GE to the Hon. Mrs. Henry Frederick Ponsonby, Witley, 17 October 1877
Title
GE to the Hon. Mrs. Henry Frederick Ponsonby, Witley, 17 October 1877
Title
GE to the Hon. Mrs. Henry Frederick Ponsonby, Witley, 17 October 1877
Sender
George Eliot
Recipient
the Hon. Mrs. Henry Frederick Ponsonby
Date(s)
- 1877-10-17
Place
Witley
Letter Content
GE to the Hon. Mrs. Henry Frederick Ponsonby, Witley, 17 October 1877
Text: Magdalen Ponsonby, Mary Ponsonby, 1927, pp. 102-124. Published: Cross, III, 316-318.
The Heights, Witley, | October 17th, 1877.
Dear Mrs. Ponsonby,
I like to know that you have been thinking of me and that you care to write to me, and though I will not disobey your considerate prohibition so far as to try and answer your letter fully, I must content my soul by telling you that we shall be settled in the old place by the end of the first week in November, and that I shall be delighted to see you there. I long to know how far that purpose for which you made your residence in London months ago has been fulfilled. And there are many other subjects, more common to all of us, that I shall have a special pleasure in talking of with you.
Let me say now, that the passage quoted from your legal friend's letter is one that I am most glad to find falling in with your own attitude of mind. The view is what I have endeavoured to represent in a little poem called "Stradivarius," which you may not have happened to read:
"I say, not God Himself can make man's best Without best men to help Him." 743
And next -- it will perhaps surprise you to know that, having read the New Republic 744 I think it one of the most condemnable books of the day; not simply because the Master of Balliol is a friend for whom I have a high regard. If I had known nothing of Mr. Jowett personally, I should equally have felt disapprobation of a work in which a young man who has no solid contribution of his own to make, sets about attempting to turn into ridicule the men who are most prominent in serious effort to make such contribution. With that impression from the New Republic I was not inclined to read anything by the same writer until I heard that he had repented and been converted to the emotions of gratitude and reverence. I think that kind of direct personal portraiture (or caricature, for except of Mr. Jowett and one other, the drawing is mere distortion) is a bastard kind of satire that I am not disposed to think the better of because Aristophanes used it in relation to Socrates. Do you know that pretty story about Bishop Thirlwall 745 -- that when somebody wanted to bring to him Forchhammer as a distinguished German writer, he replied, "No! I will never receive into my house the man who justified the death of Socrates."
But I am running on with a gossip not particularly warranted by the occasion. "O that we were all of one mind, and that mind good!" is an impossible-to-be-realised wish, and I don't wish it at all in its full extent. But I think it would be possible that men should differ speculatively as much as they do now, and yet be "of one mind" in the desire to avoid giving unnecessary pain, in the desire to do an honest part towards the general well-being which has made a comfortable nidus for themselves, in the resolve not to sacrifice another to their own egoistic promptings. Pity and fairness -- two little words which, carried out, would embrace the utmost delicacies of the moral life -- seem to me not to rest on an unverifiable hypothesis but on facts quite as irreversible as the perception that a pyramid will not stand on its apex.
I am so glad you have been enjoying Ireland in quiet. We love our bit of country and are bent on keeping it as a summer refuge always. 746 Dear Mrs. Ponsonby,
Yours affectionately,
M. E. Lewes.
Text: Magdalen Ponsonby, Mary Ponsonby, 1927, pp. 102-124. Published: Cross, III, 316-318.
The Heights, Witley, | October 17th, 1877.
Dear Mrs. Ponsonby,
I like to know that you have been thinking of me and that you care to write to me, and though I will not disobey your considerate prohibition so far as to try and answer your letter fully, I must content my soul by telling you that we shall be settled in the old place by the end of the first week in November, and that I shall be delighted to see you there. I long to know how far that purpose for which you made your residence in London months ago has been fulfilled. And there are many other subjects, more common to all of us, that I shall have a special pleasure in talking of with you.
Let me say now, that the passage quoted from your legal friend's letter is one that I am most glad to find falling in with your own attitude of mind. The view is what I have endeavoured to represent in a little poem called "Stradivarius," which you may not have happened to read:
"I say, not God Himself can make man's best Without best men to help Him." 743
And next -- it will perhaps surprise you to know that, having read the New Republic 744 I think it one of the most condemnable books of the day; not simply because the Master of Balliol is a friend for whom I have a high regard. If I had known nothing of Mr. Jowett personally, I should equally have felt disapprobation of a work in which a young man who has no solid contribution of his own to make, sets about attempting to turn into ridicule the men who are most prominent in serious effort to make such contribution. With that impression from the New Republic I was not inclined to read anything by the same writer until I heard that he had repented and been converted to the emotions of gratitude and reverence. I think that kind of direct personal portraiture (or caricature, for except of Mr. Jowett and one other, the drawing is mere distortion) is a bastard kind of satire that I am not disposed to think the better of because Aristophanes used it in relation to Socrates. Do you know that pretty story about Bishop Thirlwall 745 -- that when somebody wanted to bring to him Forchhammer as a distinguished German writer, he replied, "No! I will never receive into my house the man who justified the death of Socrates."
But I am running on with a gossip not particularly warranted by the occasion. "O that we were all of one mind, and that mind good!" is an impossible-to-be-realised wish, and I don't wish it at all in its full extent. But I think it would be possible that men should differ speculatively as much as they do now, and yet be "of one mind" in the desire to avoid giving unnecessary pain, in the desire to do an honest part towards the general well-being which has made a comfortable nidus for themselves, in the resolve not to sacrifice another to their own egoistic promptings. Pity and fairness -- two little words which, carried out, would embrace the utmost delicacies of the moral life -- seem to me not to rest on an unverifiable hypothesis but on facts quite as irreversible as the perception that a pyramid will not stand on its apex.
I am so glad you have been enjoying Ireland in quiet. We love our bit of country and are bent on keeping it as a summer refuge always. 746 Dear Mrs. Ponsonby,
Yours affectionately,
M. E. Lewes.
Signature
M. E. Lewes.
Citation
George Eliot, GE to the Hon. Mrs. Henry Frederick Ponsonby, Witley, 17 October 1877, 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/94157