GE to Maria Lewis, Griff, 27 October 1840
Title
GE to Maria Lewis, Griff, 27 October 1840
Title
GE to Maria Lewis, Griff, 27 October 1840
Sender
George Eliot
Recipient
Maria Lewis
Date(s)
- 1840-10-27
Place
GRIFF
Letter Content
GE to Maria Lewis, Griff, 27 October 1840
MS: Yale. Address: Miss Lewis | The Revd L. Harper's | Burton Latimer | near Kettering | Northamptonshire. Postmark: COVENTRY | OC 28 | 1840. Extracts published: Cross, I, 76-79.
Griff | October 27th 1840.
My dear Veronica,
My only reason for writing on an evening that finds me with a mindful of the accumulated scum of continued intercourse with the herd (I do not write superciliously) and with a head having a sore sensation as if from long pressure, is that I may obtain from you a timely promise that you will spend your holidays chiefly with me, that we may once more meet among scenes which now I am called on to leave them, I find to have grown in to my affections. Chrissey has commissioned me to request a week of your society for herself, and as the word [No] is the offspring of sin and error I doubt not you will treat it as you would its parent unless it can establish a real claim to patronage.
Carlyle says 257 that to the artisans of Glasgow the world is not one of blue skies and a green carpet, but a world of copperas-fumes, low cellars, hard wages, [striking,] and gin; and if the recollection of this picture did not remind me that gratitude should be my reservoir of feeling, that into which all that comes from above or around should be received as a source of fertilization for my soul, I should give a lachrymose parody of the said description and tell you all seriously what I now tell you playfully that mine is too often a world such as Wilkie 258 can so well paint, a walled-in world, furnished with all the details which he remembers so accurately, and the least interesting part thereof is often what I suppose must be designated the intelligent; but I deny that it has even a comparative claim to the appellation for give me a three-legged stool and it will call up associations moral, poetical, mathematical if I do but ask it, while some human beings have the odious power of contaminating the very images that are enshrined as our soul's arcana, their baleful touch has the same effect as would a uniformity in the rays of light -- it turns all objects to pale lead colour. O how lusciously joyous to have the wind of heaven blow on one after being stived 259 in a human atmosphere, to feel one's [heart leap up] 260 after the pressure that Shakspeare so admirably describes, "When a man's wit is not seconded by the forward child understanding it strikes a man as dead as a large reckoning in a small room." 261 The poor Clown's distress that his Audrey was not poetical is a type that is reacted daily under a thousand circumstances.
But it is time I check this Byronic invective, and in doing so I am reminded of Corinne's or rather Oswald's reproof, La vie est un combat, pas un hymne. We should aim to be like plants in the chamber of sickness, dispensing purifying air even in a region that turns all pale its verdure and cramps its instinctive propensity to expand. Society is a wide nursery of plants where the hundred decompose to nourish the future ten, after giving collateral benefits to their contemporaries destined for a fairer garden. An awful thought! one so heavy that if our souls could once sustain its whole weight, or rather if its whole weight were once to drop on them, they would break and burst their tenements. How long will this continue? The cry of the martyrs heard by St. John finds an echo in every heart that like Solomon's groans under the "outrage and oppression with which the earth is filled." Events are now so momentous, and the elements of society in so chemically critical a state that a drop seems enough to change its whole form. After expending the imagination in questions as to the mode in which the great transmutation of the kingdoms of this world into the kingdoms of our Lord will be effected we are reduced to the state of pausation in which the inhabitants of heaven are described to be held, before the outpouring of the Vials. 262 After all is the moral chaos of the world more fearful or naturally unreducible to order than the heart of an individual sinner? The Spirit that can cleanse the walls of that temple from its idolatrous images, hurl down the altars of sacrifice and incense to Self, and become Himself its hallowed Sheckinah, can by a multiplication of this miracle cause the whole speaking creation with one mind and one mouth to glorify their Maker.
I am reading Harris's Great Teacher, 263 and am "innig bewegt" as a German would say by its stirring eloquence which leaves you no time or strength for a cold estimate of the writer's strict merits. I wish I could read some extracts to you. Isaac Taylor's work is not yet complete. When it is so, I hope to reperuse it and then will either write or talk to you of it. Since I wrote to you I have had Aimé Martin's work, L'Education des M'e8res lent to me, and I have found it to be the real Greece whence Woman's Mission has only imported to us a few marbles -- but! Martin is a soi-distant [rational] Christian, if I mistake him not. I will send you an epitaph which he mentions and which I fancy is not translated into Woman's Mission. It is on a tomb in Paris, that of a mother: "Dors en paix O ma m'e8re, ton fils t'obéira toujours." 264 I am reading eclectically Mrs. Hemans's poems, and venture to recommend to your perusal if unknown to you, one of her longest poems, "The Forest Sanctuary." 265 I can give it my pet adjective, exquisite! I meant to write more; perhaps it is happy for you that
I am constrained to close my extra-ordinarily illegible letter. I am going out early tomorrow morning. 'Tis now eight in the evening and my Daddy has laid by his papers.
Your true
Clematis.
I have adopted as my motto, "Certum pete finem," 266 seek a sure end.
MS: Yale. Address: Miss Lewis | The Revd L. Harper's | Burton Latimer | near Kettering | Northamptonshire. Postmark: COVENTRY | OC 28 | 1840. Extracts published: Cross, I, 76-79.
Griff | October 27th 1840.
My dear Veronica,
My only reason for writing on an evening that finds me with a mindful of the accumulated scum of continued intercourse with the herd (I do not write superciliously) and with a head having a sore sensation as if from long pressure, is that I may obtain from you a timely promise that you will spend your holidays chiefly with me, that we may once more meet among scenes which now I am called on to leave them, I find to have grown in to my affections. Chrissey has commissioned me to request a week of your society for herself, and as the word [No] is the offspring of sin and error I doubt not you will treat it as you would its parent unless it can establish a real claim to patronage.
Carlyle says 257 that to the artisans of Glasgow the world is not one of blue skies and a green carpet, but a world of copperas-fumes, low cellars, hard wages, [striking,] and gin; and if the recollection of this picture did not remind me that gratitude should be my reservoir of feeling, that into which all that comes from above or around should be received as a source of fertilization for my soul, I should give a lachrymose parody of the said description and tell you all seriously what I now tell you playfully that mine is too often a world such as Wilkie 258 can so well paint, a walled-in world, furnished with all the details which he remembers so accurately, and the least interesting part thereof is often what I suppose must be designated the intelligent; but I deny that it has even a comparative claim to the appellation for give me a three-legged stool and it will call up associations moral, poetical, mathematical if I do but ask it, while some human beings have the odious power of contaminating the very images that are enshrined as our soul's arcana, their baleful touch has the same effect as would a uniformity in the rays of light -- it turns all objects to pale lead colour. O how lusciously joyous to have the wind of heaven blow on one after being stived 259 in a human atmosphere, to feel one's [heart leap up] 260 after the pressure that Shakspeare so admirably describes, "When a man's wit is not seconded by the forward child understanding it strikes a man as dead as a large reckoning in a small room." 261 The poor Clown's distress that his Audrey was not poetical is a type that is reacted daily under a thousand circumstances.
But it is time I check this Byronic invective, and in doing so I am reminded of Corinne's or rather Oswald's reproof, La vie est un combat, pas un hymne. We should aim to be like plants in the chamber of sickness, dispensing purifying air even in a region that turns all pale its verdure and cramps its instinctive propensity to expand. Society is a wide nursery of plants where the hundred decompose to nourish the future ten, after giving collateral benefits to their contemporaries destined for a fairer garden. An awful thought! one so heavy that if our souls could once sustain its whole weight, or rather if its whole weight were once to drop on them, they would break and burst their tenements. How long will this continue? The cry of the martyrs heard by St. John finds an echo in every heart that like Solomon's groans under the "outrage and oppression with which the earth is filled." Events are now so momentous, and the elements of society in so chemically critical a state that a drop seems enough to change its whole form. After expending the imagination in questions as to the mode in which the great transmutation of the kingdoms of this world into the kingdoms of our Lord will be effected we are reduced to the state of pausation in which the inhabitants of heaven are described to be held, before the outpouring of the Vials. 262 After all is the moral chaos of the world more fearful or naturally unreducible to order than the heart of an individual sinner? The Spirit that can cleanse the walls of that temple from its idolatrous images, hurl down the altars of sacrifice and incense to Self, and become Himself its hallowed Sheckinah, can by a multiplication of this miracle cause the whole speaking creation with one mind and one mouth to glorify their Maker.
I am reading Harris's Great Teacher, 263 and am "innig bewegt" as a German would say by its stirring eloquence which leaves you no time or strength for a cold estimate of the writer's strict merits. I wish I could read some extracts to you. Isaac Taylor's work is not yet complete. When it is so, I hope to reperuse it and then will either write or talk to you of it. Since I wrote to you I have had Aimé Martin's work, L'Education des M'e8res lent to me, and I have found it to be the real Greece whence Woman's Mission has only imported to us a few marbles -- but! Martin is a soi-distant [rational] Christian, if I mistake him not. I will send you an epitaph which he mentions and which I fancy is not translated into Woman's Mission. It is on a tomb in Paris, that of a mother: "Dors en paix O ma m'e8re, ton fils t'obéira toujours." 264 I am reading eclectically Mrs. Hemans's poems, and venture to recommend to your perusal if unknown to you, one of her longest poems, "The Forest Sanctuary." 265 I can give it my pet adjective, exquisite! I meant to write more; perhaps it is happy for you that
I am constrained to close my extra-ordinarily illegible letter. I am going out early tomorrow morning. 'Tis now eight in the evening and my Daddy has laid by his papers.
Your true
Clematis.
I have adopted as my motto, "Certum pete finem," 266 seek a sure end.
Signature
Clematis.
Citation
George Eliot, GE to Maria Lewis, Griff, 27 October 1840, 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/92912