GE to John Sibree, Jr., Foleshill, [11 February 1848]
Title
GE to John Sibree, Jr., Foleshill, [11 February 1848]
Title
GE to John Sibree, Jr., Foleshill, [11 February 1848]
Sender
George Eliot
Recipient
John Sibree, Jr.
Date(s)
- 1848-02-11
Place
FOLESHILL
Letter Content
GE to John Sibree, Jr., Foleshill, [11 February 1848]
MS: Berg Collection, New York Public Library. Copy (by Mrs. Cash?) at Yale. Address: Mr. John Sibree | Spring Hill College | Birmingham. Postmarks: COVENTRY | FE 11 | 1848; BIRMINGHAM | FE 12 | 1848 | A. Extracts published: Cross, I, 169-175.
Foleshill Friday.
Dear Mr. Sibree
You are a very malicious person and extremely sly withal, to tell me in that meek way that my letters are to convert you to the belief that correspondence is a good. So you punish me for my mercilessness in obliging you to feel g'eané in one letter by condemning me to that sort of purgatory for an indefinite period until you shall be pleased either to confess that you no longer contemn letter-writing or to let me know that you can endure my feminilities no longer. But I heap fire on your head, that is I make your organ of conscientiousness smart terribly (which must have been Paul's meaning) 688 by releasing you from the pangs of preface writing from henceforth. Begin your letters by abusing me, according to my example. There is nothing like a little gun-powder for a damp chimney and an explosion of that sort will set the fire of your ideas burning to admiration. I hate bashfulness and modesties as Sir Hugh Evans would say, 689 and I warn you that I shall make no apologies, though from my habit of writing only to people who, rather than have nothing from me, will tolerate nothings, I shall be very apt to forget that you are not one of those amiably silly individuals. I must write to you more now, without taking pains or laboring to be spirituelle when heaven never meant me to be so, and it is your own fault if you bear with my letters a moment after they become an infliction. I am glad you detest Mrs. Hannah More's letters. I like neither her letters, nor her books, nor her character. 690 She was that most disagreeable of all monsters, a blue-stocking -- a monster that can only exist in a miserably false state of society, in which a woman with but a smattering of learning or philosophy is classed along with singing mice and card playing pigs.
It is some time since I read Tancred, so that I have no very vivid recollection of its details, but I thought it very "thin" and inferior in the working up to Coningsby and Sybil. Young Englandism is almost as remote from my sympathies as Jacobitism as far as its form is concerned, though I love and respect it as an effort on behalf of the people. D'Israeli is unquestionably an able man, and I always enjoy his tirades against liberal principles as opposed to popular principles -- the name by which he distinguishes his own. As to his theory of [races] it has not a leg to stand on, and can only be buoyed up by such windy eloquence as [You chitty-faced squabby-nosed Europeans owe your commerce, your arts, your religion to the Hebrews -- nay the Hebrews lead your armies -- ] in proof of which he can tell us that Massena, a second-rate general of Napoleon's, was a Jew whose real name was Manasseh. 691 Extermination up to a certain point seems to be the law for the inferior races -- for the rest, fusion both for physical and moral ends. It appears to me that the law by which privileged classes degenerate from continual intermarriage must act on a larger scale in deteriorating whole races. The nations have been always kept apart until they have sufficiently developed their idiosyncrasies and then some great revolutionary force has been called into action by which the genius of a particular nation becomes a portion of the common mind of humanity. Looking at the matter aesthetically, our ideal of beauty is never formed on the characteristics of a single race. I confess the types of the [pure races,] however handsome, always impress me disagreeably -- there is an undefined feeling that I am looking not at man but at a specimen of an order under Cuvier's class, Bimana. The negroes certainly puzzle me -- all the other races seem plainly destined to extermination or fusion not excepting even the "Hebrew-Caucasian." 692 But the negroes are too important physiologically and geographically for one to think of their extermination, while the repulsion between them and the other races seems too strong for fusion to take place to any great extent.
On one point I heartily agree with D'Israeli as to the superiority of the Oriental races -- their clothes are beautiful and ours are execrable. Did you not think the picture of the Baroni family 693 interesting? I should like to know who are the originals. The fellowship of race, to which D'Israeli exultingly refers the munificence of Sidonia, is so evidently an inferior impulse which must ultimately be superseded that I wonder even he, Jew as he is, dares to boast of it. My Gentile nature kicks most resolutely against any assumption of superiority in the Jews, and is almost ready to echo Voltaire's vituperation. 694 I bow to the supremacy of Hebrew poetry, but much of their early mythology and almost all their history is utterly revolting. Their stock has produced a Moses and a Jesus, but Moses was impregnated with Egyptian philosophy and Jesus is venerated and adored by us only for that wherein he transcended or resisted Judaism. The very exaltation of their idea of a national deity into a spiritual monotheism seems to have been borrowed from the other oriental tribes. Everything specifically Jewish is of a low grade.
And do you really think that sculpture and painting are to die out of the world? If that be sooth, let another deluge come as quickly as possible that a new race of Glums and Gawries 695 may take possession of this melancholy earth. I agree with you as to the inherent superiority of music -- as that questionable woman the Countess Hahn-Hahn 696 says, painting and sculpture are but an idealizing of our actual existence. Music arches over this existence with another and a diviner. Amen too, to that ideen-voll observation of Hegel's, We hardly know what it is to feel for human misery until we have heard a shriek, and a more perfect hell might be made out of sounds than out of any preparation of fire and brimstone. When the tones of our voice have betrayed peevishness or harshness we seem to be doubly haunted by the ghost of our sins -- we are doubly conscious that we have been untrue to our part in the great Handel chorus. But I cannot assent to the notion that music is to supersede the other arts, or that the highest minds must necessarily aspire to a sort of Milton blindness in which the "tiefste der Sinne" is to be a substitute for all the rest. I cannot recognize the truth of all that is said about the necessity of religious fervour to high art. I am sceptical as to the real existence of such fervour in any of the greatest artists. Artistic power seems to me to resemble dramatic power -- to be an intuitive perception of the varied states of which the human mind is susceptible with ability to give them out anew in intensified expression. It is true that the older the world gets, originality becomes less possible. Great subjects are used up, and civilization tends evermore to repress individual predominance, highly-wrought agony or ecstatic joy. But all the gentler emotions will be ever new -- ever wrought up into more and more lovely combinations, and genius will probably take their direction. Have you ever seen a head of Christ taken from a statue by Thorwaldsen of [Christ scourged.] If not I think it would almost satisfy you. There is another work of his said to be very sublime of the archangel waiting for the command to sound the last trumpet. Yet Thorwaldsen came at the fag-end of time.
I am afraid you despise landscape painting -- but to me even the works of our own Stanfield and Roberts and Creswick 697 bring a whole world of thought and bliss -- "a sense of something far more deeply interfused." 698 The ocean and the sky and the everlasting hills are spirit to me, and they will never be robbed of their sublimity.
I am shocked to see how much paper I have covered with my sprawling "pattes de mouches." I shall really frighten you. I will be more forbearing another time. Have the students apartments at the college 699 or have you lodgings elsewhere? I have no materials for imagining your whereabouts -- a deficiency which always annoys me. Ah! I want doing good to in a thousand ways. Do not forsake the good work but write to me again as soon as you have any time to spare me.
Always yours truly
Mary Ann Evans
I am writing at midnight, so this cannot reach you till Sunday. Pardon its impertinence in presenting itself then and put it in your pocket till Monday.
MS: Berg Collection, New York Public Library. Copy (by Mrs. Cash?) at Yale. Address: Mr. John Sibree | Spring Hill College | Birmingham. Postmarks: COVENTRY | FE 11 | 1848; BIRMINGHAM | FE 12 | 1848 | A. Extracts published: Cross, I, 169-175.
Foleshill Friday.
Dear Mr. Sibree
You are a very malicious person and extremely sly withal, to tell me in that meek way that my letters are to convert you to the belief that correspondence is a good. So you punish me for my mercilessness in obliging you to feel g'eané in one letter by condemning me to that sort of purgatory for an indefinite period until you shall be pleased either to confess that you no longer contemn letter-writing or to let me know that you can endure my feminilities no longer. But I heap fire on your head, that is I make your organ of conscientiousness smart terribly (which must have been Paul's meaning) 688 by releasing you from the pangs of preface writing from henceforth. Begin your letters by abusing me, according to my example. There is nothing like a little gun-powder for a damp chimney and an explosion of that sort will set the fire of your ideas burning to admiration. I hate bashfulness and modesties as Sir Hugh Evans would say, 689 and I warn you that I shall make no apologies, though from my habit of writing only to people who, rather than have nothing from me, will tolerate nothings, I shall be very apt to forget that you are not one of those amiably silly individuals. I must write to you more now, without taking pains or laboring to be spirituelle when heaven never meant me to be so, and it is your own fault if you bear with my letters a moment after they become an infliction. I am glad you detest Mrs. Hannah More's letters. I like neither her letters, nor her books, nor her character. 690 She was that most disagreeable of all monsters, a blue-stocking -- a monster that can only exist in a miserably false state of society, in which a woman with but a smattering of learning or philosophy is classed along with singing mice and card playing pigs.
It is some time since I read Tancred, so that I have no very vivid recollection of its details, but I thought it very "thin" and inferior in the working up to Coningsby and Sybil. Young Englandism is almost as remote from my sympathies as Jacobitism as far as its form is concerned, though I love and respect it as an effort on behalf of the people. D'Israeli is unquestionably an able man, and I always enjoy his tirades against liberal principles as opposed to popular principles -- the name by which he distinguishes his own. As to his theory of [races] it has not a leg to stand on, and can only be buoyed up by such windy eloquence as [You chitty-faced squabby-nosed Europeans owe your commerce, your arts, your religion to the Hebrews -- nay the Hebrews lead your armies -- ] in proof of which he can tell us that Massena, a second-rate general of Napoleon's, was a Jew whose real name was Manasseh. 691 Extermination up to a certain point seems to be the law for the inferior races -- for the rest, fusion both for physical and moral ends. It appears to me that the law by which privileged classes degenerate from continual intermarriage must act on a larger scale in deteriorating whole races. The nations have been always kept apart until they have sufficiently developed their idiosyncrasies and then some great revolutionary force has been called into action by which the genius of a particular nation becomes a portion of the common mind of humanity. Looking at the matter aesthetically, our ideal of beauty is never formed on the characteristics of a single race. I confess the types of the [pure races,] however handsome, always impress me disagreeably -- there is an undefined feeling that I am looking not at man but at a specimen of an order under Cuvier's class, Bimana. The negroes certainly puzzle me -- all the other races seem plainly destined to extermination or fusion not excepting even the "Hebrew-Caucasian." 692 But the negroes are too important physiologically and geographically for one to think of their extermination, while the repulsion between them and the other races seems too strong for fusion to take place to any great extent.
On one point I heartily agree with D'Israeli as to the superiority of the Oriental races -- their clothes are beautiful and ours are execrable. Did you not think the picture of the Baroni family 693 interesting? I should like to know who are the originals. The fellowship of race, to which D'Israeli exultingly refers the munificence of Sidonia, is so evidently an inferior impulse which must ultimately be superseded that I wonder even he, Jew as he is, dares to boast of it. My Gentile nature kicks most resolutely against any assumption of superiority in the Jews, and is almost ready to echo Voltaire's vituperation. 694 I bow to the supremacy of Hebrew poetry, but much of their early mythology and almost all their history is utterly revolting. Their stock has produced a Moses and a Jesus, but Moses was impregnated with Egyptian philosophy and Jesus is venerated and adored by us only for that wherein he transcended or resisted Judaism. The very exaltation of their idea of a national deity into a spiritual monotheism seems to have been borrowed from the other oriental tribes. Everything specifically Jewish is of a low grade.
And do you really think that sculpture and painting are to die out of the world? If that be sooth, let another deluge come as quickly as possible that a new race of Glums and Gawries 695 may take possession of this melancholy earth. I agree with you as to the inherent superiority of music -- as that questionable woman the Countess Hahn-Hahn 696 says, painting and sculpture are but an idealizing of our actual existence. Music arches over this existence with another and a diviner. Amen too, to that ideen-voll observation of Hegel's, We hardly know what it is to feel for human misery until we have heard a shriek, and a more perfect hell might be made out of sounds than out of any preparation of fire and brimstone. When the tones of our voice have betrayed peevishness or harshness we seem to be doubly haunted by the ghost of our sins -- we are doubly conscious that we have been untrue to our part in the great Handel chorus. But I cannot assent to the notion that music is to supersede the other arts, or that the highest minds must necessarily aspire to a sort of Milton blindness in which the "tiefste der Sinne" is to be a substitute for all the rest. I cannot recognize the truth of all that is said about the necessity of religious fervour to high art. I am sceptical as to the real existence of such fervour in any of the greatest artists. Artistic power seems to me to resemble dramatic power -- to be an intuitive perception of the varied states of which the human mind is susceptible with ability to give them out anew in intensified expression. It is true that the older the world gets, originality becomes less possible. Great subjects are used up, and civilization tends evermore to repress individual predominance, highly-wrought agony or ecstatic joy. But all the gentler emotions will be ever new -- ever wrought up into more and more lovely combinations, and genius will probably take their direction. Have you ever seen a head of Christ taken from a statue by Thorwaldsen of [Christ scourged.] If not I think it would almost satisfy you. There is another work of his said to be very sublime of the archangel waiting for the command to sound the last trumpet. Yet Thorwaldsen came at the fag-end of time.
I am afraid you despise landscape painting -- but to me even the works of our own Stanfield and Roberts and Creswick 697 bring a whole world of thought and bliss -- "a sense of something far more deeply interfused." 698 The ocean and the sky and the everlasting hills are spirit to me, and they will never be robbed of their sublimity.
I am shocked to see how much paper I have covered with my sprawling "pattes de mouches." I shall really frighten you. I will be more forbearing another time. Have the students apartments at the college 699 or have you lodgings elsewhere? I have no materials for imagining your whereabouts -- a deficiency which always annoys me. Ah! I want doing good to in a thousand ways. Do not forsake the good work but write to me again as soon as you have any time to spare me.
Always yours truly
Mary Ann Evans
I am writing at midnight, so this cannot reach you till Sunday. Pardon its impertinence in presenting itself then and put it in your pocket till Monday.
Signature
Mary Ann Evans
Citation
George Eliot, GE to John Sibree, Jr., Foleshill, [11 February 1848], 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/92816