Chapter III (2)

Dear father is so decidedly progressing towards recovery that I am full of quiet joy--a gentle dawning light after the moonlight of sorrow. I have found already some of the "sweet uses" that belong only to what is called trouble, which is, after all, only a deepened gaze into life, like the sight of the darker blue and the thickening host of stars when the hazy effect of twilight is gone--as our dear Blanco White said of death. I shall have less time than I have had at my own disposal, probably; but I feel prepared to accept life, nay, lovingly to embrace it, in any form in which it shall present itself.

Some time in May Mr. Evans and his daughter went to St.
Leonard's, and remained there till near the end of June. His
mortal illness had now taken hold of him, and this was a
depressing time, both for him and for her, as will be seen
from the following letters:

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, May, 1848.]

Your words of affection seem to make this earthly atmosphere sit less heavily on my shoulders, and in gratitude I must send you my thanks before I begin to read of Henry Gow and Fair Catharine for father's delectation. In truth, I have found it somewhat difficult to live for the last week--conscious all the time that the only additions to my lot worth having must be more strength to love in my own nature; but perhaps this very consciousness has an irritating rather than a soothing effect. I have a fit of sensitiveness upon me, which, after all, is but egotism and mental idleness. The enthusiasm without which one cannot even pour out breakfast well (at least _I_ cannot) has forsaken me. You may laugh, and wonder when my enthusiasm has displayed itself, but that will only prove that you are no seer. I can never live long without it in some form or other. I possess my soul in patience for a time, believing that this dark, damp vault in which I am groping will soon come to an end, and the fresh, green earth and the bright sky be all the more precious to me. But for the present my address is Grief Castle, on the River of Gloom, in the Valley of Dolor. I was amused to find that Castle Campbell in Scotland was called so. Truly for many seasons in my life I should have been an appropriate denizen of such a place; but I have faith that unless I am destined to insanity, I shall never again abide long in that same castle. I heartily say Amen to your dictum about the cheerfulness of "large moral regions." Where _thought_ and _love_ are active--thought the formative power, love the vitalizing--there can be no sadness. They are in themselves a more intense and extended participation of a divine existence. As they grow, the highest species of faith grows too, and all things are possible. I don't know why I should prose in this way to you. But I wanted to thank you for your note, and all this selfish grumbling was at my pen's end. And now I have no time to redeem myself. We shall not stay long away from home, I feel sure.

[Sidenote: Letter to Charles Bray, 31st May, 1848.]

Father has done wonders in the 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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!

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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!--'[Greek: nenikekas Galilaie].' 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!"

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, end of 1848.]

Thank you for a sight of our blessed St. Francis's[25] 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.

[Sidenote: 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 her have
not been preserved.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Houghton, Sunday evening, 1849.]

I have been holding a court of conscience, and I cannot enjoy my Sunday's music without restoring harmony, without entering a protest against that superficial soul of mine which is perpetually contradicting and belying the true inner soul. I am in that mood which, in another age of the world, would have led me to put on sackcloth and pour ashes on my head, when I call to mind the sins of my tongue--my animadversions on the faults of others, as if I thought myself to be something when I am nothing. When shall I attain to the true spirit of love which Paul has taught for all the ages? I want no one to excuse me, dear Fanny; I only want to remove the shadow of my miserable words and deeds from before the divine image of truth and goodness, which I would have all beings worship. I need the Jesuits' discipline of silence, and though my "evil speaking" issues from the intellectual point of view rather than the moral--though there may be gall in the thought while there is honey in the feeling, yet the evil speaking is wrong. We may satirize character and qualities in the abstract without injury to our moral nature, but persons hardly ever. Poor hints and sketches of souls as we are--with some slight, transient vision of the perfect and the true--we had need help each other to gaze at the blessed heavens instead of peering into each other's eyes to find out the motes there.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Sunday morning, 4th Feb. 1849.]

I have not touched the piano for nearly two months until this morning, when, father being better, I was determined to play a mass before the piano is utterly out of tune again. _Write, asking for nothing again_, like a true disciple of Jesus. I am still feeling rather shattered in brain and limbs; but do not suppose that I lack inward peace and strength. My body is the defaulter--_consciously_ so. I triumph over all things in the spirit, but the flesh is weak, and disgraces itself by headaches and backaches. I am delighted to find that you mention Macaulay, because that is an indication that Mr. Hennell has been reading him. I thought of Mr. H. all through the book, as the only person I could be quite sure would enjoy it as much as I did myself. I did not know if it would interest you: tell me more explicitly that it does. Think of Babylon being unearthed in spite of the prophecies? Truly we are looking before and after, "au jour d'aujourd'hui," as Monsieur Bricolin says. Send me the criticism of Jacques the morn's morning--only beware there are not too many blasphemies against my divinity.

Paint soap-bubbles--and never fear but I will find _a_ meaning, though very likely not your meaning. Paint the Crucifixion in a bubble--after Turner--and then the Resurrection: I see them now.

There has been a vulgar man sitting by while I have been writing, and I have been saying parenthetical bits of civility to him to help out poor father in his conversation, so I have not been quite sure what I have been saying to you. I have woful aches which take up half my nervous strength.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, 9th Feb. 1849.]

My life is a perpetual nightmare, and always haunted by something to be done, which I have never the time, or, rather, the energy, to do. Opportunity is kind, but only to the industrious, and I, alas! am not one of them. I have sat down in desperation this evening, though dear father is very uneasy, and his moans distract me, just to tell you that you have full absolution for your criticism, which I do not reckon of the impertinent order. I wish you thoroughly to understand that the writers who have most profoundly influenced me--who have rolled away the waters from their bed, raised new mountains and spread delicious valleys for me--are not in the least oracles to me. It is just possible that I may not embrace one of their opinions; that I may wish my life to be shaped quite differently from theirs. For instance, it would signify nothing to me if a very wise person were to stun me with proofs that Rousseau's views of life, religion, and government are miserably erroneous--that he was guilty of some of the worst _bassesses_ that have degraded civilized man. I might admit all this: and it would be not the less true that Rousseau's genius has sent that electric thrill through my intellectual and moral frame which has awakened me to new perceptions; which has made man and nature a fresh world of thought and feeling to me; and this not by teaching me any new belief. It is simply that the rushing mighty wind of his inspiration has so quickened my faculties that I have been able to shape more definitely for myself ideas which had previously dwelt as dim _Ahnungen_ in my soul; the fire of his genius has so fused together old thoughts and prejudices that I have been ready to make new combinations.

It is thus with George Sand. I should never dream of going to her writings as a moral code or text-book. I don't care whether I agree with her about marriage or not--whether I think the design of her plot correct, or that she had no precise design at all, but began to write as the spirit moved her, and trusted to Providence for the catastrophe, which I think the more probable case. It is sufficient for me, as a reason for bowing before her in eternal gratitude to that "great power of God manifested in her," that I cannot read six pages of hers without feeling that it is given to her to delineate human passion and its results, and (I must say, in spite of your judgment) some of the moral instincts and their tendencies, with such truthfulness, such nicety of discrimination, such tragic power, and, withal, such loving, gentle humor, that one might live a century with nothing but one's own dull faculties, and not know so much as those six pages will suggest. The psychological anatomy of Jacques and Fernande in the early days of their marriage seems quite preternaturally true--I mean that her power of describing it is preternatural. Fernande and Jacques are merely the feminine and the masculine nature, and their early married life an every-day tragedy; but I will not dilate on the book or on your criticism, for I am so sleepy that I should write nothing but _bêtises_. I have at last the most delightful "De imitatione Christi," with quaint woodcuts. One breathes a cool air as of cloisters in the book--it makes one long to be a saint for a few months. Verily its piety has its foundations in the depth of the divine-human soul.

In March Miss Evans wrote a short notice of the "Nemesis of
Faith" for the _Coventry Herald_, in which she says:

"We are sure that its author is a bright, particular star, though he sometimes leaves us in doubt whether he be not a fallen 'son of the morning.'"

The paper was sent to Mr. Froude, and on 23d March Mrs. Bray
writes to Miss Hennell: "Last night at dusk M. A. came
running in in high glee with a most charming note from
Froude, naïvely and prettily requesting her to reveal
herself. He says he recognized her hand in the review in the
_Coventry Herald_, and if she thinks him a fallen star she
might help him to rise, but he 'believes he has only been
dipped in the Styx, and is not much the worse for the bath.'
Poor girl, I am so pleased she should have this little
episode in her dull life."

The next letter again refers to Mr. Froude's books.

[Sidenote: Letter to Miss Sara Hennell, Wednesday, April, 1849.]

Tell me not that I am a mere prater--that feeling never talks. I will talk, and caress, and look lovingly, until death makes me as stony as the Gorgon-like heads of all the judicious people I know. What is anything worth until it is uttered? Is not the universe one great utterance? Utterance there must be in word or deed to make life of any worth. Every true pentecost is a gift of utterance. Life is too short and opportunities too meagre for many deeds--besides, the best friendships are precisely those where there is no possibility of material helpfulness--and I would take no deeds as an adequate compensation for the frigid, glassy eye and hard, indifferent tones of one's very solid and sensible and conscientious friend. You will wonder of what this is _à propos_--only of a little bitterness in my own soul just at this moment, and not of anything between you and me. I have nothing to tell you, for all the "haps" of my life are so indifferent. I spin my existence so entirely out of myself that there is a sad want of proper names in my conversation, and I am becoming a greater bore than ever. It is a consciousness of this that has kept me from writing to you. My letters would be a sort of hermit's diary. I have so liked the thought of your enjoying the "Nemesis of Faith." I quote Keats's sonnet, _à propos_ of that book. It has made me feel--

"Like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez--when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific, and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise--
Silent, upon a peak in Darien."

You must read "The Shadows of the Clouds." It produces a sort of palpitation that one hardly knows whether to call wretched or delightful. I cannot take up the book again, though wanting very much to read it more closely. Poor and shallow as one's own soul is, it is blessed to think that a sort of transubstantiation is possible by which the greater ones can live in us. Egotism apart, another's greatness, beauty, or bliss is one's own. And let us sing a _Magnificat_ when we are conscious that this power of expansion and sympathy is growing, just in proportion as the individual satisfactions are lessening. Miserable dust of the earth we are, but it is worth while to be so, for the sake of the living soul--the breath of God within us. You see I can do nothing but scribble my own prosy stuff--such chopped straw as my soul is foddered on. I am translating the "Tractatus Theologico-Politicus" of Spinoza, and seem to want the only friend that knows how to praise or blame. How exquisite is the satisfaction of feeling that another mind than your own sees precisely where and what is the difficulty--and can exactly appreciate the success with which it is overcome. One knows--_sed longo intervallo_--the full meaning of the "fit audience though few." How an artist must hate the noodles that stare at his picture, with a vague notion that it _is_ a clever thing to be able to paint.

[Sidenote: Letter to Mrs. Pears, 10th May, 1849.]

I know it will gladden your heart to hear that father spoke of you the other day with affection and gratitude. He remembers you as one who helped to strengthen that beautiful spirit of resignation which has never left him through his long trial. His mind is as clear and rational as ever, notwithstanding his feebleness, and he gives me a thousand little proofs that he understands my affection and responds to it. These are very precious moments to me; my chair by father's bedside is a very blessed seat to me. My delight in the idea that you are being benefited after all, prevents me from regretting you, though you are just the friend that would complete my comfort. Every addition to your power of enjoying life is an expansion of mine. I partake of your ebb and flow. I am going to my post now. I have just snatched an interval to let you know that, though you have taken away a part of yourself from me, neither you nor any one else can take the whole.

It will have been seen from these late letters, that the last
few months of her father's illness had been a terrible strain
on his daughter's health and spirits. She did all the nursing
herself, and Mrs. Congreve (who was then Miss Bury, daughter
of the doctor who was attending Mr. Evans--and who, it will
be seen, subsequently became perhaps the most intimate and
the closest of George Eliot's friends) tells me that her
father told her at the time that he never saw a patient more
admirably and thoroughly cared for. The translating was a
great relief when she could get to it. Under date of 19th
April, 1849, Mrs. Bray writes to Miss Hennell, "M. A. is
happy now with this Spinoza to do: she says it is such a rest
for her mind."

The next letter to Rosehill pathetically describes how the
end came at last to Mr. Evans's sufferings:

[Sidenote: Letter to the Brays, half-past nine, Wednesday morning, 31st May, 1849.]

Dear friends, Mr. Bury told us last night that he thought father would not last till morning. I sat by him with my hand in his till four o'clock, and he then became quieter and has had some comfortable sleep. He is obviously weaker this morning, and has been for the last two or three days so painfully reduced that I dread to think what his dear frame may become before life gives way. My brother slept here last night, and will be here again to-night. What shall I be without my father? It will seem as if a part of my moral nature were gone. I write when I can, but I do not know whether my letter will do to send this evening.

_P.S._--Father is very, very much weaker this evening.

Mr. Evans died during that night, 31st May, 1849.

_SUMMARY._

MAY, 1846, TO MAY, 1849.

Visit to Mrs. Hennell at Hackney--Letters to Mrs.
Bray--Strauss translation published--Visit to Dover with
father--Classical books wanted--Pleasure in Strauss's
letter--Brays suspect novel-writing--Letters to Miss Sara
Hennell--Good spirits--Wicksteed's review of the Strauss
translation--Reading Foster's life--Visit to Griff--Child's
view of God (_à propos_ of Miss Hennell's "Heliados")--Visit
to London--"Elijah"--Likes London less--The Sibree family and
Mrs. John Cash's reminiscences--Letter to Miss Mary
Sibree--Letters to Miss Sara Hennell--Mental
depression--Opinion of Charles Hennell's "Inquiry"--Visit to
the Isle of Wight with father--Admiration of
Richardson--Blanco White--Delight in George Sand's "Lettres
d'un Voyageur"--Letters to Mr. John Sibree--Opinion of Mrs.
Hannah More's letters--"Tancred," "Coningsby," and
"Sybil"--D'Israeli's theory of races--Gentile nature kicks
against superiority of Jews--Bows only to the supremacy of
Hebrew poetry--Superiority of music among the arts--Relation
of religion to art--Thorwaldsen's Christ--Admiration of
Roberts and Creswick--The intellect and moral nature restrain
the passions and senses--Mr. Dawson the
lecturer--Satisfaction in French Revolution of '48--The men
of the barricade bowing to the image of Christ--Difference
between French and English working-classes--The need of
utterance--Sympathy with Mr. Sibree in religious
difficulties--Longing for a high attic in Geneva--Letters to
Miss Sara Hennell--Views on correspondence--Mental
depression--Father's illness--Father better--Goes with him to
St. Leonard's--Letter to Charles Bray--Depression to be
overcome by thought and love--Admiration of Louis
Blanc--Recovery from depression--"Jane Eyre"--Return to
Coventry--Meets Emerson--Strauss's pamphlet on Julian the
Apostate--Carlyle's eulogium on Emerson--Francis
Newman--Suffering from depression--Letter to Mrs.
Houghton--Self-condemnation for evil speaking--Letters to
Miss Hennell--Macaulay's History--On the influence of George
Sand's and Rousseau's writing--Writes review of the "Nemesis
of Faith" for the _Coventry Herald_--Opinion of the "Nemesis"
and the "Shadows of the Clouds"--Translating Spinoza's
"Tractatus Theologico-Politicus"--Letter to Mrs. Pears--The
consolations of nursing--Strain of father's illness--Father's
death.

FOOTNOTES:

[20] Organs of Combativeness.

[21] Afterwards acknowledged by the author, Robert Landor (brother of Walter Savage Landor), who also wrote the "Fountain of Arethusa," etc.

[22] John Foster, Baptist minister, born 1770, died 1843.

[23] An _Ahnung_--a presentiment--of her own future.

[24] On Emerson.

[25] Francis Newman.