I would rush into stating opinions of my own. The floods of nonsense printed in the form of critical opinions seem to me a chief curse of our times—a chief obstacle to true culture.
It is not to be forgotten, however, that George Eliot had done much critical work before she became a novelist, and that much of it was of a keen and cutting nature. Severely as she was handled by the critics, no one of them was more vigorous than was her treatment of Young and Cumming. Even in later years, when she took up the critical pen, the effect was felt. Mr. Lecky did not pass gently through her hands when she reviewed his Rationalism in Europe. Her criticisms in Theophrastus Such were penetrating and severe.
For the same reason, she read few works of contemporary fiction, that her mind might not be biassed and that she might not be discouraged in her own work. Always busy with some special subject which absorbed all her time and strength, she could give little attention to contemporary literature. To one correspondent she wrote,—