GE to Francois D'Albert-Durade, Wandsworth, 6 December 1859
Title
GE to Francois D'Albert-Durade, Wandsworth, 6 December 1859
Title
GE to Francois D'Albert-Durade, Wandsworth, 6 December 1859
Sender
George Eliot
Recipient
Francois D'Albert-Durade
Date(s)
- 1859-12-06
Place
Wandsworth
Letter Content
GE to Francois D'Albert-Durade, Wandsworth, 6 December 1859
MS: British Museum. Published: Cross, New Edition, pp. 297-299.
Holly Lodge, South Fields | Wandsworth | December 6. 59.
Dear Friend
Before your last letter 431 came, I was thinking of writing to you again to tell you of my real pleasure in once more knowing something of the way in which you and Madame d'Albert are passing your lives, and in being assured by you that you both remember me with kind feeling. I had so vivid a recollection of poor Madame Chaponni'e8re -- of her fair face and gentle manners, and of the affectionate relation there was between her and Madame d'Albert -- that I read your account of her trials and death with keen, sad interest. And now the husband, who, I used to think, had so many channels for the enjoyment of life, is gone too! 432 I can enter thoroughly into the sensitive state Madame d'Albert must be thrown into by going through so much experience of a kind to stir her deepest sympathies. I wish it might be any thing like a ray of sunlight -- a happy thought to her -- to know how I cherish the memory of her goodness to me, and all the words tones and looks which were the interpreters of her character. The years deepen the value of our past to us, and of our friends who were part of that past.
I can understand that there are many pages in "Adam Bede" in which you do not recognize the "Marian" or "Minie" of old Geneva days. 433 We knew each other too short a time, and I was under too partial and transient a phase of my mental history, for me to pour out to you much of my earlier experience. I think I hardly ever spoke to you of the strong hold Evangelical Christianity had on me from the age of fifteen to two and twenty and of the abundant intercourse I had had with earnest people of various religious sects. When I was at Geneva, I had not yet lost the attitude of antagonism which belongs to the renunciation of any belief -- also, I was very unhappy, and in a state of discord and rebellion towards my own lot. Ten years of experience have wrought great changes in that inward self: I have no longer any antagonism towards any faith in which human sorrow and human longing for purity have expressed themselves; on the contrary, I have a sympathy with it that predominates over all argumentative tendencies. I have not returned to dogmatic Christianity -- to the acceptance of any set of doctrines as a creed, and a superhuman revelation of the Unseen -- but I see in it the highest expression of the religious sentiment that has yet found its place in the history of mankind, and I have the profoundest interest in the inward life of sincere Christians in all ages. Many things that I should have argued against ten years ago, I now feel myself too ignorant and too limited in moral sensibility to speak of with confident disapprobation: on many points where I used to delight in expressing intellectual difference, I now delight in feeling an emotional agreement. On that question of our future existence, to which you allude, I have undergone the sort of change I have just indicated, although my most rooted conviction is, that the immediate object and the proper sphere of all our highest emotions are our struggling fellowmen and this earthly existence.
So much in reply to your questions on those matters. I hope I shall not have made myself more obscure by my explanation.
We are very anxious to get an accomplished translator for "Adam Bede," and a little while ago Mr. Lewes wrote to Emile Mont'e9gut whose answer we are expecting on the subject. Hitherto I have rejected propositions of translation, from the dread of having one's sentences metamorphosed into an expression of somebody else's meaning instead of one's own. I particularly wish my books to be well translated into French, because the French read so little English, and if there is any healthy truth in my art, surely they need it to purify their literary air!
I should love to go to Geneva again and walk about the old spots with you and introduce Mr. Lewes to you. He is already strongly interested in you not only through my conversation about you but through your letters, and begs me to present his compliments to you and Madame d'Albert. He is a person of the readiest, most facile intercourse -- thoroughly acquainted with French literature -- and of the most varied tastes. His great passion is now Biological Science, and he is publishing a work entitled the "Physiology of Common Life" in which he has compressed in a popular form much hard study and independent research. But he is a very airy, bright, versatile creature -- not at all a formidable personage.
I am writing a new work, which will not be published till next Easter, so that just now my hands and brain are full. At Easter our eldest boy will come home from school, and that will make a new epoch in our domestic life, for hitherto we have lived alone. I hope my heart will be large enough for all the love that is required of me.
I have written you an unconscionably long letter about myself; but it is not out of pure egoism. I feel with you under the recent trying scenes you have gone through -- perhaps these details, which carry you away, for a little while, from painful associations, may not be without their service to you. At least, let them assure you and Madame d'Albert that the thought of you is one over which I willingly linger, and that I like to find myself talking with you in imagination. I will not suppose that this assurance can be indifferent to you: it can never be indifferent to loving-hearted people to know that they are the means of creating some addition to the sum of happy thought and feeling in the world. Ever, dear Friend,
Yours with lasting regard
Marian Evans Lewes.
MS: British Museum. Published: Cross, New Edition, pp. 297-299.
Holly Lodge, South Fields | Wandsworth | December 6. 59.
Dear Friend
Before your last letter 431 came, I was thinking of writing to you again to tell you of my real pleasure in once more knowing something of the way in which you and Madame d'Albert are passing your lives, and in being assured by you that you both remember me with kind feeling. I had so vivid a recollection of poor Madame Chaponni'e8re -- of her fair face and gentle manners, and of the affectionate relation there was between her and Madame d'Albert -- that I read your account of her trials and death with keen, sad interest. And now the husband, who, I used to think, had so many channels for the enjoyment of life, is gone too! 432 I can enter thoroughly into the sensitive state Madame d'Albert must be thrown into by going through so much experience of a kind to stir her deepest sympathies. I wish it might be any thing like a ray of sunlight -- a happy thought to her -- to know how I cherish the memory of her goodness to me, and all the words tones and looks which were the interpreters of her character. The years deepen the value of our past to us, and of our friends who were part of that past.
I can understand that there are many pages in "Adam Bede" in which you do not recognize the "Marian" or "Minie" of old Geneva days. 433 We knew each other too short a time, and I was under too partial and transient a phase of my mental history, for me to pour out to you much of my earlier experience. I think I hardly ever spoke to you of the strong hold Evangelical Christianity had on me from the age of fifteen to two and twenty and of the abundant intercourse I had had with earnest people of various religious sects. When I was at Geneva, I had not yet lost the attitude of antagonism which belongs to the renunciation of any belief -- also, I was very unhappy, and in a state of discord and rebellion towards my own lot. Ten years of experience have wrought great changes in that inward self: I have no longer any antagonism towards any faith in which human sorrow and human longing for purity have expressed themselves; on the contrary, I have a sympathy with it that predominates over all argumentative tendencies. I have not returned to dogmatic Christianity -- to the acceptance of any set of doctrines as a creed, and a superhuman revelation of the Unseen -- but I see in it the highest expression of the religious sentiment that has yet found its place in the history of mankind, and I have the profoundest interest in the inward life of sincere Christians in all ages. Many things that I should have argued against ten years ago, I now feel myself too ignorant and too limited in moral sensibility to speak of with confident disapprobation: on many points where I used to delight in expressing intellectual difference, I now delight in feeling an emotional agreement. On that question of our future existence, to which you allude, I have undergone the sort of change I have just indicated, although my most rooted conviction is, that the immediate object and the proper sphere of all our highest emotions are our struggling fellowmen and this earthly existence.
So much in reply to your questions on those matters. I hope I shall not have made myself more obscure by my explanation.
We are very anxious to get an accomplished translator for "Adam Bede," and a little while ago Mr. Lewes wrote to Emile Mont'e9gut whose answer we are expecting on the subject. Hitherto I have rejected propositions of translation, from the dread of having one's sentences metamorphosed into an expression of somebody else's meaning instead of one's own. I particularly wish my books to be well translated into French, because the French read so little English, and if there is any healthy truth in my art, surely they need it to purify their literary air!
I should love to go to Geneva again and walk about the old spots with you and introduce Mr. Lewes to you. He is already strongly interested in you not only through my conversation about you but through your letters, and begs me to present his compliments to you and Madame d'Albert. He is a person of the readiest, most facile intercourse -- thoroughly acquainted with French literature -- and of the most varied tastes. His great passion is now Biological Science, and he is publishing a work entitled the "Physiology of Common Life" in which he has compressed in a popular form much hard study and independent research. But he is a very airy, bright, versatile creature -- not at all a formidable personage.
I am writing a new work, which will not be published till next Easter, so that just now my hands and brain are full. At Easter our eldest boy will come home from school, and that will make a new epoch in our domestic life, for hitherto we have lived alone. I hope my heart will be large enough for all the love that is required of me.
I have written you an unconscionably long letter about myself; but it is not out of pure egoism. I feel with you under the recent trying scenes you have gone through -- perhaps these details, which carry you away, for a little while, from painful associations, may not be without their service to you. At least, let them assure you and Madame d'Albert that the thought of you is one over which I willingly linger, and that I like to find myself talking with you in imagination. I will not suppose that this assurance can be indifferent to you: it can never be indifferent to loving-hearted people to know that they are the means of creating some addition to the sum of happy thought and feeling in the world. Ever, dear Friend,
Yours with lasting regard
Marian Evans Lewes.
Signature
Marian Evans Lewes.
Citation
George Eliot, GE to Francois D'Albert-Durade, Wandsworth, 6 December 1859, 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/92378