The Life of George Eliot. George Eliot

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СКАЧАТЬ way of walking and eating—for him—but he makes not the slightest attempt to amuse himself, so that I scarcely feel easy in following my own bent even for an hour. I have told you everything now, except that I look amiable in spite of a strong tendency to look black, and speak gently, though with a strong propensity to be snappish. Pity me, ye happier spirits that look amiable and speak gently because ye are amiable and gentle.

      Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 4th June, 1848.

      Alas for the fate of poor mortals, which condemns them to wake up some fine morning and find all the poetry in which their world was bathed only the evening before utterly gone!—the hard, angular world of chairs and tables and looking-glasses staring at them in all its naked prose! It is so in all the stages of life; the poetry of girlhood goes, the poetry of love and marriage, the poetry of maternity, and at last the very poetry of duty forsakes us for a season, and we see ourselves, and all about us, as nothing more than miserable agglomerations of atoms—poor tentative efforts of the Natur Princip to mould a personality. This is the state of prostration, the self-abnegation, through which the soul must go, and to which perhaps it must again and again return, that its poetry or religion, which is the same thing, may be a real, ever-flowing river, fresh from the windows of heaven and the fountains of the great deep—not an artificial basin, with grotto-work and gold-fish. I feel a sort of madness growing upon me, just the opposite of the delirium which makes people fancy that their bodies are filling the room. It seems to me as if I were shrinking into that mathematical abstraction, a point. But I am wasting this "good Sunday morning" in grumblings.

      Letter to Charles Bray, 8th June, 1848.

      Poor Louis Blanc! The newspapers make me melancholy; but shame upon me that I say "poor." The day will come when there will be a temple of white marble, where sweet incense and anthems shall rise to the memory of every man and woman who has had a deep Ahnung—a presentiment, a yearning, or a clear vision—of the time when this miserable reign of Mammon shall end; when men shall be no longer "like the fishes of the sea," society no more like a face one half of which—the side of profession, of lip-faith—is fair and God-like; the other half—the side of deeds and institutions—with a hard, old, wrinkled skin puckered into the sneer of a Mephistopheles. I worship the man who has written as the climax of his appeal against society, "L'inegalité des talents doit aboutir non à l'inegalité des retributions mais à l'inegalité des devoirs." You will wonder what has wrought me up into this fury. It is the loathsome fawning, the transparent hypocrisy, the systematic giving as little as possible for as much as possible that one meets with here at every turn. I feel that society is training men and women for hell.

      Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 23d June, 1848.

      All creatures about to moult, or to cast off an old skin, or enter on any new metamorphosis, have sickly feelings. It was so with me. But now I am set free from the irritating, worn-out integument. I am entering on a new period of my life, which makes me look back on the past as something incredibly poor and contemptible. I am enjoying repose, strength, and ardor in a greater degree than I have ever known, and yet I never felt my own insignificance and imperfection so completely. My heart bleeds for dear father's pains, but it is blessed to be at hand to give the soothing word and act needed. I should not have written this description of myself but that I felt your affectionate letter demanded some I-ism, which, after all, is often humility rather than pride. Paris, poor Paris—alas! alas!

      Letter to Charles Bray, June, 1848.

      I have read "Jane Eyre," and shall be glad to know what you admire in it. All self-sacrifice is good, but one would like it to be in a somewhat nobler cause than that of a diabolical law which chains a man soul and body to a putrefying carcass. However, the book is interesting; only I wish the characters would talk a little less like the heroes and heroines of police reports.

      About the beginning of July Miss Evans and her father returned to Coventry; and the 13th July was a memorable day, as Emerson came to visit the Brays, and she went with them to Stratford. All she says herself about it is in this note.

      Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Friday, July, 1848.

      I have seen Emerson—the first man I have ever seen. But you have seen still more of him, so I need not tell you what he is. I shall leave Cara to tell how the day—the Emerson day—was spent, for I have a swimming head from hanging over the desk to write business letters for father. Have you seen the review of Strauss's pamphlet in the Edinburgh? The title is "Der Romantiker auf dem Throne der Cäsaren, oder Julian der Abtrünnige"—a sort of erudite satire on the King of Prussia; but the reviewer pronounces it to have a permanent value quite apart from this fugitive interest. The "Romantiker," or Romanticist, is one who, in literature, in the arts, in religion or politics, endeavors to revive the dead past. Julian was a romanticist in wishing to restore the Greek religion and its spirit, when mankind had entered on the new development. But you have very likely seen the review. I must copy one passage, translated from the conclusion of Strauss's pamphlet, lest you should not have met with it. "Christian writers have disfigured the death-scene of Julian. They have represented him as furious, blaspheming, despairing, and in his despair exclaiming, Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!—'νενίκηκας Γαλιλαῖε.' This phrase, though false as history, has a truth in it. It contains a prophecy—to us a consoling prophecy—and it is this: Every Julian—i.e., every great and powerful man—who would attempt to resuscitate a state of society which has died, will infallibly be vanquished by the Galilean—for the Galilean is nothing less than the genius of the future!"

      Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Dec. 1848.

      Father's tongue has just given utterance to a thought which has been very visibly radiating from his eager eyes for some minutes. "I thought you were going on with the book." I can only bless you for those two notes, which have emanated from you like so much ambrosial scent from roses and lavender. Not less am I grateful for the Carlyle eulogium.24 I have shed some quite delicious tears over it. This is a world worth abiding in while one man can thus venerate and love another. More anon—this from my doleful prison of stupidity and barrenness, with a yawning trapdoor ready to let me down into utter fatuity. But I can even yet feel the omnipotence of a glorious chord. Poor pebble as I am, left entangled among slimy weeds, I can yet hear from afar the rushing of the blessed torrent, and rejoice that it is there to bathe and brighten other pebbles less unworthy of the polishing.

      Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, end of 1848.

      Thank you for a sight of our blessed St. Francis's25 letter. There is no imaginable moment in which the thought of such a being could be an intrusion. His soul is a blessed yea. There is a sort of blasphemy in that proverbial phrase, "Too good to be true." The highest inspiration of the purest, noblest human soul, is the nearest expression of the truth. Those extinct volcanoes of one's spiritual life—those eruptions of the intellect and the passions which have scattered the lava of doubt and negation over our early faith—are only a glorious Himalayan chain, beneath which new valleys of undreamed richness and beauty will spread themselves. Shall we poor earthworms have sublimer thoughts than the universe, of which we are poor chips—mere effluvia of mind—shall we have sublimer thoughts than that universe can furnish out into reality? I am living unspeakable moments, and can write no more.

      Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Jan. 1849.

      I think of you perpetually, but my thoughts are all aqueous; they will not crystallize—they are as fleeting as ripples on the sea. I am suffering perhaps as acutely as ever I did in my life. Breathe a wish that I may gather strength—the fragrance of your wish will reach me somehow.

      The next letter is to Mrs. Houghton, who, it will be remembered, was the only daughter by Mr. Evans's first marriage. Miss Evans had more intellectual sympathy with this half-sister Fanny than with any of the other members of her family, and it is a pity that more of the letters to СКАЧАТЬ