GE to Alexander Main, London, 22 April 1873
Title
GE to Alexander Main, London, 22 April 1873
Title
GE to Alexander Main, London, 22 April 1873
Sender
George Eliot
Recipient
Alexander Main
Date(s)
- 1873-04-22
Place
London
Letter Content
GE to Alexander Main, London, 22 April 1873
Text: Main's copy owned by Mr. John R. Sprunt. Hitherto unpublished.
The Priory, | 21. North Bank, | Regents Park.
April 22. 73.
My dear Mr. Main
Be sure that I shall feel a strong interest in seeing how your powers exhibit themselves in this delightful task of helping to impress on men's minds the life of dear, ever-memorable Johnson. From what Mr. Lewes tells me I am very hopeful that we shall rejoice in the issue of your labours.
There is one characteristic in you which makes me smile happily: it is akin to a quality and habit strongly marked in my husband. I mean, the promptness with which you set to work at any labour you have determined on. You lose no time in what he calls "pottering." If you had resolved to translate the Iliad (which I feel thankfully sure you have not resolved to do) you would take down the book and render the two first verses while your tea was being made. That promptitude is a great gift of nature.
As to quotations, please -- please be very moderate, whether they come from Shakespeare or any other servant of the Muses. A quotation often makes a fine summit to a climax, especially when it comes from some elder author, or from the Bible, so that there is a certain remoteness in the English as if it came from long departed prophets who lived as citizens of the ages that were future to them and had our thoughts before we were born. But I hate a style speckled with quotations. 775
Nevertheless I enter into what I think is your feeling, that when the consciousness is very full of a particular writer's mode of thought, it is almost a part of rectitude to avow the influence and give a precise quotation rather than melt down the edges and weld the borrowed metal into one's own. I have often, as I daresay you have, experienced a sense of repulsion from a writer who shows an eloquent memory of everything but his own indebtedness.
It gives us a deep satisfaction to think that your correspondence with M. Ritter is a mutual good. He is not, I imagine, a young man, and this makes the relation between you the more interesting to me. I delight in sweet interchange between an elder and a younger life. 776 I am much helped by his reception of the Epilogue to Middlemarch, 777 for some one had written a half doubt whether there ought to have been an epilogue at all -- and my readily echoing distrust had taken up the doubt. You will be glad to hear that the guinea form of the book goes off with amazing rapidity -- amazing, because nobody seems to know anybody else who buys books, so that the disappearance of editions is a mysterious case of absorption.
Good bye. Keep the highest ambition, which doesn't mind worn edges to its coat, and is bent on the quality rather than the rank of its work.
Mr. Spalding 778 is an Aberdeen man -- did you know? -- began life as a mason, is consumptive and probably doomed to an early death.
Yours always faithfully
M. E. Lewes.
Text: Main's copy owned by Mr. John R. Sprunt. Hitherto unpublished.
The Priory, | 21. North Bank, | Regents Park.
April 22. 73.
My dear Mr. Main
Be sure that I shall feel a strong interest in seeing how your powers exhibit themselves in this delightful task of helping to impress on men's minds the life of dear, ever-memorable Johnson. From what Mr. Lewes tells me I am very hopeful that we shall rejoice in the issue of your labours.
There is one characteristic in you which makes me smile happily: it is akin to a quality and habit strongly marked in my husband. I mean, the promptness with which you set to work at any labour you have determined on. You lose no time in what he calls "pottering." If you had resolved to translate the Iliad (which I feel thankfully sure you have not resolved to do) you would take down the book and render the two first verses while your tea was being made. That promptitude is a great gift of nature.
As to quotations, please -- please be very moderate, whether they come from Shakespeare or any other servant of the Muses. A quotation often makes a fine summit to a climax, especially when it comes from some elder author, or from the Bible, so that there is a certain remoteness in the English as if it came from long departed prophets who lived as citizens of the ages that were future to them and had our thoughts before we were born. But I hate a style speckled with quotations. 775
Nevertheless I enter into what I think is your feeling, that when the consciousness is very full of a particular writer's mode of thought, it is almost a part of rectitude to avow the influence and give a precise quotation rather than melt down the edges and weld the borrowed metal into one's own. I have often, as I daresay you have, experienced a sense of repulsion from a writer who shows an eloquent memory of everything but his own indebtedness.
It gives us a deep satisfaction to think that your correspondence with M. Ritter is a mutual good. He is not, I imagine, a young man, and this makes the relation between you the more interesting to me. I delight in sweet interchange between an elder and a younger life. 776 I am much helped by his reception of the Epilogue to Middlemarch, 777 for some one had written a half doubt whether there ought to have been an epilogue at all -- and my readily echoing distrust had taken up the doubt. You will be glad to hear that the guinea form of the book goes off with amazing rapidity -- amazing, because nobody seems to know anybody else who buys books, so that the disappearance of editions is a mysterious case of absorption.
Good bye. Keep the highest ambition, which doesn't mind worn edges to its coat, and is bent on the quality rather than the rank of its work.
Mr. Spalding 778 is an Aberdeen man -- did you know? -- began life as a mason, is consumptive and probably doomed to an early death.
Yours always faithfully
M. E. Lewes.
Signature
M. E. Lewes.
Citation
George Eliot, GE to Alexander Main, London, 22 April 1873, 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/91992