George Eliot's Life, as Related in Her Letters and Journals. Vol. 1 (of 3). George Eliot
pale lead-color. O how luxuriously joyous to have the wind of heaven blow on one after being stived in a human atmosphere – to feel one's heart leap up after the pressure that Shakespeare so admirably describes: "When a man's wit is not seconded by the forward chick understanding, it strikes a man as dead as a large reckoning in a small room." But it is time I check this Byronic invective, and, in doing so, I am reminded of Corinne's, or rather Oswald's, reproof – "La vie est un combat pas un hymne." We should aim to be like a plant in the chamber of sickness – dispensing purifying air even in a region that turns all pale its verdure, and cramps its instinctive propensity to expand. Society is a wide nursery of plants, where the hundreds decompose to nourish the future ten, after giving collateral benefits to their contemporaries destined for a fairer garden. An awful thought! one so heavy that if our souls could once sustain its whole weight, or, rather, if its whole weight were once to drop on them, they would break and burst their tenements. How long will this continue? The cry of the martyrs heard by St. John finds an echo in every heart that, like Solomon's, groans under "the outrage and oppression with which earth is filled." Events are now so momentous, and the elements of society in so chemically critical a state, that a drop seems enough to change its whole form.
I am reading Harris's "Great Teacher," and am innig bewegt, as a German would say, by its stirring eloquence, which leaves you no time or strength for a cold estimate of the writer's strict merits. I wish I could read some extracts to you. Isaac Taylor's work is not yet complete. When it is so, I hope to reperuse it. Since I wrote to you I have had Aimé Martin's work, "L'Education des Mères," lent to me, and I have found it to be the real Greece whence "Woman's Mission" has only imported to us a few marbles – but! Martin is a soi-disant rational Christian, if I mistake him not. I send you an epitaph which he mentions on a tomb in Paris – that of a mother: "Dors en paix, O ma mère, ton fils t'obeira toujours." I am reading eclectically Mrs. Hemans's poems, and venture to recommend to your perusal, if unknown to you, one of the longest ones – "The Forest Sanctuary." I can give it my pet adjective – exquisite.
I have adopted as my motto, "Certum pete finem" – seek a sure end.16
Come when you would best like to do so: if my heart beat at all at the time, it will be with a more rapid motion than the general, from the joy of seeing you. I cannot promise you more than calmness when that flush is past, for I am aweary, aweary – longing for rest, which seems to fly from my very anticipations. But this wrought-up sensitiveness which makes me shrink from all contact is, I know, not for communication or sympathy, and is, from that very character, a kind of trial best suited for me. Whatever tends to render us ill-contented with ourselves, and more earnest aspirants after perfect truth and goodness, is gold, though it come to us all molten and burning, and we know not our treasure until we have had long smarting.
It is impossible, to me at least, to be poetical in cold weather. I understand the Icelanders have much national poetry, but I guess it was written in the neighborhood of the boiling springs. I will promise to be as cheerful and as Christmas-like as my rickety body and chameleon-like spirits will allow. I am about to commence the making of mince-pies, with all the interesting sensations characterizing young enterprise or effort.
Happily, the moody, melancholy temperament has some counterbalancing advantages to those of the sanguine: it does sometimes meet with results more favorable than it expected, and by its knack of imagining the pessimus, cheats the world of its power to disappoint. The very worm-like originator of this coil of sentiment is the fact that you write more cheerfully of yourself than I had been thinking of you, and that, ergo, I am pleased.
On Monday and Tuesday my father and I were occupied with the sale of furniture at our new house: it is probable that we shall migrate thither in a month. I shall be incessantly hurried until after our departure, but at present I have to be grateful for a smooth passage through contemplated difficulties. Sewing is my staple article of commerce with the hard trader, Time. Now the wind has veered to the south I hope to do much more, and that with greater zest than I have done for many months – I mean, of all kinds.
I have been reading the three volumes of the "Life and Times of Louis the Fourteenth," and am as eagerly waiting for the fourth and last as any voracious novel-reader for Bulwer's last. I am afraid I am getting quite martial in my spirit, and, in the warmth of my sympathy for Turenne and Condé, losing my hatred of war. Such a conflict between individual and moral influence is no novelty. But certainly war, though the heaviest scourge with which the divine wrath against sin is manifested in Time, has been a necessary vent for impurities and a channel for tempestuous passions that must have otherwise made the whole earth, like the land of the devoted Canaanites, to vomit forth the inhabitants thereof. Awful as such a sentiment appears, it seems to me that in the present condition of man (and I do not mean this in the sense that Cowper does), such a purgation of the body politic is probably essential to its health. A foreign war would soon put an end to our national humors, that are growing to so alarming a head.
What do you think of the progress of architecture as a subject for poetry?
I am just about to set out on a purchasing expedition to Coventry: you may therefore conceive that I am full of little plans and anxieties, and will understand why I should be brief. I hope by the close of next week that we and our effects shall be deposited at Foleshill, and until then and afterwards I shall be fully occupied, so that I am sure you will not expect to hear from me for the next six weeks. One little bit of unreasonableness you must grant me – the request for a letter from yourself within that time.
Letters to Miss Lewis – First visit to London – Religious asceticism – Pascal – Hannah More's letters – Young's "Infidel Reclaimed" – Michaelmas visitors – "Life of Wilberforce" – Nineteenth birthday – Oratorio at Coventry – Religious objections to music – Letters to Mrs. Samuel Evans – Religious reflections – Besetting sin ambition – Letters to Miss Lewis – Objections to fiction-reading – Religious contentions on the nature of the visible Church – First poem – Account of books read and studies pursued – Wordsworth – Twentieth birthday – German begun – Plan of Chart of Ecclesiastical History – Religious controversies – Oxford Tracts – "Lyra Apostolica" – "Christian Year" – Chart of Ecclesiastical History forestalled – Italian begun – Trip to Derbyshire and Staffordshire – "Don Quixote" – Spenser's "Faery Queen" – Mrs. Somerville's "Connection of the Physical Sciences" – Dislike of housekeeping work – Removal to Coventry decided – "Ancient Christianity and the Oxford Tracts," by Isaac Taylor, and Mrs. John Cash's impression of its effect – Determination not to feed on the broth of literature – Visit to Birmingham to hear the "Messiah" – Reading Schiller's "Maria Stuart," and Tasso – Translation of German poem – Depression of surroundings at Griff – Reading Harris's "Great Teacher," Aimé Martin's "L'Education des Mères," and Mrs. Hemans's Poems – Selling furniture at new house – Sewing – Reading "Life and Times of Louis XIV." – Removal to Foleshill road, Coventry.
CHAPTER II
New circumstances now created a change almost amounting to a revolution in Miss Evans's life. Mr. Isaac Evans, who had been associated for some time with his father in the land-agency business, married, and it was arranged that he should take over the establishment at Griff. This led to the removal in March, 1841, of Mr. Robert Evans and his daughter to a house on the Foleshill road, in the immediate neighborhood of Coventry. The house is still standing, although considerably altered – a semi-detached house with a good bit of garden round it, and from its upper windows a wide view over the surrounding country, the immediate foreground being unfortunately, however, disfigured by the presence of mills and chimneys. It is town life now instead of country life, and we feel the effects at once in the tone of the subsequent letters. The friendships now formed with Mr. and Mrs. Bray and Miss Sara Hennell particularly, and the being brought within reach of a small circle of cultivated people generally, render this change of residence an exceedingly important
By a curious coincidence, when she became Mrs. Cross, this actually was her motto.