From the Note-Book of an Eccentric, and Other Essays, by George Eliot.

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The Essays of "George Eliot", Complete.

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From the Note-Book of an Eccentric,

and Other Essays,

by George Eliot.

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This review is an effort to gather together what one finds as one is at the tail end of reading essays by George Eliot, via various collected works of George Eliot through different publications.

The reviews were written, following the order the essays and articles were originally read, as ordered in various collections they were read from; the first few therefore being, Three Months In Weimar, and from collections - Impressions Of Theophrastus Such, and Essays of George Eliot Complete. This particular review is of essays remaining after Three Months In Weimar, Impressions Of Theophrastus Such, and Essays of George Eliot Complete, were finished.

The latter title, Essays of George Eliot Complete, is as misleading as titles of various complete collections of works of George Eliot - most aren't complete, and nor is the collection of essays.

Here is an effort to put all the reviews - mine - of the remaining essays together. First, a list of all the essays by George Eliot.

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Essays of George Eliot

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THREE MONTHS IN WEIMAR

Impressions of Theophrastus Such

The Essays of "George Eliot" Complete.

Other Essays.

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THREE MONTHS IN WEIMAR

by George Eliot.

Frasers Magazine for Town and Country,

51: 306 (1855:June)

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Impressions of Theophrastus Such,

Contents

I. Looking Inward.

II. Looking Backward.

III. How We Encourage Research.

IV. A Man Surprised at his Originality.

V. A too Deferential Man.

VI. Only Temper.

VII. A Political Molecule.

VIII. The Watch-Dog of Knowledge.

IX. A Half-Breed.

X. Debasing the Moral Currency.

XI. The Wasp Credited with the Honeycomb.

XII. “So Young!”

XIII. How We Come to Give Ourselves False Testimonials, and Believe in Them.

XIV. The too Ready Writer.

XV. Diseases of Small Authorship.

XVI. Moral Swindlers.

XVII. Shadows of the Coming Race.

XVIII. The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!

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The Essays of "George Eliot" Complete.

CONTENTS.

Preface,

“George Eliot’s” Analysis of Motives,

I.—Carlyle’s Life of Sterling,

II.—Woman in France,

III.—Evangelical Teaching,

IV.—German Wit,

V.—Natural History of German Life,

VI.—Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,

VII.—Worldliness and Other-Worldliness,

VIII.—The Influence of Rationalism,

IX.—The Grammar of Ornament,

X.—Felix Holt’s Address to Workingmen,

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Other Essays.

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Contents as in various collections

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Contents from The Complete Works of George Eliot,

e-artnow, 2020

Contact: info@e-artnow.org EAN: 4064066398552

Carlyle’s Life of Sterling

Woman in France: Madame de Sablé

Evangelical Teaching: Dr. Cumming

German Wit: Henry Heine

The Natural History of German Life

Silly Novels by Lady Novelists

Worldliness and Other-Worldliness: The Poet Young

The Influence of Rationalism The Grammar of Ornament

Address to Working Men, by Felix Holt

George Forster

Margaret Fuller

How to Avoid Disappointment

The Wisdom of the Child

A Little Fable with a Great Moral

Hints on Snubbing

From the Note-Book of an Eccentric

Leaves from a Note-Book

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Contents (from the Complete Works of George Eliot,

identical contents from four separate collections

including two publications from JA,

one from ATOZ Classics, and one other.)

From the Note-Book of an Eccentric.

How to Avoid Disappointment.

The Wisdom of the Child.

A Little Fable with a Great Moral.

Hints on Snubbing.

Carlyle’s Life of Sterling.

Margaret Fuller.

Woman in France: Madame de Sablé.

Three Months in Weimar.

Evangelical Teaching: Dr. Cumming.

German Wit: Henry Heine.

The Natural History of German Life.

Silly Novels by Lady Novelists.

George Forster.

Worldliness and Other-Worldliness: The Poet Young.

The Influence of Rationalism.

The Grammar of Ornament.

Address to Working Men, by Felix Holt.

Leaves from a Note-Book.

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Contents from

THE COMPLETE WORKS OF GEORGE ELIOT

Delphi

THREE MONTHS IN WEIMAR

SILLY NOVELS BY LADY NOVELISTS

THE NATURAL HISTORY OF GERMAN LIFE

THE INFLUENCE OF RATIONALISM

IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH

CARLYLE’S LIFE OF STERLING

WOMAN IN FRANCE: MADAME DE SABLÉ

EVANGELICAL TEACHING: DR. CUMMING

GERMAN WIT: HENRY HEINE WORLDLINESS AND OTHER-WORLDLINESS: THE POET YOUNG

THE GRAMMAR OF ORNAMENT

ADDRESS TO WORKING MEN, BY FELIX HOLT

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Our order of reviews, followed (after

THREE MONTHS IN WEIMAR

Impressions of Theophrastus Such

The Essays of "George Eliot" Complete.)

For Other Essays.

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Other Essays.

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From the Note-Book of an Eccentric.

How to Avoid Disappointment.

The Wisdom of the Child.

A Little Fable with a Great Moral.

Hints on Snubbing.

Margaret Fuller.

George Forster.

Leaves from a Note-Book

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George Forster

Margaret Fuller

How to Avoid Disappointment

The Wisdom of the Child

A Little Fable with a Great Moral

Hints on Snubbing

From the Note-Book of an Eccentric

Leaves from a Note-Book

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On reading - fortunately - From the Note-Book of an Eccentric first, it would seem that other essays are a part of this, and this ought to gave been the title of this collection. So we shall read, and write review, in this order, beginning with that one.

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Reviews.

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From the Note-Book of an Eccentric.

From the Note-Book of an Eccentric.

Coventry Herald and Observer

(December 1846)

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When one begins to read this, it's a tad startling.

"A week ago, I stood sole mourner at the grave of my friend Macarthy. He lies in a village churchyard;—not one of those peaceful green plots which seem to speak well for the influence of the bishop’s blessing, in which there is some spreading chestnut or yew of age immemorial, that seems to say to the world-weary, “Come and rest under my shadow.” No. The churchyard in which Macarthy lies looks not like a Gottes-acker, but a vicar’s acre, the profits of which (including the grazing of half-a-dozen sheep) go to eke out the curate’s yearly hundred, upon which he supports, or rather diets, the gentility of his wife and ten children. It is a thoroughfare for a materialized population, too entirely preoccupied with the needs of the living to retain an Old Mortality’s affectionate care for tomb-stones and epitaphs, or to offer to the graves that terrified veneration which hurries past them after sunset. They are in the strong grasp of giant Hunger, and fear no shadows. Not one of this plodding generation will long remember Macarthy, “the sick gentleman that lodged at widow Crowe’s,” and when the grass is green and long upon his grave, it will seem to say of him as truly as of others—“I cover the forgotten.” But it is not so, Macarthy. With me thou wilt still live: my thoughts will seem to be all spoken to thee, my actions all performed in thy presence; for ours was a love passing the love of women."

Is it possible, burials on land that's rented out for grazing, for benefit of poor curates? But one, of course, reads on, rather than go on a quest of an answer.

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"My friend was one of whom the world proved itself not worthy, for it never made a true estimate of him. His soul was a lyre of exquisite structure, but men knew not how to play on it: it was a bird endowed with rich and varied notes, which it was ready to bestow on human hearers; but their coarse fondling or brutal harshness scared it away, and the poor bird ceased to sing, save in the depths of the forest or the silence of night. To those who saw only the splendour of his genius, and the nobility of his sentiments, his childhood and youth seemed to promise a brilliant career; but any who were capable of a more discriminating estimate and refined analysis of his character, must have had a foreboding that it contained elements which would too probably operate as non-conductors, interposed between his highly charged mind and the negatively electrified souls around him. The quality on which a good prophet would have pronounced my friend’s fate to hang, was one which will be held to have placed him not above, but simply out of, the sphere of his fellow men. It was a morbid sensitiveness in his feeling of the beautiful, which I can compare to nothing but those alleged states of mesmeric lucidity, in which the patient obtains an unenviable cognizance of irregularities, happily imperceptible to us in the ordinary state of our consciousness."

" ... He moved among the things of this earth like a lapidarian among false gems, which fetch high prices and admiration from others, but to him are mere counterfeits. He seemed to have a preternaturally sharpened vision, which saw knots and blemishes, where all was smoothness to others. The unsightly condition of the masses—their dreary ignorance, the conventional distortion of human nature in upper classes—the absence of artistic harmony and beauty in the details of outward existence, were with him not merely themes for cold philosophy, indignant philippics, or pointed satire; but positively painful elements in his experience, sharp iron entering into his soul. Had his nature been less noble, his benevolence less God-like, he would have been a misanthropist, all compact of bitter sarcasm, and therefore no poet. As it was, he was a humourist—one who sported with all the forms of human life, as if they were so many May-day mummings, uncouth, monstrous disguises of poor human nature, which has not discovered its dignity. While he laughed at the follies of men, he wept over their sorrows; and while his wit lashed them as with a whip of scorpions, there was a stream of feeling in the deep caverns of his soul, which was all the time murmuring, “Would that I could die for thee, thou poor humanity!”

"From the age of twenty, I never knew him to form a particular predilection for any individual, or admit any new intimacy. He seemed to have learned by experience that his sensibility was too acute for special friendship—that his sympathy with mankind was that of a being of analogous, rather than of identical race."

" ... He seemed, indeed, to shrink from all organized existences. He was an ardent lover of Nature, but it was in her grand inorganic forms—the blue sky, the stars, the clouds, the sea, mountains, rocks, and rivers—in which she seems pregnant with some sublimer birth than the living races of this globe. He would lie on the grass gazing at the setting sun with a look of intense yearning which might have belonged to a banished Uriel. The roaring of the wind would produce in him an enthusiastic excitement, a spiritual intoxication. He felt a delight in the destructive power of the elements, which seemed to be in singular conflict with his angelic pity: had he been a witness of an earthquake, a city on fire, or the eruption of a volcano, I know not which would have predominated in him, bleeding compassion for the sufferers, or wild ecstacy at the triumphant fury of the forces of nature."

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One doesn't suspect George Eliot of beginning to write a satire or a spoof, however, until one has finished reading this piece, heartbreaking as it is so far, from the word go.

" ... When we had talked long and earnestly together, he pointed to a large trunk filled with manuscripts. “When I am dead,” he said, “take these as the only memorial I have to give, and use them as you will.” I refused to leave my friend until he was committed to his mother earth; and it then became my most interesting employment to examine the papers which contained the best history and image of his mind. I have found the results of profound thought and widely extended research-productions, some of which have been carefully meditated, others apparently thrown off with the rapidity of inspiration; but in all of them there is a strange mixture of wisdom and whimsicality, of sublime conception and stinging caricature, of deep melancholy and wild merriment. No publisher would venture to offer such caviare to the general; and my friend’s writings are not old and musty enough to fall within the scheme of any publishing club, so that the bulk of them will probably be their own tomb.

"Meanwhile, among his other manuscripts, I have discovered three thick little volumes, which were successively carried in his pocket for the purpose of noting down casual thoughts, sketches of character, and scenes out of the common; in short, as receptacles of what would probably have evaporated in conversation had my friend been in the habit of companionship. From these fragmentary stores I shall now and then give a selection in some modest nook of an unpretending journal—not to the world, far be so ambitious an aspiration from me—but to the half-dozen readers who can be attracted by unsophisticated thought and feeling, even though it be presented to them in the corner of the weekly newspaper of their own petty town."

Then it dawns - other pieces, their titles suggesting satires or spoofs, are a part of this.

Did she write this, spoofing such descriptions of persons by other authors, defyingobscure people for reasons not commonly given for exacting, as a satire on sentiments, even a pungent attack against fraud?

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September 26, 2021 - September 26, 2021.

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How to Avoid Disappointment.

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Inappropriate, (- or deliberately unassuming, low-key? -), title.

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One suspected the previous piece of being a satire or a spoof, and the rest of essays to follow the theme - but this opens differently -

"One of my favourite lounges in Paris is the studio of an artist, who tolerates my presence on the score of a slight service which I happened to render him some years ago, and which he magnifies into a lasting claim on his gratitude. I soon acquire an almost passionate interest in the progress of a noble picture. I love to think how the perfect whole exists in the imagination of the artist before his pencil has marked the canvas—to observe how every minute stroke, every dismal-looking layer of colour conduces to the ultimate effect, and how completely the creative genius which has conceived the result can calculate the necessary means. I love to watch the artist’s eye, so wrapt and unworldly in its glance, scrupulously attentive to the details of his actual labour, yet keeping ever in view the idea which that labour is to fulfil. I say to myself—this is an image of what our life should be—a series of efforts directed to the production of a contemplated whole, just as every stroke of the artist’s pencil has a purpose bearing on the conception which he retains in his mind’s eye. We should all be painting our picture, whether it be a home scene after Wilkie, a Paul preaching at Athens, or a Brutus passing sentence on his son. We should all have a purpose in life as perfectly recognised and definite as the painter’s idea of his subject. ... "

and after a - not unexpected - swift swoop down of a sharp beak of satire, taking a bite off the head of the worldly -

" ... “Indisputably,” says your man of the world, “I have never for a moment swerved from the determination to make myself rich and respectable. I chose my wife with that object; I send my sons to the University, I give dinners, I go to balls, I go to church—all that I may be ‘respectable.’ Am not I a man of purpose?” Then there is the man of public spirit, who has devoted his life to some pet project, which is to be the grand catholicon for all the diseases of society. He has travelled, he has lectured, he has canvassed, he has moved heaven and earth, has become the victim of a fixed idea, and died disappointed."

- soars very unexpectedly into a purely spiritual realm -

"Doubtless such men as these have a distinct purpose in life, but they are not the men of whom my artist reminds me—who seem to me to be painting a picture. The kind of purpose which makes life resemble a work of art in its isolated majesty or loveliness is not the attempt to satisfy that inconvenient troop of wants which metamorphose themselves like the sprites of an enchantress, so that no sooner have we provided food for the linnet’s beak than a huge lion’s maw gapes upon us. It is to live, not for our friends, not for those hostages to fortune, wives and children; not for any individual, any specific form; but for something which, while it dwells in these, has an existence beyond them. It is to live for the good, the true, the beautiful, which outlive every generation and are all-pervading as the light which vibrates from the remotest nebula to our own sun. The spirit which has ascertained its true relation to these can never be an orphan: it has its home in the eternal mind, from which neither things present nor to come can separate it. You may infallibly discern the man who lives thus. His eye has not that restless, irresolute glance which tells of no purpose beyond the present hour: it looks as you might imagine the eye of Numa to have looked after an interview with Egeria; the earnest attention and veneration with which it gazed on the divine instructress still lingering in its expression."

- way higher than expected from anyone who was normally so bound to her roots, of a religion so dominated by institutions, as this author.

It ends flat, way down -

"I said one day to my artist, when he was ardently engaged on a favourite picture, “Adolphe, has your love of art ever been tested by any great misfortune?” He replied, “I have suffered—I am suffering under a great calamity; not the blighting of ambition, not the loss of any loved one, but a far more withering sorrow; I have ceased to love the being whom I once believed that I must love while life lasted. I have cherished what I thought was a bright amethyst, and I have seen it losing its lustre day by day till I can no longer delude myself into a belief that it is not valueless. But you see,” said he, turning to me and smiling, “I love my pictures still; I should not like to die till I have worked up my chosen subjects.”

"Who would not have some purpose in life as independent in its value as art is to the artist?"

- but it's less disappointing than it could have been from a higher consciousness, and a culture that could nourish it.

Few can assure of that.

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September 27, 2021 - September 27, 2021.

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The Wisdom of the Child.

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George Eliot soars againto another spiritual height, or better, opens to a spiritual truth of simplicity -

"It may not be an original idea, but never mind, if it be a true one, that the proper result of intellectual cultivation is to restore the mind to that state of wonder and interest with which it looks on everything in childhood. Thus Jean Jacques Rousseau, couched on the grass by the side of a plant that he might examine its structure and appearance at his ease, would have seemed to a little child so like itself in taste and feeling that it would have lain down by him, in full confidence of entire sympathy between them in spite of his wizard-like, Armenian attire."

but again, relapses, and now this time, seriously -

" ... while the wonder of the wise man is the result of knowledge disclosing mystery, the simplicity and purity of his moral principles, the result of wide experience and hardly-attained self-conflict. A truce to your philosophers whose elevation above their fellow-beings consists in their ability to laugh at the ties which bind women and children, who have looked just so far into the principles of ethics as to be able to disconcert a simple soul that talks of vice and virtue as realities. The child which abstains from eating plums because grandmamma forbade is their superior in wisdom: it exercises faith and obedience to law—two of the most ennobling attributes of humanity which these philosophers have cast off. ... "

from the spiritual heights, just as she did after she soared to heights in the middle of the previous article, and this time it's not just flat.

" ... Self-renunciation, submission to law, trust, benignity, ingenuousness, rectitude—these are the qualities we delight most to witness in the child, and these are the qualities which most dignify the man."

It was almost a reaction of fear of soaring ingrained in a soul that had suffered inquisition not too long ago, in an immediately prior life.

" ... If he were to admit that all things were lawful to him, he would add, “I will not be thought under the power of any; I will not circumscribe or bring into bondage the action of any one of my highest endowments.” He feels that in submitting to the restraint of a self-imposed law, he would be presenting humanity in its grandest aspect. But it is only the highest human state at which he aims—not anything superhuman. ... "

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September 27, 2021 - September 27, 2021.

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A Little Fable with a Great Moral.

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George Eliot begins a lovely fable -

"In very early times indeed, when no maidens had looking-glasses, except the mermaidens, there lived in a deep valley two beautiful hamadryads. Now, the hamadryads are a race of nymphs that inhabit the forests. Whenever a little acorn, or a beech nut, or any other seed of a forest tree begins to sprout, a little hamadryad is born, and grows up and lives and dies with the tree. ... "

- but introduces ugliness in it for sake of a lesson - reminding one that a soul and mind and spirit warped early by fear, as church does to people in its quest of grip over them - despite its mask of benevolence - cannot take flight of beauty without a crash of horror into ugliness.

" ... So you see the hamadryads, the daughters of trees, live far longer than the daughters of men—some of them even a thousand years; still they do at last get old, and faded, and shrivelled."

And the ugliness begins before one can be steeped in the enchantment of the beauty, with the ugly name of hamdryad for a nymph that lives in a tree. Moreover, if thats insufficient to make one recoil in horror, one is reminded - more than once, which is overkill, surely, for so short a story? - that the hamdryad, living in her tree, gets old, and therefore ugly, before she dies!

"Now, the two hamadryads of whom I spoke lived in a forest by the side of a clear lake, and they loved better than anything to go down to the brink of the lake and look into the mirror of waters; but not for the same reason. Idione loved to look into the lake because she saw herself there; she would sit on the bank, weaving leaves and flowers in her silken hair, and smiling at her own image all the day long, and if the pretty water-lilies or any other plants began to spread themselves on the surface below her, and spoil her mirror, she would tear them up in anger. But Hieria cared not to look at herself in the lake; she only cared about watching the heavens as they were reflected in its bosom—the foamy clouds on the clear blue by day, and the moon and the stars by night. She did not mind that the water-lilies grew below her, for she was always looking farther off, into the deep part of the lake; she only thought the lilies pretty, and loved them.

"So, in the course of time, these two hamadryads grew old, and Idione began to be angry with the lake, and to hate it because it no longer gave back a pleasant image of herself, and she would carry little stones to the margin and dash them into the lake for vengeance; but she only tired herself, and did not hurt the lake. And as she was frowning and looking spiteful all the day, the lake only went on giving her an uglier and uglier picture of herself, till at last she ran away from it into the hollow of her tree, and sat there lonely and sad till she died. But Hieria grew old without finding it out, for she never looked for herself in the lake—only as, in the centuries she had lived, some of the thick forests had been cleared away from the earth, and men had begun to build and to plough, the sky was less often obscured by vapours, so that the lake was more and more beautiful to her, and she loved better and better the water-lilies that grew below her. Until one morning, after she had been watching the stars in the lake, she went home to her tree, and lying down, she fell into a gentle sleep, and dreamed that she had left her mouldering tree, and had been carried up to live in a star, from which she could still look down on her lake that she had loved so long. And while she was dreaming this, men came and cut down her tree, and Hieria died without knowing that she had become old."

What ugliness of a power-hungry institution is this, equating age with ugliness, and awarding death to fairies? Aren't fairies And nymphs immortal? And being creatures of not flesh, why tell lies about them ageing, much less getting ugly? Lies by misogynistic institutions, of course!

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September 27, 2021 - September 27, 2021.

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Hints on Snubbing.

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If anything, it's a British - more specifically, English - specialisation, along with hypocrisy. One could include caste system, but all West has them. Brits just had more complex ones for colonies, extended from one back home, but not without inverting that of unconverted natives.

George Eliot discourse here reminds one of How To Be An Alien, by Mikes, whom she preceded.

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"It has been sagely said that men reasoned before Aristotle was born; that animals used their limbs before anatomy was heard of; and that fingers were very efficient prehensile instruments long before the invention of forks; which ingenious observations are meant to illustrate the fact that nature is beforehand with art and science. So the faculty of snubbing has been in exercise ever since the days of Cain and Abel, though the great intellect which is to trace out the laws by which its phenomena are governed, and lay down rules for the development of all its hidden resources, has not yet arisen. There have, indeed, been examples of snubbing genius, and it is in the nature of genius to transcend all rules—rather, to furnish the type on which all rules are framed; nevertheless, it is undeniable that for snubbing to attain its complete scope and potency as a moral agent it must be reduced to an art accessible to the less intuitive mind of the many. A few crude suggestions towards this important end may not be unfruitful in the soil of some active intellect.

"Hobbes defined laughter to be the product of a triumphant feeling of superiority: substitute snubbing for laughter and you have a more just definition. The idea of snubbing presupposes inferiority in the snubbed. You can no more snub your betters than you can patronize them; on the contrary, toadyism towards superiors is the invariable attendant on a large endowment of the snubbing faculty. Toadyism, in fact, is the beautiful concavity which corresponds to the snubbing convexity: the angular posture of Baillie MacWheeble’s body is a perfect illustration."

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Did the famous incident, of Queen Victoria saying "We are not amused", take place before George Eliot wrote this?

" ... The monarchical species of snubbing is doubtless an interesting subject of investigation, but the urgent wants of society point rather to the social, political, religious, and domestic species. We throw out a few hints on these, as mere finger-posts to the rich mines below:"

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"1. All men of a thousand a year, who can occasionally afford to give champagne at their dinner parties, may feel authorized to snub any poorer genius of less magnitude than Dickens, especially if he live in the same town or neighbourhood, as in that case he can by no means be made available as a lion to be served up to the company with the soups and venison.

"2. Men of great or small wit who have established a reputation as diners-out, may give additional zest to their condiments and wine by snubbing any humbler aspirant to the applause of the company. Let them take Johnson as their model in this department.

"3. Editors of country newspapers who feel themselves and their cause in a precarious condition, and who, therefore, as Paley said of himself, cannot afford to keep a conscience, may find a forlorn hope in snubbing. Let them choose for a victim any individual who presumes to avow an opinion in opposition to their own—and, what is more, to act upon it. We assure the dullest poor fellow of an editor that he may put down such an upstart, and utterly ruin him in the esteem of the majority by keeping a stock of epithets, like so many little missies, to be hurled at him on every favourable occasion: such, for instance, as pseudo-philosopher, man of crotchets, infantine dreamer, etc. No matter how stale the epithets may be, paucity of invention is no disadvantage here, since the oftener a nickname is repeated the better it will tell. Do we not know that two-thirds of mankind are influenced, not by facts or principles, but by associations about as appropriate as the connection between a bright summer’s day and roast pig in the mind of the ingenious Mrs. Nickleby?"

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"5. Ladies who go to parties with the hope of being the belles of the evening, must on no account venture to snub any whose pretensions threaten to eclipse their own. This would look like envy. They must rather behave to such with a sweet, condescending blandness, as if unconscious of the danger of rivalry. They may, however, repay themselves by snubbing the plain and ill-dressed; nay, if they can manage to secure a brisk flirtation for the evening with any one of the gentlemen tolerably well to pass, they may even produce a very good effect by snubbing the remainder.

6. But the chief empire of feminine talent lies in the snub religious. Anacreon tells us that nature has given weapons of defence to all creatures—horns to bulls, hoofs to horses, etc., understanding to man, and to woman beauty. But this is mere poet’s flummery; he should have said bigotry, which is the far more generic attribute. All ladies of decidedly orthodox sentiments and serious habits, who, in short, form the public for whom young clergymen print volumes of sermons which may be compared to that popular specific, treacle and brimstone—all such ladies, we say, may snub any man not marriageable, and any woman not an heiress, though as full of talents or of good works as a Sir Philip Sidney or a John Howard, if he or she be suspected of diverging in opinion from that standard of truth which is lodged in the brain of the Rev. Amylatus Stultus, who keeps the key of these same ladies’ consciences. But let everyone beware of snubbing on religious grounds in quarters where there is wealth, or fashion, or influence. In such cases all aberrations from the standard are to be regarded as amiable eccentricities, which do not warrant an uncharitable construction. On the whole it must be admitted that the snub religious is a most valuable agent in society, resembling those compensating contrivances by which nature makes up for the loss of one organ by an extraordinary development of the functions of another. Now that we have no Star-Chamber, Pillory, Test Act, etc., what would become of society without this admirable refinement on the rougher measures of our ancestors? Do we not appeal to a stronger element in the minds of suspected heretics by silently putting a chalk hieroglyphic on their backs, than by hauling them off to prison or to Smithfield?

"7. As regards the snub domestic, gentlemen should by no means neglect one of the grand privileges of conjugal life, an unlimited power of snubbing their wives. Indeed, this may be said to be a sort of safety-valve for the masculine faculty of snubbing which, as men are somewhat amenable for its exercise and cannot, like women and priests, snub with impunity, might lead to no end of duels and horse-whippings, and thus reduce society to a horribly internecine state.

"8. Ladies may take reprisals for their endurance in this matter on such small deer as their governesses, servants, and such old maids of their acquaintance as are not useful in sewing or taking care of the children."

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"9. The servants, again, may snub the shoe-black or the vendor of hareskins. The shoe-black may snub the dog and cat in a variety of ingenious ways, and doubtless the beautiful chain, if we could trace it, descends to the lowest grades of existence. We have no warrant, however, to suppose that a faculty for snubbing is given to any other races than the terrestrial, since we have express authority for the fact that the archangel Michael, on a very remarkable occasion, abstained from snubbing the devil."

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September 27, 2021 - September 27, 2021.

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Margaret Fuller.

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Rare, praise from George Eliot.

"Our prediction as to the rich harvest of American biography that is now ripening finds a beautiful fulfilment in the “Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli.” Reading this book after Carlyle’s “Life of Sterling,” we are reminded, by their similarity of subject and authorship, as well as by their simultaneous preparation, that it is “the same spirit which worketh all in all.” There is a noticeable resemblance between these two gifted beings: their studies, aspirations, endeavors, and influence were of a similar nature; they had the same unsettled career and the same premature end. But Margaret Fuller had a deeper, stronger, richer life, and wielded a mightier power over her companions and contemporaries. ... "

So she qualifies it promptly.

" ... If her aim was not higher, it was clearer; and what she aimed at she accomplished. It is not, however, in contrast with Sterling, but in the midst of her friends, that we must view her. Considering the remarkable influence she exercised over the circle which ultimately acknowledged her as its ruling spirit, we are at a loss whether to regard her as the parent or child of New England transcendentalism. ... "

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" ... It seems to have been a movement on the part of different minds, as spontaneous and independent in each as it was simultaneous in all,—a movement flowing from the undying vernal impulse of nature. It was essentially an intellectual, moral, and spiritual regeneration; a renewing of the whole man; a kindling of his aspirations after full development of faculty and perfect symmetry of being. Then followed the fruits of this spirit,—faith, hope, and love; self-sacrifice, mutual sympathy, fellowship, and earnest endeavor. ... "

Was this the movement that Emerson and others, of Wellesley neighbourhood, of the On Walden Pond fame, were part of?

" ... “Thus, by mere attraction of affinity,” says Mr. Channing, “grew together the brotherhood of the ‘like-minded,’ as they were pleasantly nicknamed by outsiders and by themselves, on the ground that no two were of the same opinion.” ... "

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" ... Of this sect Margaret Fuller was the priestess. In conversation she was as copious and oracular as Coleridge, brilliant as Sterling, pungent and paradoxical as Carlyle; gifted with the inspired powers of a pythoness, she saw into the hearts and over the heads of all who came near her; and, but for a sympathy as boundless as her self-esteem, she would have despised the whole human race! ... so right royally did she carry herself that her arrogance became a virtue, worshipful as the majesty of the gods! Yet along with all this there was much self-scrutiny; and underneath it all much womanly tenderness, which ripened and mellowed till, after all, few women were more womanly than Margaret Fuller. ... The two sides of her more mature character—the tender and the strong—were harmonized and tested by the peculiar position into which she was thrown during her sojourn at Rome, at the time of the Revolution. We have not space to explain our allusions to those who have not read, or do not intend to read, these Memoirs for themselves; but in indicating our general opinion of her character, we must say that from the time she became a mother till the final tragedy when she perished with her husband and child within sight of her native shore, she was an altered woman, and evinced a greatness of soul and heroism of character so grand and subduing that we feel disposed to extend to her whole career the admiration and sympathy inspired by the closing scenes. While her reputation was at its height in the literary circles of Boston and New York, she was so self-conscious that her life seemed to be a studied act, rather than a spontaneous growth; but this was the mere flutter on the surface. The well was deep, and the spring genuine; and it is creditable to her friends, as well as to herself, that such at all times was their belief."

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George Eliot criticises the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson and others.

"We have already spoken of her in connection with Sterling. Both have found kindred spirits to write their biographies; but Emerson and his colleagues must yield to Carlyle in mastery of the pencil. The “Life of Sterling,” though made up of fragments and reminiscences, is a finished portrait. But the “Memoirs of Margaret Fuller” is a book of reminiscences merely. No attempt is made at symmetry of form or color; nor are even the outward events of her life presented in their consecutive order. Something like an appropriation of periods and localities seems to have been prearranged, but not attended to; and according to the caprice of the writer’s memory you are carried hither and thither, backwards and forwards, over the scenes of her history. A little more attention to chronology and geography would have mended the matter considerably, and made the mechanism of the narrative as good as the material. “Memoirs,” then,—memoranda,—not a life, yet full of life and full of thought,—these volumes will be read and prized by all truth-loving, sympathetic souls."

But perhaps it was never their intention to produce a work of art? Perhaps they only wished to record memories of one they cared about!

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September 27, 2021 - September 28, 2021.

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George Forster.

George Forster.

Westminster Review (October 1856)

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George Eliot writes about someone not so well known now as he was in her time, but does evidently not expect to be read over a century and a half later.

"We do not know a more touchingly tragical history than that of George Forster, who closed in so lonely and wretched a manner that life which, as a boy, he began so dazzlingly; leaping, when yet in his teens, into startling fame, and winning the lively interest of all Europe as the companion of Cook, and the recounter of his second expedition to those blessed isles of the Southern Sea. Other lives have been more violently checkered, or rent by abrupter incidents; but the web of none has been so altogether spun with the threads of straitened penury and grinding distress. ... "

Having grasped the reader's attention, she doesn't say what did happen, expecting her readers knew all of details thereof, but digresses, with a German style sentence to begin with.

" ... It is is curious to observe the course of lives: there are some whose very accidental adventures are pitched into such wondrous tune with their owners’ tempers, that fancy might stray to the thought of a moulding destiny designing their career from womb to death,—lives the turns and meetings of which strike so into their tendencies, that they foster them, whether for weal or woe, as it were out of necessity, and beyond any aid or power of repression of their own. ... "

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George Eliot explains away why some are brilliant achievers.

" ... Doubtless, when closely viewed, the mystery proves to be only that such souls, endowed with lively quickness, seize on everything akin to their promptings, while dullards stumble blindly on their way, and mysterious destiny resolves itself into a goodly dose of enterprise. ..."

More poetically,

" ... There are other lives which offer analogies more worthy of consideration: the lives of the children of their age, showing its sum total in their thoughts and doings as the blood and type of family come out in its offspring; the chance adventurers, who are transformed and diverted to their own purposes and feelings, as deluges turn to flooded lakes or rivers, according to the nature of the country that takes them in. ... "

And now George Eliot returns to the subject, but not in a vertical swoop, that wouldn't be her! She's not only spiralling around, but determined to match her long sentences to those of German literature, even though English won't lend itself to the split verb changing meanings as one turns the page before a sentence ends!

" ... Such men exist at all times; for times are the work of men, and in the summary of the man we learn to know mankind. George Forster was one of these. All his thoughts and doings are the utterings of that strange eighteenth century; as a boy turned into a mighty traveller suiting his age’s spirit of inquiry, he remains his whole life long an eager, restless wanderer, an Ishmaelite on the face of his century, ever seeking and peering on to a brighter future; his temper is marked by that simple and undoubting trust in new perfections and coming certainties, with a credulous leaning to all novel and hidden truths, prevalent in his age, when man awoke to belief after centuries of slumber; his heart is honest and generous, his spirit eager, and freed from all he considers prejudice,—allowing itself to soar into regions, the subtle air of which is too rare to live in; a sufferer by his father’s unbridled humors, in married life not slightly tried, and if not wholly wrecked then, saved only by a lifeboat of most thorough eighteenth-century build; renowned as a sailor round the world, and as the man who had brought to Europe knowledge of friendly savages, and who could, from personal acquaintance, describe new realms of nature and mankind to the sickened age yearning for fancied archetypes of man and the world;—all these characteristics give a special zest to poor George Forster’s life. ... "

And another spiral, before a small clue as to the subject.

" ... In short, we see mirrored in his history the whole painful lot and social shackling of a man of science of those days in Germany, and how a thinking and feeling mind became drifted athwart them into perilous rapids and breakneck eddies; we see a man gifted with the highest abilities and soundest learning, strong in spirit and heart, moreover privileged with a hold on the tastes of the public from the very nature of his fame,—we see this man, in spite of his advantages, doomed to toil his whole life long beneath a weight of trammels, unable to find the hand that might drag him out of the choking mud-sloughs of rotten petty courts, until at last he topples over the mighty chasm of the French Revolution. ... "

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" ... To the English public he is wholly unknown,—to that of his own country, by a freak of destiny, he was until lately only notorious; for while straitened circumstances deprived his fine intellect of that repose, as necessary to its nurture as light and space are to a tree to enable it to put forth perfect fruit, the peculiarities of his political adventures exposed him to an ill wind which blasted his memory. Almost all Forster’s writings partake of a fragmentary nature and hasty slightness of design, which were imparted to them of a necessity from the enforced circumstances of their production. They are mostly essays, contributed regularly to journals, or prefaces to translations of travels, undertaken at the bidding of publishers; but as soon as we look at them, we perceive a fund of learning, lively feeling, and suggestive thought set forth in wording so full of natural charm, that we at once guess a mind of no common power to be at work here. Twice only in the course of his hard-working life did he get respite enough to be able to undertake a connected production,—the first time, when, hardly past his boyhood, he wrote that account of his voyage with Cook, which at once made his name known all over the world; the second time, just before the close of his career, when he began, but did not finish, his journey through Brabant and England. The two volumes he accomplished are his most perfect literary work, and show what would have been the fulness of Forster. Here is a mass of thoughtful observation and rich suggestion. The whole tone and scope of his writing were wholly different from the abstractness and vagueness from which no German thinker of his day was free; it had the life of reality about it, and his truthful feeling and keen eye made him so lively an expounder of nature, that his method and style were the chosen model of Humboldt, as Forster’s example was his first incentive to scientific exploration."

And now another clue -

"The youth he had spent in his country had accustomed his mind to the ways of public life, and imparted to it habits of practical thought, which impregnated his whole being, and distinguished him for readiness of bearing amidst the dim haziness of his countrymen. His turn of mind found in the study of natural science the only nurture which the arid social system of Germany left for it; but as soon as the great French Revolution loosened the stoniness in which he had been bound, the promptings of his nature made him strike at once into the genial soil of politics. In truth, the quickenings of his mind were those that stamp the citizen; he was public-spirited in the true sense of the word; and bred in self-governing England, accustomed to public enterprise and rule, he stood before his countrymen, in the delicately organized manifoldness of his constitution, in the sparkle of his renown, and in charm of writing, like a prophet whose words, passing their understanding, were coarsely maligned. Therefore people’s minds turned away from Forster until, when after near half a century the growth of enlightenment stirred up feelings of independence, men found that in him they had possessed one whose sound and patriotic aspirations had been altogether calumniated, and who combined the qualities of a noble intellect with the virtues of the citizen."

Before George Eliot would actually condescend to return to the subject, but not before another spiral -

"It is the interesting history of this man that Heinrich König recounts in a book undertaken under the inspiration of times in many respects akin to those of his hero, and written with a most intimate knowledge of the scenery of the story’s plot. For many years he has studied every detail, however petty, of German history of the end of the last century; and before he entertained any thought of this book, he had already written a novel on the Revolution of Mayence, which is a wonderfully accurate picture of the times, and the close researches for which had made him intimately acquainted with many parts of Forster’s life."

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"George Forster was born on the 26th November, 1754, at the poor village of Nassenhuben, near Danzig, where his father, whose Christian names were John Reinhold, was the Calvinistic minister. He had been driven to this calling by his father, who had been highly displeased on learning that his son, while a student at Halle, had taken the liberty to desert the law for medicine and the natural sciences, in which he had made considerable progress. It thus happened that he was, as it were, turned off cramped from the very starting-post, and all through life’s race he limped. Though ever an honest Protestant, science was more his love than theology, and the straits of his position chafed his temper to that irascibility which afterwards so marred his good and sterling parts. His son, who amidst all his trials never laid aside a most dutiful bearing towards him, strikes off the following sketch of him once in a letter to Jacobi:—

"“My father is, in every respect, a useful man for the sciences,—possessed of solid learning, choice reading, and book-lore, besides being a good naturalist, antiquary, and also theologian, although the last study does not occupy him any more, nor can it interest him scientifically, as I think. His warmth, hot temper, and eager battling for his ideas, have done him immeasurable harm, as it is also his misfortune that he does not know, and never will know, mankind,—always suspicious and credulous exactly there where he should not be so.”"

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And finally, as George Eliot designs to delve into the subject, it get not only really interesting, but mind-boggling. But not before she pours it all in a deluge of a paragraph longer than a page, which perhaps isn't as German as a sentence of that length - which would be difficult in English; English being, according to German scholars, "a crazy mixture of French and German ".

"We can fancy the quarrelsome divine plagued by his boorish parishioners in the midst of his study of Buffon, and flying into whims of wrongs under the friction of such daily worries. The living was not a fat one, while his family—for he early married a cousin—was the contrary of meagre; seven children required feeding, and the means to do so were not ready at hand. Under these circumstances the elder Forster, with his hankering for the sciences and his discontent with his parish, jumped at an offer made to him by the Russian Government to inspect and report on the new colonies founded on the banks of the Volga. Taking his son George, then eleven years old, with him, he spent the summer of 1765 in performing the journey and returning to St. Petersburg; in the autumn he handed in his report, the matter of which is said to have been so good as to have given the Empress suggestions for her great code of laws. His blustering temper, however, which often proved his worst enemy, closed his promising career in Russia; and he spent the winter in St. Petersburg, urging obstinate claims for recompense and imperturbably refusing to accept the offers made. During this time his wants drove him to the shifts of a translator, in which he called his boy to his aid, who was following the course of lessons at the high-school, and who thus early was broken in to his life-long drudgery of an overworked literary hack. At last the priest-sage gave vent to his anger with the Russian Government, and left St. Petersburg with the satisfaction of having at least had his will, if not the very sum of money, and none other than that which he had made his mind up to have. But if St. Petersburg and the Russias were well behind him and his son, it was not very clear what land lay ahead. The good Christians of Nassenhuben had provided themselves, during their high-priest’s gaddings about on the Volga, with some ghostly vice-regent, who seems to have been unwilling to give up his realm on his lord’s advent; and so John Reinhold, who perhaps rather liked the chance, conscious of his real acquirements and sphere of action, took the sudden resolve to seek his fortune in England, and, without even visiting his wife or family, sailed thither with his son. They sturdily fought off the dreariness of the voyage, lengthened by storms, with the study of English; and soon after their arrival, the father’s solid scientific knowledge having gained him the good-will of many distinguished men in London, he was appointed teacher of natural history at an educational institution for dissenting clergymen, at Warrington in Lancashire. George was apprenticed to a Russian merchant named Lewin; but the sedentary application of this life so pulled the youth down, that when, on his mother and sisters’ arrival, he escorted them to Warrington, his father became alarmed at his favorite child’s looks, and kept him by him. George was thus brought back to the study of the natural sciences under his father’s immediate influence; and as the latter soon embroiled himself, as usual, with his superiors, while the wants of his large family caused him to feel sorely pinched in his resources, the son had to put himself into the family traces, and help sturdily to keep the household van going. We find him, therefore, not only combining the parts of scholar and teacher, learning botany and zoology from his restless father, and teaching French and German in a neighboring school to those who ought to have been his playfellows, but the poor youth’s strength was still further strained by continual translations of foreign books of travels into English. ... "

But George Eliot has to get enigmatic now, leaving a reader to flounder for her meaning.

" ... From this time of his life a story remains which is told by all his biographers, as foreshadowing in its small burden the haphazards which so often befell him, and the temper with which he took them. The pygmy professor’s road to his lecture-chair lay past a pastry-cook’s savory stall of sweet cakes, and the tale of this temptation ended as temptations will end when brought to bear on lively flesh and blood; the savor tingled through his veins, till, wholly rapt by its witchery, he swallowed as many cakes as he could cram. The cook, however, like a crafty worldly cook, only considered his pies’ sweetness as the means of barter; and before their taste was off poor George’s lips, the horror of dunnery and dismay of debt cut short his relish. Shame made him skulk along back ways; but the sharp cook’s twinkling eyes would flash on him still, until his little heart burst forth its bitter distress in a fervent prayer, when, lo! on crossing the next fence on his hiding by-path, his eye caught sight of a guinea embedded in a horse’s tread, and, having run to pay his debts, he bought with the remainder a gilt thimble for his sister. Painful troubles and dribbling windfalls of luck are indeed the tissue of his whole life; but if a lowness of spirit did come over him for a season in his gloomy times, one sunny ray was ever enough to lighten his heart and make it beat high and bold."

Pygmy professor, cakes, gold?

Again, George Eliot condescends to return to Foster's life.

"Under all these circumstances, and with the peculiar keen temper of Dr. John Reinhold Forster, it will be easily believed that he clutched at the sudden offer to accompany Cook as naturalist on his expedition. He only bargained to be allowed to take with him his son, then seventeen years of age; and so hurried was their departure that only nine days intervened between decision on the journey and embarkation. The history of this voyage is known to most persons. At that time all Europe eagerly watched its result; for since the discovery of America, no geographical riddles had so whetted its curiosity as those of the great Southern Sea. The fashionable idyllic sentimentalism of those times, so fostered by the hothouse breathings of B. de St. Pierre and Rousseau, was fascinated by the gentle savages and peaceful virgin isles of whose reality Cook’s first voyage had given the certainty; and all the smirking skirmishers of enlightenment were on the eager look-out for new and startling confirmation of their yearning dreams. How the many and large views of nature such a journey brought with it must have impressed the quick mind of young Forster, already so given to a wandering, shifting life, can be easily conceived. The driest man could not have met with such a chance at such an age of his life without learning from it somewhat which lasted for the remainder of it. George Forster bore away with him that largeness of views on nature and man which so nobly marked his thoughts in all stages of his life; he got his mind enriched with a tender, yet a large and manly sense of nature’s beauty, whose healthy freshness contrasted as vividly with the mawkish feeling of those times as a peasant girl’s ruddy cheek with a painted face; but he also bore away from these three roving years a hankering after travel which never left him, and to which, under the weight of trouble, he was too apt to give himself up, as the drinker grasps at his dram, while the seeds of lasting illness were laid in his body by an attack of scurvy."

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And now, finally, a reader unfamiliar with the subject of the article begins to comprehend the eulogistic opening paragraph.

"The enjoyment of these pleasures was somewhat marred by painful embarrassments arising from fresh outbursts of his father’s wild temper, which chafed at the discipline of a man-of-war, entailing on the commander the necessity of severe measures to repress his mutinous freaks. The youth himself was, however, a favorite with Cook; and the language in which he speaks of him in a biographical sketch, written many years later, shows how thoroughly he knew the worth of that daring seaman’s character. But when, on the return of the expedition, the Doctor, with headstrong stubbornness, ran foul of the Admiralty itself, George was dragged into the quarrel, or from filial love rushed into it to a degree which had a lasting influence. It seems that the elder Forster had not fully understood the meaning of his engagement with the Government, according to which no account of the voyage was to be published before the official one: the Admiralty, therefore, stopped the publication of a work he was preparing; and in consequence of the fiery naturalist’s persistence in contesting its right to do so, it proceeded to an act which seems harsh, and might have maddened many a quieter man so laden with troubles, who saw his hopes of gain vanish, and nothing before him but poverty, debts, and a starving family,—it despoiled him of any share in the proposed Government publication. The blow was a desperate one. Yet even now the old man could not curb his temper ever so little, or matters would still have come to run more smoothly: George himself says as much in a letter of later date, although at all times he held his father to have been unjustly and most cruelly treated. As no mention of his own name had been made in the engagement with Government, he balked the Admiralty’s precautions (probably at his father’s desire) by writing himself an account of the voyage,—a proceeding which at the time exposed him to much abuse, and poisoned the quarrel beyond remedy. In this work the journey and the countries visited are described with simple truth, and a color which shows how thoroughly his soul had become impregnated with the sunny warmth of the tropics. The artlessness of the account has a charm which carries the reader away, and is sufficient proof that, although the father looked over the scientific description of animals and flowers, the bulk of the work is entirely George’s own. The success of the book was great; the author’s name became at once well known, and the poor family garrets in Percy Street were enlivened by the hail of many a foreigner, anxious to see the lucky travellers who had, beyond doubt, beheld and been in the happy South Sea Isles. It was on the occasion of such a pilgrimage that George was first brought together with a young German physician, whose name was Sömmering. He had come over to England to attend its medical schools; and that attraction which had drawn him unto his renowned countrymen grew quickly into the tightest bonds of friendship with the younger of them, fastened by kinship in studies, and probably also by ties of masonic brotherhood, which then, and for many years after, largely took hold of their minds in that alchemistic form under which it so mightily swayed the thought of Europe of that century."

Next part, already heartbreaking -

"The proceeds of the book were, unfortunately, small in money; starvation daily haunted the wretched dwelling, barely staved off: by petty gifts from a friend, or some German princeling, coaxed into dribbling forth scanty alms by a present of South Sea rarities; the sale of the latter also came to an absolute standstill, and the Admiralty was deaf to the roar of claims, till at last hard-hearted creditors came down on the forlorn family, and bore away its mainstay and pillar, and dreary King’s Bench shut on the chafing Doctor. It was indeed a bleak and starving future which George had then to look upon,—his father imprisoned and no prospect of relief, his mother sick and his sisters weak and helpless, while he himself was racked by continued ill-health maiming the sinews of his good-will to work. He soon had to yield to the conviction that in England there was no chance of obtaining aid; so, with the one thought of straining his utmost nerve for his parents, he turned himself to his native country, from which sundry cheers of fellow-feeling had at times gladdened the wretchedness of Percy Street. Making up, therefore, a bale of dried plants and other specimens of natural history, in the hope some continental museums might buy them, he, whose name was then trumpeted forth as the foremost of explorers, embarked at Harwich, to cross to Holland as an anxious pedler and seeker of alms. Nothing can be more touching than to read in his letters to his parents his grief at their sorrows, and his unflinching trust in Providence:—

"“I am well and fresh” (he writes to his father), “resigned, and full of trust that God will not forsake us ; he has often proved his exceeding goodness, and will deliver us out of our present evil chances and hardships, which have weighed us down for these last years. I submit to all trials with the firm trust that they are meant for our best, and believe that, while I leave everything to the ordaining of the most perfect Being, I act neither unrighteously nor forwardly if I beseech him daily for the peace and earthly welfare of us all; for also here on earth we can reach to a certain pitch of happiness, and why, then, should we not pray for it?”"

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"Though he was received by the learned men of Holland with the most flattering kindness, and every sort of civil attention was paid him, he soon saw that he could have no hopes of bettering his family by any help from that country. ... "

"George hastened to Germany, reproaching himself with the slightest delay. At Düsseldorf, then renowned for its galleries of art, he was, however, waylaid by Jacobi, who, with enthusiastic kindness, as soon as he heard of the famed traveller’s arrival, wrote him before daybreak a pressing invitation to spend a whole day with him. Forster was fascinated by the society he was introduced to, and that spell in Jacobi’s bearing which had ravished Goethe with delight. One of the lords of the German commonwealth of letters, the bosom friend of Goethe and of its chief leaders, whom he loved to gather around him at his country-seat at Pempelfort, he enthralled the loving temper of young Forster by the welling forth of his speech, which he would let flow in the full stream of enthusiasm. Forster found himself transferred, as it were by a wizard’s wand, into the very midst of the choicest spirits of Germany, while the charm of Jacobi’s kindly hospitality soothed his aching heart like balm. The latest poems of Goethe; snatches from “Woldemar,” which Jacobi was then writing; freshly received letters from the stars of literature,—were the treats which, during four days, were thrust on Forster, spiced by the touching kindness of his host and his sisters; he tore himself from Düsseldorf, enraptured with his new friends. “Such people as these we shall not meet again on our whole journey,” was his exclamation to Alexander von Humboldt, when, twelve years later, on their trip to England, they turned out of their way to visit Jacobi.

"Cassel was the goal of his immediate expectations. He had hopes that the new Landgrave, Frederick II., who partook of the fashionable taste for dallying with enlightenment, provided it could be done cheaply, might be tempted to gain a man of his father’s fame for his new high-school. This sovereign, who, during his father’s lifetime, had forsaken his Protestant faith and ancestral views in politics, had, since his accession to his states, calmed the lively fears of the old servants of his house by steadily settling down into all the good old family ways. Although remaining a Catholic himself, he swore, as a true son of Hesse, to the maintenance of Protestantism in his country; and, quitting forthwith the Austrian Court, with which while heir apparent he had been unmindful enough of his blood to flirt, he left off all newfangled whims, to the delight of his gray-haired ministers, ruling as his father had ruled before him, to the comfort of himself and the fattening of his exchequer, which he shrewdly enriched by selling twenty-two thousand true Hessians to England for £7,000,000. If the sum seemed large, it also appears that the Landgrave had many calls for it. But George soon saw his hopes vanish afresh; the whole of the funds allotted for the mental enlightenment of such Hessians as were not gaining it in another way in America, had been sunk in a parcel of rubbishy marbles, which were their owner’s joy and pride. A sum that might have freed the starving traveller from King’s Bench, and have allowed him and his family to live at Cassel, could not possibly be made forthcoming; but, in its stead, his Highness deigned to admit George to a gracious audience in his statue gallery, and insisted on his delaying his filial researches till after the next sitting of his Academy of Antiquities, at which he accordingly held a discourse; and at last the Landgrave not only accepted a copy of the father’s books, but even strained his poverty to the disbursing of a gift of fifty louis, besides thrusting on the unwilling son the appointment of professor of natural history at the University of Cassel, with the dazzling salary of seventy pounds. It is touching to read how anxiously Forster debated with his conscience, whether he would be justified in accepting anything for himself as long as he had not achieved that relief for his parents which he had set out to seek; and when at last he did accept, it was with the express understanding that he should be allowed certain months of absence, wherein he might bring his endeavors to a satisfactory result. At Göttingen he made acquaintances which afterwards ripened into friendship,—especially that of Heyne; and he wrote a letter to his father—who he evidently feared might misinterpret his proceedings—in which he tried to enliven his gloom by the friendly greetings of the leading members of that University; but such kindly wishes were all he reaped, both here and at Berlin, with the exception of a pittance of one hundred louis from the Prince of Dessau, bestowed in a warm-hearted manner, and coupled with the promise to use his influence in England with the Admiralty, to obtain some recompense, which, however, proved vain. Such painful disappointments did not allow Forster to begin his stay at Cassel, in the spring of 1779, with a light heart; and his correspondence reveals his writhing efforts to burst his father’s prison bars, when, in the forlorn midnight of this gloom, a hidden hand all of a sudden thrust comfort and freedom on the wretched family. The masonic lodges of Germany, at the call of the Duke of Brunswick, their grand-master, paid the father’s debts, while the chair of natural history at Halle was to provide for his maintenance. True, however, to his self-willed temper, he nearly marred his own luck; for he could not for a long while be brought to give up the character of a victim, and insisted on his just claims, spurning what he deemed a dishonorable compromise, till the earnest entreaties of his family and the smarting reminiscences of imprisonment at last softened his resolve. ... Sömmering, the brother of his heart,—he to whom in the heyday of betrothal he wrote, “Love itself yields to the bond of soul which links me to thee,”—obtained the professorship of anatomy at Cassel, by dint of sundry diplomatic wiles which his eager friend suggested to him; for the Landgrave had snatched up the crotchet, that only Frenchmen knew the science, and it wanted no little knack to master his whims. ... Nor was the society of Cassel wanting in interest; besides many men of more or less distinction who were attached to its high-school, it counted the illustrious historian, Johannes von Müller, amongst its residents, between whom and Forster an intimacy sprang up; so that, had it not been for other discomforts, he might have contentedly endured the petty worries of Court attendance; for the Landgrave regarded his University, with its staff, as his toys, and Forster found, on promotion to the inspectorship of a most threadbare cabinet of natural history, that he shared with the statue gallery the honor of being his Highness’s chief entertainer. But the want of money, the canker of his life, soon made its gnawings felt. The pittance of his salary, and the loss by shipwreck of all his little property on its way from England, had made it impossible for the famished youth to start his establishment, however frugally, without a loan the cost of which shackled him like a galley-chain. ... “Fy! fy! I can’t get a book to look at here, unless I buy it,” he writes to Jacobi. “Cassel is a perfect wilderness, as regards new books, for the annual sum allotted for procuring such for the Prince’s library does not amount to £60.” ... "

"Freemasonry, in the garb of Illumination and Rosicrucian-ism, at that time had largely laid hold of the mind of Germany. ... "

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" ... He was offered the professorship of natural history at Wilna in Poland, and accepted it, not merely on his own hasty promptings, but by the counsel of such wary friends as Lichtenberg and Heyne. The conditions were, in fact, such as might have tempted many a literary man: besides a fair salary, a sum was settled for correspondence and the purchase of specimens of natural history, while the flattering language of the Primate Poniatowsky’s letter was backed by subscriptions which freed him from his liabilities at Cassel, and provided for his travelling outlay. Thus, at a moment when the atmosphere of Cassel choked his manly vigor, luck seemed to shower on him the very windfall befitting his wants; and with the good cheer with which he had formerly run to buy his sister a thimble with the chance sovereign that saved him from his boyish scrapes, he now leapt forward to snatch the happiness which seemed to be beckoning him.

"Happiness this time appeared to him in the guise of a young girl of twenty. During his visits to Göttingen he had learnt to know Theresa Heyne ..."

" ... George, on his part, with his susceptibility and generous feeling, was strongly drawn to the lively girl; and although the kindly old father, with his wary forethought, would not allow himself to be edged into express sanction of the marriage, as long as Forster’s worldly means were so doubtful, the eager girl soon dragged his good-will into a tacit understanding that the wedding should come off as soon as Polish pledges proved trustworthy; and he started for his new home with the consciousness of being betrothed. ... He passed through Vienna on his way ... The Emperor Joseph received him in his closet, with his well-known friendliness, and on dismissing him, after much talk, foretold him laughingly that he would not long stay in the wilderness of Poland; while invitations from the mighty Kaunitz, and choice meetings at the house of the celebrated Countess Theresa Thum, whose pride and joy it was to gather together the picked spirits of Vienna, showed in what esteem the traveller was held by all."

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"At Grodno he found himself in the very heart of the life and Court of Poland. The first free diet which had met since many years, was then holding its sittings there; and the mean huts and filthy lanes of the so-called city were thronged by the motley crush of Polish aristocracy, from the King and magnificent magnates with their dazzling followings, down to the equally haughty peasant nobles swaggering about with their big swords (the badge of their rank), while they floundered through the mammoth sloughs of mire in huge boots lined with dirty straw, in their proud disdain of the effeminacy of stockings and linen. Amongst the higher classes, however, he found many persons possessed of much elegant culture, which was, moreover, set off by a lordly hospitality, in which they vied with each other to show how highly they valued the gain of so noteworthy a man to their country. The King’s sister, commonly called Madame de Cracovie, because her deceased husband, Marshal Branicki, had been Castellan of Cracow, received him with the most marked kindliness, and presented him herself to her brother, whom he often saw in the familiarity of her evening meetings. That worn-out lover of the great Catherine, by whose bounty he had been pensioned with the royalty of Poland, had a mind whose dainty and over-refined taste delighted in the society of literary men, and Forster experienced the courtesy of his bearing, while the assurances of good-will which he gathered from the King and Primate for himself and the University encouraged his hopes for the future. ... "

"That worn-out lover of the great Catherine"? Is George Eliot quoting from sources, or merely fact everyone - at the time - was aware of, just didn't usually mention in print?

"The first acquaintance with Wilna did not discourage him. It was true that “the cabinet of natural history proved not only a child in its cradle, but not even a fine child, while the library was most meagre;” but then he had the assurance that their wants were acknowledged, and would be made good. The University, as most of the schools in Poland, had been founded by the Jesuits, in consequence of whose suppression the whole system of education was being remodelled. His lodging was in the old palace of the Order, and, though wretchedly bleak and bare, he comforted himself by comparing it with those of his fellow-teachers, and by the readiness with which such changes as he asked for were granted. Many of the Jesuits remained attached to the high-school as laymen; and although he arrived by no means well disposed towards them,—having been fully warned by the great Jesuit-croaker, Nicolai, against their wiles,—his first letters speak the praise of their unselfish behavior, so that he even utters his conviction that the Jesuits of Wilna, at least, do not deserve the suspicion under which their brethren generally labor. The difficulties of his position showed themselves immediately on entering upon his duties, when he had to deliver his lectures in Latin; for though a master in German style, and able to write English and French with wonderful correctness, Latin composition was a labor which cost him “an everlasting time;” while the unwonted tongue hampered his speech, which was at all times highly embarrassed in the professor’s chair, although its flow in conversation was astounding. ... As all such bits of economy were, however, altogether insufficient to mend the hole made in his income, he restlessly sought means of repairing it, and at last decided on perfecting himself in the study of medicine. There was a great want of physicians in the country, and the skill of such as there were was eagerly sought and richly paid by noble Poles, who seemed to have pinned their faith in health on the multitude of doctors; for we are told that as soon as anything like ailing was felt, the sick man called all the leeches together he could lay hold of, when he himself would preside, and adjudge their debate. With feverish looking forward to spring and happiness, he thus fretted through the dreariness of his first Polish winter in utter loneliness and daily worry; for, as time wore on, he saw that none of the pledges made to him were kept, while painful rheumatisms and weakened eyesight, brought on by climate, racked his poor body, until, at the very moment of his start on his longed-for journey, a putrid fever laid him for several weeks on a sick-bed, and threatened to cut short his life in its bloom. Convalescence, like all other things, is helped by a stout heart; thus, as soon as the crisis was surmounted, his eagerness quickened his recovery, so that he reached Göttingen in August, 1785; and, having been married in the beginning of the following month, he hastened back with his wife to his bleak banishment.

"Henceforth Forster’s household was the sanctuary wherein alone, during the remaining two years of his stay in Poland, he found refuge from endless teasing and annoyance. If fancy rather than thorough love had made Theresa become his wife, acquaintance with her husband at all events at first confirmed and increased her good opinion of him. Forster always maintained in his daily bearing so chaste a delicacy that his widow declares never to have seen him guilty of an unseemly outburst; and this overwrought unwillingness to ruffle her peace of mind was such, that he never brought himself to unfold his many straits to her, until this very silence produced the misunderstanding which it had been meant to avoid. Thus, while in his generous fear lest she should not be fully aware of the lot she was encountering, he had always dwelt much on the privations awaiting her in Poland, this nice feeling had kept him from alluding to the pet home he had prepared; so that the young woman was quite rapt with joy to find so snug a dwelling on her arrival at Wilna. It was, in truth, not more than they wanted; for beyond it they found no comfort. If Cassel was loathsome, yet how grand was it when compared with the Polish University, which had not even one bookseller. Intercourse with the world was slow and difficult; he could not often even hear of new books, much less get a sight of them; so that his letters to Lichtenberg piteously beg for the crumbs which might be swept from the fulness of his literary table. The want of all congenial society was the bitterest hardship to him; for the revels of the Lithuanian nobles had no charms, and his Jesuit fellows, on closer knowledge, had come out in their true light. Having failed in their stealthy stalking for the father and mother’s souls, they hoped to net that of George’s first-born child; but their wiles were roughly torn by a gruff sally, “that, as baptism must be, it should be done according to Calvinism,” and henceforth their friendship was at an end. The turmoils of the State and the ill-will discovered to be borne to the University by the Primate, who even applied its funds to the one of Cracow, abashed his trust in promised improvements which would have enabled him to make himself practically useful; yet every time that in a fit of anguish he eagerly jumped at a chance of escape from this forlorn banishment, he was quickly dragged back by the feeling of its impossibility. By agreement he had bound himself to serve for eight years, in consideration of the payments whereby he had been freed from his Cassel debts; and no literary labor in his present wilderness, obliged as he was to buy at great expense every book he might require, could ever enable him to pay off this loan. ... "

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"He even produced, besides sundry translations, two little works which deserve notice, to the writing of which he devoted himself so assiduously, that long before daybreak he sat at his desk, and his health began to suffer from the strain. The one was a dissertation on “The Human Race,” intended as an answer to an essay by Kant on the same subject, in which mistaken statements had been made about the South Sea Islanders. The dogmatic boldness with which the metaphysician laid down the law in matters of science displeased Forster, who in general had little liking for speculative philosophy, and even called Kant, in a private letter, “the archsophist and arch-scholastic of the age.” In this dissertation, which is written with great moderation, he maintained the existence of distinct races of men, though he did not deny their belonging to one kind. The other work was a “Life of Cook,” already alluded to, the dedication of which Was graciously acknowledged by the Emperor Joseph—a fact rendered highly remarkable by the broad freedom of thought running through the whole book, which contains, as in a summary, the political faith which guided Forster’s future conduct. It has often been noticed, that there is not a single passage in any of the French writers of the eighteenth century, which shows any foreknowledge of the revolution which was coming over their country, although many travellers (amongst them Goldsmith) foretold it; but there is no man whose prophecies can vie in clearness with those of Forster. As early as 1782, he exclaimed in a letter to his father, “Europe seems to be on the point of a fearful overthrow;” and in a remarkable fragment amongst his writings, the precise date of which is not known, the following striking words occur:—

"“We stand at the close of the century; this universal longing for change in our present forms, for relief from our many defects, the searching hither and thither, this revolt of reason against political pressure, this supremacy of understanding over feeling, these educational institutions for the rearing of sensible machines, these convulsive clutchings of faith at miraculous powers beyond the realm of understanding, this struggle between enlightenment and religion, this universal leavening,—herald a new teacher and a new doctrine.”

"Yielding to his heart’s ever warm interest in his fellow-beings’ weal, he had been steadily growing in his age’s political thought, so that it was ever engrossing the better part of his mind; and while, therefore, it is not wonderful that in 1787 he should have arrived at writing as he then did, it is most wonderful that the head of the Holy Roman Empire should have nodded approbation to such words as these:—

"“Human infallibility is disappearing before the dawn of knowledge. Tolerance and freedom of conscience proclaim the victory of reason, and make the way for freedom of the press and free search into all those relations which, under the name of truth, are of value to man. Lastly, luxury and industry are giving new worth to life; the arts are attaining the height of perfection and simplicity; observation and experience are enlarging and combining all knowledge, and all political powers are tending to an equality; in short, it is, or is about to be, the season of flowering.”"

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"Early one morning in the month of June, 1787, Forster was disturbed at his desk by the entry of a Russian naval officer, who, presenting him with a letter from the ambassador, Stackelberg, made the startling announcement that he had full power to settle all terms, if he would agree to accompany a voyage of discovery in the Southern Ocean. What a leap for Forster from dreariest banishment into the very Eden of dreams! The open-handedness of the Russian Government removed all difficulties about the repayment of his loans, and an ample salary was assigned to him, as also a pension for his wife in the event of his death; while his delight with luck was raised in the highest pitch by the promised companionship of Sömmering, whom the Empress immediately appointed physician to the expedition, on Forster’s recommendation; and as soon as ever he had brought his affairs to a close, he hastened away, traversing with six post-horses the space between Poland and Göttingen, which he reached on the 16th September. His hopes were fated to meet with a sad dash: the outbreak of the Turkish war caused the voyage to be laid aside for the present; and as Forster would not accept an appointment at St. Petersburg just after his escape from Polish winters, he was turned adrift on the world with a year’s salary, but free from debt, so that, though pleasant visions had come to nought, he yet blessed the wondrous luck which alone had been able to snatch him from Poland and set him down in the heart of Europe. ... "

"While Forster was thus anxiously looking around him for some opening suitable to his wants, his attention was drawn to the electoral city of Mayence, where his old friend Johannes von Müller had just vacated the librarianship, on promotion to be the Elector’s private secretary, while the prospect of the society of Sömmering, who had for several years taught anatomy there, was a most powerful attraction. By the counsel of friends he went thither, that his presence might draw attention to him; and, having been presented to the Elector by Müller, his appointment was decided on with a speed unwonted for the lazy sluggishness of spiritual courts. The salary was small; but then there was the advantage of a central position, which the portly Elector, with sly shrewdness, pointed out to him when, throwing open the casement of his closet, he showed him the view over the Rhine and its rich banks, asked him to compare it with Poland, and went on to reckon the cheapness of provisions,—backing the whole with promise of regular payment.

"It is as well shortly to describe the soil into which Forster was now transplanted; for it was owing to its nature that his life took the turn it did. The ancient German Empire was dying the death of corruption, and the very death-slumbers of its elders were being broken in upon by forward heirs; foremost among whom was Prussia, who, like a nightmare, bestrode and pinched them, even at the point of death. ... The time-honored See of Mayence, with whose spiritual electorate was coupled the arch-chancellorship of the empire, as it had ever been one of the chief pleasure-haunts of the lustiness of Rhenish prelacy, so was it in its decay the hotbed of corruption. The predecessors of the reigning Elector had, like the Emperor Joseph, partaken of the reforming fashion of his time, and had foolishly thought that the worn-out body might be quickened again into youth. The Elector—simple, good-natured man, the chief feature of whose temper was kindly trustful feeling, and a fondness for plain burgher-like life—forsook the wonted pomp of a high prince of the empire, to follow the bent of his homely likings. Instead of having courtly feasts, he not only mingled in the holiday gambols of the citizens, but he forfeited the indulgence of his courtiers, who with shrugs would have winked at these whims of a sovereign, by his harmful meddling in the olden habits of the State. Saints were curtailed of their dues, monkish trickery was checked; and when, in 1773, the Jesuits were suppressed by the Pope, Eusmerich Joseph seemed like a man who felt a load off his chest, and launched forth into plans for setting up sound schools in his lands. The Jesuit party was, however, not crushed, though beaten; and on the Elector’s suspicious death in the following year, before he had time to carry out all his plans, they carried by a push the election of Canon Erthal as his successor. Shrewd, ambitious, and thoroughly worldly, he had graduated in the schools of courtly diplomacy, where he had acquired that varnish whereby poor wits can for a time pass themselves off as minds of superior stuff. As the party had worked the strong Catholic feeling of the population, the new Elector began his reign with a mighty show of piety and devotion that edified the mob, but which were laid aside for more congenial pastimes, as soon as their need was less apparent; the banqueting halls of the archiepiscopal pleasure palaces rang with the revelry of feasts, the spice of whose cheer was set off by ribald wit."

George Eliot gives descriptions of the various corruptions prevailing, and proceeds to the caste system, which was in line with mist of Europe.

" ... The throng was choicely noble; for the utmost that was given to a burgher in Mayence was the gift of a clerkship. The nobility was, however, far from being all on an equality within itself, and the highest class, whose string of ancestors enabled them to stand the tests required for canonries, looked down as haughtily on their lower fellows as those again on the mob of burghers at large; while besides, and above all hereditary rank, there was the consecration of holy orders, whereby, first, only even the highest-born nobility became entitled to share fully the fatness of the State. Gluttony, wassailing, and a greedy craving for rich prebends, were the main qualities of these servants of the Church; and it was well when, in the revelry of their drinking-bouts over flagons of old Rhenish, which in summer time they loved to hold in the pleasure-grounds of their lordly abbeys scattered along the stately river’s banks, their wanton humor would be content with such harmless freaks as wagering whether this or that lady’s calves could be encircled by the ribbons of their gold canon’s crosses."

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"Yet were there some men amongst them who, athwart all this overcoat of fashionable dross, were not without stuff ... Forster found here Stadion, who, from a gay and enterprising canon, became one of the leading ministers of Austria; while the master of modern statesmen, Prince Metternich, took his first lesson in cunning in this high school of human worthlessness. High above these in nobleness of nature, as in the splendor of his birth, but so hampered by the contradictions between his position and his likings, that he never mastered their difficulties, and thus through life had an awkward hesitation in his public conduct which looked almost like wilful trimming, was Dalberg, Bishop of Erfurt, coadjutor and expected successor of the Elector; but who afterwards, under Napoleon, became Duke of Frankfort, and died as Bishop of Ratisbon. His love of letters was great; and so zealously had he devoted his fine intelligence to study, especially of metaphysics, that his works ranked him amongst his country’s leading writers, while his position and prospects caused him to be looked to, by such men as Schiller, as the coming Lorenzo de’ Medici of Germany. Everything without the circle of nobility was held to be mob; and at most a sort of half recognition was now and then extended as a favor to the professors, though never so far as to admit them with their wives to the houses of the aristocracy. ... in Mayence itself there were a few citizens whose Rhenish light-mindedness had been unwittingly rapt by the political freethinking of the professors. These latter were, indeed, a body by themselves, whose opinions, probably whetted by daily grinding against the world around, were so wholly at variance with its whole creed, that in their compactness they looked like a set of pioneers thrust forward into the enemy’s country in advance of the coming revolution. This circle was the only one which offered Forster any chance of society. The old Jesuit party, which had already declaimed often against the Protestant Johannes von Müller, looked with no friendly eyes on the new librarian; and such was the bigoted feeling fomented against everything that came from him, that his bare proposal to sell the duplicate copies of books was met by the cry that desecration was threatening the work of the fathers, every single book gathered by whom deserved being treasured as a relique. In truth, as far as public enterprise was concerned, there was nothing gained by change from Poland; for the Elector and his Court, like a host of locusts, ate up the wealth of the land in their lavish luxury, while the jealous ill-will of the Jesuit swarms stifled every undertaking which smacked of enlightenment or free thought. Mayence, therefore, had no resources beyond the society of a few friends, foremost amongst whom was Sömmering, and its position in the heart of Germany. The neighborhood of Düsseldorf reawakened the intimacy with Jacobi, which had slacked in distant Poland, while the literary activity of Heyne spurred Forster to share it by becoming a regular contributor to the “Göttingen Advertiser,” and the kindly old man’s fatherly love filled that gap in his heart which had been made by his wilful sire’s estrangement. ... "

"The family-ghost, poverty, showed itself in the household as soon as its tent had been pitched on the banks of the Rhine. Although he had been urged by the Elector to give lessons in natural history, the best of reasons stayed his doing so—for no pupils were to be found; and his duties as librarian were easy, since the fifteen thousand works which formed the boasted fifty thousand volumes of the library, were stowed away in a lumber-room beyond reach or use. ... The family-ghost, poverty, showed itself in the household as soon as its tent had been pitched on the banks of the Rhine. Although he had been urged by the Elector to give lessons in natural history, the best of reasons stayed his doing so—for no pupils were to be found; and his duties as librarian were easy, since the fifteen thousand works which formed the boasted fifty thousand volumes of the library, were stowed away in a lumber-room beyond reach or use. A private pupil—a certain Mr. Thomas Brand—was the only pecuniary advantage brought by the journey, beyond a crowd of vivid impressions; for he had seen the two chief events on which the attention of Europe was fastened. In England he had attended Warren Hastings’s trial, where he had heard and beheld all the oratory and the genius of the country; while in Paris he had looked on the pageantry of its strange liberty, in the enthusiastic preparations for the great feast of the Champs de Mars. The result he gave to the world in his “Views of the Rhine and Brabant;” a work which, written in the gloomiest period of his life, is a masterpiece of racy writing, both as regards clearness of wording as well as the ease with which an array of deep thought is marshalled. “I tell you I hold your ‘Views’ to be one of the best books in our language,” is the opinion pronounced by Lichtenberg."

" ... Huber appeared, on the occasion of these embarrassments, as the beam that propped the tumbling homestead; for while his simpering feeling had a charm for Theresa under the circumstances of her situation, he not only actually helped Forster in the toils of translation, but, from his many connections with leading publishers and literary journals, was enabled to be in many ways of real service to him. It was, therefore, in that state of inner strife which is brought about by want of happiness, that during her husband’s absence the wife was, as it were, thrust to rest herself in Huber, who naturally redoubled his nursing care, sanctioned, as it was, by Forster’s knowledge thereof; while, on the other hand, Theresa’s undisturbed attention fastened itself more and more on his devotion until it came out to her sight in striking relief against the dim canvas of household disappointment. Thus Forster returned from England after failure in his hopes, while the irresistible temptations of books and charts had largely added to the heavy outlay of his journey, to find that he had lost the greatest blessing of his life,—the peace of a loving home. ... Forster shrouded the barrenness of his home from every one, fighting, with a brave heart, the throng of his painful disappointments and the ever-growing load of poverty and debt. ... "

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"The household was not the only thing which had changed: time had borne Mayence itself along with it. The great world-drama in France was progressing in its mighty working; and all Europe was watching it, some with hearty sympathy, others with hatred and fear. The Elector and his pampered courtiers, too rotten at heart to be quickened into a manly outburst of hate, kept shooting from over their cups a shower of wit-bolts at King Mob. Soon a throng of noble exiles began to crowd the neighborhood of the Rhine, who loved rather to eat goodly messes in other men’s homes than to try to save their own; and great was the soul’s delight of the Electoral Court that chance should allow them to fawn in daily intimacy on so high and illustrious a brood. The town and country were literally overrun by boastful runaways, in pandering to whose whims it was felt to be an honor to squander the exchequer; and the general ill-will at these newcomers, which was powerfully fomented in the first instance by the dearness of food, was heightened into exasperation by the swaggering effrontery of their behavior. While every branch of the administration was neglected and its hardworking servants were being starved, every fund and resource of the country was drained to its uttermost farthing that the Electoral Court might not be stinted in its pomp. The Prince de Condé was splendidly lodged, with his mistress, the Princesse de Monaco, in the Episcopal Palace of Worms, which belonged to the Elector; and on Comte d’Artois’ visit to Mayence, his private household was defrayed by the impoverished principality at a daily cost of £200. Wherever money could be found, it was laid hold of by the clutches of the pilfering Court; and thus about a million of florins, which belonged to the University, out of the sale of church lands, were swallowed up in gormandizing and riot. ... Meanwhile the tide of German politics was rising, and rapidly bearing away the little princes who were unguardedly disporting themselves in its heavy swell. There was a mighty plotting of statecraft going on between Austria and Prussia; and the Elector of Mayence was puffed up and full of importance, for he had been admitted to look on in that innermost closet where the secretest designs were being concocted by wily heads, too glad to buy with a little flattery a cat’s-paw willing to pick for them the burning brands out of the fire. As he found his old ministers too awkward to handle such nice devices, he procured from Vienna Baron Albini as a master in statesmanship, and bestowing on him the title of Grand Chancellor, with a salary befitting his high dignity, he trustfully had himself launched, under his steering, upon the sea of political machination. The first fruits of such superior guidance was the glorious honor of holding Liège at a cost of three millions of florins, as a conqueror, with the Mayence army, as soon as the two heads of the empire decided that German troops should quash the revolutionary movement in that bishopric. This army was of a piece with the whole fabric of the State; for while it barely counted three thousand ill-appointed and worse-fed soldiers, its army list counted no less than twelve noble and richly paid generals. But when the coronation of the new Emperor Francis had come off at Frankfort, which the Elector, of course, attended with the pomp and state befitting his high rank, then it was that the flock of princely brains there assembled and laboring in the birth-throes of subtlest State thought, accepted the invitation to the hospitable retreat of Mayence as best suited to their deep councillings; and its sovereign gloated with delight at seeing himself the pivot around which the princes of Europe moved. Never had anything been beheld like the endless changes of dazzling revelry which followed on each other during the stay of princes and statesmen, so that it was a wonder at what time they snatched bare minutes for those cunning designs which it was whispered were being woven in a poor hut, away from din and distraction, on the shrouded islet of Weissanau. At last the high-born wiseacres were delivered, and the printing-presses of the Court published the Duke of Brunswick’s famous manifesto. “These are the men whose measures one is told to approve of,” Forster exclaimed. “That man is happy who has found a nook whence he can quietly look on the mad turmoil.”

"The French Revolution could not otherwise than powerfully interest one who was so alive to the welfare and doings of his fellow-beings. His letters to Heyne show how closely he watched its course, and that, keenly aware of its blemishes, he yet ever felt such sympathy for its struggles that he would become quite enraged at the fashion of overlooking its world-meaning in the flippant judgments currently passed upon it after flurried glances at some of its wild incidents. ... "

" ... Heyne, whose thoroughly humane feeling was being constantly shocked by the wanton temper of German aristocracy, but whose character partook of a certain painful caution, kept hovering about his outspoken son-in-law with timid hints and prudent counsels. ... Already, while Forster was writing his “Views,” Heyne had given vent to his fears as to how he would treat the political and religious considerations which would be suggested by the events of the countries he described, and Forster had felt so discouraged by his exceeding timidity, that he had given himself much trouble to explain away the meaning of his warnings. Soon after this, however, he was thrown into a mightier fit of alarm, on hearing that his son-in-law was translating a work of Brissot’s, of which he had written a review for the “Göttingen Advertiser,” in language which had attracted such attention that the name of its author had been repeatedly asked. In the trouble of his mind he posted off a letter of earnest warning as to the consequences likely to ensue from so rash an undertaking, when Forster answered as follows:—

"“I am not translating Brissot, and never thought of doing so. There is as much aristocratizing going on in my house as there is spoken on the other side; and as for myself, I certainly belong as little to the enragés of the one party as of the other. It is this very fairness which is hateful to all the fools and rogues who have espoused a party…. How should I tumble on the thought of wishing to preach an overthrow which I myself do not desire, but rather hold to be so great a mishap for Germany, that I make every effort to ward it off, and on this account chiefly blame all the lying reviewers, who only embitter the public by their partiality, inasmuch as they give themselves the appearance as if it must needs trust them on their word…. I can remain silent, but I cannot write against my insight and conviction.”"

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"His literary labors at this period brought his latterly somewhat forgotten name with fresh vividness to the memory of the general public. Besides his “Views,” which he wrote in such sunny moments as he could snatch, he translated the Sanscrit drama, “Sacontala,” from Sir W. Jones’s English version. This glowing flower, picked from the tropical garden of Indian poetry, excited such intense interest in Germany, that Goethe, in an epigram, styled it the embodiment of all beauty. ... In vain he would recur to his proposed work on the “Botany of the South Sea,” for which, when last in England, he had launched into the outlay of having the drawings colored by skilled artists: there was no one who would pay for the work. “I could find a publisher in Germany, but none who would pay me. Fruitlessly do I look about me for a Mæcenas amongst our magnates and princes, who would pay with a couple of hundred louis for being paraded in a dedication as the protector of the work, and becoming immortal in the world of science.” Soon after these sad bewailings, in a letter written late in 1791, it was the mockery of his lot, that just when they were too late, two chances were thrown to him, which a little earlier might have proved the cables of his rescue from shipwreck. Prospects of enlarged activity were opened to him in Mayence by the sudden decision of the Elector to assign the Jesuit church to the library, while on the death of the Professor of Natural History, his salary was added to Forster’s pay. On the other hand, a man of the highest standing and name, unexpectedly put himself in friendly communication with him. Amongst his literary jobs, he had received from the well-known Berlin publisher, Voss, the commission to write an account of the events of 1790, with an especial view to the part played in them by the Prussian statesman, Herzberg, between whom and Pitt he wished a parallel to be drawn. Herzberg, the old minister of Frederick the Great, and at that moment pretty much out of favor at the Court of his successor, felt himself too much interested in this work not to wish that an account bearing the name of such an author and publisher should be trustworthy. He wrote Forster a letter, marked by honorable esteem, in which, after sending him some printed documents, he offered, if the manuscript were communicated to him, to look through it, and see that its statements were historically true, “as the King had positively forbidden him to make known a collection of State Papers he had prepared, and which would have thrown much light on these events.” Forster thankfully accepted the offer; and Herzberg expressed himself highly satisfied with his exposition of his ministry. Before this business had, however, gone thus far, Mayence had been occupied by the French, and Forster had embarked in the new state-vessel, as he thought, beyond possibility of an honorable return. Herzberg wrote him, through Voss, a letter in which he expressed his hope that Forster would continue a well-intentioned Prussian, and accompanied it not only with a batch of books having reference to the history of the said times, but also with the silver medal of the Berlin Academy (of which Forster was a member and Herzberg curator), and sent him a considerable sum of money. It is plain that the statesman, who knew of Forster’s embarrassed circumstances, thought that he might by these means save a man, whose worth and abilities he had learnt to know, from following a path which he believed would lead to his destruction. ... "

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" ... Custine had suddenly passed the Rhine at Spiers, and was in full march on Mayence, having thoroughly beaten the Electoral troops under Colonel Winkelmann, an officer of such excellent sentiments that the bare words of freedom and the rights of man were enough to send him into a fit of raving. It was as if a pack of wild beasts had been suddenly let loose on a tea-party; the whole nobility of Mayence thought of nothing but to snatch up as much of their wealth as they could carry, and betake themselves with it beyond the Rhine. It was an endless bustle and trooping by day and night across the bridge and through the town gates: laden skiffs covered the river, and the roads were blocked with every sort of cart and wagon; while runaways on foot and horse hurried along in selfish haste to their hiding-places, thoughtless of all but their own safety. It is said that two hundred thousand florins were spent in means of transport out of the town in these few days. The Elector scurried into the town, to take a glimpse at it, but left it again secretly, after dark, on the day of his arrival, in well-closed chariots, with his mistress and his jewels, having first seen that his arms were well erased from his carriage-panels, after which he bethought himself of duly naming Chancellor Albini as Regent. The treasures of the churches were also packed up and got safely out of the town; and then the High Chancellor called the burghers (in truth, the only inhabitants who remained) to a meeting, at which he urged them not to lose courage, but, abiding by the town, to defend it to the last, and, addressing them as his brethren, read a proclamation, forbidding flight and removal of goods, on pain of severest punishment. The fraternal title, we are told, so dumfoundered the burgher brains, that a rough journeyman unwittingly gave vent to his astonishment by a thundering rap of his big fist on the table, accompanied by a monstrous oath; when, just as brotherly affection was about to make them all strike into that stream of bravery let loose by the Chancellor, an ill-timed meddler dashed this flow of mind by the shout that their most gracious brother, the Chancellor, in his heavily laden chariot, had just safely passed the gates. His Excellency General von Gymnich, Master-General of the Ordnance, swore loudly he would defend the town to his last shirt; and truly endless was the clatter and the bustle of warlike preparations during the next few days. ... Now and then a bit of news would come how Custine had advanced another march; and once the sight of a cloud of dust sent such a thrill of fear through the town, that the garrison nearly crushed itself to atoms in scampering across the bridge on the Rhine; until, on the 19th of October, the French arrived bodily under the walls of Mayence, and summoned the town to surrender; when General von Gymnich gathered his splendidly clad brother generals about him, amongst them the Elector’s relative, Count Hatzfeldt, to consider in council whether they should desert or defend the town. To desert was the decision they quickly came to; so, having bargained that each officer should be allowed to take away a horse out of the Elector’s stable, while he himself received six famous cream-colored steeds, his Excellency-in-Chief rode over to the opposite bank with the proud bearing of one who had worthily taken care of his master’s dearest interests; and, having received each officer’s pledge to restore his animal to its owner, he hastened to present himself, his horses, and his report, at Erfurt, whither his sovereign had retired.

"It was no wish to abet French conquest which made Forster remain in Mayence. His post was there; the world without was all strange to him, and offered him no home which he could make for in these troubles; and while his duty and his interests both told him to stay, his generous mind was, moreover, deeply shocked at the selfishness of the higher classes, and of every one connected with the Government. The very last act of the Elector was to pilfer and bear away with him the saving fund of widows and orphans, so that Forster could well exclaim, “The last quivering of despotism is one more piece of unrighteousness, which calls to Heaven for vengeance.” He determined, therefore, to abide events,—a resolve in which he was strengthened at the time by Theresa’s good cheer and encouragement. ... from being his fellow-professors’ champion for their dues and rights, he came to have to do with the equitable allotment of the demands of the French Commissariat, until step by step he was drawn into being the heart and soul of the new administration, and, on the appointment of a provisional government, allowed himself to be named one of its nine members. ... "

"This step was final; it tore almost all his ties of friendship; and even Sömmering was so overcome with fear and horror, that, turning away from one who loved him so dearly, he henceforth would have no further knowledge of him. Traitor and low designer were the names showered upon him; and the Duke of Brunswick’s remark, on hearing of Forster’s doings, was astonishment that one who had so many means of earning a livelihood should have sought a rebel’s calling! Yet if Forster proved wrong in his political belief, he shared his mistake with many keen thinkers; for even the shrewd Johannes von Müller, initiated as he was into all the springs and workings of German statecraft, gave it as his opinion, on a hasty visit to Mayence for matters of private business (where he was beset by hundreds of doubtful burghers seeking to steady their minds by the wisdom of so deep an oracle), that under the circumstances they would do best to rally round the republican Government. In the midst of the bustle of convening the assembly which was to decide whether Mayence would become independent or not, affairs without the walls grew dark and threatening."

" ... It was in the turmoil of such troubled times, when every day the look-out became more and more threatening, that he determined Theresa should no longer encounter the risks of his lot. She had been entirely deprived of society by the universal emigration (Huber, as Saxon agent, had been forced to leave the town), and hardships which would formerly have excited her romantic temper, now only tended to depress it; so it was decided that Thomas Brand, the English pupil, should take her to Strasburg, where she was to reside with good Jacobin friends of her husband. Thus was the knot of Forster’s marriage noiselessly untied, although it is certain that neither husband nor wife was fully aware that they were then unloosening it so completely forever. Much deep and earnest thought had Forster held within himself as to what it was his honest duty to do for his wife’s happiness; that secret about Huber weighed upon him, in spite of his philosophy; yet, seeing himself and the ship of his household becoming more and more engulfed in an eddy, he wished to see his wife at least landed beyond its reach; and thus this severing was, in truth, a renunciation on his part. Huber soon after vowed that as long as he lived Theresa should never suffer want, and, forsaking his diplomatic calling,—advancement in which was barred by his well-known friendship for the Jacobins,—he went to Switzerland, whither she had gone from Strasburg with her children. Strange to say, a happier and a better understanding between all three was the immediate result of this unwonted settlement. ... "

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" ... he was made to travel through the country districts, as Government Commissioner, to watch the elections of deputies for the Constituent Assembly of Mayence,—an office which brought him into collision with the nobles on their estates. The Union was voted at once, when Forster, with two other citizens, was sent to bear to the Convention the decree which he himself had drawn up. So little did he foresee, in the eagerness of that hour, how events were upon the point of turning, that he expected to be back before the end of three weeks, and even neglected to take any care for his books and papers. On the 30th of March he was admitted to the bar of the Convention, where he was received with the enthusiastic cheers of that France to which he was sent as the spokesman of its new brethren, although one short week was sufficient to prove how unstable and tottering was the Union he heralded.

"The allied armies had crossed the Rhine the day before Forster’s departure, and since then had advanced upon the town, so as to invest it completely. Under such circumstances, return was for the present out of the question; so to shift for himself as he best could in the heaving surf of Paris, on the pittance of eighteen assignat livres a day, was all the look-out left to him, and he tried to make it as cheery a one as good-will would allow. A large world suited Forster’s temper; the many shiftings of his early life had given him habits of largeness, and there was in the nature of Paris and its world-movement abundance to fasten and powerfully interest the peculiar tastes of his mind. Moreover, he came thither with a lively trust and belief in the great Revolution, which the excitement of partisanship had worked up into passionate liking; and yet the first impression of what he saw, when he began to sift and order the crush of sight which thronged on him, was disappointment, which, in spite of himself, stole with clammy chill over his boiling enthusiasm. He saw the ugly underworkings of parties and of party-chiefs, and his gossamer visions threatened absolutely to fade away at the strong glare of Paris light. “The only thing still wanting, after all I have suffered of late, is to have the conviction forced on me, that I have offered up my best strength to a monster, and have worked with honest zeal for a cause with which no one else will work honestly, and which is a cloak for the maddest passions.” Forster’s political faith, and keen glance into the workings of men and times, were, however, far too steady to be shaken or blinded by any sudden gust. He had become enamored of the Revolution for herself; and through the throng of low suitors who had jostled and dragged her along into the filth of their debaucheries, his eye, disregarding the harlotry of foisted fashion, dwelt ever lovingly on the beauty with which she had been born. Thus, while goaded to despair by the excesses and horrors of the violent party, he yet proclaimed himself a Jacobin, because he saw in extreme measures the State’s only safeguard against a return of old abuses. “I do not deny that the men of the Mountain often show themselves from a disadvantageous and impolitic side; but they seem withal to be freer from prejudice than the others, and, beyond doubt, they have more power and decision.” Thus Forster remained true to his convictions,—for with him they were the clear light of belief, which no chance storm could lastingly trouble, for he knew that, in the heaven of his world, certain seasons must have passing storms, and that the big darkness was but the shadow which must come along with the mighty lightning that would clear the firmament. ... "

" ... Affairs in Mayence grew daily worse; for not only were a hundred ducats put upon his outlawed head, about which he could afford to joke from his Paris garret, but what was infinitely more alarming, a thorough rain of shells and cannon-balls had been hurled upon the town, great part of which, and especially of his own neighborhood, had been burned; while, even if his house escaped destruction, there was small chance that he would be able to recover his papers, which he had so thoughtlessly forgotten to stow away. Without his papers he was like a palsied man pilfered of his crutches; for his hopes of active employment in the service of France did not wear a promising look. All France was then bustling about Paris and the office haunts of the ministers; and unless a man had big shoulders, and a strong will to make others afraid of him, there was small likelihood for his luck in picking up anything. Lebrun, Minister of Foreign Affairs, had indeed received him in a friendly manner, and he had the justest claims on the State for whose benefit he had risked and lost his all; yet, if such hopes were worth aught, their value was as yet to come, and so far not even in sight."

"He thought of studying Eastern languages, and of going to India for some years.

"“If I could only scrape together £400 or £500, and were it only £300, I would learn Persian and Arabic, and go overland to India to gather new experience, and besides make my fortune as a physician in a few years. Wholly new objects, foreign sights, movement, occupation, discomfort, and even danger,—all this together, with the consciousness that I am busy in the enjoyment and pursuit of such human work as suits my powers, knowledge, and taste, must infallibly prove healing balm to my wounded feelings. I might stay away from four to six years, or still longer, and then return not yet too old to enjoy the end of my days in my children’s arms; while, finding them happy, I should bring back to you a friend thankful for the fulfilment of your motherly duties.”"

"At times Lebrun threw out a sign which buoyed up his hope, and made him look nearer home than India for a beam whereon to float from drowning; until at last, in October, he really was named a French envoy, and was sent to Cambrai to negotiate an exchange of prisoners with the allied generals. On the very day of his appointment, the Angel of Blood had passed close by him with his sword. Lux, one of his two fellow-deputies from Mayence, and who had been the comrade of all his Paris penury, had been arrested that morning to be dragged before the revolutionary tribunal. The poor youth, crazed with admiration of Charlotte Corday’s heroism, had loudly said that he would hold it as his highest honor to be doomed to share her death, and wrote an apotheosis of her, in which he proposed that a statue should be erected to her as greater than Brutus. ... "

" ... Theresa was staying at Neufchâtel, which, being under Prussian supremacy, was forbidden ground to the outlaw. Yet for her to come over into France was even more dangerous than for Forster to break the decree of the Convention, which forbade any one to cross the boundaries without the Government’s express permission. The first petty police-officer might cheaply show his zeal by laying hold of her as a skulking emigrant; while Huber, as an enemy’s subject, could never be admitted.

"About the middle of October, being at last relieved from his diplomatic functions, Forster moved heaven and earth in Paris to be able to obtain his wishes. It was resolved that Theresa should come with Huber to Travers, a poor village in the Jura, a few miles from the French frontier, whither Forster was to cross from Pontarlier. He obtained a loan of one thousand livres from an old Mayence friend. He reckoned on his official character to overcome any difficulties on the frontier, while he hoped to shield himself against the penalty of death which was attached to the transport of coin out of the country, by bringing back a paper in Huber’s possession, which, written by Clermont Tonnerre, contained matters of high importance about General Luckner’s supposed treason, and which, if subjected to inquiry, Forster would pretend to have been bought with the money he had, in truth, carried to his children. At last the arrangements were ready, and early in November he left Paris for Pontarlier. The chief of the frontier post proved a friendly man, who willingly agreed to help him as far as he could; so, riding across the snowy ridges of the Jura, he reached unobserved the appointed hamlet on a November morning. ... "

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"“But a few lines from my bed of pain, that my darlings be not without tidings. ... You will understand that I can do no work. I can only save myself. I cannot continue this scrawl,—therefore, only be without anxiety. I beg of you, dear Huber, take care that our Theresa does not create herself any fancies. It is true that I am very and painfully ill; but once more—there is no danger. Your letters, my dear child, which I have all received, have been a dear gift to me in my illness; be sure to continue writing assiduously! We have everywhere been victorious like lions; the Frankfort call has been full of augury. I am curious to learn how public spirit will express itself on the other side of the Rhine, now that the truth of the news is undoubted. Is it not true, my children—a few words are better than nothing? I have no more strength to write. Farewell! Guard yourselves against illness,—kiss my darlings.”"

" ... at five o’clock in the afternoon of the 12th January, 1794, the brave soul breathed its last."

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" ... So forsaken was the end of one who had begun life so dazzlingly. Hardly a word was spoken about his death; and if so, then was it mostly a curse, for pity was barely dared to be whispered. Sömmering, peevish and fretting at the chattels he had lost during the Mayence outbreak, started back from the very name of Forster as from the Evil One. Lichtenberg timidly bewailed that his married state imposed caution, so that all he could afford to do for his friend’s memory was to think freely of him. Jacobi’s delicate nature did not mingle in the low choir of hooters, but still he stood silently aloof; and, most shocking of all, the old father at Halle, in the mad frenzy of hoary age, belched forth a yell of outrage against his George, to have seen whom swing on the gallows he declared would have been the closing pleasure of his life. One man alone dared to weep openly for him, and tenderly he wept over his loss,—kindly old Heyne, who, in the fulness of his honest heart, cast aside all his caution and regard for consequences, to let its sorrow pour itself forth.

"“Since yesterday’s news, which has altogether confounded me” (he wrote to Huber on the 31st of January), “I cannot collect my thoughts. I cannot console myself for the loss of my Forster. Truly was he my Forster. I loved him beyond expression; so many feelings were mingled in him. His worth—ah! he will never be replaced for the world. The knowledge that was gathered in him will not soon again be found in one man. The noblest nature—the noblest heart; and for me ever the object of sorrow, of pity. I always thought of him with emotion; he deserved to be happy more than thousand others, and yet was never so,—was so deeply unhappy! It is as yet impossible for me to think that I am never to see him again! I shall never be able to forget him; always will he float before my eyes,—thou noblest, best man! What would I give for one hour which I might have conversed with him! Rest in peace, my dear, my cherished Forster!”

"The man who had borne the name of Germany all over the world, whose writings were amongst the masterpieces of its language, whose feelings were so true and whose thought so national, that he first coined a thorough German word for public spirit (gemeingeist),—that man’s memory was tracked and hunted down as of the vilest traitor; so that, nearly forty years after his death, his wife did not dare to publish his letters without prefixing an apology. Four months after Forster’s death Theresa and Huber were married, and the remainder of their lives was at least happy and contented."

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September 28, 2021 - September 28, 2021.

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Leaves from a Note-Book

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One has to wonder if this was meant to be the second half of From the Note-Book of an Eccentric, and other pieces weren't really a part thereof; but it could be either way.

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"Authorship.

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"To lay down in the shape of practical moral rules courses of conduct only to be made real by the rarest states of motive and disposition, tends not to elevate, but to degrade the general standard, by turning that rare attainment from an object of admiration into an impossible prescription, against which the average nature first rebels and then flings out ridicule. It is for art to present images of a lovelier order than the actual, gently winning the affections, and so determining the taste. But in any rational criticism of the time which is meant to guide a practical reform, it is idle to insist that action ought to be this or that, without considering how far the outward conditions of such change are present, even supposing the inward disposition towards it. Practically, we must be satisfied to aim at something short of perfection—and at something very much further off it in one case than in another. While the fundamental conceptions of morality seem as stationary through ages as the laws of life, so that a moral manual written eighteen centuries ago still admonishes us that we are low in our attainments, it is quite otherwise with the degree to which moral conceptions have penetrated the various forms of social activity, and made what may be called the special conscience of each calling, art, or industry. ... "

"moral manual written eighteen centuries ago"?? Wasn't crossing over from Egypt far older? Or does George Eliot consider her people perfect about following ten commandments?

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Seriously, was she German?

"Among those callings which have not yet acquired anything near a full-grown conscience in the public mind is Authorship. Yet the changes brought about by the spread of instruction and the consequent struggles of an uneasy ambition, are, or at least might well be, forcing on many minds the need of some regulating principle with regard to the publication of intellectual products, which would override the rule of the market: a principle, that is, which should be derived from a fixing of the author’s vocation according to those characteristics in which it differs from the other bread-winning professions. Let this be done, if possible, without any cant, which would carry the subject into Utopia, away from existing needs. The guidance wanted is a clear notion of what should justify men and women in assuming public authorship, and of the way in which they should be determined by what is usually called success. But the forms of authorship must be distinguished; journalism, for example, carrying a necessity for that continuous production which in other kinds of writing is precisely the evil to be fought against, and judicious careful compilation, which is a great public service, holding in its modest diligence a guarantee against those deductions of vanity and idleness which draw many a young gentleman into reviewing, instead of the sorting and copying which his small talents could not rise to with any vigor and completeness."

It's not about the specific criteria she sets out, it's about the notion of society, state, setting out rules of authorship!

In Germany, we were told we cannot call ourselves Dr without permission of the government. Our doctorates, from reputed universities in U.S., we're of no consequence whatsoever. We responded say I g those laws don't apply to non citizens. But then we found out that not only setting up any trade - baking bread at home for sale, tailoring, ... required a government licence in Germany, it required a vocational school course certificate; and as to flying a small plane, you needed such rigmarole to go through to ride in one, not just flying one.

And here George Eliot suggests controlling authors!

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"A manufacturer goes on producing calicoes as long and as fast as he can find a market for them; and in obeying this indication of demand he gives his factory its utmost usefulness to the world in general and to himself in particular. Another manufacturer buys a new invention of some light kind likely to attract the public fancy, is successful in finding a multitude who will give their testers for the transiently desirable commodity, and before the fashion is out, pockets a considerable sum: the commodity was colored with a green which had arsenic in it that damaged the factory workers and the purchasers. What then? These, he contends (or does not know or care to contend), are superficial effects, which it is folly to dwell upon while we have epidemic diseases and bad government.

"The first manufacturer we will suppose blameless. Is an author simply on a par with him, as to the rules of production?"

When George Eliot prescribes control, she doesn't see the problems resulting, from authors - or anyone speaking against government- being sent to concentration camps by nazis, to their being sent to Siberia by another regime, to their being murdered and never heard of again, by yet others. Simplest was the complex network in U.S., "a free country", described by Upton Sinclair in his various works, including The Brass Check.

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" ... The calico scarcely varies in appropriateness of quality, no consumer is in danger of getting too much of it, and neglecting his boots, hats, and flannel shirts in consequence. That there should be large quantities of the same sort in the calico manufacture is an advantage: the sameness is desirable, and nobody is likely to roll his person in so many folds of calico as to become a mere bale of cotton goods, and nullify his senses of hearing and touch, while his morbid passion for Manchester shirtings makes him still cry “More!” The wise manufacturer gets richer and richer, and the consumers he supplies have their real wants satisfied and no more."

George Eliot never thought of fashion industry, artificially raised prices of - not calico, but - synthetic fabrics, and bullying if female customers in West, to buy tons of "season's fashion" and discard them next season, all ruinous for pockets, especially of women; all this, before accessories and cosmetics!

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"For a man who has a certain gift of writing to say, “I will make the most of it while the public likes my wares, as long as the market is open and I am able to supply it at a money profit—such profit being the sign of liking”—he should have a belief that his wares have nothing akin to the arsenic green in them, and also that his continuous supply is secure from a degradation in quality which the habit of consumption encouraged in the buyers may hinder them from marking their sense of by rejection; so that they complain, but pay, and read while they complain. Unless he has that belief, he is on a level with the manufacturer who gets rich by fancy-wares colored with arsenic green. He really cares for nothing but his income. He carries on authorship on the principle of the gin-palace."

Not only prohibition of alcohol has never succeeded, but even tobacco isn't banned yet, it's only smoking in public that's banned in most of West; one should see Westerners smoking arrogantly across Asia, even in airports, despite bans! Then there are cigarette sales outside schools, and police protecting them from protesters, in South East Asia - getting children of countrues other than U.S. addicted early. Afghanistan farmers were discouraged from sowing food crops, encouraged to sow opium crops, during two decades of Western occupation - just as British did to India. And we haven't discussed HFCS yet, which not only us addictive, but damages body; no legislation to ban it has even been thought of, it proliferated through U.S. almost unavoidable via all processed food including most bread, and of course, all "cola"s. Dieting industry benefits, as does medical industry.

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"It is in the highest sense lawful for him to get as good a price as he honorably can for the best work he is capable of; but not for him to force or hurry his production, or even do over again what has already been done, either by himself or others, so as to render his work no real contribution, for the sake of bringing up his income to the fancy pitch. An author who would keep a pure and noble conscience, and with that a developing instead of degenerating intellect and taste, must cast out of his aims the aim to be rich. And therefore he must keep his expenditure low—he must make for himself no dire necessity to earn sums in order to pay bills."

So says George Eliot with a severe piety, and yet, she proclaims rights of Anglican invasions around the world in Impressions of Theophrastus Such, as a heaven sanctioned right, to loot and massacre others, to chop off hands of weavers in India so British can sell substandard manufactured cloth of Britain to India, to starve millions of Indians to death by stealing India's harvest, and yes, to war against China to force China to buy opium from Brits so Chinese can get addicted. And if India or China don't want any of it, George Eliot thumps her fist and glories with satisfaction about having punished them.

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"But after the restraints and rules which must guide the acknowledged author, whose power of making a real contribution is ascertained, comes the consideration, how or on what principle are we to find a check for that troublesome disposition to authorship arising from the spread of what is called Education, which turns a growing rush of vanity and ambition into this current? The well-taught, an increasing number, are almost all able to write essays on given themes, which demand new periodicals to save them from lying in cold obstruction. The ill-taught—also an increasing number—read many books, seem to themselves able to write others surprisingly like what they read, and probably superior, since the variations are such as please their own fancy, and such as they would have recommended to their favorite authors: these ill-taught persons are perhaps idle and want to give themselves “an object;” or they are short of money, and feel disinclined to get it by a commoner kind of work; or they find a facility in putting sentences together which gives them more than a suspicion that they have genius, which, if not very cordially believed in by private confidants, will be recognized by an impartial public; or, finally, they observe that writing is sometimes well paid, and sometimes a ground of fame or distinction, and without any use of punctilious logic, they conclude to become writers themselves."

Did she ever think of looking at a mirror, as she wrote that?

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Judgments on Authors.

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"In endeavoring to estimate a remarkable writer who aimed at more than temporary influence, we have first to consider what was his individual contribution to the spiritual wealth of mankind? Had he a new conception? Did he animate long-known but neglected truths with new vigor, and cast fresh light on their relation to other admitted truths? Did he impregnate any ideas with a fresh store of emotion, and in this way enlarge the area of moral sentiment? Did he, by a wise emphasis here, and a wise disregard there, give a more useful or beautiful proportion to aims or motives? And even where his thinking was most mixed with the sort of mistake which is obvious to the majority, as well as that which can only be discerned by the instructed, or made manifest by the progress of things, has it that salt of a noble enthusiasm which should rebuke our critical discrimination if its correctness is inspired with a less admirable habit of feeling?"

Why not judge them, to begin with, as one would a baker? If it's healthy, attractive, tastes good, good enough. Modern art was born because painters found no takers for good work.

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Story-Telling.

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"What is the best way of telling a story? Since the standard must be the interest of the audience, there must be several or many good ways rather than one best. ... "

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"The modes of telling a story founded on these processes of outward and inward life derive their effectiveness from the superior mastery of images and pictures in grasping the attention—or, one might say with more fundamental accuracy, from the fact that our earliest, strongest impressions, our most intimate convictions, are simply images added to more or less of sensation. These are the primitive instruments of thought. Hence it is not surprising that early poetry took this way—telling a daring deed, a glorious achievement, without caring for what went before. The desire for orderly narration is a later, more reflective birth. The presence of the Jack in the box affects every child: it is the more reflective lad, the miniature philosopher, who wants to know how he got there."

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Historic Imagination.

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"What really took place in and around Constantine before, upon, and immediately after his declared conversion?"

Constantine had no intention of converting; he imposed his will, about monotheism, but the God was Sun, and church accepted - and when he died, they simply claimed he was converted. Such lies go on ever since.

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Value in Originality.

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"The supremacy given in European cultures to the literatures of Greece and Rome has had an effect almost equal to that of a common religion in binding the Western nations together. It is foolish to be forever complaining of the consequent uniformity, as if there were an endless power of originality in the human mind. Great and precious origination must always be comparatively rare, and can only exist on condition of a wide, massive uniformity. When a multitude of men have learned to use the same language in speech and writing, then and then only can the greatest masters of language arise. For in what does their mastery consist? They use words which are already a familiar medium of understanding and sympathy in such a way as greatly to enlarge the understanding and sympathy. Originality of this order changes the wild grasses into world-feeding grain. Idiosyncrasies are pepper and spices of questionable aroma."

Didn't the author pontificate exactly opposite, in 'Authorship'?

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To the Prosaic all Things are Prosaic.

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“Is the time we live in prosaic?” “That depends: it must certainly be prosaic to one whose mind takes a prosaic stand in contemplating it.” “But it is precisely the most poetic minds that most groan over the vulgarity of the present, its degenerate sensibility to beauty, eagerness for materialistic explanation, noisy triviality.” “Perhaps they would have had the same complaint to make about the age of Elizabeth, if, living then, they had fixed their attention on its more sordid elements, or had been subject to the grating influence of its everyday meannesses, and had sought refuge from them in the contemplation of whatever suited their taste in a former age.”

Wordplay?

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“Dear Religious Love”

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"We get our knowledge of perfect Love by glimpses and in fragments chiefly—the rarest only among us knowing what it is to worship and caress, reverence and cherish, divide our bread and mingle our thoughts at one and the same time, under inspiration of the same object. Finest aromas will so often leave the fruits to which they are native and cling elsewhere, leaving the fruit empty of all but its coarser structure!"

That last sentence is telling. Come to think of it, there isn't a love story in all her work.

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We Make our Own Precedents.

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"In the times of national mixture when modern Europe was, as one may say, a-brewing, it was open to a man who did not like to be judged by the Roman law to choose which of certain other codes he would be tried by. So, in our own times, they who openly adopt a higher rule than their neighbors do thereby make act of choice as to the laws and precedents by which they shall be approved or condemned, and thus it may happen that we see a man morally pilloried for a very customary deed, and yet having no right to complain, inasmuch as in his foregoing deliberative course of life he had referred himself to the tribunal of those higher conceptions, before which such a deed is without quetion condemnable."

What about the cheats?

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Birth of Tolerance.

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"Tolerance first comes through equality of struggle, as in the case of Arianism and Catholicism in the early times—Valens, Eastern and Arian, Valentinian, Western and Catholic, alike publishing edicts of tolerance; or it comes from a common need of relief from an oppressive predominance, as when James II. published his Act of Tolerance towards non-Anglicans, being forced into liberality towards the Dissenters by the need to get it for the Catholics. Community of interest is the root of justice; community of suffering, the root of pity; community of joy, the root of love."

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Felix qui non potuit.

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"Many feel themselves very confidently on safe ground when they say: It must be good for man to know the Truth. But it is clearly not good for a particular man to know some particular truth, as irremediable treachery in one whom he cherishes—better that he should die without knowing it.

"Of scientific truth, is it not conceivable that some facts as to the tendency of things affecting the final destination of the race might be more hurtful when they had entered into the human consciousness than they would have been if they had remained purely external in their activity?"

Such as?

Darwin's realisation about evolution?

Bible belt has gone from claiming equality to banning teaching evolution.

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Divine Grace a Real Emanation.

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"There is no such thing as an impotent or neutral deity, if the deity be really believed in, and contemplated either in prayer or meditation. Every object of thought reacts on the mind that conceives it, still more on that which habitually contemplates it. ... "

Reminds one of various internet debates - one, where a Jewish debater balked at importance of perception and claimed idea was important; another where a muslim female questioned why india nade up different Gods, why not just make up one for all purposes!

Are those, or any other monotheistic, really different from atheists? "Idea", "make up gods"???? If that's all there is to it, why bother converting?

As to faith, isn't Perception of Reality the real McCoy?

And while it's widely assumed that monotheism is superior, there's no reason in its support, much less evidence of Reality, on any level.

It's just domination by power of having conquered, massacred, looted. By which logic they can force people to chant "one is two", just as well.

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“A Fine Excess.”

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"Feeling is Energy. One can hardly insist too much, in the present stage of thinking, on the efficacy of feeling in stimulating to ardent co-operation, quite apart from the conviction that such co-operation is needed for the achievement of the end in view. Just as hatred will vent itself in private curses no longer believed to have any potency, and joy, in private singing far out among the woods and fields, so sympathetic feeling can only be satisfied by joining in the action which expresses it, though the added “Bravo!” the added push, the added penny is no more than a grain of dust on a rolling mass."

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September 28, 2021 - September 28, 2021.

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September 26, 2021 - September 28, 2021.

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Reviews - Books I Read - DRJG

Tuesday, September 28, 2021

From the Note-Book of an Eccentric, and Other Essays, by George Eliot.

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