My Dear Spencer: Your telegram which reached me on Friday evening
caused me great perplexity, inasmuch as I had just been talking to
Morley, and agreeing with him that the proposal for a funeral in
Westminster Abbey had a very questionable look to us, who desired
nothing so much as that peace and honor should attend George Eliot
to her grave.
It can hardly be doubted that the proposal will be bitterly
opposed, possibly (as happened in Mill's case with less
provocation) with the raking up of past histories, about which the
opinion even of those who have least the desire or the right to be
pharisaical is strongly divided, and which had better be forgotten.
With respect to putting pressure on the Dean of Westminster, I have
to consider that he has some confidence in me, and before asking
him to do something for which he is pretty sure to be violently
assailed, I have to ask myself whether I really think it a right
thing for a man in his position to do.
Now I can not say I do. However much I may lament the circumstance,
Westminster Abbey is a Christian Church and not a Pantheon, and the
Dean thereof is officially a Christian priest, and we ask him to
bestow exceptional Christian honors by this burial in the Abbey.
George Eliot is known not only as a great writer, but as a person
whose life and opinions were in notorious antagonism to Christian
practise in regard to marriage, and Christian theory in regard to
dogma. How am I to tell the Dean that I think he ought to read over
the body of a person who did not repent of what the Church
considers mortal sin, a service not one solitary proposition of
which she would have accepted for truth while she was alive? How am
I to urge him to do that which, if I were in his place, I should
most emphatically refuse to do? You tell me that Mrs. Cross wished
for the funeral in the Abbey. While I desire to entertain the
greatest respect for her wishes, I am very sorry to hear it. I do
not understand the feeling which could create such a desire on any
personal grounds, save those of affection, and the natural yearning
to be near, even in death, those whom we have loved. And on public
grounds the wish is still less intelligible to me. One can not eat
one's cake and have it too. Those who elect to be free in thought
and deed must not hanker after the rewards, if they are to be so
called, which the world offers to those who put up with its
fetters.
Thus, however I look at the proposal, it seems to me to be a
profound mistake, and I can have nothing to do with it. I shall be
deeply grieved if this resolution is ascribed to any other motives
than those which I have set forth at greater length than I
intended.
Ever yours very faithfully,
T. H. HUXLEY
[Illustration: JOHN TYNDALL]