i88o DEATH OF GEORGE ELIOT 



19 



Herbert Spencer, who had urged him to join in memorialis- 

 ing the Dean, Huxley replied as follows : — 



4 Marlborough Place, Dec. 27, 1880. 



My dear Spencer — Your telegram which reached me on 

 Friday evening caused me great perplexity, inasmuch as I had 

 just been talking with Morley, and agreeing with him that the 

 proposal for a funeral in Westminster Abbey had a very ques- 

 tionable look to us, who desired nothing so much as that peace 

 and honour 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 provoca- 

 tion), 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 for- 

 gotten. 



With respect to putting pressure on the Dean of West- 

 minster, 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 cannot 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 honours 

 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 practice in regard to mar- 

 riage, 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 in 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 to those whom we have loved. And on 

 public grounds the wish is still less intelligible to me. One 

 cannot eat one's cake and have it too. Those who elect to be 



