The Religion of Inhumanity, within The Fortnightly Review, vol. 19, issue 78

The Religion of Inhumanity, within The Fortnightly Review, vol. 19, issue 78

Harrison, Frederic

London: Virtue & Co., 1873. The Fortnightly Review, vol. 19, issue 78, 1873-06-01, pp. 677-99

Internet Archive

1873

George Eliot to Frederic Harrison, 20 June 1873. “Before receiving your note I had already gone through your article on Fitzjames Stephen's book, but I had not seen the book itself. I have a liking for him personally, and classifying men broadly as ‘bad and good,’ I should put him far within the borders of the good. Hence I hoped that if I saw the whole context of sentences which had set my teeth on edge when I read them as quotations, their effect might be mitigated. And I was told that he had written a remonstrance against some things said in your article. So I waited until I had read his full statement. I have now both finished his book and re-read your article, and I want to tell you that on this second, more illuminated reading, my sympathy has gone with you almost unswervingly. You are pungent, but he should remember that he has been offensively contemptuous to a large number of thinkers whom any audience in the world would regard as his peers. I confess that I think the least excusable portions of his book are chiefly due to an inoculation of that shallow undiscriminating scorn, made to seem profound by a ‘rimbombo’ of rhetoric (like the singing into big jars to make demon-music in an opera) which is the disease of Carlyle's later writing. The new submission of Mr. Stephen's mind to this influence gives strange incongruities to his style. "O bubbles, love each other!" etc., etc. is a sort of question-begging which is evidently a transplantation. Raise the image of a bubble -- what can be more ridiculous than fellow-feeling? The objection is, that we are not bubbles, but men and women -- and it is for these rhetorical gentlemen to justify their "taste" in finding the eternal duration of their neighbour an indispensable reason for feeling kindly towards him. There is a great deal in the book which, according to my lights, seems to me wise and wholesome -- and you express your own agreement with the parts to which I refer. But (excepting perhaps the «passage» paragraph where you do not seem to allow enough for the terrible difficulty of limits which besets us in all moral questions, the ¶ on p. 693 -- "By insisting" etc.) I think that your criticism is thoroughly justified both in matter and tone. I do not mean all this in the presumptuous sense of delivering a judgment, but simply in the sense of expressing my fellow-feeling. And the concluding statement from pp. 694 to 699 is what one desires to see put in various forms -- a statement which embraces and explains faiths, instead of simply contending against them.” GEL 5: 421-3

Harrison, Frederic, The Religion of Inhumanity, within The Fortnightly Review, vol. 19, issue 78, George Eliot's Reading, George Eliot Archive, edited by Beverley Park Rilett. https://GeorgeEliotArchive.org, Accessed September 7, 2026. https://www.georgeeliotarchive.org/items/show/57129

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