GE to Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, London, 29 October 1876
Title
GE to Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, London, 29 October 1876
Title
GE to Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, London, 29 October 1876
Sender
George Eliot
Recipient
Mrs. Harriet Beecher S
Date(s)
- 1876-10-29
Place
London
Letter Content
GE to Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, London, 29 October 1876
MS: Mr. Lyman Beecher Stowe. Published: Cross, III, 293-296.
October 29. 76.
Dear Friend
[Evermore thanks] for your last letter, full of a generous sympathy that can afford to be frank. The lovely photograph of the grandson will be carefully preserved. It has the sort of beauty which seems to be peculiarly abundant in America -- at once rounded and delicate in form.
I do hope you will be able to carry out your wish to visit your son 551 at Bonn, notwithstanding that heavy crown of years that your dear Rabbi has to carry. If the sea-voyage could be borne without much disturbance, the land-journey might be made easy by taking it in short stages -- the plan we always pursue in travelling. You see, I have an interested motive in wishing you to come to Europe again, since I can't go to America. But I enter thoroughly into the disinclination to move when there are studies that make each day too short. If we were neighbours, I should be in danger of getting troublesome to the revered Orientalist, with all kinds of questions.
As to the Jewish element in [Deronda,] I expected from first to last in writing it, that it would create much stronger resistance and even repulsion than it has actually met with. But precisely because I felt that the usual attitude of Christians towards Jews is -- I hardly know whether to say more impious or more stupid when viewed in the light of their professed principles, I therefore felt urged to treat Jews with such sympathy and understanding as my nature and knowledge could attain to. Moreover, not only towards the Jews, but towards all oriental peoples with whom we English come in contact, a spirit of arrogance and contemptuous dictatorialness is observable which has become a national disgrace to us. There is nothing I should care more to do, if it were possible, than to rouse the imagination of men and women to a vision of human claims in those races of their fellow-men who most differ from them in customs and beliefs. But towards the Hebrews we western people who have been reared in Christianity, have a peculiar debt and, whether we acknowledge it or not, a peculiar thoroughness of fellowship in religious and moral sentiment. Can anything be more disgusting than to hear people called "educated" making small jokes about eating ham, and showing themselves empty of any real knowledge as to the relation of their own social and religious life to the history of the people they think themselves witty in insulting? They hardly know that Christ was a Jew. And I find men educated at Rugby supposing that Christ spoke Greek. 552 To my feeling, this deadness to the history which has prepared half our world for us, this inability to find interest in any form of life that is not clad in the same coat-tails and flounces as our own lies very close to the worst kind of irreligion. The best that can be said of it is, that it is a sign of the intellectual narrowness -- in plain English, the stupidity, which is still the average mark of our culture.
Yes, I expected more aversion than I have found. But I was happily independent in material things and felt no temptation to accommodate my writing to any standard except that of trying to do my best in what seemed to me most needful to be done, and I sum up with the writer of the Book of Maccabees -- [if I have done well, and as befits the subject, it is what I desired, but if I have done ill, it is what I could attain unto.] 553
You are in the middle of a more glorious autumn than ours, but we too are having now and then a little sunshine on the changing woods. I hope that I am right in putting the address from which you wrote to me on the 25th September, so that my note may not linger away from you and leave you to imagine me indifferent or negligent.
Please offer my reverent regard to Mr. Stowe, and believe me, dear Friend
Always your gratefully affectionate
M. E. Lewes.
We spent three months in East Switzerland, and are the better for it.
MS: Mr. Lyman Beecher Stowe. Published: Cross, III, 293-296.
October 29. 76.
Dear Friend
[Evermore thanks] for your last letter, full of a generous sympathy that can afford to be frank. The lovely photograph of the grandson will be carefully preserved. It has the sort of beauty which seems to be peculiarly abundant in America -- at once rounded and delicate in form.
I do hope you will be able to carry out your wish to visit your son 551 at Bonn, notwithstanding that heavy crown of years that your dear Rabbi has to carry. If the sea-voyage could be borne without much disturbance, the land-journey might be made easy by taking it in short stages -- the plan we always pursue in travelling. You see, I have an interested motive in wishing you to come to Europe again, since I can't go to America. But I enter thoroughly into the disinclination to move when there are studies that make each day too short. If we were neighbours, I should be in danger of getting troublesome to the revered Orientalist, with all kinds of questions.
As to the Jewish element in [Deronda,] I expected from first to last in writing it, that it would create much stronger resistance and even repulsion than it has actually met with. But precisely because I felt that the usual attitude of Christians towards Jews is -- I hardly know whether to say more impious or more stupid when viewed in the light of their professed principles, I therefore felt urged to treat Jews with such sympathy and understanding as my nature and knowledge could attain to. Moreover, not only towards the Jews, but towards all oriental peoples with whom we English come in contact, a spirit of arrogance and contemptuous dictatorialness is observable which has become a national disgrace to us. There is nothing I should care more to do, if it were possible, than to rouse the imagination of men and women to a vision of human claims in those races of their fellow-men who most differ from them in customs and beliefs. But towards the Hebrews we western people who have been reared in Christianity, have a peculiar debt and, whether we acknowledge it or not, a peculiar thoroughness of fellowship in religious and moral sentiment. Can anything be more disgusting than to hear people called "educated" making small jokes about eating ham, and showing themselves empty of any real knowledge as to the relation of their own social and religious life to the history of the people they think themselves witty in insulting? They hardly know that Christ was a Jew. And I find men educated at Rugby supposing that Christ spoke Greek. 552 To my feeling, this deadness to the history which has prepared half our world for us, this inability to find interest in any form of life that is not clad in the same coat-tails and flounces as our own lies very close to the worst kind of irreligion. The best that can be said of it is, that it is a sign of the intellectual narrowness -- in plain English, the stupidity, which is still the average mark of our culture.
Yes, I expected more aversion than I have found. But I was happily independent in material things and felt no temptation to accommodate my writing to any standard except that of trying to do my best in what seemed to me most needful to be done, and I sum up with the writer of the Book of Maccabees -- [if I have done well, and as befits the subject, it is what I desired, but if I have done ill, it is what I could attain unto.] 553
You are in the middle of a more glorious autumn than ours, but we too are having now and then a little sunshine on the changing woods. I hope that I am right in putting the address from which you wrote to me on the 25th September, so that my note may not linger away from you and leave you to imagine me indifferent or negligent.
Please offer my reverent regard to Mr. Stowe, and believe me, dear Friend
Always your gratefully affectionate
M. E. Lewes.
We spent three months in East Switzerland, and are the better for it.
Signature
M. E. Lewes.
Citation
George Eliot, GE to Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, London, 29 October 1876, 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/93462