GE to [Martha Jackson?], Griff, [March 1841]
Title
GE to [Martha Jackson?], Griff, [March 1841]
Title
GE to [Martha Jackson?], Griff, [March 1841]
Sender
George Eliot
Recipient
[Martha Jackson?]
Date(s)
- 1841-03
Place
GRIFF
Letter Content
GE to [Martha Jackson?], Griff, [March 1841]
MS: Tinker Collection, Yale. Hitherto unpublished.
Letters from a Town Mouse to a Country Mouse. 303
Dearest Rusticus.
Your proposition that I should write my journal in the form of letters to you, smiles upon me invitingly. You say that scraps of thought and knowledge are hardly ever edifying to you except when they come to you associated with a personality, and that you shall get wiser on my scraps than by reading whole books of dead men who have neither face nor voice for you. That will stimulate me to write down the day's gatherings with more completeness than I have ever had resolution to do in the stiff sort of soliloquy that belongs to ordinary journal writing. In gloomy weather I shall fancy you with your feet on your fender, your double eye-glass over your nose, looking at me with friendly scrutiny as I tell you of my little affairs, or recall the impressions of my day's thought and reading. In fair weather, I shall fancy that we are strolling together round your five acres, which you contrive to expand into a large farm by elaboration of thought and handiwork, throwing as much soul into your indignant spudding of a single thistle as any ordinary Ofellus 304 would spend over a crop large enough to seed the worlds in the Milky Way. I, your companion, pause mechanically where you pause -- look at a cow when you look at her -- watch the flight of a straw which you toss aside with your leisurely spud, and all the while chatter egoistically about my own thoughts and doings, complacently reflecting now and then, how very useful I am to you by keeping up your sympathy with a world where language is at a more sophisticated stage than Ba-a!
Towzer's nose pushes itself against my fingers, and then my fingers wander about his rough coat as I write. I am in the country, without the trouble of packing up: I see the autumn berries, I snuff the peculiar freshness of the autumn air between the hedge rows in the green lane, and the new soil the plough is turning over in the next field; or I wrap my cloak round me and enjoy the December hoar frost that defines every lingering brown leaf on the brambles or the young oaks; or I please myself in detecting the very earliest spring buds, and the delicate hints of colour on the bough tips; or I hear the swirl of the scythe as I watch the delicate grasses trembling under the eager flight and restless alighting of the humming insects; or I stand entranced before the glory of form and colour in the ripe full-eared corn field.
You will almost accuse me of valuing you as I do some painters' figures -- for the sake of the landscape in which you are placed. Well! I suppose we are all loved (or despised) a little for the sake of our circumstances as well as for our qualities. The most heroic grocer would be under some disadvantage from the fact that you imagine him in company with pyramidal parcels of sugar, bladders of lard, and a general odour of tallow and the coating of cheese. And the most impudent thieving gipsy has the charm of the furzy common about her. What extrinsic charm have I, to make people care for me a little more than my qualities might deserve? Certainly none from the landscape about me, and as little from the carpets and curtains and other recommendations of an elegant interior which have often helped to fix a man's choice of his partner for life -- (for who will pretend that a woman who is reached through a spacious entrance hall with Indian matting can appear as utterly commonplace as Miss Jackson seen through the open parlour-door as you enter the passage?). A little obloquy and a little celebrity are the two points of attraction in me beyond my personal qualities: apart from these I should be thrown back for the impression I make, on the sense or humour there might be in my conversation, or on the moral dispositions that might manifest themselves in my looks, voice and actions. Heaven help us! The reasons why we should be loved shrivel up frightfully when we have to consider ourselves without any adjuncts -- stripped before we are weighed. I don't think my celebrity gives me any additional attraction for you, but I do think I owe some of your interest in me to my obloquy, which has been useful to me in many other ways, as I will demonstrate to you some day.
At present I am disinclined to journal-writing, for we are undergoing one of the chief among the minor disagreeables of life -- that of moving. 305 To me it is a deeply painful incident -- it is like dying to one stage of existence, henceforth nothing will have the charm of old use and wont which makes the days pass so easily -- at least until novelty has merged once again into habit. 306
MS: Tinker Collection, Yale. Hitherto unpublished.
Letters from a Town Mouse to a Country Mouse. 303
Dearest Rusticus.
Your proposition that I should write my journal in the form of letters to you, smiles upon me invitingly. You say that scraps of thought and knowledge are hardly ever edifying to you except when they come to you associated with a personality, and that you shall get wiser on my scraps than by reading whole books of dead men who have neither face nor voice for you. That will stimulate me to write down the day's gatherings with more completeness than I have ever had resolution to do in the stiff sort of soliloquy that belongs to ordinary journal writing. In gloomy weather I shall fancy you with your feet on your fender, your double eye-glass over your nose, looking at me with friendly scrutiny as I tell you of my little affairs, or recall the impressions of my day's thought and reading. In fair weather, I shall fancy that we are strolling together round your five acres, which you contrive to expand into a large farm by elaboration of thought and handiwork, throwing as much soul into your indignant spudding of a single thistle as any ordinary Ofellus 304 would spend over a crop large enough to seed the worlds in the Milky Way. I, your companion, pause mechanically where you pause -- look at a cow when you look at her -- watch the flight of a straw which you toss aside with your leisurely spud, and all the while chatter egoistically about my own thoughts and doings, complacently reflecting now and then, how very useful I am to you by keeping up your sympathy with a world where language is at a more sophisticated stage than Ba-a!
Towzer's nose pushes itself against my fingers, and then my fingers wander about his rough coat as I write. I am in the country, without the trouble of packing up: I see the autumn berries, I snuff the peculiar freshness of the autumn air between the hedge rows in the green lane, and the new soil the plough is turning over in the next field; or I wrap my cloak round me and enjoy the December hoar frost that defines every lingering brown leaf on the brambles or the young oaks; or I please myself in detecting the very earliest spring buds, and the delicate hints of colour on the bough tips; or I hear the swirl of the scythe as I watch the delicate grasses trembling under the eager flight and restless alighting of the humming insects; or I stand entranced before the glory of form and colour in the ripe full-eared corn field.
You will almost accuse me of valuing you as I do some painters' figures -- for the sake of the landscape in which you are placed. Well! I suppose we are all loved (or despised) a little for the sake of our circumstances as well as for our qualities. The most heroic grocer would be under some disadvantage from the fact that you imagine him in company with pyramidal parcels of sugar, bladders of lard, and a general odour of tallow and the coating of cheese. And the most impudent thieving gipsy has the charm of the furzy common about her. What extrinsic charm have I, to make people care for me a little more than my qualities might deserve? Certainly none from the landscape about me, and as little from the carpets and curtains and other recommendations of an elegant interior which have often helped to fix a man's choice of his partner for life -- (for who will pretend that a woman who is reached through a spacious entrance hall with Indian matting can appear as utterly commonplace as Miss Jackson seen through the open parlour-door as you enter the passage?). A little obloquy and a little celebrity are the two points of attraction in me beyond my personal qualities: apart from these I should be thrown back for the impression I make, on the sense or humour there might be in my conversation, or on the moral dispositions that might manifest themselves in my looks, voice and actions. Heaven help us! The reasons why we should be loved shrivel up frightfully when we have to consider ourselves without any adjuncts -- stripped before we are weighed. I don't think my celebrity gives me any additional attraction for you, but I do think I owe some of your interest in me to my obloquy, which has been useful to me in many other ways, as I will demonstrate to you some day.
At present I am disinclined to journal-writing, for we are undergoing one of the chief among the minor disagreeables of life -- that of moving. 305 To me it is a deeply painful incident -- it is like dying to one stage of existence, henceforth nothing will have the charm of old use and wont which makes the days pass so easily -- at least until novelty has merged once again into habit. 306
Citation
George Eliot, GE to [Martha Jackson?], Griff, [March 1841], Complete George Eliot Letters(2026), George Eliot Archive, edited by Beverley Park Rilett. https://GeorgeEliotArchive.org, Accessed September 7, 2026. https://georgeeliotarchive.org/items/show/91963