GE to the Hon. Mrs. Henry Frederick Ponsonby, London, 10 December 1874
Title
GE to the Hon. Mrs. Henry Frederick Ponsonby, London, 10 December 1874
Title
GE to the Hon. Mrs. Henry Frederick Ponsonby, London, 10 December 1874
Sender
George Eliot
Recipient
the Hon. Mrs. Henry Frederick Ponsonby
Date(s)
- 1874-12-10
Place
London
Letter Content
GE to the Hon. Mrs. Henry Frederick Ponsonby, London, 10 December 1874
Text: Cross, III, 245-250, and Magdalen Ponsonby, Mary Ponsonby, [1927] pp. 93-97.
The Priory, | 21. North Bank, | Regents Park.
December 10th, 1874.
My dear Mrs. Ponsonby, 172
For some days after receiving your note with the photographs and accompanying papers, I was head-achy and deferred thanking you in the hope that I might bye-and-bye be able to write something more than -- mere acknowledgment.
I am deeply interested in what you have confided to me, and feel the confidence to be a strong link between us. But I fear that any such limited considerations as I could put before you, in the sort of letter which is all that I could manage to write specially to you at present, could hardly have much more efficacy than what you have found in my books, which have for their main bearing a conclusion the opposite of that in which your studies seem to have painfully imprisoned you -- a conclusion without which I could not have cared to write any representation of human life -- namely, that the fellowship between man and man which has been the principle of development, social and moral, is not dependent on conceptions of what is not man: and that the idea of God, so far as it has been a high spiritual influence, is the ideal of a goodness entirely human (i.e., an exaltation of the human).
Have you quite fairly represented yourself in saying that you have ceased to pity your suffering fellow-men, because you can no longer think of them, as individualities of immortal duration, in some other state of existence than this of which you know the pains and the pleasures? -- that you feel less for them now you regard them as more miserable? And, on a closer examination of your feelings, should you find that you had lost all sense of quality in actions -- all possibility of admiration that yearns to imitate -- all keen sense of what is cruel and injurious -- all belief that your conduct (and therefore the conduct of others) can have any difference of effect on the wellbeing of those immediately about you (and therefore on those afar off), whether you carelessly follow your selfish moods or encourage that vision of others' needs, which is the source of justice, tenderness, sympathy in the fullest sense? I cannot believe that your strong intellect will continue to see, in the conditions of man's appearance on this planet, a destructive relation to your sympathy: this seems to me equivalent to saying that you care no longer for colour, now you know the laws of the spectrum.
As to the necessary combinations through which life is manifested, and which seem to present themselves to you as a hideous fatalism, which ought logically to petrify your volition -- have they, in fact, any such influence on your ordinary course of action in the primary affairs of your existence as a human, social, domestic creature? And if they don't hinder you from taking measures for a bath, without which you know you cannot secure the delicate cleanliness which is your second nature, why should they hinder you from a line of resolve in a higher strain of duty to your ideal, both for yourself and others? But the consideration of molecular physics is not the direct ground of human love and moral action, any more than it is the direct means of composing a noble picture or of enjoying great music. One might as well hope to dissect one's own body and be merry in doing it, as take molecular physics (in which you must banish from your field of view what is specifically human) to be your dominant guide, your determiner of motives, in what is solely human. That every study has its bearing on every other is true; but pain and relief, love and sorrow, have their peculiar history which make an experience and knowledge over and above the swing of atoms.
The teaching you quote as George Sand's would, I think, deserve to be called nonsensical if it did not deserve to be called wicked. What sort of "culture of the intellect" is that which, instead of widening the mind to a fuller and fuller response to all the elements of our existence, isolates it in a moral stupidity? -- which flatters egoism with the possibility that a complex and refined human society can continue wherein relations have no sacredness beyond the inclinationof changing moods? -- or figures to itself an aesthetic human life that one may compare to that of the fabled grasshoppers who were once men, but having heard the song of the Muses could do nothing but sing, and starved themselves so till they died and had a fit resurrection as grasshoppers; and "this," says Socrates, "was the return the Muses made them." 173
With regard to the pains and limitations of one's personal lot, I suppose that there is not a single man, or woman, who has not more or less need of that stoical resignation which is often a hidden heroism, or who, in considering his or her past history, is not aware that it has been cruelly affected by the ignorant or selfish action of some fellow-being in a more or less close relation of life. And to my mind, there can be no stronger motive, than this perception, to an energetic effort that the lives nearest to us shall not suffer in a like manner from us.
The progress of the world -- which you say can only come at the right time -- can certainly never come at all save by the modified action of the individual beings who compose the world; and that we can say to ourselves with effect, "There is an order of considerations which I will keep myself continually in mind of, so that they may continually be the prompters of certain feelings and actions," seems to me as undeniable as that we can resolve to study the Semitic languages and apply to an Oriental scholar to give us daily lessons. What would your keen wit say to a young man who alleged the physical basis of nervous action as a reason why he could not possibly take that course?
When I wrote the first page of this letter I thought I was going to say that I had not courage to enter on the momentous points you had touched on, in the hasty brief form of a letter. But I have been led on sentence after sentence -- not, I fear, with any inspiration beyond that of my anxiety. You will, at least, pardon any ill-advised things I may have written on the prompting of the moment.
I hope that we shall see you before very long, and that you will always believe me,
Most sincerely yours,
M. E. Lewes.
P.S. As to duration, and the way in which it affects your views of the human history, what is really the difference to your imagination between Infinitude and billions, when you have to consider the value of human experience? Will you say that since your life has a term of threescore years and ten, it was really a matter of indifference whether you were a cripple with a wretched skin disease or an active creature with a mind at large for the enjoyment of knowledge and with a nature which has attracted others to you?
Difficulties of thought and acceptance of what is without full comprehension belong to every system of thinking. The question is to find the least incomplete.
Text: Cross, III, 245-250, and Magdalen Ponsonby, Mary Ponsonby, [1927] pp. 93-97.
The Priory, | 21. North Bank, | Regents Park.
December 10th, 1874.
My dear Mrs. Ponsonby, 172
For some days after receiving your note with the photographs and accompanying papers, I was head-achy and deferred thanking you in the hope that I might bye-and-bye be able to write something more than -- mere acknowledgment.
I am deeply interested in what you have confided to me, and feel the confidence to be a strong link between us. But I fear that any such limited considerations as I could put before you, in the sort of letter which is all that I could manage to write specially to you at present, could hardly have much more efficacy than what you have found in my books, which have for their main bearing a conclusion the opposite of that in which your studies seem to have painfully imprisoned you -- a conclusion without which I could not have cared to write any representation of human life -- namely, that the fellowship between man and man which has been the principle of development, social and moral, is not dependent on conceptions of what is not man: and that the idea of God, so far as it has been a high spiritual influence, is the ideal of a goodness entirely human (i.e., an exaltation of the human).
Have you quite fairly represented yourself in saying that you have ceased to pity your suffering fellow-men, because you can no longer think of them, as individualities of immortal duration, in some other state of existence than this of which you know the pains and the pleasures? -- that you feel less for them now you regard them as more miserable? And, on a closer examination of your feelings, should you find that you had lost all sense of quality in actions -- all possibility of admiration that yearns to imitate -- all keen sense of what is cruel and injurious -- all belief that your conduct (and therefore the conduct of others) can have any difference of effect on the wellbeing of those immediately about you (and therefore on those afar off), whether you carelessly follow your selfish moods or encourage that vision of others' needs, which is the source of justice, tenderness, sympathy in the fullest sense? I cannot believe that your strong intellect will continue to see, in the conditions of man's appearance on this planet, a destructive relation to your sympathy: this seems to me equivalent to saying that you care no longer for colour, now you know the laws of the spectrum.
As to the necessary combinations through which life is manifested, and which seem to present themselves to you as a hideous fatalism, which ought logically to petrify your volition -- have they, in fact, any such influence on your ordinary course of action in the primary affairs of your existence as a human, social, domestic creature? And if they don't hinder you from taking measures for a bath, without which you know you cannot secure the delicate cleanliness which is your second nature, why should they hinder you from a line of resolve in a higher strain of duty to your ideal, both for yourself and others? But the consideration of molecular physics is not the direct ground of human love and moral action, any more than it is the direct means of composing a noble picture or of enjoying great music. One might as well hope to dissect one's own body and be merry in doing it, as take molecular physics (in which you must banish from your field of view what is specifically human) to be your dominant guide, your determiner of motives, in what is solely human. That every study has its bearing on every other is true; but pain and relief, love and sorrow, have their peculiar history which make an experience and knowledge over and above the swing of atoms.
The teaching you quote as George Sand's would, I think, deserve to be called nonsensical if it did not deserve to be called wicked. What sort of "culture of the intellect" is that which, instead of widening the mind to a fuller and fuller response to all the elements of our existence, isolates it in a moral stupidity? -- which flatters egoism with the possibility that a complex and refined human society can continue wherein relations have no sacredness beyond the inclinationof changing moods? -- or figures to itself an aesthetic human life that one may compare to that of the fabled grasshoppers who were once men, but having heard the song of the Muses could do nothing but sing, and starved themselves so till they died and had a fit resurrection as grasshoppers; and "this," says Socrates, "was the return the Muses made them." 173
With regard to the pains and limitations of one's personal lot, I suppose that there is not a single man, or woman, who has not more or less need of that stoical resignation which is often a hidden heroism, or who, in considering his or her past history, is not aware that it has been cruelly affected by the ignorant or selfish action of some fellow-being in a more or less close relation of life. And to my mind, there can be no stronger motive, than this perception, to an energetic effort that the lives nearest to us shall not suffer in a like manner from us.
The progress of the world -- which you say can only come at the right time -- can certainly never come at all save by the modified action of the individual beings who compose the world; and that we can say to ourselves with effect, "There is an order of considerations which I will keep myself continually in mind of, so that they may continually be the prompters of certain feelings and actions," seems to me as undeniable as that we can resolve to study the Semitic languages and apply to an Oriental scholar to give us daily lessons. What would your keen wit say to a young man who alleged the physical basis of nervous action as a reason why he could not possibly take that course?
When I wrote the first page of this letter I thought I was going to say that I had not courage to enter on the momentous points you had touched on, in the hasty brief form of a letter. But I have been led on sentence after sentence -- not, I fear, with any inspiration beyond that of my anxiety. You will, at least, pardon any ill-advised things I may have written on the prompting of the moment.
I hope that we shall see you before very long, and that you will always believe me,
Most sincerely yours,
M. E. Lewes.
P.S. As to duration, and the way in which it affects your views of the human history, what is really the difference to your imagination between Infinitude and billions, when you have to consider the value of human experience? Will you say that since your life has a term of threescore years and ten, it was really a matter of indifference whether you were a cripple with a wretched skin disease or an active creature with a mind at large for the enjoyment of knowledge and with a nature which has attracted others to you?
Difficulties of thought and acceptance of what is without full comprehension belong to every system of thinking. The question is to find the least incomplete.
Signature
M. E. Lewes.
Citation
George Eliot, GE to the Hon. Mrs. Henry Frederick Ponsonby, London, 10 December 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/94152