ABSTRACT
Success to all your wishes except for the destruction of us Saxons and believe me always very cordially yours / Jane W Carlyle
MARY RUSSELL Thornhill
NLS 603.216
120 JANE CARLYLE NEWLY SELECTED LETTERS
HELEN WELSH Maryland St, LiverjJool
... I would have answered your letter in the enthusiasm ql the moment if the moment had not been needed for more practical purposes. There was much to be put straight on my return morally as well as materially, and I had not even my normal amount of force either moral or material to bring to the work: for the excitement of a houseful of the most exciting and excited people during the last ten days had been a prodigious overbalance to the 'Pure air' and other advantages of Addiscombe.The more I see of aristocratic life, the more I wonder how people with the same system of nerves as oneself, and with the same human needs, can keep themselves alive in it-and sane! Lady Harriet especially, who is the woman of largest intellect I have ever seen-how she can reconcile herself to a life which is after all a mere dramatic representation, however successful, fills me with astonishment and a certain sorrow. But like the pigs they 'are used to it.' and nobody, I fancy knows till he try how difficult it is to tear himself loose from the network of Lilliputan packthreads in which our nobility grow up from their earliest days. a poor woman has enough of serious occupation cut out for her by the nature of things-sometimes more than is good for her-and therein lies her grievance-we in our sphere have also something given us to do-how far it may suit our taste is another question and a secondary one-we see at least how our activity may be turned to account better or worse. but a great Lady-should she take a notion to wrap herself in a blanket and go to sleep like Beauty for a hundred years; what would stand still that needs to go forward?-only herself!-and should she take the better notion to put away Great-Lady-things and lead a rational useful life how is she to set about it? how extricate herself from the imposed donothingism of her position?- As Lady Harriet herself once said to me 'one
would have to begin by quarrelling with all one's husbands relations and one's own' -a beginning that one may be excused for finding rather questionable!- No! it is not easy for a Great Lady in these days to be anything but 'an ornament to Society in every direction: and that her Ladyship succeeds in being-to perfection! The old illustration of the camel passing thro' the eye of a needle still holds good-Let those who are not in the camels shoes, among whom are you and I, be thankful-...
