Frederic Harrison to GE, London, 19 July [1866]
Title
Frederic Harrison to GE, London, 19 July [1866]
Title
Frederic Harrison to GE, London, 19 July [1866]
Sender
Frederic Harrison
Recipient
George Eliot
Date(s)
- 1866-07-19
Place
London
Letter Content
Frederic Harrison to GE, London, 19 July [1866]
MS: Tinker Collection, Yale. The copy of Felix Holt mentioned is also in the Tinker Collection. On the half-title of Vol. I Harrison has written: "Frederic Harrison | presented by the Author | 1866." Hitherto unpublished.
New Square | Linc: Inn | July 19.
My dear Mrs. Lewes,
Knowing that you were gone to take a complete rest abroad I have waited to thank you for the most welcome and most unexpected copy of Felix Holt which I received through your kindness on the morning of publication. I read it all through again just as if it was new to me altogether and I have read it over 4 or 5 times again. I find myself taking it up as I take up Tennyson or Shelley or Browning and thinking out the sequences of thought suggested by the undertones of the thought and the harmony of the lines. Can it be right to put the subtle finish of a poem into the language of a prose narrative? It is not a waste of toil? And yet whilst so many readers must miss all that, most of them even not consciously observing the fact, that they have a really new species of literature before them (a romance constructed in the artistic spirit and aim of a poem) yet it is not all lost. I know whole families where the three volumes have been read chapter by chapter and line by line and reread and recited as are the stanzas of In Memoriam. Of course the really worthy readers have taken their feast well and rightly. Indeed I observe that just those whose opinion one most wishes to have have taken the most pains to form it truly and have quite seized the task before them and the standard of thought upon which they have been called. The right people have I think read it in the right way so far as they could.
You will not need me to tell you and will not care to know about the general public or the library world or that sort of thing or what they think or say. The public (poor beast) as you know is greatly delighted and consumes the good thing largely with dim conscious reason to himself why he wags his tail over it. The critics have been too much abashed to commit much folly and some of them have risen into real sense and life. But you know a great deal more of that than you care to know already, I am sure. Enough if I say that public, critics, and people of sense have come to agree (as I ventured to say at first they would) that this is the most complete delightful and abiding thing they have yet had and each party and school are determined to see their own side in it -- the religious people, the non-religious people, the various sections of religious people, the educated, the simple, the radicals, the Tories, the socialists, the intellectual reformers, the domestic circle, the critics, the metaphysicians, the artists, the Positivists, the squires, are all quite convinced that it has been conceived from their own point of view.
Not all -- I have met a dissentient. At a big house at a big dinner of big people where for my many sins the Devil entrapped me a very beautiful and most stony young lady of fashion -- a girl with brains who understood the good and with an ossified heart which just beat strong enough to hate it declared to me with much decision and discrimination that she disliked it all exceedingly. She hated to have such people brought before her or before the world. There might be such people as Felix Holt but they should be put down. It was wrong to encourage their vagaries. It might be natural but not a subject for art. Felix and Esther might have lived and perhaps do but their wrong-headed ways are simply tiresome and disagreeable to men and women of the world. Low rough unregulated natures must be dealt with by schoolmasters parsons and constables, kept out of the way of art and society and beauty -- a girl like a block of ice, clear hard and beautiful -- a female Lord Cranbourne 499 only beautiful.
Are you sure that your destiny is not to produce a poem -- not a poem in prose but in measure -- a drama? Is it possible that there is not one yet existing or does it lie like the statue in the marble block? I am no fortune-teller but I believe it is in the Stars.
I am no fortune-teller but if I were and found ground enough to prophecy I should say that your destiny might take this turn to achieve such a picture as this. Positivism is a conception of society with all the old elements reknit and recast. In it society and men exist under the old relations reharmonized. Its dogma is vast, abstract, unpopular. The social and human form is eminently sympathetic, capable of idealization, and popular. Comte designed to close his life by the work of moulding the normal state into an ideal in a great comprehensive poem -- a task which he would never have accomplished and did not begin. But some one will some day. In the meantime the idealization of certain normal relations is eminently the task of all art. I believe, we believe, probably with no more reason than the Tories, metaphysicians and others I mentioned above that this is being done. But we are fanatics, we are people of one idea (a big idea it is true), we want more. To us it seems that the great elements of society and human life can even now be treated with completeness in their normal forms with conscious relation to the complete ideal of Comte. There is not any one, there never has been any one but yourself to whom we could look for this.
It is presumptuous and foolish for me to say this knowing so little of your plans, your interest in Comte, and the rest. But as I have ventured to unfold an old fancy of mine will you bear with me whilst I make it clearer what I mean. I certainly do not mean anything which would directly put forth doctrines or notions of Comte or even imply that the reader had ever heard of him or his ideas. I presume that art must use the [milieu] before it, and not, except for some special purposes create a new world fill it and people it with new beings. I suppose an ideal tale relating to [the] state of society which should have subjectively and objectively realized in its completeness a Positive system of life would be, even if an artistic marvel, valuable and intelligible exclusively (like Bekker's Charicles 500) to the actual student of Comte; as one might suppose a romance of society in Mars or Venus, with habits and customs of the Martial and Aphrodisian natives might be to an astronomer. I presume no true art is directly didactic or dogmatic. But I can conceive -- and forgive me for wearying you with a dream -- an ever present dream of mine that the grand features of Comte's world might be sketched in fiction in their normal relations though under the forms of our familiar life. There is nothing in Positive existence which is not in the depths of human nature and civilized society. There is no social force which it uses which is not now in germ or in disuse present around us -- no human passion which it supposes absent or which it will not set itself to govern. Now I have imagined the temporal and the spiritual power outlined so in their main functions -- the home, the school, the temple, the workroom, the teacher, the ruler, the capitalist, the labourer, the wife, the mother, the child, of the future might be drawn so as to do no violence to our familiar ideas yet consciously standing in their normal place. Types of these all exist about us. All I conceive is a state of society sufficiently favourable for them to develop themselves freely, and hold their natural relations, a surrounding adequate for them to perform normally where for instance the moral and practical forces are sufficiently elevated to control without arousing too strong resistance, and where the good forces are sufficiently strong to show their value by practical results.
But I must try and make my meaning still somewhat plainer. I just add a practical example. Let us conceive somewhere in a corner remote from disturbance say of Normandy or French Canada where something of the social tone of Catholicism lingers (a social tone I should suppose almost indispensable as a background for the Positivist relations) yet where the Revolution and Progress has deeply penetrated so far as to destroy all strictly dogmatic religion -- leaving a thorough and conscious doctrinal blank with a residuum of the Catholic social spirit -- say for instance a secluded manufacturing village near Rouen in which the Revolution and Industrial Progress had uprooted the doctrines and rights both of Catholicism and Feudalism but had left the sentiment of both, sufficiently near to the centres of modern life to be thoroughly abreast of the results of Progress of thought labour and Society yet not shaken or poisoned by the ceaseless action of the negative solvent. In such a society one could conceive the manufacturer roughly fulfilling the conditions of the normal capitalist sufficiently master of the situation to be independent of the different tone and conduct of the actual capitalist -- supplemented it might be by a rural capitalist -- a transformed French noble with just the best sentiments of feudalism surviving and none of its vices. Then the actual church and cur'e9 receding into the background the spiritual power would be represented by the local physician for instance -- a man of the new world with complete scientific and moral cultivation who should gradually acquire a free spontaneous and entirely moral ascendancy over both capitalist and labourer -- who should found and superintend schools free in every sense, dogmatically and materially one who without coming into conflict with the church or its representatives might practically succeed to the whole influence and spiritual duties of the Catholic priest and from the conscience of the powerful capitalist or capitalists and the grateful confidence of the people whom he taught and healed might have gained the requisite basis to exercise moral control of the best kind. Once given such a spiritual and such a temporal power as this under conditions favourable enough to permit them full scope and there would be little difficulty in supposing a sufficient number of families enjoying physical intellectual and moral advantages to make the tone of the place a fair representation of a new society, without supposing anything but a French village of the 19th Century -- and some one or two of these families might easily throw up normal types of the domestic forces and relations. If the conditions were such as to make possible one normal proletariate family, one normal capitalist family, one normal school, the conception of society in its main features would be complete. In France it would not be impossible to have at once the revolutionised social system with the Catholic traditions and sentiments.
Of course I do not mean a state of things in which evil was extinct -- couleur de rose -- too impassive to sustain any keen interests and too much removed from real life to be lifelike. In such a state of things it would be right to imagine all the passions and most of the evils which afflict men and societies now. Only they must not be dominant or sufficient to shake the controlling forces to pieces. Every conflict possible in the breast of man or between classes might be there and yet the humanising powers which govern them sufficiently vigorous and disciplined. There are such forces now in every society even in the worst, but in the best they are hardly enough concerted and harmonious to show their action very clearly. All that would be necessary to invent would be the conditions which would give an organic unity to the good elements. They now fight like untrained heroes without a chief. Conceive conditions in which they become disciplined veterans under a scientific leader. A strike for instance in such a society would bring out all the grave dangers of industrial existence and many of the darker passions both of workman and capitalist but if it yielded before the habitual principles common to both sides and the active intervention of a trusted teacher it would easily illustrate the superiority of the new to the old life. So too a domestic tragedy would be curbed within the narrowest limits by more systematic intervention of the feminine influences and the priest teacher adviser or friend. What the world yet wants to be shown is the possibility in real life of healthy moral control over societies -- and the infinite scope and power of wealth used morally. They are the two great elements of the future civilization on which men are blindly sceptical. And nothing I think but a miracle or a great work of art can flash it into their souls. That this miracle may be furnished to them I do not despair when I see the finest artistic mastery devoted to the solution of the greatest problems and the highest purposes. 501 Believe me to be
Most sincerely yours
Frederic Harrison.
MS: Tinker Collection, Yale. The copy of Felix Holt mentioned is also in the Tinker Collection. On the half-title of Vol. I Harrison has written: "Frederic Harrison | presented by the Author | 1866." Hitherto unpublished.
New Square | Linc: Inn | July 19.
My dear Mrs. Lewes,
Knowing that you were gone to take a complete rest abroad I have waited to thank you for the most welcome and most unexpected copy of Felix Holt which I received through your kindness on the morning of publication. I read it all through again just as if it was new to me altogether and I have read it over 4 or 5 times again. I find myself taking it up as I take up Tennyson or Shelley or Browning and thinking out the sequences of thought suggested by the undertones of the thought and the harmony of the lines. Can it be right to put the subtle finish of a poem into the language of a prose narrative? It is not a waste of toil? And yet whilst so many readers must miss all that, most of them even not consciously observing the fact, that they have a really new species of literature before them (a romance constructed in the artistic spirit and aim of a poem) yet it is not all lost. I know whole families where the three volumes have been read chapter by chapter and line by line and reread and recited as are the stanzas of In Memoriam. Of course the really worthy readers have taken their feast well and rightly. Indeed I observe that just those whose opinion one most wishes to have have taken the most pains to form it truly and have quite seized the task before them and the standard of thought upon which they have been called. The right people have I think read it in the right way so far as they could.
You will not need me to tell you and will not care to know about the general public or the library world or that sort of thing or what they think or say. The public (poor beast) as you know is greatly delighted and consumes the good thing largely with dim conscious reason to himself why he wags his tail over it. The critics have been too much abashed to commit much folly and some of them have risen into real sense and life. But you know a great deal more of that than you care to know already, I am sure. Enough if I say that public, critics, and people of sense have come to agree (as I ventured to say at first they would) that this is the most complete delightful and abiding thing they have yet had and each party and school are determined to see their own side in it -- the religious people, the non-religious people, the various sections of religious people, the educated, the simple, the radicals, the Tories, the socialists, the intellectual reformers, the domestic circle, the critics, the metaphysicians, the artists, the Positivists, the squires, are all quite convinced that it has been conceived from their own point of view.
Not all -- I have met a dissentient. At a big house at a big dinner of big people where for my many sins the Devil entrapped me a very beautiful and most stony young lady of fashion -- a girl with brains who understood the good and with an ossified heart which just beat strong enough to hate it declared to me with much decision and discrimination that she disliked it all exceedingly. She hated to have such people brought before her or before the world. There might be such people as Felix Holt but they should be put down. It was wrong to encourage their vagaries. It might be natural but not a subject for art. Felix and Esther might have lived and perhaps do but their wrong-headed ways are simply tiresome and disagreeable to men and women of the world. Low rough unregulated natures must be dealt with by schoolmasters parsons and constables, kept out of the way of art and society and beauty -- a girl like a block of ice, clear hard and beautiful -- a female Lord Cranbourne 499 only beautiful.
Are you sure that your destiny is not to produce a poem -- not a poem in prose but in measure -- a drama? Is it possible that there is not one yet existing or does it lie like the statue in the marble block? I am no fortune-teller but I believe it is in the Stars.
I am no fortune-teller but if I were and found ground enough to prophecy I should say that your destiny might take this turn to achieve such a picture as this. Positivism is a conception of society with all the old elements reknit and recast. In it society and men exist under the old relations reharmonized. Its dogma is vast, abstract, unpopular. The social and human form is eminently sympathetic, capable of idealization, and popular. Comte designed to close his life by the work of moulding the normal state into an ideal in a great comprehensive poem -- a task which he would never have accomplished and did not begin. But some one will some day. In the meantime the idealization of certain normal relations is eminently the task of all art. I believe, we believe, probably with no more reason than the Tories, metaphysicians and others I mentioned above that this is being done. But we are fanatics, we are people of one idea (a big idea it is true), we want more. To us it seems that the great elements of society and human life can even now be treated with completeness in their normal forms with conscious relation to the complete ideal of Comte. There is not any one, there never has been any one but yourself to whom we could look for this.
It is presumptuous and foolish for me to say this knowing so little of your plans, your interest in Comte, and the rest. But as I have ventured to unfold an old fancy of mine will you bear with me whilst I make it clearer what I mean. I certainly do not mean anything which would directly put forth doctrines or notions of Comte or even imply that the reader had ever heard of him or his ideas. I presume that art must use the [milieu] before it, and not, except for some special purposes create a new world fill it and people it with new beings. I suppose an ideal tale relating to [the] state of society which should have subjectively and objectively realized in its completeness a Positive system of life would be, even if an artistic marvel, valuable and intelligible exclusively (like Bekker's Charicles 500) to the actual student of Comte; as one might suppose a romance of society in Mars or Venus, with habits and customs of the Martial and Aphrodisian natives might be to an astronomer. I presume no true art is directly didactic or dogmatic. But I can conceive -- and forgive me for wearying you with a dream -- an ever present dream of mine that the grand features of Comte's world might be sketched in fiction in their normal relations though under the forms of our familiar life. There is nothing in Positive existence which is not in the depths of human nature and civilized society. There is no social force which it uses which is not now in germ or in disuse present around us -- no human passion which it supposes absent or which it will not set itself to govern. Now I have imagined the temporal and the spiritual power outlined so in their main functions -- the home, the school, the temple, the workroom, the teacher, the ruler, the capitalist, the labourer, the wife, the mother, the child, of the future might be drawn so as to do no violence to our familiar ideas yet consciously standing in their normal place. Types of these all exist about us. All I conceive is a state of society sufficiently favourable for them to develop themselves freely, and hold their natural relations, a surrounding adequate for them to perform normally where for instance the moral and practical forces are sufficiently elevated to control without arousing too strong resistance, and where the good forces are sufficiently strong to show their value by practical results.
But I must try and make my meaning still somewhat plainer. I just add a practical example. Let us conceive somewhere in a corner remote from disturbance say of Normandy or French Canada where something of the social tone of Catholicism lingers (a social tone I should suppose almost indispensable as a background for the Positivist relations) yet where the Revolution and Progress has deeply penetrated so far as to destroy all strictly dogmatic religion -- leaving a thorough and conscious doctrinal blank with a residuum of the Catholic social spirit -- say for instance a secluded manufacturing village near Rouen in which the Revolution and Industrial Progress had uprooted the doctrines and rights both of Catholicism and Feudalism but had left the sentiment of both, sufficiently near to the centres of modern life to be thoroughly abreast of the results of Progress of thought labour and Society yet not shaken or poisoned by the ceaseless action of the negative solvent. In such a society one could conceive the manufacturer roughly fulfilling the conditions of the normal capitalist sufficiently master of the situation to be independent of the different tone and conduct of the actual capitalist -- supplemented it might be by a rural capitalist -- a transformed French noble with just the best sentiments of feudalism surviving and none of its vices. Then the actual church and cur'e9 receding into the background the spiritual power would be represented by the local physician for instance -- a man of the new world with complete scientific and moral cultivation who should gradually acquire a free spontaneous and entirely moral ascendancy over both capitalist and labourer -- who should found and superintend schools free in every sense, dogmatically and materially one who without coming into conflict with the church or its representatives might practically succeed to the whole influence and spiritual duties of the Catholic priest and from the conscience of the powerful capitalist or capitalists and the grateful confidence of the people whom he taught and healed might have gained the requisite basis to exercise moral control of the best kind. Once given such a spiritual and such a temporal power as this under conditions favourable enough to permit them full scope and there would be little difficulty in supposing a sufficient number of families enjoying physical intellectual and moral advantages to make the tone of the place a fair representation of a new society, without supposing anything but a French village of the 19th Century -- and some one or two of these families might easily throw up normal types of the domestic forces and relations. If the conditions were such as to make possible one normal proletariate family, one normal capitalist family, one normal school, the conception of society in its main features would be complete. In France it would not be impossible to have at once the revolutionised social system with the Catholic traditions and sentiments.
Of course I do not mean a state of things in which evil was extinct -- couleur de rose -- too impassive to sustain any keen interests and too much removed from real life to be lifelike. In such a state of things it would be right to imagine all the passions and most of the evils which afflict men and societies now. Only they must not be dominant or sufficient to shake the controlling forces to pieces. Every conflict possible in the breast of man or between classes might be there and yet the humanising powers which govern them sufficiently vigorous and disciplined. There are such forces now in every society even in the worst, but in the best they are hardly enough concerted and harmonious to show their action very clearly. All that would be necessary to invent would be the conditions which would give an organic unity to the good elements. They now fight like untrained heroes without a chief. Conceive conditions in which they become disciplined veterans under a scientific leader. A strike for instance in such a society would bring out all the grave dangers of industrial existence and many of the darker passions both of workman and capitalist but if it yielded before the habitual principles common to both sides and the active intervention of a trusted teacher it would easily illustrate the superiority of the new to the old life. So too a domestic tragedy would be curbed within the narrowest limits by more systematic intervention of the feminine influences and the priest teacher adviser or friend. What the world yet wants to be shown is the possibility in real life of healthy moral control over societies -- and the infinite scope and power of wealth used morally. They are the two great elements of the future civilization on which men are blindly sceptical. And nothing I think but a miracle or a great work of art can flash it into their souls. That this miracle may be furnished to them I do not despair when I see the finest artistic mastery devoted to the solution of the greatest problems and the highest purposes. 501 Believe me to be
Most sincerely yours
Frederic Harrison.
Signature
Frederic Harrison.
Citation
Frederic Harrison, Frederic Harrison to GE, London, 19 July [1866], Complete George Eliot Letters(2026), George Eliot Archive, edited by Beverley Park Rilett. https://GeorgeEliotArchive.org, Accessed September 7, 2026. https://www.georgeeliotarchive.org/items/show/91842