GE to Mrs. Peter Alfred Taylor, London, 30 July 1863
Title
GE to Mrs. Peter Alfred Taylor, London, 30 July 1863
Title
GE to Mrs. Peter Alfred Taylor, London, 30 July 1863
Sender
George Eliot
Recipient
Mrs. Peter Alfred Taylor
Date(s)
- 1863-07-30
Place
London
Letter Content
GE to Mrs. Peter Alfred Taylor, London, 30 July 1863
Text: Cross, II, 359-360.
I have wanted for several days to make some feeble sign in writing that I think of your trouble. But one claim after another has arisen as a hindrance. Conceive us, please, with three boys at home, all bigger than their father! It is a congestion of youthfulness on our mature brains that disturbs the course of our lives a little, and makes us think of most things as good to be deferred till the boys are settled again. I tell you so much to make you understand that "omission" is not with me equivalent to "neglect," and that I do care for what happens to you.
Renan is a favourite with me. 175 I feel more kinship with his mind than with that of any other living French author. But I think I shall not do more than look through the Introduction to his [Vie de J'e9sus] -- unless I happen to be more fascinated by the constructive part than I expect to be from the specimens I have seen. 176 For minds acquainted with the European culture of this last half-century, Renan's book can furnish no new result; and they are likely to set little store by the too facile construction of a life from materials of which the biographical significance becomes more dubious as they are more closely examined. It seems to me the soul of Christianity lies not at all in the facts of an individual life, but in the ideas of which that life was the meeting-point and the new starting-point. We can never have a satisfactory basis for the history of the man Jesus, but that negation does not affect the Idea of the Christ either in its historical influence or its great symbolic meanings. Still such books as Renan's have their value in helping the popular imagination to feel that the sacred past is of one woof with that human present, which ought to be sacred too.
You mention Renan in your note, and the mention has sent me off into rather gratuitous remarks, you perceive. But such scrappy talk about great subjects may have a better excuse than usual, if it just serves to divert your mind from the sad things that must be importuning you now.
Text: Cross, II, 359-360.
I have wanted for several days to make some feeble sign in writing that I think of your trouble. But one claim after another has arisen as a hindrance. Conceive us, please, with three boys at home, all bigger than their father! It is a congestion of youthfulness on our mature brains that disturbs the course of our lives a little, and makes us think of most things as good to be deferred till the boys are settled again. I tell you so much to make you understand that "omission" is not with me equivalent to "neglect," and that I do care for what happens to you.
Renan is a favourite with me. 175 I feel more kinship with his mind than with that of any other living French author. But I think I shall not do more than look through the Introduction to his [Vie de J'e9sus] -- unless I happen to be more fascinated by the constructive part than I expect to be from the specimens I have seen. 176 For minds acquainted with the European culture of this last half-century, Renan's book can furnish no new result; and they are likely to set little store by the too facile construction of a life from materials of which the biographical significance becomes more dubious as they are more closely examined. It seems to me the soul of Christianity lies not at all in the facts of an individual life, but in the ideas of which that life was the meeting-point and the new starting-point. We can never have a satisfactory basis for the history of the man Jesus, but that negation does not affect the Idea of the Christ either in its historical influence or its great symbolic meanings. Still such books as Renan's have their value in helping the popular imagination to feel that the sacred past is of one woof with that human present, which ought to be sacred too.
You mention Renan in your note, and the mention has sent me off into rather gratuitous remarks, you perceive. But such scrappy talk about great subjects may have a better excuse than usual, if it just serves to divert your mind from the sad things that must be importuning you now.
Citation
George Eliot, GE to Mrs. Peter Alfred Taylor, London, 30 July 1863, 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/93591