GE to Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, London, 11 November 1874
Title
GE to Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, London, 11 November 1874
Title
GE to Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, London, 11 November 1874
Sender
George Eliot
Recipient
Mrs. Harriet Beecher S
Date(s)
- 1874-11-11
Place
London
Letter Content
GE to Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, London, 11 November 1874
MS: Mr. Lyman Beecher Stowe. Published: Cross, III, 242-244.
The Priory, | 21. North Bank, | Regents Park.
November 11. 74.
My dear Friend
I feel rather disgraced by the fact that I received your last kind letter nearly two months ago. But a brief note of mine, written immediately on hearing of you from Mrs. Fields, must have crossed yours and the Professor's kind letters to me, and I hope it proved to you that I love you in my heart.
We were in the country then, but soon afterwards we set out on a six weeks' journey, and we are but just settled in our winter home.
Those unspeakable troubles 156 in which I necessarily felt more for you than for any one else concerned, are I trust, well at an end and you are enjoying a time of peace. It was like your own sympathetic energy to be able, even while the storm was yet hanging in your sky, to write to me about my husband's books. Will you not agree with me that there is one comprehensive Church whose fellowship consists in the desire to purify and ennoble human life, and where the best members of all narrower churches may call themselves brother and sister in spite of differences? I am writing to your dear Husband as well as to you, and in answer to his question about Goethe, I must say, for my part, that I think he had a strain of mysticism in his soul, -- of so much mysticism as I think inevitably belongs to a full poetic nature -- I mean the delighted bathing of the soul in emotions which overpass the outlines of definite thought. I should take the "Imitation" as a type (it is one which your husband also mentions), but perhaps I might differ from him in my attempt to intrpret the unchangeable and universal meanings of that great book.
Mr. Lewes, however, who has a better right than I to a conclusion about Goethe, thinks that he entered into the experience of the mystic -- as in the confessions of the Sch'f6ne Seele 157 -- simply by force of his sympathetic genius, and that his personal individual bent was towards the clear and plastic exclusively. Do not imagine that Mr. Lewes is guided in his exposition by theoretic antipathies. He is singularly tolerant of difference, and able to admire what is unlike himself.
He is busy now correcting the proofs of his second volume. I wonder whether you have headaches and are rickety as we are, or whether you have a glorious immunity from those ills of the flesh. Your husband's photograph looks worthy to represent one of those wondrous Greeks who wrote grand dramas at eighty or ninety.
I am decidedly among the correspondents who may exercise their friends in the virtue of giving and hoping for nothing again. Otherwise I am unprofitable. Yet believe me, dear Friends, I am always with lively memories of you
Yours affectionately
M. E. Lewes.
MS: Mr. Lyman Beecher Stowe. Published: Cross, III, 242-244.
The Priory, | 21. North Bank, | Regents Park.
November 11. 74.
My dear Friend
I feel rather disgraced by the fact that I received your last kind letter nearly two months ago. But a brief note of mine, written immediately on hearing of you from Mrs. Fields, must have crossed yours and the Professor's kind letters to me, and I hope it proved to you that I love you in my heart.
We were in the country then, but soon afterwards we set out on a six weeks' journey, and we are but just settled in our winter home.
Those unspeakable troubles 156 in which I necessarily felt more for you than for any one else concerned, are I trust, well at an end and you are enjoying a time of peace. It was like your own sympathetic energy to be able, even while the storm was yet hanging in your sky, to write to me about my husband's books. Will you not agree with me that there is one comprehensive Church whose fellowship consists in the desire to purify and ennoble human life, and where the best members of all narrower churches may call themselves brother and sister in spite of differences? I am writing to your dear Husband as well as to you, and in answer to his question about Goethe, I must say, for my part, that I think he had a strain of mysticism in his soul, -- of so much mysticism as I think inevitably belongs to a full poetic nature -- I mean the delighted bathing of the soul in emotions which overpass the outlines of definite thought. I should take the "Imitation" as a type (it is one which your husband also mentions), but perhaps I might differ from him in my attempt to intrpret the unchangeable and universal meanings of that great book.
Mr. Lewes, however, who has a better right than I to a conclusion about Goethe, thinks that he entered into the experience of the mystic -- as in the confessions of the Sch'f6ne Seele 157 -- simply by force of his sympathetic genius, and that his personal individual bent was towards the clear and plastic exclusively. Do not imagine that Mr. Lewes is guided in his exposition by theoretic antipathies. He is singularly tolerant of difference, and able to admire what is unlike himself.
He is busy now correcting the proofs of his second volume. I wonder whether you have headaches and are rickety as we are, or whether you have a glorious immunity from those ills of the flesh. Your husband's photograph looks worthy to represent one of those wondrous Greeks who wrote grand dramas at eighty or ninety.
I am decidedly among the correspondents who may exercise their friends in the virtue of giving and hoping for nothing again. Otherwise I am unprofitable. Yet believe me, dear Friends, I am always with lively memories of you
Yours affectionately
M. E. Lewes.
Signature
M. E. Lewes.
Citation
George Eliot, GE to Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, London, 11 November 1874, 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/93461