I suppose my hesitation in writing to you to tell you of a debt I feel towards you is vanity. If you did not know me, you might think a good deal more of my judgment than it is worth, and I should feel bold in that possibility. But when judgment is understood to mean one's own impression of delight, one ought not to shrink from making one's small offering of burnt clay because others can give gold statues. It would be narrowness to suppose that an artist can only care for the impressions of those who know the methods of his art as well as feel its effects. Art works for all it can touch. And I want, in gratitude to tell you that your work makes life larger and more beautiful to me. I mean that historical life of all the world, in which our little personal share often seem a mere standing-room from which we can look all round, and chiefly backwards. Perhaps the work has a strain of special sadness in it - perhaps a deeper sense of the of the tremendous outer forces which urge us, than the inner impulse toward heroic struggle and achievement; but the sadness is so inwrought with pure, elevating sensibility to all that is sweet and beautiful in the story of man in the face of the earth, that it can no more be found fault with than the sadness of mid-day,when Pan is touchy like the rest of us. Don't you agree with me that much superfluous stuff is written on all sides about the purpose of art? A nasty mind makes nasty art, whether for art or any other sake; and a meagre mind will bring forth what is meagre. And some effect in determining other minds there must be, according to the degree of nobleness or meaness in the selection made of the artist's soul. Your work impresses me with the happy sense of noble selection and of power determined by refined sympathy. That is why I wanted to thank you in writing, since lip-homage has fallen into disrepute. I cannot help liking to tell you a sign that my delight must have taken a little bit of the same curve as yours. Looking, apropos of your picture, into the "Iphigenia in Aulis," to read the chorus you know of, I found my blue pencil-marks made seven years ago (and gone into that forgetfulness which makes my mind seem very large and empty) - blue pencil-marks mad against the dance-loving Kithara and the footsteps of the muses and the nereids dancing on the shining sands. I was pleased to see that my mind had been touched in a dumb way by what has touched yours to fine utterance.
George Elliot became a close friend of the Burne-Jones's from February 1868. In July 1870 she spent a holiday at Whitby with Georgie, Philip and Margaret. She was therefore party to the consequences of the Zambaco affair, but as this letter shows she remained impartial. It is difficult to ascertain the painting to which she refers, but as she visited the Studio she was aware of most of the artist's work at this date.