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diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6833f05 --- /dev/null +++ b/.gitattributes @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +* text=auto +*.txt text +*.md text diff --git a/17954-8.txt b/17954-8.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ea1ccf0 --- /dev/null +++ b/17954-8.txt @@ -0,0 +1,1438 @@ +Project Gutenberg's Critical Miscellanies (Vol 3 of 3), by John Morley + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: Critical Miscellanies (Vol 3 of 3) + The Life of George Eliot + +Author: John Morley + +Release Date: March 9, 2006 [EBook #17954] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CRITICAL MISCELLANIES (VOL 3 OF 3) *** + + + + +Produced by Paul Murray, Graeme Mackreth and the Online +Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net + + + + + + +CRITICAL + +MISCELLANIES + +BY +JOHN MORLEY + +VOL. III. + +Essay 4: The Life of George Eliot + +London +MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited +NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY + +1904 + + + + +THE LIFE OF GEORGE ELIOT + + +On Literary Biography 93 + +As a mere letter-writer will not rank among the famous +masters 96 + +Mr. Myers's Essay 100 + +Letter to Mr. Harrison 107 + +Hebrew her favourite study 112 + +Limitless persistency in application 113 + +Romola 114 + +Mr. R.W. Mackay's _Progress of the Intellect_ 120 + +The period of her productions, 1856-1876 124 + +Mr. Browning 125 + +An æsthetic not a doctrinal teacher 126 + +Disliked vehemence 130 + +Conclusion 131 + + + + +THE LIFE OF GEORGE ELIOT.[1] + + +The illustrious woman who is the subject of these volumes makes a remark +to her publisher which is at least as relevant now as it was then. Can +nothing be done, she asks, by dispassionate criticism towards the reform +of our national habits in the matter of literary biography? 'Is it +anything short of odious that as soon as a man is dead his desk should +be raked, and every insignificant memorandum which he never meant for +the public be printed for the gossiping amusement of people too idle to +reread his books?' Autobiography, she says, at least saves a man or a +woman that the world is curious about, from the publication of a string +of mistakes called Memoirs. Even to autobiography, however, she +confesses her deep repugnance unless it can be written so as to involve +neither self-glorification nor impeachment of others--a condition, by +the way, with which hardly any, save Mill's, can be said to comply. 'I +like,' she proceeds, 'that _He being dead yet speaketh_ should have +quite another meaning than that' (iii. 226, 297, 307). She shows the +same fastidious apprehension still more clearly in another way. 'I have +destroyed almost all my friends' letters to me,' she says, 'because they +were only intended for my eyes, and could only fall into the hands of +persons who knew little of the writers if I allowed them to remain till +after my death. In proportion as I love every form of piety--which is +venerating love--I hate hard curiosity; and, unhappily, my experience +has impressed me with the sense that hard curiosity is the more common +temper of mind' (ii. 286). There is probably little difference among us +in respect of such experience as that. + +[Footnote 1: _George Eliot's Life_. By J.W. Cross. Three volumes. +Blackwood and Sons. 1885.] + +Much biography, perhaps we might say most, is hardly above the level of +that 'personal talk,' to which Wordsworth sagely preferred long barren +silence, the flapping of the flame of his cottage fire, and the +under-song of the kettle on the hob. It would not, then, have much +surprised us if George Eliot had insisted that her works should remain +the only commemoration of her life. There be some who think that those +who have enriched the world with great thoughts and fine creations, +might best be content to rest unmarked 'where heaves the turf in many a +mouldering heap,' leaving as little work to the literary executor, +except of the purely crematory sort, as did Aristotle, Plato, +Shakespeare, and some others whose names the world will not willingly +let die. But this is a stoic's doctrine; the objector may easily retort +that if it had been sternly acted on, we should have known very very +little about Dr. Johnson, and nothing about Socrates. + +This is but an ungracious prelude to some remarks upon a book, which +must be pronounced a striking success. There will be very little dispute +as to the fact that the editor of these memorials of George Eliot has +done his work with excellent taste, judgment, and sense. He found no +autobiography nor fragment of one, but he has skilfully shaped a kind of +autobiography by a plan which, so far as we know, he is justified in +calling new, and which leaves her life to write itself in extracts from +her letters and journals. With the least possible obtrusion from the +biographer, the original pieces are formed into a connected whole 'that +combines a narrative of day-to-day life with the play of light and shade +which only letters written in serious moods can give.' The idea is a +good one, and Mr. Cross deserves great credit for it. We may hope that +its success will encourage imitators. Certainly there are drawbacks. We +miss the animation of mixed narrative. There is, too, a touch of +monotony in listening for so long to the voice of a single speaker +addressing others who are silent behind a screen. But Mr. Cross could +not, we think, have devised a better way of dealing with his material: +it is simple, modest, and effective. + +George Eliot, after all, led the life of a studious recluse, with none +of the bustle, variety, motion, and large communication with the outer +world, that justified Lockhart and Moore in making a long story of the +lives of Scott and Byron. Even here, among men of letters, who were also +men of action and of great sociability, are not all biographies too +long? Let any sensible reader turn to the shelf where his Lives repose; +we shall be surprised if he does not find that nearly every one of them, +taking the present century alone, and including such splendid and +attractive subjects as Goethe, Hume, Romilly, Mackintosh, Horner, +Chalmers, Arnold, Southey, Cowper, would not have been all the better +for judicious curtailment. Lockhart, who wrote the longest, wrote also +the shortest, the Life of Burns; and the shortest is the best, in spite +of defects which would only have been worse if the book had been bigger. +It is to be feared that, conscientious and honourable as his self-denial +has been, even Mr. Cross has not wholly resisted the natural and +besetting error of the biographer. Most people will think that the +hundred pages of the Italian tour (vol. ii.), and some other not very +remarkable impressions of travel, might as well or better have been left +out. + +As a mere letter-writer, George Eliot will not rank among the famous +masters of what is usually considered especially a woman's art. She was +too busy in serious work to have leisure for that most delightful way of +wasting time. Besides that, she had by nature none of that fluency, +rapidity, abandonment, pleasant volubility, which make letters amusing, +captivating, or piquant. What Mr. Cross says of her as the mistress of a +_salon_, is true of her for the most part as a correspondent:--'Playing +around many disconnected subjects, in talk, neither interested nor +amused her much. She took things too seriously, and seldom found the +effort of entertaining compensated by the gain' (iii. 335). There is the +outpouring of ardent feeling for her friends, sobering down, as life +goes on, into a crooning kindliness, affectionate and honest, but often +tinged with considerable self-consciousness. It was said of some one +that his epigrams did honour to his heart; in the reverse direction we +occasionally feel that George Eliot's effusive playfulness does honour +to her head. It lacks simplicity and _verve_. Even in an invitation to +dinner, the words imply a grave sense of responsibility on both sides, +and sense of responsibility is fatal to the charm of familiar +correspondence. + +As was inevitable in one whose mind was so habitually turned to the +deeper elements of life, she lets fall the pearls of wise speech even in +short notes. Here are one or two:-- + +'My own experience and development deepen every day my conviction that +our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathise +with individual suffering and individual joy.' + +'If there is one attitude more odious to me than any other of the many +attitudes of "knowingness," it is that air of lofty superiority to the +vulgar. She will soon find out that I am a very commonplace woman.' + +'It so often happens that others are measuring us by our past self +while we are looking back on that self with a mixture of disgust and +sorrow.' + +The following is one of the best examples, one of the few examples, of +her best manner:-- + + I have been made rather unhappy by my husband's impulsive + proposal about Christmas. We are dull old persons, and your two + sweet young ones ought to find each Christmas a new bright bead + to string on their memory, whereas to spend the time with us + would be to string on a dark shrivelled berry. They ought to have + a group of young creatures to be joyful with. Our own children + always spend their Christmas with Gertrude's family; and we have + usually taken our sober merry-making with friends out of town. + Illness among these will break our custom this year; and thus + _mein Mann_, feeling that our Christmas was free, considered how + very much he liked being with you, omitting the other side of the + question--namely, our total lack of means to make a suitably + joyous meeting, a real festival, for Phil and Margaret. I was + conscious of this lack in the very moment of the proposal, and + the consciousness has been pressing on me more and more painfully + ever since. Even my husband's affectionate hopefulness cannot + withstand my melancholy demonstration. So pray consider the + kill-joy proposition as entirely retracted, and give us something + of yourselves only on simple black-letter days, when the Herald + Angels have not been raising expectations early in the morning. + +This is very pleasant, but such pieces are rare, and the infirmity of +human nature has sometimes made us sigh over these pages at the +recollection of the cordial cheeriness of Scott's letters, the high +spirits of Macaulay, the graceful levity of Voltaire, the rattling +dare-devilry of Byron. Epistolary stilts among men of letters went out +of fashion with Pope, who, as was said, thought that unless every period +finished with a conceit, the letter was not worth the postage. Poor +spirits cannot be the explanation of the stiffness in George Eliot's +case, for no letters in the English language are so full of playfulness +and charm as those of Cowper, and he was habitually sunk in gulfs deeper +and blacker than George Eliot's own. It was sometimes observed of her, +that in her conversation, _elle s'écoutait quand elle parlait_--she +seemed to be listening to her own voice while she spoke. It must be +allowed that we are not always free from an impression of +self-listening, even in the most caressing of the letters before us. + +This is not much better, however, than trifling. I daresay that if a +lively Frenchman could have watched the inspired Pythia on the sublime +tripod, he would have cried, _Elle s'écoute quand elle parle_. When +everything of that kind has been said, we have the profound +satisfaction, which is not quite a matter of course in the history of +literature, of finding after all that the woman and the writer were one. +The life does not belie the books, nor private conduct stultify public +profession. We close the third volume of the biography, as we have so +often closed the third volume of her novels, feeling to the very core +that in spite of a style that the French call _alambiqué_, in spite of +tiresome double and treble distillations of phraseology, in spite of +fatiguing moralities, gravities, and ponderosities, we have still been +in communion with a high and commanding intellect and a great nature. We +are vexed by pedantries that recall the _précieuses_ of the Hôtel +Rambouillet, but we know that she had the soul of the most heroic women +in history. We crave more of the Olympian serenity that makes action +natural and repose refreshing, but we cannot miss the edification of a +life marked by indefatigable labour after generous purposes, by an +unsparing struggle for duty, and by steadfast and devout fellowship with +lofty thoughts. + +Those who know Mr. Myers's essay on George Eliot will not have forgotten +its most imposing passage:-- + + I remember how at Cambridge, I waited with her once in the + Fellows' Garden of Trinity, on an evening of rainy May; and she, + stirred somewhat beyond her wont, and taking as her text the + three words which have been used so often as the inspiring + trumpet-calls of men,--the words _God_, _Immortality_, + _Duty_,--pronounced, with terrible earnestness, how inconceivable + was the _first_, how unbelievable the _second_, and yet how + peremptory and absolute the _third_. Never, perhaps, had sterner + accents affirmed the sovereignty of impersonal and unrecompensing + law. I listened, and night fell; her grave, majestic countenance + turned toward me like a Sibyl's in the gloom; it was as though + she withdrew from my grasp, one by one, the two scrolls of + promise, and left me the third scroll only, awful with inevitable + fates. + +To many, the relation which was the most important event in George +Eliot's life will seem one of those irretrievable errors which reduce +all talk of duty to a mockery. It is inevitable that this should be so, +and those who disregard a social law have little right to complain. Men +and women whom in every other respect it would be monstrous to call bad, +have taken this particular law into their own hands before now, and +committed themselves to conduct of which 'magnanimity owes no account to +prudence.' But if they had sense and knew what they were about, they +have braced themselves to endure the disapproval of a majority +fortunately more prudential than themselves. The world is busy, and its +instruments are clumsy. It cannot know all the facts; it has neither +time nor material for unravelling all the complexities of motive, or for +distinguishing mere libertinage from grave and deliberate moral +misjudgment; it is protecting itself as much as it is condemning the +offenders. On all this, then, we need have neither sophistry nor cant. +But those who seek something deeper than a verdict for the honest +working purpose of leaving cards and inviting to dinner, may feel, as +has been observed by a contemporary writer, that men and women are more +fairly judged, if judge them we must, by the way in which they bear the +burden of an error than by the decision that laid the burden on their +lives. Some idea of this kind was in her own mind when she wrote to her +most intimate friend in 1857, 'If I live five years longer, the positive +result of my existence on the side of truth and goodness will outweigh +the small negative good that would have consisted in my not doing +anything to shock others' (i. 461). This urgent desire to balance the +moral account may have had something to do with that laborious sense of +responsibility which weighed so heavily on her soul, and had so +equivocal an effect upon her art. Whatever else is to be said of this +particular union, nobody can deny that the picture on which it left a +mark was an exhibition of extraordinary self-denial, energy, and +persistency in the cultivation and the use of great gifts and powers for +what their possessor believed to be the highest objects for society and +mankind. + +A more perfect companionship, one on a higher intellectual level, or of +more sustained mental activity, is nowhere recorded. Lewes's mercurial +temperament contributed as much as the powerful mind of his consort to +prevent their seclusion from degenerating into an owlish stagnation. To +the very last (1878) he retained his extraordinary buoyancy. 'Nothing +but death could quench that bright flame. Even on his worst days he had +always a good story to tell; and I remember on one occasion in the +drawing-room at Witley, between two bouts of pain, he sang through with +great _brio_, though without much voice, the greater portion of the +tenor part in the _Barber of Seville_, George Eliot playing his +accompaniment, and both of them thoroughly enjoying the fun' (iii. 334). +All this gaiety, his inexhaustible vivacity, the facility of his +transitions from brilliant levity to a keen seriousness, the readiness +of his mental response, and the wide range of intellectual +accomplishments that were much more than superficial, made him a source +of incessant and varied stimulation. Even those, and there were some, +who thought that his gaiety bordered on flippancy, that his genial +self-content often came near to shockingly bad taste, and that his +reminiscences of poor Mr. Fitzball and the green-room and all the rest +of the Bohemia in which he had once dwelt, were too racy for his +company, still found it hard to resist the alert intelligence with which +he rose to every good topic, and the extraordinary heartiness and +spontaneity with which the wholesome spring of human laughter was +touched in him. + +Lewes had plenty of egotism, not to give it a more unamiable name, but +it never mastered his intellectual sincerity. George Eliot describes him +as one of the few human beings she has known who will, in the heat of an +argument, see, and straightway confess, that he is in the wrong, instead +of trying to shift his ground or use any other device of vanity. 'The +intense happiness of our union,' she wrote to a friend, 'is derived in a +high degree from the perfect freedom with which we each follow and +declare our own impressions. In this respect I know _no_ man so great as +he--that difference of opinion rouses no egotistic irritation in him, +and that he is ready to admit that another argument is the stronger the +moment his intellect recognises it' (ii. 279). This will sound very easy +to the dispassionate reader, because it is so obviously just and proper, +but if the dispassionate reader ever tries, he may find the virtue not +so easy as it looks. Finally, and above all, we can never forget in +Lewes's case how much true elevation and stability of character was +implied in the unceasing reverence, gratitude, and devotion with which +for five-and-twenty years he treated her to whom he owed all his +happiness, and who most truly, in his own words (ii. 76), had made his +life a new birth. + +The reader will be mistaken if he should infer from such passages as +abound in her letters that George Eliot had any particular weakness for +domestic or any other kind of idolatry. George Sand, in _Lucrezia +Floriani_, where she drew so unkind a picture of Chopin, has described +her own life and character as marked by 'a great facility for illusions, +a blind benevolence of judgment, a tenderness of heart that was +inexhaustible; consequently great precipitancy, many mistakes, much +weakness, fits of heroic devotion to unworthy objects, enormous force +applied to an end that was wretched in truth and fact, but sublime in +her thought.' George Eliot had none of this facility. Nor was general +benignity in her at all of the poor kind that is incompatible with a +great deal of particular censure. Universal benevolence never lulled an +active critical faculty, nor did she conceive true humility as at all +consisting in hiding from an impostor that you have found him out. Like +Cardinal Newman, for whose beautiful passage at the end of the +_Apologia_ she expresses such richly deserved admiration (ii. 387), she +unites to the gift of unction and brotherly love a capacity for giving +an extremely shrewd nip to a brother whom she does not love. Her +passion for Thomas-a-Kempis did not prevent her, and there was no reason +why it should, from dealing very faithfully with a friend, for instance +(ii. 271); from describing Mr. Buckle as a conceited, ignorant man; or +castigating Brougham and other people in slashing reviews; or otherwise +from showing that great expansiveness of the affections went with a +remarkably strong, hard, masculine, positive, judging head. + +The benefits that George Eliot gained from her exclusive companionship +with a man of lively talents were not without some compensating +drawbacks. The keen stimulation and incessant strain, unrelieved by +variety of daily intercourse, and never diversified by participation in +the external activities of the world, tended to bring about a loaded, +over-conscious, over-anxious state of mind, which was not only not +wholesome in itself, but was inconsistent with the full freshness and +strength of artistic work. The presence of the real world in his life +has, in all but one or two cases, been one element of the novelist's +highest success in the world of imaginative creation. George Eliot had +no greater favourite than Scott, and when a series of little books upon +English men of letters was planned, she said that she thought that +writer among us the happiest to whom it should fall to deal with Scott. +But Scott lived full in the life of his fellow-men. Even of Wordsworth, +her other favourite, though he was not a creative artist, we may say +that he daily saturated himself in those natural elements and effects, +which were the material, the suggestion, and the sustaining inspiration +of his consoling and fortifying poetry. George Eliot did not live in the +midst of her material, but aloof from it and outside of it. Heaven +forbid that this should seem to be said by way of censure. Both her +health and other considerations made all approach to busy sociability in +any of its shapes both unwelcome and impossible. But in considering the +relation of her manner of life to her work, her creations, her +meditations, one cannot but see that when compared with some writers of +her own sex and age, she is constantly bookish, artificial, and +mannered. She is this because she fed her art too exclusively, first on +the memories of her youth, and next from books, pictures, statues, +instead of from the living model, as seen in its actual motion. It is +direct calls and personal claims from without that make fiction alive. +Jane Austen bore her part in the little world of the parlour that she +described. The writer of _Sylvia's Lovers_, whose work George Eliot +appreciated with unaffected generosity (i. 305), was the mother of +children, and was surrounded by the wholesome actualities of the family. +The authors of _Jane Eyre_ and _Wuthering Heights_ passed their days in +one long succession of wild, stormy, squalid, anxious, and miserable +scenes--almost as romantic, as poetic, and as tragic, to use George +Eliot's words, as their own stories. George Sand eagerly shared, even to +the pitch of passionate tumult and disorder, in the emotions, the +aspirations, the ardour, the great conflicts and controversies of her +time. In every one of these, their daily closeness to the real life of +the world has given a vitality to their work which we hardly expect that +even the next generation will find in more than one or two of the +romances of George Eliot. It may even come to pass that their position +will be to hers as that of Fielding is to Richardson in our own day. + +In a letter to Mr. Harrison, which is printed here (ii. 441), George +Eliot describes her own method as 'the severe effort of trying to make +certain ideas thoroughly incarnate, as if they had revealed themselves +to me first in the flesh and not in the spirit.' The passage recalls a +discussion one day at the Priory in 1877. She was speaking of the +different methods of the poetic or creative art, and said that she began +with moods, thoughts, passions, and then invented the story for their +sake, and fitted it to them; Shakespeare, on the other hand, picked up a +story that struck him, and then proceeded to work in the moods, +thoughts, passions, as they came to him in the course of meditation on +the story. We hardly need the result to convince us that Shakespeare +chose the better part. + +The influence of her reserved fashion of daily life was heightened by +the literary exclusiveness which of set purpose she imposed upon +herself. 'The less an author hears about himself,' she says, in one +place, 'the better.' 'It is my rule, very strictly observed, not to +read the criticisms on my writings. For years I have found this +abstinence necessary to preserve me from that discouragement as an +artist, which ill-judged praise, no less than ill-judged blame, tends to +produce in us.' George Eliot pushed this repugnance to criticism beyond +the personal reaction of it upon the artist, and more than disparaged +its utility, even in the most competent and highly trained hands. She +finds that the diseased spot in the literary culture of our time is +touched with the finest point by the saying of La Bruyère, that 'the +pleasure of criticism robs us of the pleasure of being keenly moved by +very fine things' (iii. 327). 'It seems to me,' she writes (ii. 412), +'much better to read a man's own writings than to read what others say +about him, especially when the man is first-rate and the others +third-rate. As Goethe said long ago about Spinoza, "I always preferred +to learn from the man himself what _he_ thought, rather than to hear +from some one else what he ought to have thought."' As if the scholar +will not always be glad to do both, to study his author and not to +refuse the help of the rightly prepared commentator; as if even Goethe +himself would not have been all the better acquainted with Spinoza if he +could have read Mr. Pollock's book upon him. But on this question Mr. +Arnold has fought a brilliant battle, and to him George Eliot's heresies +may well be left. + +On the personal point whether an author should ever hear of himself, +George Eliot oddly enough contradicts herself in a casual remark upon +Bulwer. 'I have a great respect,' she says, 'for the energetic industry +which has made the most of his powers. He has been writing diligently +for more than thirty years, constantly improving his position, and +profiting by the lessons of public opinion and of other writers' (ii. +322). But if it is true that the less an author hears about himself the +better, how are these salutary 'lessons of public opinion' to penetrate +to him? 'Rubens,' she says, writing from Munich in 1858 (ii. 28), 'gives +me more pleasure than any other painter whether right or wrong. More +than any one else he makes me feel that painting is a great art, and +that he was a great artist. His are such real breathing men and women, +moved by passions, not mincing, and grimacing, and posing in mere +imitation of passion.' But Rubens did not concentrate his intellect on +his own ponderings, nor shut out the wholesome chastenings of praise and +blame, lest they should discourage his inspiration. Beethoven, another +of the chief objects of George Eliot's veneration, bore all the rough +stress of an active and troublesome calling, though of the musician, if +of any, we may say, that his is the art of self-absorption. + +Hence, delightful and inspiring as it is to read this story of diligent +and discriminating cultivation, of accurate truth and real erudition and +beauty, not vaguely but methodically interpreted, one has some of the +sensations of the moral and intellectual hothouse. Mental hygiene is apt +to lead to mental valetudinarianism. 'The ignorant journalist,' may be +left to the torment which George Eliot wished that she could inflict on +one of those literary slovens whose manuscripts bring even the most +philosophic editor to the point of exasperation: 'I should like to stick +red-hot skewers through the writer, whose style is as sprawling as his +handwriting.' By all means. But much that even the most sympathetic +reader finds repellent in George Eliot's later work might perhaps never +have been, if Mr. Lewes had not practised with more than Russian rigour +a censorship of the press and the post-office which kept every +disagreeable whisper scrupulously from her ear. To stop every draft with +sandbags, screens, and curtains, and to limit one's exercise to a drive +in a well-warmed brougham with the windows drawn up, may save a few +annoying colds in the head, but the end of the process will be the +manufacture of an invalid. + +Whatever view we may take of the precise connection between what she +read, or abstained from reading, and what she wrote, no studious man or +woman can look without admiration and envy on the breadth, variety, +seriousness, and energy, with which she set herself her tasks and +executed them. She says in one of her letters, 'there is something more +piteous almost than soapless poverty in the application of feminine +incapacity to literature' (ii. 16). Nobody has ever taken the +responsibilities of literature more ardently in earnest. She was +accustomed to read aloud to Mr. Lewes three hours a day, and her +private reading, except when she was engaged in the actual stress of +composition, must have filled as many more. His extraordinary alacrity +and her brooding intensity of mind prevented these hours from being that +leisurely process in slippers and easy-chair which passes with many for +the practice of literary cultivation. Much of her reading was for the +direct purposes of her own work. The young lady who begins to write +historic novels out of her own head will find something much to her +advantage if she will refer to the list of books read by George Eliot +during the latter half of 1861, when she was meditating _Romola_ (ii. +325). Apart from immediate needs and uses, no student of our time has +known better the solace, the delight, the guidance that abide in great +writings. Nobody who did not share the scholar's enthusiasm could have +described the blind scholar in his library in the adorable fifth chapter +of _Romola_; and we feel that she must have copied out with keen gusto +of her own those words of Petrarch which she puts into old Bardo's +mouth--'_Libri medullitus delectant, colloquuntur, consulunt, et viva +quadam nobis atque arguta familiaritate junguntur._' + +As for books that are not books, as Milton bade us do with 'neat repasts +of wine,' she wisely spared to interpose them oft. Her standards of +knowledge were those of the erudite and the savant, and even in the +region of beauty she was never content with any but definite +impressions. In one place in these volumes, by the way, she makes a +remark curiously inconsistent with the usual scientific attitude of her +mind. She has been reading Darwin's _Origin of Species_, on which she +makes the truly astonishing criticism that it is 'sadly wanting in +illustrative facts,' and that 'it is not impressive from want of +luminous and orderly presentation' (ii. 43-48). Then she says that 'the +development theory, and all other explanation of processes by which +things came to be, produce a feeble impression compared with the mystery +that lies under processes.' This position it does not now concern us to +discuss, but at least it is in singular discrepancy with her strong +habitual preference for accurate and quantitative knowledge, over vague +and misty moods in the region of the unknowable and the unreachable. + +George Eliot's means of access to books were very full. She knew French, +German, Italian, and Spanish accurately. Greek and Latin, Mr. Cross +tells us, she could read with thorough delight to herself; though after +the appalling specimen of Mill's juvenile Latinity that Mr. Bain has +disinterred, the fastidious collegian may be sceptical of the +scholarship of prodigies. Hebrew was her favourite study to the end of +her days. People commonly supposed that she had been inoculated with an +artificial taste for science by her companion. We now learn that she +took a decided interest in natural science long before she made Mr. +Lewes's acquaintance, and many of the roundabout pedantries that +displeased people in her latest writings, and were set down to his +account, appeared in her composition before she had ever exchanged a +word with him. + +All who knew her well enough were aware that she had what Mr. Cross +describes as 'limitless persistency in application.' This is an old +account of genius, but nobody illustrates more effectively the infinite +capacity of taking pains. In reading, in looking at pictures, in playing +difficult music, in talking, she was equally importunate in the search, +and equally insistent on mastery. Her faculty of sustained concentration +was part of her immense intellectual power. 'Continuous thought did not +fatigue her. She could keep her mind on the stretch hour after hour; the +body might give way, but the brain remained unwearied' (iii. 422). It is +only a trifling illustration of the infection of her indefatigable +quality of taking pains, that Lewes should have formed the important +habit of rewriting every page of his work, even of short articles for +Reviews, before letting it go to the press. The journal shows what sore +pain and travail composition was to her. She wrote the last volume of +_Adam Bede_ in six weeks; she 'could not help writing it fast, because +it was written under the stress of emotion.' But what a prodigious +contrast between her pace and Walter Scott's twelve volumes a year! Like +many other people of powerful brains, she united strong and clear +general retentiveness with a weak and untrustworthy verbal memory. 'She +never could trust herself to write a quotation without verifying it.' +'What courage and patience,' she says of some one else, 'are wanted for +every life that aims to produce anything,' and her own existence was one +long and painful sermon on that text. + +Over few lives have the clouds of mental dejection hung in such heavy +unmoving banks. Nearly every chapter is strewn with melancholy words. 'I +cannot help thinking more of your illness than of the pleasure in +prospect--according to my foolish nature, which is always prone to live +in past pain.' The same sentiment is the mournful refrain that runs +through all. Her first resounding triumph, the success of _Adam Bede_, +instead of buoyancy and exultation, only adds a fresh sense of the +weight upon her future life. 'The self-questioning whether my nature +will be able to meet the heavy demands upon it, both of personal duty +and intellectual production--presses upon me almost continually in a way +that prevents me even from tasting the quiet joy I might have in the +_work done_. I feel no regret that the fame, as such, brings no +pleasure; but it _is_ a grief to me that I do not constantly feel strong +in thankfulness that my past life has vindicated its uses.' + +_Romola_ seems to have been composed in constant gloom. 'I remember my +wife telling me, at Witley,' says Mr. Cross, 'how cruelly she had +suffered at Dorking from working under a leaden weight at this time. The +writing of _Romola_ ploughed into her more than any of her other books. +She told me she could put her finger on it as marking a well-defined +transition in her life. In her own words, "I began it a young woman--I +finished it an old woman."' She calls upon herself to make 'greater +efforts against indolence and the despondency that comes from too +egoistic a dread of failure.' 'This is the last entry I mean to make in +my old book in which I wrote for the first time at Geneva in 1849. What +moments of despair I passed through after that--despair that life would +ever be made precious to me by the consciousness that I lived to some +good purpose! It was that sort of despair that sucked away the sap of +half the hours which might have been filled by energetic youthful +activity; and the same demon tries to get hold of me again whenever an +old work is dismissed and a new one is being meditated' (ii. 307). One +day the entry is: 'Horrible scepticism about all things paralysing my +mind. Shall I ever be good for anything again? Ever do anything again?' +On another, she describes herself to a trusted friend as 'a mind +morbidly desponding, and a consciousness tending more and more to +consist in memories of error and imperfection rather than in a +strengthening sense of achievement.' We have to turn to such books as +Bunyan's _Grace Abounding_ to find any parallel to such wretchedness. + +Times were not wanting when the sun strove to shine through the gloom, +when the resistance to melancholy was not wholly a failure, and when, as +she says, she felt that Dante was right in condemning to the Stygian +marsh those who had been sad under the blessed sunlight. 'Sad were we in +the sweet air that is gladdened by the sun, bearing sluggish smoke in +our hearts; now lie we sadly here in the black ooze.' But still for the +most part sad she remained in the sweet air, and the look of pain that +haunted her eyes and brow even in her most genial and animated moments, +only told too truly the story of her inner life. + +That from this central gloom a shadow should spread to her work was +unavoidable. It would be rash to compare George Eliot with Tacitus, with +Dante, with Pascal. A novelist--for as a poet, after trying hard to +think otherwise, most of us find her magnificent but unreadable--as a +novelist bound by the conditions of her art to deal in a thousand +trivialities of human character and situation, she has none of their +severity of form. But she alone of moderns has their note of sharp-cut +melancholy, of sombre rumination, of brief disdain. Living in a time +when humanity has been raised, whether formally or informally, into a +religion, she draws a painted curtain of pity before the tragic scene. +Still the attentive ear catches from time to time the accents of an +unrelenting voice, that proves her kindred with those three mighty +spirits and stern monitors of men. In George Eliot, a reader with a +conscience may be reminded of the saying that when a man opens Tacitus +he puts himself in the confessional. She was no vague dreamer over the +folly and the weakness of men, and the cruelty and blindness of destiny. +Hers is not the dejection of the poet who 'could lie down like a tired +child, And weep away this life of care,' as Shelley at Naples; nor is it +the despairing misery that moved Cowper in the awful verses of the +_Castaway_. It was not such self-pity as wrung from Burns the cry to +life, 'Thou art a galling load, Along a rough, a weary road, To wretches +such as I;' nor such general sense of the woes of the race as made Keats +think of the world as a place where men sit and hear each other groan, +'Where but to think is to be full of sorrow, And leaden-eyed despairs.' +She was as far removed from the plangent reverie of Rousseau as from the +savage truculence of Swift. Intellectual training had given her the +spirit of order and proportion, of definiteness and measure, and this +marks her alike from the great sentimentalists and the sweeping +satirists. 'Pity and fairness,' as she beautifully says (iii. 317), 'are +two little words which, carried out, would embrace the utmost delicacies +of the moral life.' But hers is not seldom the severe fairness of the +judge, and the pity that may go with putting on the black cap after a +conviction for high treason. In the midst of many an easy flowing page, +the reader is surprised by some bitter aside, some judgment of intense +and concentrated irony with the flash of a blade in it, some biting +sentence where lurks the stern disdain and the anger of Tacitus, and +Dante, and Pascal. Souls like these are not born for happiness. + + * * * * * + +This is not the occasion for an elaborate discussion of George Eliot's +place in the mental history of her time, but her biography shows that +she travelled along the road that was trodden by not a few in her day. +She started from that fervid evangelicalism which has made the base of +many a powerful character in this century, from Cardinal Newman +downwards. Then with curious rapidity she threw it all off, and embraced +with equal zeal the rather harsh and crude negations which were then +associated with the _Westminster Review_. The second stage did not last +much longer than the first. 'Religious and moral sympathy with the +historical life of man,' she said (ii. 363), 'is the larger half of +culture;' and this sympathy, which was the fruit of her culture, had by +the time she was thirty become the new seed of a positive faith and a +semi-conservative creed. Here is a passage from a letter of 1862 (she +had translated Strauss, we may remind ourselves, in 1845, and Feuerbach +in 1854):-- + + Pray don't ask me ever again not to rob a man of his religious + belief, as if you thought my mind tended to such robbery. I have + too profound a conviction of the efficacy that lies in all + sincere faith, and the spiritual blight that comes with no-faith, + to have any negative propagandism in me. In fact, I have very + little sympathy with Freethinkers as a class, and have lost all + interest in mere antagonism to religious doctrines. I care only + to know, if possible, the lasting meaning that lies in all + religious doctrine from the beginning till now (ii. 243). + +Eleven years later the same tendency had deepened and gone farther:-- + + All the great religions of the world, historically considered, + are rightly the objects of deep reverence and sympathy--they are + the record of spiritual struggles, which are the types of our + own. This is to me preeminently true of Hebrewism and + Christianity, on which my own youth was nourished. And in this + sense I have no antagonism towards any religious belief, but a + strong outflow of sympathy. Every community met to worship the + highest Good (which is understood to be expressed by God) carries + me along in its main current; and if there were not reasons + against my following such an inclination, I should go to church + or chapel, constantly, for the sake of the delightful emotions of + fellowship which come over me in religious assemblies--the very + nature of such assemblies being the recognition of a binding + belief or spiritual law, which is to lift us into willing + obedience and save us from the slavery of unregulated passion or + impulse. And with regard to other people, it seems to me that + those who have no definite conviction which constitutes a + protesting faith, may often more beneficially cherish the good + within them and be better members of society by a conformity + based on the recognised good in the public belief, than by a + nonconformity which has nothing but negatives to utter. _Not_, of + course, if the conformity would be accompanied by a consciousness + of hypocrisy. That is a question for the individual conscience to + settle. But there is enough to be said on the different points of + view from which conformity may be regarded, to hinder a ready + judgment against those who continue to conform after ceasing to + believe in the ordinary sense. But with the utmost largeness of + allowance for the difficulty of deciding in special cases, it + must remain true that the highest lot is to have definite beliefs + about which you feel that 'necessity is laid upon you' to declare + them, as something better which you are bound to try and give to + those who have the worse (iii. 215-217). + +These volumes contain many passages in the same sense--as, of course, +her books contain them too. She was a constant reader of the Bible, and +the _Imitatio_ was never far from her hand. 'She particularly enjoyed +reading aloud some of the finest chapters of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and St. +Paul's Epistles. The Bible and our elder English poets best suited the +organ-like tones of her voice, which required for their full effect a +certain solemnity and majesty of rhythm.' She once expressed to a +younger friend, who shared her opinions, her sense of the loss which +they had in being unable to practise the old ordinances of family +prayer. 'I hope,' she says, 'we are well out of that phase in which the +most philosophic view of the past was held to be a smiling survey of +human folly, and when the wisest man was supposed to be one who could +sympathise with no age but the age to come' (ii. 308). + +For this wise reaction she was no doubt partially indebted, as so many +others have been, to the teaching of Comte. Unquestionably the +fundamental ideas had come into her mind at a much earlier period, when, +for example, she was reading Mr. R.W. Mackay's _Progress of the +Intellect_ (1850, i. 253). But it was Comte who enabled her to +systematise these ideas, and to give them that 'definiteness,' which, as +these pages show in a hundred places, was the quality that she sought +before all others alike in men and their thoughts. She always remained +at a respectful distance from complete adherence to Comte's scheme, but +she was never tired of protesting that he was a really great thinker, +that his famous survey of the Middle Ages in the fifth volume of the +_Positive Philosophy_ was full of luminous ideas, and that she had +thankfully learned much from it. Wordsworth, again, was dear to her in +no small degree on the strength of such passages as that from the +_Prelude_, which is the motto of one of the last chapters of her last +novel:-- + + The human nature with which I felt + That I belonged and reverenced with love, + Was not a persistent presence, but a spirit + Diffused through time and space, with aid derived + Of evidence from monuments, erect, + Prostrate, or leaning towards their common rest + In earth, _the widely scattered wreck sublime_ + _Of vanished nations_. + +Or this again, also from the _Prelude_ (see iii. 389):-- + + There is + One great society alone on earth: + The noble Living and the noble Dead. + +Underneath this growth and diversity of opinion we see George Eliot's +oneness of character, just, for that matter, as we see it in Mill's long +and grave march from the uncompromising denials instilled into him by +his father, then through Wordsworthian mysticism and Coleridgean +conservatism, down to the pale belief and dim starlight faith of his +posthumous volume. George Eliot was more austere, more unflinching, and +of ruder intellectual constancy than Mill. She never withdrew from the +position that she had taken up, of denying and rejecting; she stood to +that to the end: what she did was to advance to the far higher +perception that denial and rejection are not the aspects best worth +attending to or dwelling upon. She had little patience with those who +fear that the doctrine of protoplasm must dry up the springs of human +effort. Any one who trembles at that catastrophe may profit by a +powerful remonstrance of hers in the pages before us (iii. 245-250, also +228). + + The consideration of molecular physics is not the direct ground + of human love and moral action, any more than it is the direct + means of composing a noble picture or of enjoying great music. + One might as well hope to dissect one's own body and be merry in + doing it, as take molecular physics (in which you must banish + from your field of view what is specifically human) to be your + dominant guide, your determiner of motives, in what is solely + human. That every study has its bearing on every other is true; + but pain and relief, love and sorrow, have their peculiar history + which make an experience and knowledge over and above the swing + of atoms. + + With regard to the pains and limitations of one's personal lot, I + suppose there is not a single man or woman who has not more or + less need of that stoical resignation which is often a hidden + heroism, or who, in considering his or her past history, is not + aware that it has been cruelly affected by the ignorant or + selfish action of some fellow-being in a more or less close + relation of life. And to my mind there can be no stronger motive + than this perception, to an energetic effort that the lives + nearest to us shall not suffer in a like manner from _us_. + + As to duration and the way in which it affects your view of the + human history, what is really the difference to your imagination + between infinitude and billions when you have to consider the + value of human experience? Will you say that since your life has + a term of threescore years and ten, it was really a matter of + indifference whether you were a cripple with a wretched skin + disease, or an active creature with a mind at large for the + enjoyment of knowledge, and with a nature which has attracted + others to you? + +For herself, she remained in the position described in one of her +letters in 1860 (ii. 283):--'I have faith in the working out of higher +possibilities than the Catholic or any other Church has presented; and +those who have strength to wait and endure are bound to accept no +formula which their whole souls--their intellect, as well as their +emotions--do not embrace with entire reverence. The highest calling and +election is _to do without opium_, and live through all our pain with +conscious, clear-eyed endurance.' She would never accept the common +optimism. As she says here:--'Life, though a good to men on the whole, +is a doubtful good to many, and to some not a good at all. To my thought +it is a source of constant mental distortion to make the denial of this +a part of religion--to go on pretending things are better than they +are.' + +Of the afflicting dealings with the world of spirits, which in those +days were comparatively limited to the untutored minds of America, but +which since have come to exert so singular a fascination for some of the +most brilliant of George Eliot's younger friends (see iii. 204), she +thought as any sensible Philistine among us persists in thinking to this +day:-- + + If it were another spirit aping Charlotte Brontë--if here and + there at rare spots and among people of a certain temperament, or + even at many spots and among people of all temperaments, tricksy + spirits are liable to rise as a sort of earth-bubbles and set + furniture in movement, and tell things which we either know + already or should be as well without knowing--I must frankly + confess that I have but a feeble interest in these doings, + feeling my life very short for the supreme and awful revelations + of a more orderly and intelligible kind which I shall die with an + imperfect knowledge of. If there were miserable spirits whom we + could help--then I think we should pause and have patience with + their trivial-mindedness; but otherwise I don't feel bound to + study them more than I am bound to study the special follies of a + peculiar phase of human society. Others, who feel differently, + and are attracted towards this study, are making an experiment + for us as to whether anything better than bewilderment can come + of it. At present it seems to me that to rest any fundamental + part of religion on such a basis is a melancholy misguidance of + men's minds from the true sources of high and pure emotion (iii. + 161). + +The period of George Eliot's productions was from 1856, the date of her +first stories, down to 1876, when she wrote, not under her brightest +star, her last novel of _Daniel Deronda_. During this time the great +literary influences of the epoch immediately preceding had not indeed +fallen silent, but the most fruitful seed had been sown. Carlyle's +_Sartor_ (1833-1834), and his _Miscellaneous Essays_ (collected, 1839), +were in all hands; but he had fallen into the terrible slough of his +Prussian history (1858-1865), and the last word of his evangel had gone +forth to all whom it concerned. _In Memoriam_, whose noble music and +deep-browed thought awoke such new and wide response in men's hearts, +was published in 1850. The second volume of _Modern Painters_, of which +I have heard George Eliot say, as of _In Memoriam_ too, that she owed +much and very much to it, belongs to an earlier date still (1846), and +when it appeared, though George Eliot was born in the same year as its +author, she was still translating Strauss at Coventry. Mr. Browning, for +whose genius she had such admiration, and who was always so good a +friend, did indeed produce during this period some work which the adepts +find as full of power and beauty as any that ever came from his pen. But +Mr. Browning's genius has moved rather apart from the general currents +of his time, creating character and working out motives from within, +undisturbed by transient shadows from the passing questions and answers +of the day. + +The romantic movement was then upon its fall. The great Oxford movement, +which besides its purely ecclesiastical effects, had linked English +religion once more to human history, and which was itself one of the +unexpected outcomes of the romantic movement, had spent its original +force, and no longer interested the stronger minds among the rising +generation. The hour had sounded for the scientific movement. In 1859 +was published the _Origin of Species_, undoubtedly the most far-reaching +agency of the time, supported as it was by a volume of new knowledge +which came pouring in from many sides. The same period saw the +important speculations of Mr. Spencer, whose influence on George Eliot +had from their first acquaintance been of a very decisive kind. Two +years after the _Origin of Species_ came Maine's _Ancient Law_, and that +was followed by the accumulations of Mr. Tylor and others, exhibiting +order and fixed correlation among great sets of facts which had hitherto +lain in that cheerful chaos of general knowledge which has been called +general ignorance. The excitement was immense. Evolution, development, +heredity, adaptation, variety, survival, natural selection, were so many +patent pass-keys that were to open every chamber. + +George Eliot's novels, as they were the imaginative application of this +great influx of new ideas, so they fitted in with the moods which those +ideas had called up. 'My function,' she said (iii. 330), 'is that of the +æsthetic, not the doctrinal teacher--the rousing of the nobler emotions +which make mankind desire the social right, not the prescribing of +special measures, concerning which the artistic mind, however strongly +moved by social sympathy, is often not the best judge.' Her influence in +this direction over serious and impressionable minds was great indeed. +The spirit of her art exactly harmonised with the new thoughts that were +shaking the world of her contemporaries. Other artists had drawn their +pictures with a strong ethical background, but she gave a finer colour +and a more spacious air to her ethics by showing the individual passions +and emotions of her characters, their adventures and their fortunes, as +evolving themselves from long series of antecedent causes, and bound up +with many widely operating forces and distant events. Here, too, we find +ourselves in the full stream of evolution, heredity, survival, and fixed +inexorable law. + +This scientific quality of her work may be considered to have stood in +the way of her own aim. That the nobler emotions roused by her writings +tend to 'make mankind desire the social right' is not to be doubted; but +we are not sure that she imparts peculiar energy to the desire. What she +kindles is not a very strenuous, aggressive, and operative desire. The +sense of the iron limitations that are set to improvement in present and +future by inexorable forces of the past, is stronger in her than any +intrepid resolution to press on to whatever improvement may chance to be +within reach if we only make the attempt. In energy, in inspiration, in +the kindling of living faith in social effort, George Sand, not to speak +of Mazzini, takes a far higher place. + +It was certainly not the business of an artist to form judgments in the +sphere of practical politics, but George Eliot was far too humane a +nature not to be deeply moved by momentous events as they passed. Yet +her observations, at any rate after 1848, seldom show that energy of +sympathy of which we have been speaking, and these observations +illustrate our point. We can hardly think that anything was ever said +about the great civil war in America, so curiously far-fetched as the +following reflection:--'My best consolation is that an example on so +tremendous a scale of the need for the education of mankind through the +affections and sentiments, as a basis for true development, will have a +strong influence on all thinkers, and be a check to the arid narrow +antagonism which in some quarters is held to be the only form of liberal +thought' (ii. 335). + +In 1848, as we have said, she felt the hopes of the hour in all their +fulness. To a friend she writes (i. 179):--'You and Carlyle (have you +seen his article in last week's _Examiner?_) are the only two people who +feel just as I would have them--who can glory in what is actually great +and beautiful without putting forth any cold reservations and +incredulities to save their credit for wisdom. I am all the more +delighted with your enthusiasm because I didn't expect it. I feared that +you lacked revolutionary ardour. But no--you are just as +_sans-culottish_ and rash as I would have you. You are not one of those +sages whose reason keeps so tight a rein on their emotions that they are +too constantly occupied in calculating consequences to rejoice in any +great manifestation of the forces that underlie our everyday existence. + +'I thought we had fallen on such evil days that we were to see no really +great movement--that ours was what St. Simon calls a purely critical +epoch, not at all an organic one; but I begin to be glad of my date. I +would consent, however, to have a year clipt off my life for the sake +of witnessing such a scene as that of the men of the barricades bowing +to the image of Christ, 'who first taught fraternity to men.' One +trembles to look into every fresh newspaper lest there should be +something to mar the picture; but hitherto even the scoffing newspaper +critics have been compelled into a tone of genuine respect for the +French people and the Provisional Government. Lamartine can act a poem +if he cannot write one of the very first order. I hope that beautiful +face given to him in the pictorial newspaper is really his: it is worthy +of an aureole. I have little patience with people who can find time to +pity Louis Philippe and his moustachioed sons. Certainly our decayed +monarchs should be pensioned off: we should have an hospital for them, +or a sort of zoological garden, where these worn-out humbugs may be +preserved. It is but justice that we should keep them, since we have +spoiled them for any honest trade. Let them sit on soft cushions, and +have their dinner regularly, but, for heaven's sake, preserve me from +sentimentalising over a pampered old man when the earth has its millions +of unfed souls and bodies. Surely he is not so Ahab-like as to wish that +the revolution had been deferred till his son's days: and I think the +shades of the Stuarts would have some reason to complain if the +Bourbons, who are so little better than they, had been allowed to reign +much longer.' + +The hopes of '48 were not very accurately fulfilled, and in George Eliot +they never came to life again. Yet in social things we may be sure that +undying hope is the secret of vision. + +There is a passage in Coleridge's _Friend_ which seems to represent the +outcome of George Eliot's teaching on most, and not the worst, of her +readers:--'The tangle of delusions,' says Coleridge, 'which stifled and +distorted the growing tree of our well-being has been torn away; the +parasite weeds that fed on its very roots have been plucked up with a +salutary violence. To us there remain only quiet duties, the constant +care, the gradual improvement, the cautious and unhazardous labours of +the industrious though contented gardener--to prune, to strengthen, to +engraft, and one by one to remove from its leaves and fresh shoots the +slug and the caterpillar.' Coleridge goes farther than George Eliot, +when he adds the exhortation--'Far be it from us to undervalue with +light and senseless detraction the conscientious hardihood of our +predecessors, or even to condemn in them that vehemence to which the +blessings it won for us leave us now neither temptation nor pretext.' + +George Eliot disliked vehemence more and more as her work advanced. The +word 'crudity,' so frequently on her lips, stood for all that was +objectionable and distasteful. The conservatism of an artistic moral +nature was shocked by the seeming peril to which priceless moral +elements of human character were exposed by the energumens of progress. +Their impatient hopes for the present appeared to her rather +unscientific; their disregard of the past very irreverent and impious. +Mill had the same feeling when he disgusted his father by standing up +for Wordsworth, on the ground that Wordsworth was helping to keep alive +in human nature elements which utilitarians and innovators would need +when their present and particular work was done. Mill, being free from +the exaltations that make the artist, kept a truer balance. His famous +pair of essays on Bentham and Coleridge were published (for the first +time, so far as our generation was concerned) in the same year as _Adam +Bede_, and I can vividly remember how the 'Coleridge' first awoke in +many of us, who were then youths at Oxford, that sense of truth having +many mansions, and that desire and power of sympathy with the past, with +the positive bases of the social fabric, and with the value of +Permanence in States, which form the reputable side of all +conservatisms. This sentiment and conviction never took richer or more +mature form than in the best work of George Eliot, and her stories +lighted up with a fervid glow the truths that minds of another type had +just brought to the surface. It was this that made her a great moral +force at that epoch, especially for all who were capable by intellectual +training of standing at her point of view. We even, as I have said, +tried hard to love her poetry, but the effort has ended less in love +than in a very distant homage to the majestic in intention and the +sonorous in execution. In fiction, too, as the years go by, we begin to +crave more fancy, illusion, enchantment, than the quality of her genius +allowed. But the loftiness of her character is abiding, and it passes +nobly through the ordeal of an honest biography. 'For the lessons,' says +the fine critic already quoted, 'most imperatively needed by the mass of +men, the lessons of deliberate kindness, of careful truth, of unwavering +endeavour,--for these plain themes one could not ask a more convincing +teacher than she whom we are commemorating now. Everything in her aspect +and presence was in keeping with the bent of her soul. The deeply-lined +face, the too marked and massive features, were united with an air of +delicate refinement, which in one way was the more impressive because it +seemed to proceed so entirely from within. Nay, the inward beauty would +sometimes quite transform the external harshness; there would be moments +when the thin hands that entwined themselves in their eagerness, the +earnest figure that bowed forward to speak and hear, the deep gaze +moving from one face to another with a grave appeal,--all these seemed +the transparent symbols that showed the presence of a wise, benignant +soul.' As a wise, benignant soul George Eliot will still remain for all +right-judging men and women. + + + + + +End of Project Gutenberg's Critical Miscellanies (Vol 3 of 3), by John Morley + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CRITICAL MISCELLANIES (VOL 3 OF 3) *** + +***** This file should be named 17954-8.txt or 17954-8.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + http://www.gutenberg.org/1/7/9/5/17954/ + +Produced by Paul Murray, Graeme Mackreth and the Online +Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: Critical Miscellanies (Vol 3 of 3) + The Life of George Eliot + +Author: John Morley + +Release Date: March 9, 2006 [EBook #17954] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CRITICAL MISCELLANIES (VOL 3 OF 3) *** + + + + +Produced by Paul Murray, Graeme Mackreth and the Online +Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net + + + + + + +</pre> + + + +<h2>CRITICAL</h2> + +<h2>MISCELLANIES</h2> + +<h4>BY</h4> +<h3>JOHN MORLEY</h3> + +<h5>VOL. III.</h5> + +<h4>Essay 4: The Life of George Eliot</h4> + +<p class="center" style="margin-top: 5em;"><small>London<br /> +MACMILLAN AND CO., <span class="smcap">Limited</span><br /> +NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY<br /> + +1904</small><br /> +</p> + + + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> +<h3>THE LIFE OF GEORGE ELIOT</h3> + + +<p style="margin-top: 2em;"> +<a href="#link_1">On Literary Biography</a><br /> + +<a href="#link_2">As a mere letter-writer will not rank among the famous +masters</a><br /> + +<a href="#link_3">Mr. Myers's Essay</a><br /> + +<a href="#link_4">Letter to Mr. Harrison</a><br /> + +<a href="#link_5">Hebrew her favourite study</a><br /> + +<a href="#link_6">Limitless persistency in application</a><br /> + +<a href="#link_7">Romola</a><br /> + +<a href="#link_8">Mr. R.W. Mackay's <i>Progress of the Intellect</i></a><br /> + +<a href="#link_9">The period of her productions, 1856-1876</a><br /> + +<a href="#link_10">Mr. Browning</a><br /> + +<a href="#link_11">An æsthetic not a doctrinal teacher</a><br /> + +<a href="#link_12">Disliked vehemence</a><br /> + +<a href="#link_13">Conclusion</a> +</p> + + + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> +<h4>THE LIFE OF GEORGE ELIOT.<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></h4> + + +<p><a name="link_1" id="link_1"></a>The illustrious woman who is the subject of these volumes makes a remark +to her publisher which is at least as relevant now as it was then. Can +nothing be done, she asks, by dispassionate criticism towards the reform +of our national habits in the matter of literary biography? 'Is it +anything short of odious that as soon as a man is dead his desk should +be raked, and every insignificant memorandum which he never meant for +the public be printed for the gossiping amusement of people too idle to +reread his books?' Autobiography, she says, at least saves a man or a +woman that the world is curious about, from the publication of a string +of mistakes called Memoirs. Even to autobiography, however, she +confesses her deep repugnance unless it can be written so as to involve +neither self-glorification nor impeachment of others—a condition, by +the way, with which hardly any, save Mill's, can be said to comply. 'I +like,' she proceeds, 'that <i>He being dead yet speaketh</i> should have +quite another meaning than that' (iii. 226, 297, 307). She shows the +same fastidious apprehension still more clearly in another way. 'I have +destroyed almost all my friends' letters to me,' she says, 'because they +were only intended for my eyes, and could only fall into the hands of +persons who knew little of the writers if I allowed them to remain till +after my death. In proportion as I love every form of piety—which is +venerating love—I hate hard curiosity; and, unhappily, my experience +has impressed me with the sense that hard curiosity is the more common +temper of mind' (ii. 286). There is probably little difference among us +in respect of such experience as that.</p> + +<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> <i>George Eliot's Life</i>. By J.W. Cross. Three volumes. +Blackwood and Sons. 1885.</p></div> + +<p>Much biography, perhaps we might say most, is hardly above the level of +that 'personal talk,' to which Wordsworth sagely preferred long barren +silence, the flapping of the flame of his cottage fire, and the +under-song of the kettle on the hob. It would not, then, have much +surprised us if George Eliot had insisted that her works should remain +the only commemoration of her life. There be some who think that those +who have enriched the world with great thoughts and fine creations, +might best be content to rest unmarked 'where heaves the turf in many a +mouldering heap,' leaving as little work to the literary executor, +except of the purely crematory sort, as did Aristotle, Plato, +Shakespeare, and some others whose names the world will not willingly +let die. But this is a stoic's doctrine; the objector may easily retort +that if it had been sternly acted on, we should have known very very +little about Dr. Johnson, and nothing about Socrates.</p> + +<p>This is but an ungracious prelude to some remarks upon a book, which +must be pronounced a striking success. There will be very little dispute +as to the fact that the editor of these memorials of George Eliot has +done his work with excellent taste, judgment, and sense. He found no +autobiography nor fragment of one, but he has skilfully shaped a kind of +autobiography by a plan which, so far as we know, he is justified in +calling new, and which leaves her life to write itself in extracts from +her letters and journals. With the least possible obtrusion from the +biographer, the original pieces are formed into a connected whole 'that +combines a narrative of day-to-day life with the play of light and shade +which only letters written in serious moods can give.' The idea is a +good one, and Mr. Cross deserves great credit for it. We may hope that +its success will encourage imitators. Certainly there are drawbacks. We +miss the animation of mixed narrative. There is, too, a touch of +monotony in listening for so long to the voice of a single speaker +addressing others who are silent behind a screen. But Mr. Cross could +not, we think, have devised a better way of dealing with his material: +it is simple, modest, and effective.</p> + +<p>George Eliot, after all, led the life of a studious recluse, with none +of the bustle, variety, motion, and large communication with the outer +world, that justified Lockhart and Moore in making a long story of the +lives of Scott and Byron. Even here, among men of letters, who were also +men of action and of great sociability, are not all biographies too +long? Let any sensible reader turn to the shelf where his Lives repose; +we shall be surprised if he does not find that nearly every one of them, +taking the present century alone, and including such splendid and +attractive subjects as Goethe, Hume, Romilly, Mackintosh, Horner, +Chalmers, Arnold, Southey, Cowper, would not have been all the better +for judicious curtailment. Lockhart, who wrote the longest, wrote also +the shortest, the Life of Burns; and the shortest is the best, in spite +of defects which would only have been worse if the book had been bigger. +It is to be feared that, conscientious and honourable as his self-denial +has been, even Mr. Cross has not wholly resisted the natural and +besetting error of the biographer. Most people will think that the +hundred pages of the Italian tour (vol. ii.), and some other not very +remarkable impressions of travel, might as well or better have been left +out.</p> + +<p><a name="link_2" id="link_2"></a>As a mere letter-writer, George Eliot will not rank among the famous +masters of what is usually considered especially a woman's art. She was +too busy in serious work to have leisure for that most delightful way of +wasting time. Besides that, she had by nature none of that fluency, +rapidity, abandonment, pleasant volubility, which make letters amusing, +captivating, or piquant. What Mr. Cross says of her as the mistress of a +<i>salon</i>, is true of her for the most part as a correspondent:—'Playing +around many disconnected subjects, in talk, neither interested nor +amused her much. She took things too seriously, and seldom found the +effort of entertaining compensated by the gain' (iii. 335). There is the +outpouring of ardent feeling for her friends, sobering down, as life +goes on, into a crooning kindliness, affectionate and honest, but often +tinged with considerable self-consciousness. It was said of some one +that his epigrams did honour to his heart; in the reverse direction we +occasionally feel that George Eliot's effusive playfulness does honour +to her head. It lacks simplicity and <i>verve</i>. Even in an invitation to +dinner, the words imply a grave sense of responsibility on both sides, +and sense of responsibility is fatal to the charm of familiar +correspondence.</p> + +<p>As was inevitable in one whose mind was so habitually turned to the +deeper elements of life, she lets fall the pearls of wise speech even in +short notes. Here are one or two:—</p> + +<p>'My own experience and development deepen every day my conviction that +our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathise +with individual suffering and individual joy.'</p> + +<p>'If there is one attitude more odious to me than any other of the many +attitudes of "knowingness," it is that air of lofty superiority to the +vulgar. She will soon find out that I am a very commonplace woman.'</p> + +<p>'It so often happens that others are measuring us by our past self +while we are looking back on that self with a mixture of disgust and +sorrow.'</p> + +<p>The following is one of the best examples, one of the few examples, of +her best manner:—</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>I have been made rather unhappy by my husband's impulsive +proposal about Christmas. We are dull old persons, and your two +sweet young ones ought to find each Christmas a new bright bead +to string on their memory, whereas to spend the time with us +would be to string on a dark shrivelled berry. They ought to have +a group of young creatures to be joyful with. Our own children +always spend their Christmas with Gertrude's family; and we have +usually taken our sober merry-making with friends out of town. +Illness among these will break our custom this year; and thus +<i>mein Mann</i>, feeling that our Christmas was free, considered how +very much he liked being with you, omitting the other side of the +question—namely, our total lack of means to make a suitably +joyous meeting, a real festival, for Phil and Margaret. I was +conscious of this lack in the very moment of the proposal, and +the consciousness has been pressing on me more and more painfully +ever since. Even my husband's affectionate hopefulness cannot +withstand my melancholy demonstration. So pray consider the +kill-joy proposition as entirely retracted, and give us something +of yourselves only on simple black-letter days, when the Herald +Angels have not been raising expectations early in the morning.</p></div> + +<p>This is very pleasant, but such pieces are rare, and the infirmity of +human nature has sometimes made us sigh over these pages at the +recollection of the cordial cheeriness of Scott's letters, the high +spirits of Macaulay, the graceful levity of Voltaire, the rattling +dare-devilry of Byron. Epistolary stilts among men of letters went out +of fashion with Pope, who, as was said, thought that unless every period +finished with a conceit, the letter was not worth the postage. Poor +spirits cannot be the explanation of the stiffness in George Eliot's +case, for no letters in the English language are so full of playfulness +and charm as those of Cowper, and he was habitually sunk in gulfs deeper +and blacker than George Eliot's own. It was sometimes observed of her, +that in her conversation, <i>elle s'écoutait quand elle parlait</i>—she +seemed to be listening to her own voice while she spoke. It must be +allowed that we are not always free from an impression of +self-listening, even in the most caressing of the letters before us.</p> + +<p>This is not much better, however, than trifling. I daresay that if a +lively Frenchman could have watched the inspired Pythia on the sublime +tripod, he would have cried, <i>Elle s'écoute quand elle parle</i>. When +everything of that kind has been said, we have the profound +satisfaction, which is not quite a matter of course in the history of +literature, of finding after all that the woman and the writer were one. +The life does not belie the books, nor private conduct stultify public +profession. We close the third volume of the biography, as we have so +often closed the third volume of her novels, feeling to the very core +that in spite of a style that the French call <i>alambiqué</i>, in spite of +tiresome double and treble distillations of phraseology, in spite of +fatiguing moralities, gravities, and ponderosities, we have still been +in communion with a high and commanding intellect and a great nature. We +are vexed by pedantries that recall the <i>précieuses</i> of the Hôtel +Rambouillet, but we know that she had the soul of the most heroic women +in history. We crave more of the Olympian serenity that makes action +natural and repose refreshing, but we cannot miss the edification of a +life marked by indefatigable labour after generous purposes, by an +unsparing struggle for duty, and by steadfast and devout fellowship with +lofty thoughts.</p> + +<p><a name="link_3" id="link_3"></a>Those who know Mr. Myers's essay on George Eliot will not have forgotten +its most imposing passage:—</p> + +<div class="blockquot">I remember how at Cambridge, I waited with her once in the +Fellows' Garden of Trinity, on an evening of rainy May; and she, +stirred somewhat beyond her wont, and taking as her text the +three words which have been used so often as the inspiring +trumpet-calls of men,—the words <i>God</i>, <i>Immortality</i>, +<i>Duty</i>,—pronounced, with terrible earnestness, how inconceivable +was the <i>first</i>, how unbelievable the <i>second</i>, and yet how +peremptory and absolute the <i>third</i>. Never, perhaps, had sterner +accents affirmed the sovereignty of impersonal and unrecompensing +law. I listened, and night fell; her grave, majestic countenance +turned toward me like a Sibyl's in the gloom; it was as though +she withdrew from my grasp, one by one, the two scrolls of +promise, and left me the third scroll only, awful with inevitable +fates.</div> + +<p>To many, the relation which was the most important event in George +Eliot's life will seem one of those irretrievable errors which reduce +all talk of duty to a mockery. It is inevitable that this should be so, +and those who disregard a social law have little right to complain. Men +and women whom in every other respect it would be monstrous to call bad, +have taken this particular law into their own hands before now, and +committed themselves to conduct of which 'magnanimity owes no account to +prudence.' But if they had sense and knew what they were about, they +have braced themselves to endure the disapproval of a majority +fortunately more prudential than themselves. The world is busy, and its +instruments are clumsy. It cannot know all the facts; it has neither +time nor material for unravelling all the complexities of motive, or for +distinguishing mere libertinage from grave and deliberate moral +misjudgment; it is protecting itself as much as it is condemning the +offenders. On all this, then, we need have neither sophistry nor cant. +But those who seek something deeper than a verdict for the honest +working purpose of leaving cards and inviting to dinner, may feel, as +has been observed by a contemporary writer, that men and women are more +fairly judged, if judge them we must, by the way in which they bear the +burden of an error than by the decision that laid the burden on their +lives. Some idea of this kind was in her own mind when she wrote to her +most intimate friend in 1857, 'If I live five years longer, the positive +result of my existence on the side of truth and goodness will outweigh +the small negative good that would have consisted in my not doing +anything to shock others' (i. 461). This urgent desire to balance the +moral account may have had something to do with that laborious sense of +responsibility which weighed so heavily on her soul, and had so +equivocal an effect upon her art. Whatever else is to be said of this +particular union, nobody can deny that the picture on which it left a +mark was an exhibition of extraordinary self-denial, energy, and +persistency in the cultivation and the use of great gifts and powers for +what their possessor believed to be the highest objects for society and +mankind.</p> + +<p>A more perfect companionship, one on a higher intellectual level, or of +more sustained mental activity, is nowhere recorded. Lewes's mercurial +temperament contributed as much as the powerful mind of his consort to +prevent their seclusion from degenerating into an owlish stagnation. To +the very last (1878) he retained his extraordinary buoyancy. 'Nothing +but death could quench that bright flame. Even on his worst days he had +always a good story to tell; and I remember on one occasion in the +drawing-room at Witley, between two bouts of pain, he sang through with +great <i>brio</i>, though without much voice, the greater portion of the +tenor part in the <i>Barber of Seville</i>, George Eliot playing his +accompaniment, and both of them thoroughly enjoying the fun' (iii. 334). +All this gaiety, his inexhaustible vivacity, the facility of his +transitions from brilliant levity to a keen seriousness, the readiness +of his mental response, and the wide range of intellectual +accomplishments that were much more than superficial, made him a source +of incessant and varied stimulation. Even those, and there were some, +who thought that his gaiety bordered on flippancy, that his genial +self-content often came near to shockingly bad taste, and that his +reminiscences of poor Mr. Fitzball and the green-room and all the rest +of the Bohemia in which he had once dwelt, were too racy for his +company, still found it hard to resist the alert intelligence with which +he rose to every good topic, and the extraordinary heartiness and +spontaneity with which the wholesome spring of human laughter was +touched in him.</p> + +<p>Lewes had plenty of egotism, not to give it a more unamiable name, but +it never mastered his intellectual sincerity. George Eliot describes him +as one of the few human beings she has known who will, in the heat of an +argument, see, and straightway confess, that he is in the wrong, instead +of trying to shift his ground or use any other device of vanity. 'The +intense happiness of our union,' she wrote to a friend, 'is derived in a +high degree from the perfect freedom with which we each follow and +declare our own impressions. In this respect I know <i>no</i> man so great as +he—that difference of opinion rouses no egotistic irritation in him, +and that he is ready to admit that another argument is the stronger the +moment his intellect recognises it' (ii. 279). This will sound very easy +to the dispassionate reader, because it is so obviously just and proper, +but if the dispassionate reader ever tries, he may find the virtue not +so easy as it looks. Finally, and above all, we can never forget in +Lewes's case how much true elevation and stability of character was +implied in the unceasing reverence, gratitude, and devotion with which +for five-and-twenty years he treated her to whom he owed all his +happiness, and who most truly, in his own words (ii. 76), had made his +life a new birth.</p> + +<p>The reader will be mistaken if he should infer from such passages as +abound in her letters that George Eliot had any particular weakness for +domestic or any other kind of idolatry. George Sand, in <i>Lucrezia +Floriani</i>, where she drew so unkind a picture of Chopin, has described +her own life and character as marked by 'a great facility for illusions, +a blind benevolence of judgment, a tenderness of heart that was +inexhaustible; consequently great precipitancy, many mistakes, much +weakness, fits of heroic devotion to unworthy objects, enormous force +applied to an end that was wretched in truth and fact, but sublime in +her thought.' George Eliot had none of this facility. Nor was general +benignity in her at all of the poor kind that is incompatible with a +great deal of particular censure. Universal benevolence never lulled an +active critical faculty, nor did she conceive true humility as at all +consisting in hiding from an impostor that you have found him out. Like +Cardinal Newman, for whose beautiful passage at the end of the +<i>Apologia</i> she expresses such richly deserved admiration (ii. 387), she +unites to the gift of unction and brotherly love a capacity for giving +an extremely shrewd nip to a brother whom she does not love. Her +passion for Thomas-a-Kempis did not prevent her, and there was no reason +why it should, from dealing very faithfully with a friend, for instance +(ii. 271); from describing Mr. Buckle as a conceited, ignorant man; or +castigating Brougham and other people in slashing reviews; or otherwise +from showing that great expansiveness of the affections went with a +remarkably strong, hard, masculine, positive, judging head.</p> + +<p>The benefits that George Eliot gained from her exclusive companionship +with a man of lively talents were not without some compensating +drawbacks. The keen stimulation and incessant strain, unrelieved by +variety of daily intercourse, and never diversified by participation in +the external activities of the world, tended to bring about a loaded, +over-conscious, over-anxious state of mind, which was not only not +wholesome in itself, but was inconsistent with the full freshness and +strength of artistic work. The presence of the real world in his life +has, in all but one or two cases, been one element of the novelist's +highest success in the world of imaginative creation. George Eliot had +no greater favourite than Scott, and when a series of little books upon +English men of letters was planned, she said that she thought that +writer among us the happiest to whom it should fall to deal with Scott. +But Scott lived full in the life of his fellow-men. Even of Wordsworth, +her other favourite, though he was not a creative artist, we may say +that he daily saturated himself in those natural elements and effects, +which were the material, the suggestion, and the sustaining inspiration +of his consoling and fortifying poetry. George Eliot did not live in the +midst of her material, but aloof from it and outside of it. Heaven +forbid that this should seem to be said by way of censure. Both her +health and other considerations made all approach to busy sociability in +any of its shapes both unwelcome and impossible. But in considering the +relation of her manner of life to her work, her creations, her +meditations, one cannot but see that when compared with some writers of +her own sex and age, she is constantly bookish, artificial, and +mannered. She is this because she fed her art too exclusively, first on +the memories of her youth, and next from books, pictures, statues, +instead of from the living model, as seen in its actual motion. It is +direct calls and personal claims from without that make fiction alive. +Jane Austen bore her part in the little world of the parlour that she +described. The writer of <i>Sylvia's Lovers</i>, whose work George Eliot +appreciated with unaffected generosity (i. 305), was the mother of +children, and was surrounded by the wholesome actualities of the family. +The authors of <i>Jane Eyre</i> and <i>Wuthering Heights</i> passed their days in +one long succession of wild, stormy, squalid, anxious, and miserable +scenes—almost as romantic, as poetic, and as tragic, to use George +Eliot's words, as their own stories. George Sand eagerly shared, even to +the pitch of passionate tumult and disorder, in the emotions, the +aspirations, the ardour, the great conflicts and controversies of her +time. In every one of these, their daily closeness to the real life of +the world has given a vitality to their work which we hardly expect that +even the next generation will find in more than one or two of the +romances of George Eliot. It may even come to pass that their position +will be to hers as that of Fielding is to Richardson in our own day.</p> + +<p><a name="link_4" id="link_4"></a>In a letter to Mr. Harrison, which is printed here (ii. 441), George +Eliot describes her own method as 'the severe effort of trying to make +certain ideas thoroughly incarnate, as if they had revealed themselves +to me first in the flesh and not in the spirit.' The passage recalls a +discussion one day at the Priory in 1877. She was speaking of the +different methods of the poetic or creative art, and said that she began +with moods, thoughts, passions, and then invented the story for their +sake, and fitted it to them; Shakespeare, on the other hand, picked up a +story that struck him, and then proceeded to work in the moods, +thoughts, passions, as they came to him in the course of meditation on +the story. We hardly need the result to convince us that Shakespeare +chose the better part.</p> + +<p>The influence of her reserved fashion of daily life was heightened by +the literary exclusiveness which of set purpose she imposed upon +herself. 'The less an author hears about himself,' she says, in one +place, 'the better.' 'It is my rule, very strictly observed, not to +read the criticisms on my writings. For years I have found this +abstinence necessary to preserve me from that discouragement as an +artist, which ill-judged praise, no less than ill-judged blame, tends to +produce in us.' George Eliot pushed this repugnance to criticism beyond +the personal reaction of it upon the artist, and more than disparaged +its utility, even in the most competent and highly trained hands. She +finds that the diseased spot in the literary culture of our time is +touched with the finest point by the saying of La Bruyère, that 'the +pleasure of criticism robs us of the pleasure of being keenly moved by +very fine things' (iii. 327). 'It seems to me,' she writes (ii. 412), +'much better to read a man's own writings than to read what others say +about him, especially when the man is first-rate and the others +third-rate. As Goethe said long ago about Spinoza, "I always preferred +to learn from the man himself what <i>he</i> thought, rather than to hear +from some one else what he ought to have thought."' As if the scholar +will not always be glad to do both, to study his author and not to +refuse the help of the rightly prepared commentator; as if even Goethe +himself would not have been all the better acquainted with Spinoza if he +could have read Mr. Pollock's book upon him. But on this question Mr. +Arnold has fought a brilliant battle, and to him George Eliot's heresies +may well be left.</p> + +<p>On the personal point whether an author should ever hear of himself, +George Eliot oddly enough contradicts herself in a casual remark upon +Bulwer. 'I have a great respect,' she says, 'for the energetic industry +which has made the most of his powers. He has been writing diligently +for more than thirty years, constantly improving his position, and +profiting by the lessons of public opinion and of other writers' (ii. +322). But if it is true that the less an author hears about himself the +better, how are these salutary 'lessons of public opinion' to penetrate +to him? 'Rubens,' she says, writing from Munich in 1858 (ii. 28), 'gives +me more pleasure than any other painter whether right or wrong. More +than any one else he makes me feel that painting is a great art, and +that he was a great artist. His are such real breathing men and women, +moved by passions, not mincing, and grimacing, and posing in mere +imitation of passion.' But Rubens did not concentrate his intellect on +his own ponderings, nor shut out the wholesome chastenings of praise and +blame, lest they should discourage his inspiration. Beethoven, another +of the chief objects of George Eliot's veneration, bore all the rough +stress of an active and troublesome calling, though of the musician, if +of any, we may say, that his is the art of self-absorption.</p> + +<p>Hence, delightful and inspiring as it is to read this story of diligent +and discriminating cultivation, of accurate truth and real erudition and +beauty, not vaguely but methodically interpreted, one has some of the +sensations of the moral and intellectual hothouse. Mental hygiene is apt +to lead to mental valetudinarianism. 'The ignorant journalist,' may be +left to the torment which George Eliot wished that she could inflict on +one of those literary slovens whose manuscripts bring even the most +philosophic editor to the point of exasperation: 'I should like to stick +red-hot skewers through the writer, whose style is as sprawling as his +handwriting.' By all means. But much that even the most sympathetic +reader finds repellent in George Eliot's later work might perhaps never +have been, if Mr. Lewes had not practised with more than Russian rigour +a censorship of the press and the post-office which kept every +disagreeable whisper scrupulously from her ear. To stop every draft with +sandbags, screens, and curtains, and to limit one's exercise to a drive +in a well-warmed brougham with the windows drawn up, may save a few +annoying colds in the head, but the end of the process will be the +manufacture of an invalid.</p> + +<p>Whatever view we may take of the precise connection between what she +read, or abstained from reading, and what she wrote, no studious man or +woman can look without admiration and envy on the breadth, variety, +seriousness, and energy, with which she set herself her tasks and +executed them. She says in one of her letters, 'there is something more +piteous almost than soapless poverty in the application of feminine +incapacity to literature' (ii. 16). Nobody has ever taken the +responsibilities of literature more ardently in earnest. She was +accustomed to read aloud to Mr. Lewes three hours a day, and her +private reading, except when she was engaged in the actual stress of +composition, must have filled as many more. His extraordinary alacrity +and her brooding intensity of mind prevented these hours from being that +leisurely process in slippers and easy-chair which passes with many for +the practice of literary cultivation. Much of her reading was for the +direct purposes of her own work. The young lady who begins to write +historic novels out of her own head will find something much to her +advantage if she will refer to the list of books read by George Eliot +during the latter half of 1861, when she was meditating <i>Romola</i> (ii. +325). Apart from immediate needs and uses, no student of our time has +known better the solace, the delight, the guidance that abide in great +writings. Nobody who did not share the scholar's enthusiasm could have +described the blind scholar in his library in the adorable fifth chapter +of <i>Romola</i>; and we feel that she must have copied out with keen gusto +of her own those words of Petrarch which she puts into old Bardo's +mouth—'<i>Libri medullitus delectant, colloquuntur, consulunt, et viva +quadam nobis atque arguta familiaritate junguntur.</i>'</p> + +<p>As for books that are not books, as Milton bade us do with 'neat repasts +of wine,' she wisely spared to interpose them oft. Her standards of +knowledge were those of the erudite and the savant, and even in the +region of beauty she was never content with any but definite +impressions. In one place in these volumes, by the way, she makes a +remark curiously inconsistent with the usual scientific attitude of her +mind. She has been reading Darwin's <i>Origin of Species</i>, on which she +makes the truly astonishing criticism that it is 'sadly wanting in +illustrative facts,' and that 'it is not impressive from want of +luminous and orderly presentation' (ii. 43-48). Then she says that 'the +development theory, and all other explanation of processes by which +things came to be, produce a feeble impression compared with the mystery +that lies under processes.' This position it does not now concern us to +discuss, but at least it is in singular discrepancy with her strong +habitual preference for accurate and quantitative knowledge, over vague +and misty moods in the region of the unknowable and the unreachable.</p> + +<p>George Eliot's means of access to books were very full. She knew French, +German, Italian, and Spanish accurately. Greek and Latin, Mr. Cross +tells us, she could read with thorough delight to herself; though after +the appalling specimen of Mill's juvenile Latinity that Mr. Bain has +disinterred, the fastidious collegian may be sceptical of the +scholarship of prodigies. <a name="link_5" id="link_5"></a>Hebrew was her favourite study to the end of +her days. People commonly supposed that she had been inoculated with an +artificial taste for science by her companion. We now learn that she +took a decided interest in natural science long before she made Mr. +Lewes's acquaintance, and many of the roundabout pedantries that +displeased people in her latest writings, and were set down to his +account, appeared in her composition before she had ever exchanged a +word with him.</p> + +<p><a name="link_6" id="link_6"></a>All who knew her well enough were aware that she had what Mr. Cross +describes as 'limitless persistency in application.' This is an old +account of genius, but nobody illustrates more effectively the infinite +capacity of taking pains. In reading, in looking at pictures, in playing +difficult music, in talking, she was equally importunate in the search, +and equally insistent on mastery. Her faculty of sustained concentration +was part of her immense intellectual power. 'Continuous thought did not +fatigue her. She could keep her mind on the stretch hour after hour; the +body might give way, but the brain remained unwearied' (iii. 422). It is +only a trifling illustration of the infection of her indefatigable +quality of taking pains, that Lewes should have formed the important +habit of rewriting every page of his work, even of short articles for +Reviews, before letting it go to the press. The journal shows what sore +pain and travail composition was to her. She wrote the last volume of +<i>Adam Bede</i> in six weeks; she 'could not help writing it fast, because +it was written under the stress of emotion.' But what a prodigious +contrast between her pace and Walter Scott's twelve volumes a year! Like +many other people of powerful brains, she united strong and clear +general retentiveness with a weak and untrustworthy verbal memory. 'She +never could trust herself to write a quotation without verifying it.' +'What courage and patience,' she says of some one else, 'are wanted for +every life that aims to produce anything,' and her own existence was one +long and painful sermon on that text.</p> + +<p>Over few lives have the clouds of mental dejection hung in such heavy +unmoving banks. Nearly every chapter is strewn with melancholy words. 'I +cannot help thinking more of your illness than of the pleasure in +prospect—according to my foolish nature, which is always prone to live +in past pain.' The same sentiment is the mournful refrain that runs +through all. Her first resounding triumph, the success of <i>Adam Bede</i>, +instead of buoyancy and exultation, only adds a fresh sense of the +weight upon her future life. 'The self-questioning whether my nature +will be able to meet the heavy demands upon it, both of personal duty +and intellectual production—presses upon me almost continually in a way +that prevents me even from tasting the quiet joy I might have in the +<i>work done</i>. I feel no regret that the fame, as such, brings no +pleasure; but it <i>is</i> a grief to me that I do not constantly feel strong +in thankfulness that my past life has vindicated its uses.'</p> + +<p><a name="link_7" id="link_7"></a><i>Romola</i> seems to have been composed in constant gloom. 'I remember my +wife telling me, at Witley,' says Mr. Cross, 'how cruelly she had +suffered at Dorking from working under a leaden weight at this time. The +writing of <i>Romola</i> ploughed into her more than any of her other books. +She told me she could put her finger on it as marking a well-defined +transition in her life. In her own words, "I began it a young woman—I +finished it an old woman."' She calls upon herself to make 'greater +efforts against indolence and the despondency that comes from too +egoistic a dread of failure.' 'This is the last entry I mean to make in +my old book in which I wrote for the first time at Geneva in 1849. What +moments of despair I passed through after that—despair that life would +ever be made precious to me by the consciousness that I lived to some +good purpose! It was that sort of despair that sucked away the sap of +half the hours which might have been filled by energetic youthful +activity; and the same demon tries to get hold of me again whenever an +old work is dismissed and a new one is being meditated' (ii. 307). One +day the entry is: 'Horrible scepticism about all things paralysing my +mind. Shall I ever be good for anything again? Ever do anything again?' +On another, she describes herself to a trusted friend as 'a mind +morbidly desponding, and a consciousness tending more and more to +consist in memories of error and imperfection rather than in a +strengthening sense of achievement.' We have to turn to such books as +Bunyan's <i>Grace Abounding</i> to find any parallel to such wretchedness.</p> + +<p>Times were not wanting when the sun strove to shine through the gloom, +when the resistance to melancholy was not wholly a failure, and when, as +she says, she felt that Dante was right in condemning to the Stygian +marsh those who had been sad under the blessed sunlight. 'Sad were we in +the sweet air that is gladdened by the sun, bearing sluggish smoke in +our hearts; now lie we sadly here in the black ooze.' But still for the +most part sad she remained in the sweet air, and the look of pain that +haunted her eyes and brow even in her most genial and animated moments, +only told too truly the story of her inner life.</p> + +<p>That from this central gloom a shadow should spread to her work was +unavoidable. It would be rash to compare George Eliot with Tacitus, with +Dante, with Pascal. A novelist—for as a poet, after trying hard to +think otherwise, most of us find her magnificent but unreadable—as a +novelist bound by the conditions of her art to deal in a thousand +trivialities of human character and situation, she has none of their +severity of form. But she alone of moderns has their note of sharp-cut +melancholy, of sombre rumination, of brief disdain. Living in a time +when humanity has been raised, whether formally or informally, into a +religion, she draws a painted curtain of pity before the tragic scene. +Still the attentive ear catches from time to time the accents of an +unrelenting voice, that proves her kindred with those three mighty +spirits and stern monitors of men. In George Eliot, a reader with a +conscience may be reminded of the saying that when a man opens Tacitus +he puts himself in the confessional. She was no vague dreamer over the +folly and the weakness of men, and the cruelty and blindness of destiny. +Hers is not the dejection of the poet who 'could lie down like a tired +child, And weep away this life of care,' as Shelley at Naples; nor is it +the despairing misery that moved Cowper in the awful verses of the +<i>Castaway</i>. It was not such self-pity as wrung from Burns the cry to +life, 'Thou art a galling load, Along a rough, a weary road, To wretches +such as I;' nor such general sense of the woes of the race as made Keats +think of the world as a place where men sit and hear each other groan, +'Where but to think is to be full of sorrow, And leaden-eyed despairs.' +She was as far removed from the plangent reverie of Rousseau as from the +savage truculence of Swift. Intellectual training had given her the +spirit of order and proportion, of definiteness and measure, and this +marks her alike from the great sentimentalists and the sweeping +satirists. 'Pity and fairness,' as she beautifully says (iii. 317), 'are +two little words which, carried out, would embrace the utmost delicacies +of the moral life.' But hers is not seldom the severe fairness of the +judge, and the pity that may go with putting on the black cap after a +conviction for high treason. In the midst of many an easy flowing page, +the reader is surprised by some bitter aside, some judgment of intense +and concentrated irony with the flash of a blade in it, some biting +sentence where lurks the stern disdain and the anger of Tacitus, and +Dante, and Pascal. Souls like these are not born for happiness.</p> + +<hr style='width: 45%;' /> + +<p>This is not the occasion for an elaborate discussion of George Eliot's +place in the mental history of her time, but her biography shows that +she travelled along the road that was trodden by not a few in her day. +She started from that fervid evangelicalism which has made the base of +many a powerful character in this century, from Cardinal Newman +downwards. Then with curious rapidity she threw it all off, and embraced +with equal zeal the rather harsh and crude negations which were then +associated with the <i>Westminster Review</i>. The second stage did not last +much longer than the first. 'Religious and moral sympathy with the +historical life of man,' she said (ii. 363), 'is the larger half of +culture;' and this sympathy, which was the fruit of her culture, had by +the time she was thirty become the new seed of a positive faith and a +semi-conservative creed. Here is a passage from a letter of 1862 (she +had translated Strauss, we may remind ourselves, in 1845, and Feuerbach +in 1854):—</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>Pray don't ask me ever again not to rob a man of his religious +belief, as if you thought my mind tended to such robbery. I have +too profound a conviction of the efficacy that lies in all +sincere faith, and the spiritual blight that comes with no-faith, +to have any negative propagandism in me. In fact, I have very +little sympathy with Freethinkers as a class, and have lost all +interest in mere antagonism to religious doctrines. I care only +to know, if possible, the lasting meaning that lies in all +religious doctrine from the beginning till now (ii. 243).</p></div> + +<p>Eleven years later the same tendency had deepened and gone farther:—</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>All the great religions of the world, historically considered, +are rightly the objects of deep reverence and sympathy—they are +the record of spiritual struggles, which are the types of our +own. This is to me preeminently true of Hebrewism and +Christianity, on which my own youth was nourished. And in this +sense I have no antagonism towards any religious belief, but a +strong outflow of sympathy. Every community met to worship the +highest Good (which is understood to be expressed by God) carries +me along in its main current; and if there were not reasons +against my following such an inclination, I should go to church +or chapel, constantly, for the sake of the delightful emotions of +fellowship which come over me in religious assemblies—the very +nature of such assemblies being the recognition of a binding +belief or spiritual law, which is to lift us into willing +obedience and save us from the slavery of unregulated passion or +impulse. And with regard to other people, it seems to me that +those who have no definite conviction which constitutes a +protesting faith, may often more beneficially cherish the good +within them and be better members of society by a conformity +based on the recognised good in the public belief, than by a +nonconformity which has nothing but negatives to utter. <i>Not</i>, of +course, if the conformity would be accompanied by a consciousness +of hypocrisy. That is a question for the individual conscience to +settle. But there is enough to be said on the different points of +view from which conformity may be regarded, to hinder a ready +judgment against those who continue to conform after ceasing to +believe in the ordinary sense. But with the utmost largeness of +allowance for the difficulty of deciding in special cases, it +must remain true that the highest lot is to have definite beliefs +about which you feel that 'necessity is laid upon you' to declare +them, as something better which you are bound to try and give to +those who have the worse (iii. 215-217).</p></div> + +<p>These volumes contain many passages in the same sense—as, of course, +her books contain them too. She was a constant reader of the Bible, and +the <i>Imitatio</i> was never far from her hand. 'She particularly enjoyed +reading aloud some of the finest chapters of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and St. +Paul's Epistles. The Bible and our elder English poets best suited the +organ-like tones of her voice, which required for their full effect a +certain solemnity and majesty of rhythm.' She once expressed to a +younger friend, who shared her opinions, her sense of the loss which +they had in being unable to practise the old ordinances of family +prayer. 'I hope,' she says, 'we are well out of that phase in which the +most philosophic view of the past was held to be a smiling survey of +human folly, and when the wisest man was supposed to be one who could +sympathise with no age but the age to come' (ii. 308).</p> + +<p><a name="link_8" id="link_8"></a>For this wise reaction she was no doubt partially indebted, as so many +others have been, to the teaching of Comte. Unquestionably the +fundamental ideas had come into her mind at a much earlier period, when, +for example, she was reading Mr. R.W. Mackay's <i>Progress of the +Intellect</i> (1850, i. 253). But it was Comte who enabled her to +systematise these ideas, and to give them that 'definiteness,' which, as +these pages show in a hundred places, was the quality that she sought +before all others alike in men and their thoughts. She always remained +at a respectful distance from complete adherence to Comte's scheme, but +she was never tired of protesting that he was a really great thinker, +that his famous survey of the Middle Ages in the fifth volume of the +<i>Positive Philosophy</i> was full of luminous ideas, and that she had +thankfully learned much from it. Wordsworth, again, was dear to her in +no small degree on the strength of such passages as that from the +<i>Prelude</i>, which is the motto of one of the last chapters of her last +novel:—</p> + +<p style="margin-left:10em"> +The human nature with which I felt<br /> +That I belonged and reverenced with love,<br /> +Was not a persistent presence, but a spirit<br /> +Diffused through time and space, with aid derived<br /> +Of evidence from monuments, erect,<br /> +Prostrate, or leaning towards their common rest<br /> +In earth, <i>the widely scattered wreck sublime</i><br /> +<i>Of vanished nations</i>. +</p> + +<p>Or this again, also from the <i>Prelude</i> (see iii. 389):—</p> + +<p> +<span style="margin-left: 19em;">There is</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 10em;">One great society alone on earth:</span><br /> +<span style="margin-left: 10em;">The noble Living and the noble Dead.</span><br /> +</p> + +<p>Underneath this growth and diversity of opinion we see George Eliot's +oneness of character, just, for that matter, as we see it in Mill's long +and grave march from the uncompromising denials instilled into him by +his father, then through Wordsworthian mysticism and Coleridgean +conservatism, down to the pale belief and dim starlight faith of his +posthumous volume. George Eliot was more austere, more unflinching, and +of ruder intellectual constancy than Mill. She never withdrew from the +position that she had taken up, of denying and rejecting; she stood to +that to the end: what she did was to advance to the far higher +perception that denial and rejection are not the aspects best worth +attending to or dwelling upon. She had little patience with those who +fear that the doctrine of protoplasm must dry up the springs of human +effort. Any one who trembles at that catastrophe may profit by a +powerful remonstrance of hers in the pages before us (iii. 245-250, also +228).</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>The consideration of molecular physics is not the direct ground +of human love and moral action, any more than it is the direct +means of composing a noble picture or of enjoying great music. +One might as well hope to dissect one's own body and be merry in +doing it, as take molecular physics (in which you must banish +from your field of view what is specifically human) to be your +dominant guide, your determiner of motives, in what is solely +human. That every study has its bearing on every other is true; +but pain and relief, love and sorrow, have their peculiar history +which make an experience and knowledge over and above the swing +of atoms.</p> + +<p>With regard to the pains and limitations of one's personal lot, I +suppose there is not a single man or woman who has not more or +less need of that stoical resignation which is often a hidden +heroism, or who, in considering his or her past history, is not +aware that it has been cruelly affected by the ignorant or +selfish action of some fellow-being in a more or less close +relation of life. And to my mind there can be no stronger motive +than this perception, to an energetic effort that the lives +nearest to us shall not suffer in a like manner from <i>us</i>.</p> + +<p>As to duration and the way in which it affects your view of the +human history, what is really the difference to your imagination +between infinitude and billions when you have to consider the +value of human experience? Will you say that since your life has +a term of threescore years and ten, it was really a matter of +indifference whether you were a cripple with a wretched skin +disease, or an active creature with a mind at large for the +enjoyment of knowledge, and with a nature which has attracted +others to you?</p></div> + +<p>For herself, she remained in the position described in one of her +letters in 1860 (ii. 283):—'I have faith in the working out of higher +possibilities than the Catholic or any other Church has presented; and +those who have strength to wait and endure are bound to accept no +formula which their whole souls—their intellect, as well as their +emotions—do not embrace with entire reverence. The highest calling and +election is <i>to do without opium</i>, and live through all our pain with +conscious, clear-eyed endurance.' She would never accept the common +optimism. As she says here:—'Life, though a good to men on the whole, +is a doubtful good to many, and to some not a good at all. To my thought +it is a source of constant mental distortion to make the denial of this +a part of religion—to go on pretending things are better than they +are.'</p> + +<p>Of the afflicting dealings with the world of spirits, which in those +days were comparatively limited to the untutored minds of America, but +which since have come to exert so singular a fascination for some of the +most brilliant of George Eliot's younger friends (see iii. 204), she +thought as any sensible Philistine among us persists in thinking to this +day:—</p> + +<div class="blockquot"><p>If it were another spirit aping Charlotte Brontë—if here and +there at rare spots and among people of a certain temperament, or +even at many spots and among people of all temperaments, tricksy +spirits are liable to rise as a sort of earth-bubbles and set +furniture in movement, and tell things which we either know +already or should be as well without knowing—I must frankly +confess that I have but a feeble interest in these doings, +feeling my life very short for the supreme and awful revelations +of a more orderly and intelligible kind which I shall die with an +imperfect knowledge of. If there were miserable spirits whom we +could help—then I think we should pause and have patience with +their trivial-mindedness; but otherwise I don't feel bound to +study them more than I am bound to study the special follies of a +peculiar phase of human society. Others, who feel differently, +and are attracted towards this study, are making an experiment +for us as to whether anything better than bewilderment can come +of it. At present it seems to me that to rest any fundamental +part of religion on such a basis is a melancholy misguidance of +men's minds from the true sources of high and pure emotion (iii. +161).</p></div> + +<p><a name="link_9" id="link_9"></a>The period of George Eliot's productions was from 1856, the date of her +first stories, down to 1876, when she wrote, not under her brightest +star, her last novel of <i>Daniel Deronda</i>. During this time the great +literary influences of the epoch immediately preceding had not indeed +fallen silent, but the most fruitful seed had been sown. Carlyle's +<i>Sartor</i> (1833-1834), and his <i>Miscellaneous Essays</i> (collected, 1839), +were in all hands; but he had fallen into the terrible slough of his +Prussian history (1858-1865), and the last word of his evangel had gone +forth to all whom it concerned. <i>In Memoriam</i>, whose noble music and +deep-browed thought awoke such new and wide response in men's hearts, +was published in 1850. The second volume of <i>Modern Painters</i>, of which +I have heard George Eliot say, as of <i>In Memoriam</i> too, that she owed +much and very much to it, belongs to an earlier date still (1846), and +when it appeared, though George Eliot was born in the same year as its +author, she was still translating Strauss at Coventry.<a name="link_10" id="link_10"></a> Mr. Browning, for +whose genius she had such admiration, and who was always so good a +friend, did indeed produce during this period some work which the adepts +find as full of power and beauty as any that ever came from his pen. But +Mr. Browning's genius has moved rather apart from the general currents +of his time, creating character and working out motives from within, +undisturbed by transient shadows from the passing questions and answers +of the day.</p> + +<p>The romantic movement was then upon its fall. The great Oxford movement, +which besides its purely ecclesiastical effects, had linked English +religion once more to human history, and which was itself one of the +unexpected outcomes of the romantic movement, had spent its original +force, and no longer interested the stronger minds among the rising +generation. The hour had sounded for the scientific movement. In 1859 +was published the <i>Origin of Species</i>, undoubtedly the most far-reaching +agency of the time, supported as it was by a volume of new knowledge +which came pouring in from many sides. The same period saw the +important speculations of Mr. Spencer, whose influence on George Eliot +had from their first acquaintance been of a very decisive kind. Two +years after the <i>Origin of Species</i> came Maine's <i>Ancient Law</i>, and that +was followed by the accumulations of Mr. Tylor and others, exhibiting +order and fixed correlation among great sets of facts which had hitherto +lain in that cheerful chaos of general knowledge which has been called +general ignorance. The excitement was immense. Evolution, development, +heredity, adaptation, variety, survival, natural selection, were so many +patent pass-keys that were to open every chamber.</p> + +<p>George Eliot's novels, as they were the imaginative application of this +great influx of new ideas, so they fitted in with the moods which those +ideas had called up.<a name="link_11" id="link_11"></a> 'My function,' she said (iii. 330), 'is that of the +æsthetic, not the doctrinal teacher—the rousing of the nobler emotions +which make mankind desire the social right, not the prescribing of +special measures, concerning which the artistic mind, however strongly +moved by social sympathy, is often not the best judge.' Her influence in +this direction over serious and impressionable minds was great indeed. +The spirit of her art exactly harmonised with the new thoughts that were +shaking the world of her contemporaries. Other artists had drawn their +pictures with a strong ethical background, but she gave a finer colour +and a more spacious air to her ethics by showing the individual passions +and emotions of her characters, their adventures and their fortunes, as +evolving themselves from long series of antecedent causes, and bound up +with many widely operating forces and distant events. Here, too, we find +ourselves in the full stream of evolution, heredity, survival, and fixed +inexorable law.</p> + +<p>This scientific quality of her work may be considered to have stood in +the way of her own aim. That the nobler emotions roused by her writings +tend to 'make mankind desire the social right' is not to be doubted; but +we are not sure that she imparts peculiar energy to the desire. What she +kindles is not a very strenuous, aggressive, and operative desire. The +sense of the iron limitations that are set to improvement in present and +future by inexorable forces of the past, is stronger in her than any +intrepid resolution to press on to whatever improvement may chance to be +within reach if we only make the attempt. In energy, in inspiration, in +the kindling of living faith in social effort, George Sand, not to speak +of Mazzini, takes a far higher place.</p> + +<p>It was certainly not the business of an artist to form judgments in the +sphere of practical politics, but George Eliot was far too humane a +nature not to be deeply moved by momentous events as they passed. Yet +her observations, at any rate after 1848, seldom show that energy of +sympathy of which we have been speaking, and these observations +illustrate our point. We can hardly think that anything was ever said +about the great civil war in America, so curiously far-fetched as the +following reflection:—'My best consolation is that an example on so +tremendous a scale of the need for the education of mankind through the +affections and sentiments, as a basis for true development, will have a +strong influence on all thinkers, and be a check to the arid narrow +antagonism which in some quarters is held to be the only form of liberal +thought' (ii. 335).</p> + +<p>In 1848, as we have said, she felt the hopes of the hour in all their +fulness. To a friend she writes (i. 179):—'You and Carlyle (have you +seen his article in last week's <i>Examiner?</i>) are the only two people who +feel just as I would have them—who can glory in what is actually great +and beautiful without putting forth any cold reservations and +incredulities to save their credit for wisdom. I am all the more +delighted with your enthusiasm because I didn't expect it. I feared that +you lacked revolutionary ardour. But no—you are just as +<i>sans-culottish</i> and rash as I would have you. You are not one of those +sages whose reason keeps so tight a rein on their emotions that they are +too constantly occupied in calculating consequences to rejoice in any +great manifestation of the forces that underlie our everyday existence.</p> + +<p>'I thought we had fallen on such evil days that we were to see no really +great movement—that ours was what St. Simon calls a purely critical +epoch, not at all an organic one; but I begin to be glad of my date. I +would consent, however, to have a year clipt off my life for the sake +of witnessing such a scene as that of the men of the barricades bowing +to the image of Christ, 'who first taught fraternity to men.' One +trembles to look into every fresh newspaper lest there should be +something to mar the picture; but hitherto even the scoffing newspaper +critics have been compelled into a tone of genuine respect for the +French people and the Provisional Government. Lamartine can act a poem +if he cannot write one of the very first order. I hope that beautiful +face given to him in the pictorial newspaper is really his: it is worthy +of an aureole. I have little patience with people who can find time to +pity Louis Philippe and his moustachioed sons. Certainly our decayed +monarchs should be pensioned off: we should have an hospital for them, +or a sort of zoological garden, where these worn-out humbugs may be +preserved. It is but justice that we should keep them, since we have +spoiled them for any honest trade. Let them sit on soft cushions, and +have their dinner regularly, but, for heaven's sake, preserve me from +sentimentalising over a pampered old man when the earth has its millions +of unfed souls and bodies. Surely he is not so Ahab-like as to wish that +the revolution had been deferred till his son's days: and I think the +shades of the Stuarts would have some reason to complain if the +Bourbons, who are so little better than they, had been allowed to reign +much longer.'</p> + +<p>The hopes of '48 were not very accurately fulfilled, and in George Eliot +they never came to life again. Yet in social things we may be sure that +undying hope is the secret of vision.</p> + +<p>There is a passage in Coleridge's <i>Friend</i> which seems to represent the +outcome of George Eliot's teaching on most, and not the worst, of her +readers:—'The tangle of delusions,' says Coleridge, 'which stifled and +distorted the growing tree of our well-being has been torn away; the +parasite weeds that fed on its very roots have been plucked up with a +salutary violence. To us there remain only quiet duties, the constant +care, the gradual improvement, the cautious and unhazardous labours of +the industrious though contented gardener—to prune, to strengthen, to +engraft, and one by one to remove from its leaves and fresh shoots the +slug and the caterpillar.' Coleridge goes farther than George Eliot, +when he adds the exhortation—'Far be it from us to undervalue with +light and senseless detraction the conscientious hardihood of our +predecessors, or even to condemn in them that vehemence to which the +blessings it won for us leave us now neither temptation nor pretext.'</p> + +<p><a name="link_12" id="link_12"></a>George Eliot disliked vehemence more and more as her work advanced. The +word 'crudity,' so frequently on her lips, stood for all that was +objectionable and distasteful. The conservatism of an artistic moral +nature was shocked by the seeming peril to which priceless moral +elements of human character were exposed by the energumens of progress. +Their impatient hopes for the present appeared to her rather +unscientific; their disregard of the past very irreverent and impious. +Mill had the same feeling when he disgusted his father by standing up +for Wordsworth, on the ground that Wordsworth was helping to keep alive +in human nature elements which utilitarians and innovators would need +when their present and particular work was done. Mill, being free from +the exaltations that make the artist, kept a truer balance. His famous +pair of essays on Bentham and Coleridge were published (for the first +time, so far as our generation was concerned) in the same year as <i>Adam +Bede</i>, and I can vividly remember how the 'Coleridge' first awoke in +many of us, who were then youths at Oxford, that sense of truth having +many mansions, and that desire and power of sympathy with the past, with +the positive bases of the social fabric, and with the value of +Permanence in States, which form the reputable side of all +conservatisms. <a name="link_13" id="link_13"></a>This sentiment and conviction never took richer or more +mature form than in the best work of George Eliot, and her stories +lighted up with a fervid glow the truths that minds of another type had +just brought to the surface. It was this that made her a great moral +force at that epoch, especially for all who were capable by intellectual +training of standing at her point of view. We even, as I have said, +tried hard to love her poetry, but the effort has ended less in love +than in a very distant homage to the majestic in intention and the +sonorous in execution. In fiction, too, as the years go by, we begin to +crave more fancy, illusion, enchantment, than the quality of her genius +allowed. But the loftiness of her character is abiding, and it passes +nobly through the ordeal of an honest biography. 'For the lessons,' says +the fine critic already quoted, 'most imperatively needed by the mass of +men, the lessons of deliberate kindness, of careful truth, of unwavering +endeavour,—for these plain themes one could not ask a more convincing +teacher than she whom we are commemorating now. Everything in her aspect +and presence was in keeping with the bent of her soul. The deeply-lined +face, the too marked and massive features, were united with an air of +delicate refinement, which in one way was the more impressive because it +seemed to proceed so entirely from within. Nay, the inward beauty would +sometimes quite transform the external harshness; there would be moments +when the thin hands that entwined themselves in their eagerness, the +earnest figure that bowed forward to speak and hear, the deep gaze +moving from one face to another with a grave appeal,—all these seemed +the transparent symbols that showed the presence of a wise, benignant +soul.' As a wise, benignant soul George Eliot will still remain for all +right-judging men and women.</p> + + + + + + + + +<pre> + + + + + +End of Project Gutenberg's Critical Miscellanies (Vol 3 of 3), by John Morley + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CRITICAL MISCELLANIES (VOL 3 OF 3) *** + +***** This file should be named 17954-h.htm or 17954-h.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + http://www.gutenberg.org/1/7/9/5/17954/ + +Produced by Paul Murray, Graeme Mackreth and the Online +Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: Critical Miscellanies (Vol 3 of 3) + The Life of George Eliot + +Author: John Morley + +Release Date: March 9, 2006 [EBook #17954] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ASCII + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CRITICAL MISCELLANIES (VOL 3 OF 3) *** + + + + +Produced by Paul Murray, Graeme Mackreth and the Online +Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net + + + + + + +CRITICAL + +MISCELLANIES + +BY +JOHN MORLEY + +VOL. III. + +Essay 4: The Life of George Eliot + +London +MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited +NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY + +1904 + + + + +THE LIFE OF GEORGE ELIOT + + +On Literary Biography 93 + +As a mere letter-writer will not rank among the famous +masters 96 + +Mr. Myers's Essay 100 + +Letter to Mr. Harrison 107 + +Hebrew her favourite study 112 + +Limitless persistency in application 113 + +Romola 114 + +Mr. R.W. Mackay's _Progress of the Intellect_ 120 + +The period of her productions, 1856-1876 124 + +Mr. Browning 125 + +An aesthetic not a doctrinal teacher 126 + +Disliked vehemence 130 + +Conclusion 131 + + + + +THE LIFE OF GEORGE ELIOT.[1] + + +The illustrious woman who is the subject of these volumes makes a remark +to her publisher which is at least as relevant now as it was then. Can +nothing be done, she asks, by dispassionate criticism towards the reform +of our national habits in the matter of literary biography? 'Is it +anything short of odious that as soon as a man is dead his desk should +be raked, and every insignificant memorandum which he never meant for +the public be printed for the gossiping amusement of people too idle to +reread his books?' Autobiography, she says, at least saves a man or a +woman that the world is curious about, from the publication of a string +of mistakes called Memoirs. Even to autobiography, however, she +confesses her deep repugnance unless it can be written so as to involve +neither self-glorification nor impeachment of others--a condition, by +the way, with which hardly any, save Mill's, can be said to comply. 'I +like,' she proceeds, 'that _He being dead yet speaketh_ should have +quite another meaning than that' (iii. 226, 297, 307). She shows the +same fastidious apprehension still more clearly in another way. 'I have +destroyed almost all my friends' letters to me,' she says, 'because they +were only intended for my eyes, and could only fall into the hands of +persons who knew little of the writers if I allowed them to remain till +after my death. In proportion as I love every form of piety--which is +venerating love--I hate hard curiosity; and, unhappily, my experience +has impressed me with the sense that hard curiosity is the more common +temper of mind' (ii. 286). There is probably little difference among us +in respect of such experience as that. + +[Footnote 1: _George Eliot's Life_. By J.W. Cross. Three volumes. +Blackwood and Sons. 1885.] + +Much biography, perhaps we might say most, is hardly above the level of +that 'personal talk,' to which Wordsworth sagely preferred long barren +silence, the flapping of the flame of his cottage fire, and the +under-song of the kettle on the hob. It would not, then, have much +surprised us if George Eliot had insisted that her works should remain +the only commemoration of her life. There be some who think that those +who have enriched the world with great thoughts and fine creations, +might best be content to rest unmarked 'where heaves the turf in many a +mouldering heap,' leaving as little work to the literary executor, +except of the purely crematory sort, as did Aristotle, Plato, +Shakespeare, and some others whose names the world will not willingly +let die. But this is a stoic's doctrine; the objector may easily retort +that if it had been sternly acted on, we should have known very very +little about Dr. Johnson, and nothing about Socrates. + +This is but an ungracious prelude to some remarks upon a book, which +must be pronounced a striking success. There will be very little dispute +as to the fact that the editor of these memorials of George Eliot has +done his work with excellent taste, judgment, and sense. He found no +autobiography nor fragment of one, but he has skilfully shaped a kind of +autobiography by a plan which, so far as we know, he is justified in +calling new, and which leaves her life to write itself in extracts from +her letters and journals. With the least possible obtrusion from the +biographer, the original pieces are formed into a connected whole 'that +combines a narrative of day-to-day life with the play of light and shade +which only letters written in serious moods can give.' The idea is a +good one, and Mr. Cross deserves great credit for it. We may hope that +its success will encourage imitators. Certainly there are drawbacks. We +miss the animation of mixed narrative. There is, too, a touch of +monotony in listening for so long to the voice of a single speaker +addressing others who are silent behind a screen. But Mr. Cross could +not, we think, have devised a better way of dealing with his material: +it is simple, modest, and effective. + +George Eliot, after all, led the life of a studious recluse, with none +of the bustle, variety, motion, and large communication with the outer +world, that justified Lockhart and Moore in making a long story of the +lives of Scott and Byron. Even here, among men of letters, who were also +men of action and of great sociability, are not all biographies too +long? Let any sensible reader turn to the shelf where his Lives repose; +we shall be surprised if he does not find that nearly every one of them, +taking the present century alone, and including such splendid and +attractive subjects as Goethe, Hume, Romilly, Mackintosh, Horner, +Chalmers, Arnold, Southey, Cowper, would not have been all the better +for judicious curtailment. Lockhart, who wrote the longest, wrote also +the shortest, the Life of Burns; and the shortest is the best, in spite +of defects which would only have been worse if the book had been bigger. +It is to be feared that, conscientious and honourable as his self-denial +has been, even Mr. Cross has not wholly resisted the natural and +besetting error of the biographer. Most people will think that the +hundred pages of the Italian tour (vol. ii.), and some other not very +remarkable impressions of travel, might as well or better have been left +out. + +As a mere letter-writer, George Eliot will not rank among the famous +masters of what is usually considered especially a woman's art. She was +too busy in serious work to have leisure for that most delightful way of +wasting time. Besides that, she had by nature none of that fluency, +rapidity, abandonment, pleasant volubility, which make letters amusing, +captivating, or piquant. What Mr. Cross says of her as the mistress of a +_salon_, is true of her for the most part as a correspondent:--'Playing +around many disconnected subjects, in talk, neither interested nor +amused her much. She took things too seriously, and seldom found the +effort of entertaining compensated by the gain' (iii. 335). There is the +outpouring of ardent feeling for her friends, sobering down, as life +goes on, into a crooning kindliness, affectionate and honest, but often +tinged with considerable self-consciousness. It was said of some one +that his epigrams did honour to his heart; in the reverse direction we +occasionally feel that George Eliot's effusive playfulness does honour +to her head. It lacks simplicity and _verve_. Even in an invitation to +dinner, the words imply a grave sense of responsibility on both sides, +and sense of responsibility is fatal to the charm of familiar +correspondence. + +As was inevitable in one whose mind was so habitually turned to the +deeper elements of life, she lets fall the pearls of wise speech even in +short notes. Here are one or two:-- + +'My own experience and development deepen every day my conviction that +our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathise +with individual suffering and individual joy.' + +'If there is one attitude more odious to me than any other of the many +attitudes of "knowingness," it is that air of lofty superiority to the +vulgar. She will soon find out that I am a very commonplace woman.' + +'It so often happens that others are measuring us by our past self +while we are looking back on that self with a mixture of disgust and +sorrow.' + +The following is one of the best examples, one of the few examples, of +her best manner:-- + + I have been made rather unhappy by my husband's impulsive + proposal about Christmas. We are dull old persons, and your two + sweet young ones ought to find each Christmas a new bright bead + to string on their memory, whereas to spend the time with us + would be to string on a dark shrivelled berry. They ought to have + a group of young creatures to be joyful with. Our own children + always spend their Christmas with Gertrude's family; and we have + usually taken our sober merry-making with friends out of town. + Illness among these will break our custom this year; and thus + _mein Mann_, feeling that our Christmas was free, considered how + very much he liked being with you, omitting the other side of the + question--namely, our total lack of means to make a suitably + joyous meeting, a real festival, for Phil and Margaret. I was + conscious of this lack in the very moment of the proposal, and + the consciousness has been pressing on me more and more painfully + ever since. Even my husband's affectionate hopefulness cannot + withstand my melancholy demonstration. So pray consider the + kill-joy proposition as entirely retracted, and give us something + of yourselves only on simple black-letter days, when the Herald + Angels have not been raising expectations early in the morning. + +This is very pleasant, but such pieces are rare, and the infirmity of +human nature has sometimes made us sigh over these pages at the +recollection of the cordial cheeriness of Scott's letters, the high +spirits of Macaulay, the graceful levity of Voltaire, the rattling +dare-devilry of Byron. Epistolary stilts among men of letters went out +of fashion with Pope, who, as was said, thought that unless every period +finished with a conceit, the letter was not worth the postage. Poor +spirits cannot be the explanation of the stiffness in George Eliot's +case, for no letters in the English language are so full of playfulness +and charm as those of Cowper, and he was habitually sunk in gulfs deeper +and blacker than George Eliot's own. It was sometimes observed of her, +that in her conversation, _elle s'ecoutait quand elle parlait_--she +seemed to be listening to her own voice while she spoke. It must be +allowed that we are not always free from an impression of +self-listening, even in the most caressing of the letters before us. + +This is not much better, however, than trifling. I daresay that if a +lively Frenchman could have watched the inspired Pythia on the sublime +tripod, he would have cried, _Elle s'ecoute quand elle parle_. When +everything of that kind has been said, we have the profound +satisfaction, which is not quite a matter of course in the history of +literature, of finding after all that the woman and the writer were one. +The life does not belie the books, nor private conduct stultify public +profession. We close the third volume of the biography, as we have so +often closed the third volume of her novels, feeling to the very core +that in spite of a style that the French call _alambique_, in spite of +tiresome double and treble distillations of phraseology, in spite of +fatiguing moralities, gravities, and ponderosities, we have still been +in communion with a high and commanding intellect and a great nature. We +are vexed by pedantries that recall the _precieuses_ of the Hotel +Rambouillet, but we know that she had the soul of the most heroic women +in history. We crave more of the Olympian serenity that makes action +natural and repose refreshing, but we cannot miss the edification of a +life marked by indefatigable labour after generous purposes, by an +unsparing struggle for duty, and by steadfast and devout fellowship with +lofty thoughts. + +Those who know Mr. Myers's essay on George Eliot will not have forgotten +its most imposing passage:-- + + I remember how at Cambridge, I waited with her once in the + Fellows' Garden of Trinity, on an evening of rainy May; and she, + stirred somewhat beyond her wont, and taking as her text the + three words which have been used so often as the inspiring + trumpet-calls of men,--the words _God_, _Immortality_, + _Duty_,--pronounced, with terrible earnestness, how inconceivable + was the _first_, how unbelievable the _second_, and yet how + peremptory and absolute the _third_. Never, perhaps, had sterner + accents affirmed the sovereignty of impersonal and unrecompensing + law. I listened, and night fell; her grave, majestic countenance + turned toward me like a Sibyl's in the gloom; it was as though + she withdrew from my grasp, one by one, the two scrolls of + promise, and left me the third scroll only, awful with inevitable + fates. + +To many, the relation which was the most important event in George +Eliot's life will seem one of those irretrievable errors which reduce +all talk of duty to a mockery. It is inevitable that this should be so, +and those who disregard a social law have little right to complain. Men +and women whom in every other respect it would be monstrous to call bad, +have taken this particular law into their own hands before now, and +committed themselves to conduct of which 'magnanimity owes no account to +prudence.' But if they had sense and knew what they were about, they +have braced themselves to endure the disapproval of a majority +fortunately more prudential than themselves. The world is busy, and its +instruments are clumsy. It cannot know all the facts; it has neither +time nor material for unravelling all the complexities of motive, or for +distinguishing mere libertinage from grave and deliberate moral +misjudgment; it is protecting itself as much as it is condemning the +offenders. On all this, then, we need have neither sophistry nor cant. +But those who seek something deeper than a verdict for the honest +working purpose of leaving cards and inviting to dinner, may feel, as +has been observed by a contemporary writer, that men and women are more +fairly judged, if judge them we must, by the way in which they bear the +burden of an error than by the decision that laid the burden on their +lives. Some idea of this kind was in her own mind when she wrote to her +most intimate friend in 1857, 'If I live five years longer, the positive +result of my existence on the side of truth and goodness will outweigh +the small negative good that would have consisted in my not doing +anything to shock others' (i. 461). This urgent desire to balance the +moral account may have had something to do with that laborious sense of +responsibility which weighed so heavily on her soul, and had so +equivocal an effect upon her art. Whatever else is to be said of this +particular union, nobody can deny that the picture on which it left a +mark was an exhibition of extraordinary self-denial, energy, and +persistency in the cultivation and the use of great gifts and powers for +what their possessor believed to be the highest objects for society and +mankind. + +A more perfect companionship, one on a higher intellectual level, or of +more sustained mental activity, is nowhere recorded. Lewes's mercurial +temperament contributed as much as the powerful mind of his consort to +prevent their seclusion from degenerating into an owlish stagnation. To +the very last (1878) he retained his extraordinary buoyancy. 'Nothing +but death could quench that bright flame. Even on his worst days he had +always a good story to tell; and I remember on one occasion in the +drawing-room at Witley, between two bouts of pain, he sang through with +great _brio_, though without much voice, the greater portion of the +tenor part in the _Barber of Seville_, George Eliot playing his +accompaniment, and both of them thoroughly enjoying the fun' (iii. 334). +All this gaiety, his inexhaustible vivacity, the facility of his +transitions from brilliant levity to a keen seriousness, the readiness +of his mental response, and the wide range of intellectual +accomplishments that were much more than superficial, made him a source +of incessant and varied stimulation. Even those, and there were some, +who thought that his gaiety bordered on flippancy, that his genial +self-content often came near to shockingly bad taste, and that his +reminiscences of poor Mr. Fitzball and the green-room and all the rest +of the Bohemia in which he had once dwelt, were too racy for his +company, still found it hard to resist the alert intelligence with which +he rose to every good topic, and the extraordinary heartiness and +spontaneity with which the wholesome spring of human laughter was +touched in him. + +Lewes had plenty of egotism, not to give it a more unamiable name, but +it never mastered his intellectual sincerity. George Eliot describes him +as one of the few human beings she has known who will, in the heat of an +argument, see, and straightway confess, that he is in the wrong, instead +of trying to shift his ground or use any other device of vanity. 'The +intense happiness of our union,' she wrote to a friend, 'is derived in a +high degree from the perfect freedom with which we each follow and +declare our own impressions. In this respect I know _no_ man so great as +he--that difference of opinion rouses no egotistic irritation in him, +and that he is ready to admit that another argument is the stronger the +moment his intellect recognises it' (ii. 279). This will sound very easy +to the dispassionate reader, because it is so obviously just and proper, +but if the dispassionate reader ever tries, he may find the virtue not +so easy as it looks. Finally, and above all, we can never forget in +Lewes's case how much true elevation and stability of character was +implied in the unceasing reverence, gratitude, and devotion with which +for five-and-twenty years he treated her to whom he owed all his +happiness, and who most truly, in his own words (ii. 76), had made his +life a new birth. + +The reader will be mistaken if he should infer from such passages as +abound in her letters that George Eliot had any particular weakness for +domestic or any other kind of idolatry. George Sand, in _Lucrezia +Floriani_, where she drew so unkind a picture of Chopin, has described +her own life and character as marked by 'a great facility for illusions, +a blind benevolence of judgment, a tenderness of heart that was +inexhaustible; consequently great precipitancy, many mistakes, much +weakness, fits of heroic devotion to unworthy objects, enormous force +applied to an end that was wretched in truth and fact, but sublime in +her thought.' George Eliot had none of this facility. Nor was general +benignity in her at all of the poor kind that is incompatible with a +great deal of particular censure. Universal benevolence never lulled an +active critical faculty, nor did she conceive true humility as at all +consisting in hiding from an impostor that you have found him out. Like +Cardinal Newman, for whose beautiful passage at the end of the +_Apologia_ she expresses such richly deserved admiration (ii. 387), she +unites to the gift of unction and brotherly love a capacity for giving +an extremely shrewd nip to a brother whom she does not love. Her +passion for Thomas-a-Kempis did not prevent her, and there was no reason +why it should, from dealing very faithfully with a friend, for instance +(ii. 271); from describing Mr. Buckle as a conceited, ignorant man; or +castigating Brougham and other people in slashing reviews; or otherwise +from showing that great expansiveness of the affections went with a +remarkably strong, hard, masculine, positive, judging head. + +The benefits that George Eliot gained from her exclusive companionship +with a man of lively talents were not without some compensating +drawbacks. The keen stimulation and incessant strain, unrelieved by +variety of daily intercourse, and never diversified by participation in +the external activities of the world, tended to bring about a loaded, +over-conscious, over-anxious state of mind, which was not only not +wholesome in itself, but was inconsistent with the full freshness and +strength of artistic work. The presence of the real world in his life +has, in all but one or two cases, been one element of the novelist's +highest success in the world of imaginative creation. George Eliot had +no greater favourite than Scott, and when a series of little books upon +English men of letters was planned, she said that she thought that +writer among us the happiest to whom it should fall to deal with Scott. +But Scott lived full in the life of his fellow-men. Even of Wordsworth, +her other favourite, though he was not a creative artist, we may say +that he daily saturated himself in those natural elements and effects, +which were the material, the suggestion, and the sustaining inspiration +of his consoling and fortifying poetry. George Eliot did not live in the +midst of her material, but aloof from it and outside of it. Heaven +forbid that this should seem to be said by way of censure. Both her +health and other considerations made all approach to busy sociability in +any of its shapes both unwelcome and impossible. But in considering the +relation of her manner of life to her work, her creations, her +meditations, one cannot but see that when compared with some writers of +her own sex and age, she is constantly bookish, artificial, and +mannered. She is this because she fed her art too exclusively, first on +the memories of her youth, and next from books, pictures, statues, +instead of from the living model, as seen in its actual motion. It is +direct calls and personal claims from without that make fiction alive. +Jane Austen bore her part in the little world of the parlour that she +described. The writer of _Sylvia's Lovers_, whose work George Eliot +appreciated with unaffected generosity (i. 305), was the mother of +children, and was surrounded by the wholesome actualities of the family. +The authors of _Jane Eyre_ and _Wuthering Heights_ passed their days in +one long succession of wild, stormy, squalid, anxious, and miserable +scenes--almost as romantic, as poetic, and as tragic, to use George +Eliot's words, as their own stories. George Sand eagerly shared, even to +the pitch of passionate tumult and disorder, in the emotions, the +aspirations, the ardour, the great conflicts and controversies of her +time. In every one of these, their daily closeness to the real life of +the world has given a vitality to their work which we hardly expect that +even the next generation will find in more than one or two of the +romances of George Eliot. It may even come to pass that their position +will be to hers as that of Fielding is to Richardson in our own day. + +In a letter to Mr. Harrison, which is printed here (ii. 441), George +Eliot describes her own method as 'the severe effort of trying to make +certain ideas thoroughly incarnate, as if they had revealed themselves +to me first in the flesh and not in the spirit.' The passage recalls a +discussion one day at the Priory in 1877. She was speaking of the +different methods of the poetic or creative art, and said that she began +with moods, thoughts, passions, and then invented the story for their +sake, and fitted it to them; Shakespeare, on the other hand, picked up a +story that struck him, and then proceeded to work in the moods, +thoughts, passions, as they came to him in the course of meditation on +the story. We hardly need the result to convince us that Shakespeare +chose the better part. + +The influence of her reserved fashion of daily life was heightened by +the literary exclusiveness which of set purpose she imposed upon +herself. 'The less an author hears about himself,' she says, in one +place, 'the better.' 'It is my rule, very strictly observed, not to +read the criticisms on my writings. For years I have found this +abstinence necessary to preserve me from that discouragement as an +artist, which ill-judged praise, no less than ill-judged blame, tends to +produce in us.' George Eliot pushed this repugnance to criticism beyond +the personal reaction of it upon the artist, and more than disparaged +its utility, even in the most competent and highly trained hands. She +finds that the diseased spot in the literary culture of our time is +touched with the finest point by the saying of La Bruyere, that 'the +pleasure of criticism robs us of the pleasure of being keenly moved by +very fine things' (iii. 327). 'It seems to me,' she writes (ii. 412), +'much better to read a man's own writings than to read what others say +about him, especially when the man is first-rate and the others +third-rate. As Goethe said long ago about Spinoza, "I always preferred +to learn from the man himself what _he_ thought, rather than to hear +from some one else what he ought to have thought."' As if the scholar +will not always be glad to do both, to study his author and not to +refuse the help of the rightly prepared commentator; as if even Goethe +himself would not have been all the better acquainted with Spinoza if he +could have read Mr. Pollock's book upon him. But on this question Mr. +Arnold has fought a brilliant battle, and to him George Eliot's heresies +may well be left. + +On the personal point whether an author should ever hear of himself, +George Eliot oddly enough contradicts herself in a casual remark upon +Bulwer. 'I have a great respect,' she says, 'for the energetic industry +which has made the most of his powers. He has been writing diligently +for more than thirty years, constantly improving his position, and +profiting by the lessons of public opinion and of other writers' (ii. +322). But if it is true that the less an author hears about himself the +better, how are these salutary 'lessons of public opinion' to penetrate +to him? 'Rubens,' she says, writing from Munich in 1858 (ii. 28), 'gives +me more pleasure than any other painter whether right or wrong. More +than any one else he makes me feel that painting is a great art, and +that he was a great artist. His are such real breathing men and women, +moved by passions, not mincing, and grimacing, and posing in mere +imitation of passion.' But Rubens did not concentrate his intellect on +his own ponderings, nor shut out the wholesome chastenings of praise and +blame, lest they should discourage his inspiration. Beethoven, another +of the chief objects of George Eliot's veneration, bore all the rough +stress of an active and troublesome calling, though of the musician, if +of any, we may say, that his is the art of self-absorption. + +Hence, delightful and inspiring as it is to read this story of diligent +and discriminating cultivation, of accurate truth and real erudition and +beauty, not vaguely but methodically interpreted, one has some of the +sensations of the moral and intellectual hothouse. Mental hygiene is apt +to lead to mental valetudinarianism. 'The ignorant journalist,' may be +left to the torment which George Eliot wished that she could inflict on +one of those literary slovens whose manuscripts bring even the most +philosophic editor to the point of exasperation: 'I should like to stick +red-hot skewers through the writer, whose style is as sprawling as his +handwriting.' By all means. But much that even the most sympathetic +reader finds repellent in George Eliot's later work might perhaps never +have been, if Mr. Lewes had not practised with more than Russian rigour +a censorship of the press and the post-office which kept every +disagreeable whisper scrupulously from her ear. To stop every draft with +sandbags, screens, and curtains, and to limit one's exercise to a drive +in a well-warmed brougham with the windows drawn up, may save a few +annoying colds in the head, but the end of the process will be the +manufacture of an invalid. + +Whatever view we may take of the precise connection between what she +read, or abstained from reading, and what she wrote, no studious man or +woman can look without admiration and envy on the breadth, variety, +seriousness, and energy, with which she set herself her tasks and +executed them. She says in one of her letters, 'there is something more +piteous almost than soapless poverty in the application of feminine +incapacity to literature' (ii. 16). Nobody has ever taken the +responsibilities of literature more ardently in earnest. She was +accustomed to read aloud to Mr. Lewes three hours a day, and her +private reading, except when she was engaged in the actual stress of +composition, must have filled as many more. His extraordinary alacrity +and her brooding intensity of mind prevented these hours from being that +leisurely process in slippers and easy-chair which passes with many for +the practice of literary cultivation. Much of her reading was for the +direct purposes of her own work. The young lady who begins to write +historic novels out of her own head will find something much to her +advantage if she will refer to the list of books read by George Eliot +during the latter half of 1861, when she was meditating _Romola_ (ii. +325). Apart from immediate needs and uses, no student of our time has +known better the solace, the delight, the guidance that abide in great +writings. Nobody who did not share the scholar's enthusiasm could have +described the blind scholar in his library in the adorable fifth chapter +of _Romola_; and we feel that she must have copied out with keen gusto +of her own those words of Petrarch which she puts into old Bardo's +mouth--'_Libri medullitus delectant, colloquuntur, consulunt, et viva +quadam nobis atque arguta familiaritate junguntur._' + +As for books that are not books, as Milton bade us do with 'neat repasts +of wine,' she wisely spared to interpose them oft. Her standards of +knowledge were those of the erudite and the savant, and even in the +region of beauty she was never content with any but definite +impressions. In one place in these volumes, by the way, she makes a +remark curiously inconsistent with the usual scientific attitude of her +mind. She has been reading Darwin's _Origin of Species_, on which she +makes the truly astonishing criticism that it is 'sadly wanting in +illustrative facts,' and that 'it is not impressive from want of +luminous and orderly presentation' (ii. 43-48). Then she says that 'the +development theory, and all other explanation of processes by which +things came to be, produce a feeble impression compared with the mystery +that lies under processes.' This position it does not now concern us to +discuss, but at least it is in singular discrepancy with her strong +habitual preference for accurate and quantitative knowledge, over vague +and misty moods in the region of the unknowable and the unreachable. + +George Eliot's means of access to books were very full. She knew French, +German, Italian, and Spanish accurately. Greek and Latin, Mr. Cross +tells us, she could read with thorough delight to herself; though after +the appalling specimen of Mill's juvenile Latinity that Mr. Bain has +disinterred, the fastidious collegian may be sceptical of the +scholarship of prodigies. Hebrew was her favourite study to the end of +her days. People commonly supposed that she had been inoculated with an +artificial taste for science by her companion. We now learn that she +took a decided interest in natural science long before she made Mr. +Lewes's acquaintance, and many of the roundabout pedantries that +displeased people in her latest writings, and were set down to his +account, appeared in her composition before she had ever exchanged a +word with him. + +All who knew her well enough were aware that she had what Mr. Cross +describes as 'limitless persistency in application.' This is an old +account of genius, but nobody illustrates more effectively the infinite +capacity of taking pains. In reading, in looking at pictures, in playing +difficult music, in talking, she was equally importunate in the search, +and equally insistent on mastery. Her faculty of sustained concentration +was part of her immense intellectual power. 'Continuous thought did not +fatigue her. She could keep her mind on the stretch hour after hour; the +body might give way, but the brain remained unwearied' (iii. 422). It is +only a trifling illustration of the infection of her indefatigable +quality of taking pains, that Lewes should have formed the important +habit of rewriting every page of his work, even of short articles for +Reviews, before letting it go to the press. The journal shows what sore +pain and travail composition was to her. She wrote the last volume of +_Adam Bede_ in six weeks; she 'could not help writing it fast, because +it was written under the stress of emotion.' But what a prodigious +contrast between her pace and Walter Scott's twelve volumes a year! Like +many other people of powerful brains, she united strong and clear +general retentiveness with a weak and untrustworthy verbal memory. 'She +never could trust herself to write a quotation without verifying it.' +'What courage and patience,' she says of some one else, 'are wanted for +every life that aims to produce anything,' and her own existence was one +long and painful sermon on that text. + +Over few lives have the clouds of mental dejection hung in such heavy +unmoving banks. Nearly every chapter is strewn with melancholy words. 'I +cannot help thinking more of your illness than of the pleasure in +prospect--according to my foolish nature, which is always prone to live +in past pain.' The same sentiment is the mournful refrain that runs +through all. Her first resounding triumph, the success of _Adam Bede_, +instead of buoyancy and exultation, only adds a fresh sense of the +weight upon her future life. 'The self-questioning whether my nature +will be able to meet the heavy demands upon it, both of personal duty +and intellectual production--presses upon me almost continually in a way +that prevents me even from tasting the quiet joy I might have in the +_work done_. I feel no regret that the fame, as such, brings no +pleasure; but it _is_ a grief to me that I do not constantly feel strong +in thankfulness that my past life has vindicated its uses.' + +_Romola_ seems to have been composed in constant gloom. 'I remember my +wife telling me, at Witley,' says Mr. Cross, 'how cruelly she had +suffered at Dorking from working under a leaden weight at this time. The +writing of _Romola_ ploughed into her more than any of her other books. +She told me she could put her finger on it as marking a well-defined +transition in her life. In her own words, "I began it a young woman--I +finished it an old woman."' She calls upon herself to make 'greater +efforts against indolence and the despondency that comes from too +egoistic a dread of failure.' 'This is the last entry I mean to make in +my old book in which I wrote for the first time at Geneva in 1849. What +moments of despair I passed through after that--despair that life would +ever be made precious to me by the consciousness that I lived to some +good purpose! It was that sort of despair that sucked away the sap of +half the hours which might have been filled by energetic youthful +activity; and the same demon tries to get hold of me again whenever an +old work is dismissed and a new one is being meditated' (ii. 307). One +day the entry is: 'Horrible scepticism about all things paralysing my +mind. Shall I ever be good for anything again? Ever do anything again?' +On another, she describes herself to a trusted friend as 'a mind +morbidly desponding, and a consciousness tending more and more to +consist in memories of error and imperfection rather than in a +strengthening sense of achievement.' We have to turn to such books as +Bunyan's _Grace Abounding_ to find any parallel to such wretchedness. + +Times were not wanting when the sun strove to shine through the gloom, +when the resistance to melancholy was not wholly a failure, and when, as +she says, she felt that Dante was right in condemning to the Stygian +marsh those who had been sad under the blessed sunlight. 'Sad were we in +the sweet air that is gladdened by the sun, bearing sluggish smoke in +our hearts; now lie we sadly here in the black ooze.' But still for the +most part sad she remained in the sweet air, and the look of pain that +haunted her eyes and brow even in her most genial and animated moments, +only told too truly the story of her inner life. + +That from this central gloom a shadow should spread to her work was +unavoidable. It would be rash to compare George Eliot with Tacitus, with +Dante, with Pascal. A novelist--for as a poet, after trying hard to +think otherwise, most of us find her magnificent but unreadable--as a +novelist bound by the conditions of her art to deal in a thousand +trivialities of human character and situation, she has none of their +severity of form. But she alone of moderns has their note of sharp-cut +melancholy, of sombre rumination, of brief disdain. Living in a time +when humanity has been raised, whether formally or informally, into a +religion, she draws a painted curtain of pity before the tragic scene. +Still the attentive ear catches from time to time the accents of an +unrelenting voice, that proves her kindred with those three mighty +spirits and stern monitors of men. In George Eliot, a reader with a +conscience may be reminded of the saying that when a man opens Tacitus +he puts himself in the confessional. She was no vague dreamer over the +folly and the weakness of men, and the cruelty and blindness of destiny. +Hers is not the dejection of the poet who 'could lie down like a tired +child, And weep away this life of care,' as Shelley at Naples; nor is it +the despairing misery that moved Cowper in the awful verses of the +_Castaway_. It was not such self-pity as wrung from Burns the cry to +life, 'Thou art a galling load, Along a rough, a weary road, To wretches +such as I;' nor such general sense of the woes of the race as made Keats +think of the world as a place where men sit and hear each other groan, +'Where but to think is to be full of sorrow, And leaden-eyed despairs.' +She was as far removed from the plangent reverie of Rousseau as from the +savage truculence of Swift. Intellectual training had given her the +spirit of order and proportion, of definiteness and measure, and this +marks her alike from the great sentimentalists and the sweeping +satirists. 'Pity and fairness,' as she beautifully says (iii. 317), 'are +two little words which, carried out, would embrace the utmost delicacies +of the moral life.' But hers is not seldom the severe fairness of the +judge, and the pity that may go with putting on the black cap after a +conviction for high treason. In the midst of many an easy flowing page, +the reader is surprised by some bitter aside, some judgment of intense +and concentrated irony with the flash of a blade in it, some biting +sentence where lurks the stern disdain and the anger of Tacitus, and +Dante, and Pascal. Souls like these are not born for happiness. + + * * * * * + +This is not the occasion for an elaborate discussion of George Eliot's +place in the mental history of her time, but her biography shows that +she travelled along the road that was trodden by not a few in her day. +She started from that fervid evangelicalism which has made the base of +many a powerful character in this century, from Cardinal Newman +downwards. Then with curious rapidity she threw it all off, and embraced +with equal zeal the rather harsh and crude negations which were then +associated with the _Westminster Review_. The second stage did not last +much longer than the first. 'Religious and moral sympathy with the +historical life of man,' she said (ii. 363), 'is the larger half of +culture;' and this sympathy, which was the fruit of her culture, had by +the time she was thirty become the new seed of a positive faith and a +semi-conservative creed. Here is a passage from a letter of 1862 (she +had translated Strauss, we may remind ourselves, in 1845, and Feuerbach +in 1854):-- + + Pray don't ask me ever again not to rob a man of his religious + belief, as if you thought my mind tended to such robbery. I have + too profound a conviction of the efficacy that lies in all + sincere faith, and the spiritual blight that comes with no-faith, + to have any negative propagandism in me. In fact, I have very + little sympathy with Freethinkers as a class, and have lost all + interest in mere antagonism to religious doctrines. I care only + to know, if possible, the lasting meaning that lies in all + religious doctrine from the beginning till now (ii. 243). + +Eleven years later the same tendency had deepened and gone farther:-- + + All the great religions of the world, historically considered, + are rightly the objects of deep reverence and sympathy--they are + the record of spiritual struggles, which are the types of our + own. This is to me preeminently true of Hebrewism and + Christianity, on which my own youth was nourished. And in this + sense I have no antagonism towards any religious belief, but a + strong outflow of sympathy. Every community met to worship the + highest Good (which is understood to be expressed by God) carries + me along in its main current; and if there were not reasons + against my following such an inclination, I should go to church + or chapel, constantly, for the sake of the delightful emotions of + fellowship which come over me in religious assemblies--the very + nature of such assemblies being the recognition of a binding + belief or spiritual law, which is to lift us into willing + obedience and save us from the slavery of unregulated passion or + impulse. And with regard to other people, it seems to me that + those who have no definite conviction which constitutes a + protesting faith, may often more beneficially cherish the good + within them and be better members of society by a conformity + based on the recognised good in the public belief, than by a + nonconformity which has nothing but negatives to utter. _Not_, of + course, if the conformity would be accompanied by a consciousness + of hypocrisy. That is a question for the individual conscience to + settle. But there is enough to be said on the different points of + view from which conformity may be regarded, to hinder a ready + judgment against those who continue to conform after ceasing to + believe in the ordinary sense. But with the utmost largeness of + allowance for the difficulty of deciding in special cases, it + must remain true that the highest lot is to have definite beliefs + about which you feel that 'necessity is laid upon you' to declare + them, as something better which you are bound to try and give to + those who have the worse (iii. 215-217). + +These volumes contain many passages in the same sense--as, of course, +her books contain them too. She was a constant reader of the Bible, and +the _Imitatio_ was never far from her hand. 'She particularly enjoyed +reading aloud some of the finest chapters of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and St. +Paul's Epistles. The Bible and our elder English poets best suited the +organ-like tones of her voice, which required for their full effect a +certain solemnity and majesty of rhythm.' She once expressed to a +younger friend, who shared her opinions, her sense of the loss which +they had in being unable to practise the old ordinances of family +prayer. 'I hope,' she says, 'we are well out of that phase in which the +most philosophic view of the past was held to be a smiling survey of +human folly, and when the wisest man was supposed to be one who could +sympathise with no age but the age to come' (ii. 308). + +For this wise reaction she was no doubt partially indebted, as so many +others have been, to the teaching of Comte. Unquestionably the +fundamental ideas had come into her mind at a much earlier period, when, +for example, she was reading Mr. R.W. Mackay's _Progress of the +Intellect_ (1850, i. 253). But it was Comte who enabled her to +systematise these ideas, and to give them that 'definiteness,' which, as +these pages show in a hundred places, was the quality that she sought +before all others alike in men and their thoughts. She always remained +at a respectful distance from complete adherence to Comte's scheme, but +she was never tired of protesting that he was a really great thinker, +that his famous survey of the Middle Ages in the fifth volume of the +_Positive Philosophy_ was full of luminous ideas, and that she had +thankfully learned much from it. Wordsworth, again, was dear to her in +no small degree on the strength of such passages as that from the +_Prelude_, which is the motto of one of the last chapters of her last +novel:-- + + The human nature with which I felt + That I belonged and reverenced with love, + Was not a persistent presence, but a spirit + Diffused through time and space, with aid derived + Of evidence from monuments, erect, + Prostrate, or leaning towards their common rest + In earth, _the widely scattered wreck sublime_ + _Of vanished nations_. + +Or this again, also from the _Prelude_ (see iii. 389):-- + + There is + One great society alone on earth: + The noble Living and the noble Dead. + +Underneath this growth and diversity of opinion we see George Eliot's +oneness of character, just, for that matter, as we see it in Mill's long +and grave march from the uncompromising denials instilled into him by +his father, then through Wordsworthian mysticism and Coleridgean +conservatism, down to the pale belief and dim starlight faith of his +posthumous volume. George Eliot was more austere, more unflinching, and +of ruder intellectual constancy than Mill. She never withdrew from the +position that she had taken up, of denying and rejecting; she stood to +that to the end: what she did was to advance to the far higher +perception that denial and rejection are not the aspects best worth +attending to or dwelling upon. She had little patience with those who +fear that the doctrine of protoplasm must dry up the springs of human +effort. Any one who trembles at that catastrophe may profit by a +powerful remonstrance of hers in the pages before us (iii. 245-250, also +228). + + The consideration of molecular physics is not the direct ground + of human love and moral action, any more than it is the direct + means of composing a noble picture or of enjoying great music. + One might as well hope to dissect one's own body and be merry in + doing it, as take molecular physics (in which you must banish + from your field of view what is specifically human) to be your + dominant guide, your determiner of motives, in what is solely + human. That every study has its bearing on every other is true; + but pain and relief, love and sorrow, have their peculiar history + which make an experience and knowledge over and above the swing + of atoms. + + With regard to the pains and limitations of one's personal lot, I + suppose there is not a single man or woman who has not more or + less need of that stoical resignation which is often a hidden + heroism, or who, in considering his or her past history, is not + aware that it has been cruelly affected by the ignorant or + selfish action of some fellow-being in a more or less close + relation of life. And to my mind there can be no stronger motive + than this perception, to an energetic effort that the lives + nearest to us shall not suffer in a like manner from _us_. + + As to duration and the way in which it affects your view of the + human history, what is really the difference to your imagination + between infinitude and billions when you have to consider the + value of human experience? Will you say that since your life has + a term of threescore years and ten, it was really a matter of + indifference whether you were a cripple with a wretched skin + disease, or an active creature with a mind at large for the + enjoyment of knowledge, and with a nature which has attracted + others to you? + +For herself, she remained in the position described in one of her +letters in 1860 (ii. 283):--'I have faith in the working out of higher +possibilities than the Catholic or any other Church has presented; and +those who have strength to wait and endure are bound to accept no +formula which their whole souls--their intellect, as well as their +emotions--do not embrace with entire reverence. The highest calling and +election is _to do without opium_, and live through all our pain with +conscious, clear-eyed endurance.' She would never accept the common +optimism. As she says here:--'Life, though a good to men on the whole, +is a doubtful good to many, and to some not a good at all. To my thought +it is a source of constant mental distortion to make the denial of this +a part of religion--to go on pretending things are better than they +are.' + +Of the afflicting dealings with the world of spirits, which in those +days were comparatively limited to the untutored minds of America, but +which since have come to exert so singular a fascination for some of the +most brilliant of George Eliot's younger friends (see iii. 204), she +thought as any sensible Philistine among us persists in thinking to this +day:-- + + If it were another spirit aping Charlotte Bronte--if here and + there at rare spots and among people of a certain temperament, or + even at many spots and among people of all temperaments, tricksy + spirits are liable to rise as a sort of earth-bubbles and set + furniture in movement, and tell things which we either know + already or should be as well without knowing--I must frankly + confess that I have but a feeble interest in these doings, + feeling my life very short for the supreme and awful revelations + of a more orderly and intelligible kind which I shall die with an + imperfect knowledge of. If there were miserable spirits whom we + could help--then I think we should pause and have patience with + their trivial-mindedness; but otherwise I don't feel bound to + study them more than I am bound to study the special follies of a + peculiar phase of human society. Others, who feel differently, + and are attracted towards this study, are making an experiment + for us as to whether anything better than bewilderment can come + of it. At present it seems to me that to rest any fundamental + part of religion on such a basis is a melancholy misguidance of + men's minds from the true sources of high and pure emotion (iii. + 161). + +The period of George Eliot's productions was from 1856, the date of her +first stories, down to 1876, when she wrote, not under her brightest +star, her last novel of _Daniel Deronda_. During this time the great +literary influences of the epoch immediately preceding had not indeed +fallen silent, but the most fruitful seed had been sown. Carlyle's +_Sartor_ (1833-1834), and his _Miscellaneous Essays_ (collected, 1839), +were in all hands; but he had fallen into the terrible slough of his +Prussian history (1858-1865), and the last word of his evangel had gone +forth to all whom it concerned. _In Memoriam_, whose noble music and +deep-browed thought awoke such new and wide response in men's hearts, +was published in 1850. The second volume of _Modern Painters_, of which +I have heard George Eliot say, as of _In Memoriam_ too, that she owed +much and very much to it, belongs to an earlier date still (1846), and +when it appeared, though George Eliot was born in the same year as its +author, she was still translating Strauss at Coventry. Mr. Browning, for +whose genius she had such admiration, and who was always so good a +friend, did indeed produce during this period some work which the adepts +find as full of power and beauty as any that ever came from his pen. But +Mr. Browning's genius has moved rather apart from the general currents +of his time, creating character and working out motives from within, +undisturbed by transient shadows from the passing questions and answers +of the day. + +The romantic movement was then upon its fall. The great Oxford movement, +which besides its purely ecclesiastical effects, had linked English +religion once more to human history, and which was itself one of the +unexpected outcomes of the romantic movement, had spent its original +force, and no longer interested the stronger minds among the rising +generation. The hour had sounded for the scientific movement. In 1859 +was published the _Origin of Species_, undoubtedly the most far-reaching +agency of the time, supported as it was by a volume of new knowledge +which came pouring in from many sides. The same period saw the +important speculations of Mr. Spencer, whose influence on George Eliot +had from their first acquaintance been of a very decisive kind. Two +years after the _Origin of Species_ came Maine's _Ancient Law_, and that +was followed by the accumulations of Mr. Tylor and others, exhibiting +order and fixed correlation among great sets of facts which had hitherto +lain in that cheerful chaos of general knowledge which has been called +general ignorance. The excitement was immense. Evolution, development, +heredity, adaptation, variety, survival, natural selection, were so many +patent pass-keys that were to open every chamber. + +George Eliot's novels, as they were the imaginative application of this +great influx of new ideas, so they fitted in with the moods which those +ideas had called up. 'My function,' she said (iii. 330), 'is that of the +aesthetic, not the doctrinal teacher--the rousing of the nobler emotions +which make mankind desire the social right, not the prescribing of +special measures, concerning which the artistic mind, however strongly +moved by social sympathy, is often not the best judge.' Her influence in +this direction over serious and impressionable minds was great indeed. +The spirit of her art exactly harmonised with the new thoughts that were +shaking the world of her contemporaries. Other artists had drawn their +pictures with a strong ethical background, but she gave a finer colour +and a more spacious air to her ethics by showing the individual passions +and emotions of her characters, their adventures and their fortunes, as +evolving themselves from long series of antecedent causes, and bound up +with many widely operating forces and distant events. Here, too, we find +ourselves in the full stream of evolution, heredity, survival, and fixed +inexorable law. + +This scientific quality of her work may be considered to have stood in +the way of her own aim. That the nobler emotions roused by her writings +tend to 'make mankind desire the social right' is not to be doubted; but +we are not sure that she imparts peculiar energy to the desire. What she +kindles is not a very strenuous, aggressive, and operative desire. The +sense of the iron limitations that are set to improvement in present and +future by inexorable forces of the past, is stronger in her than any +intrepid resolution to press on to whatever improvement may chance to be +within reach if we only make the attempt. In energy, in inspiration, in +the kindling of living faith in social effort, George Sand, not to speak +of Mazzini, takes a far higher place. + +It was certainly not the business of an artist to form judgments in the +sphere of practical politics, but George Eliot was far too humane a +nature not to be deeply moved by momentous events as they passed. Yet +her observations, at any rate after 1848, seldom show that energy of +sympathy of which we have been speaking, and these observations +illustrate our point. We can hardly think that anything was ever said +about the great civil war in America, so curiously far-fetched as the +following reflection:--'My best consolation is that an example on so +tremendous a scale of the need for the education of mankind through the +affections and sentiments, as a basis for true development, will have a +strong influence on all thinkers, and be a check to the arid narrow +antagonism which in some quarters is held to be the only form of liberal +thought' (ii. 335). + +In 1848, as we have said, she felt the hopes of the hour in all their +fulness. To a friend she writes (i. 179):--'You and Carlyle (have you +seen his article in last week's _Examiner?_) are the only two people who +feel just as I would have them--who can glory in what is actually great +and beautiful without putting forth any cold reservations and +incredulities to save their credit for wisdom. I am all the more +delighted with your enthusiasm because I didn't expect it. I feared that +you lacked revolutionary ardour. But no--you are just as +_sans-culottish_ and rash as I would have you. You are not one of those +sages whose reason keeps so tight a rein on their emotions that they are +too constantly occupied in calculating consequences to rejoice in any +great manifestation of the forces that underlie our everyday existence. + +'I thought we had fallen on such evil days that we were to see no really +great movement--that ours was what St. Simon calls a purely critical +epoch, not at all an organic one; but I begin to be glad of my date. I +would consent, however, to have a year clipt off my life for the sake +of witnessing such a scene as that of the men of the barricades bowing +to the image of Christ, 'who first taught fraternity to men.' One +trembles to look into every fresh newspaper lest there should be +something to mar the picture; but hitherto even the scoffing newspaper +critics have been compelled into a tone of genuine respect for the +French people and the Provisional Government. Lamartine can act a poem +if he cannot write one of the very first order. I hope that beautiful +face given to him in the pictorial newspaper is really his: it is worthy +of an aureole. I have little patience with people who can find time to +pity Louis Philippe and his moustachioed sons. Certainly our decayed +monarchs should be pensioned off: we should have an hospital for them, +or a sort of zoological garden, where these worn-out humbugs may be +preserved. It is but justice that we should keep them, since we have +spoiled them for any honest trade. Let them sit on soft cushions, and +have their dinner regularly, but, for heaven's sake, preserve me from +sentimentalising over a pampered old man when the earth has its millions +of unfed souls and bodies. Surely he is not so Ahab-like as to wish that +the revolution had been deferred till his son's days: and I think the +shades of the Stuarts would have some reason to complain if the +Bourbons, who are so little better than they, had been allowed to reign +much longer.' + +The hopes of '48 were not very accurately fulfilled, and in George Eliot +they never came to life again. Yet in social things we may be sure that +undying hope is the secret of vision. + +There is a passage in Coleridge's _Friend_ which seems to represent the +outcome of George Eliot's teaching on most, and not the worst, of her +readers:--'The tangle of delusions,' says Coleridge, 'which stifled and +distorted the growing tree of our well-being has been torn away; the +parasite weeds that fed on its very roots have been plucked up with a +salutary violence. To us there remain only quiet duties, the constant +care, the gradual improvement, the cautious and unhazardous labours of +the industrious though contented gardener--to prune, to strengthen, to +engraft, and one by one to remove from its leaves and fresh shoots the +slug and the caterpillar.' Coleridge goes farther than George Eliot, +when he adds the exhortation--'Far be it from us to undervalue with +light and senseless detraction the conscientious hardihood of our +predecessors, or even to condemn in them that vehemence to which the +blessings it won for us leave us now neither temptation nor pretext.' + +George Eliot disliked vehemence more and more as her work advanced. The +word 'crudity,' so frequently on her lips, stood for all that was +objectionable and distasteful. The conservatism of an artistic moral +nature was shocked by the seeming peril to which priceless moral +elements of human character were exposed by the energumens of progress. +Their impatient hopes for the present appeared to her rather +unscientific; their disregard of the past very irreverent and impious. +Mill had the same feeling when he disgusted his father by standing up +for Wordsworth, on the ground that Wordsworth was helping to keep alive +in human nature elements which utilitarians and innovators would need +when their present and particular work was done. Mill, being free from +the exaltations that make the artist, kept a truer balance. His famous +pair of essays on Bentham and Coleridge were published (for the first +time, so far as our generation was concerned) in the same year as _Adam +Bede_, and I can vividly remember how the 'Coleridge' first awoke in +many of us, who were then youths at Oxford, that sense of truth having +many mansions, and that desire and power of sympathy with the past, with +the positive bases of the social fabric, and with the value of +Permanence in States, which form the reputable side of all +conservatisms. This sentiment and conviction never took richer or more +mature form than in the best work of George Eliot, and her stories +lighted up with a fervid glow the truths that minds of another type had +just brought to the surface. It was this that made her a great moral +force at that epoch, especially for all who were capable by intellectual +training of standing at her point of view. We even, as I have said, +tried hard to love her poetry, but the effort has ended less in love +than in a very distant homage to the majestic in intention and the +sonorous in execution. In fiction, too, as the years go by, we begin to +crave more fancy, illusion, enchantment, than the quality of her genius +allowed. But the loftiness of her character is abiding, and it passes +nobly through the ordeal of an honest biography. 'For the lessons,' says +the fine critic already quoted, 'most imperatively needed by the mass of +men, the lessons of deliberate kindness, of careful truth, of unwavering +endeavour,--for these plain themes one could not ask a more convincing +teacher than she whom we are commemorating now. Everything in her aspect +and presence was in keeping with the bent of her soul. The deeply-lined +face, the too marked and massive features, were united with an air of +delicate refinement, which in one way was the more impressive because it +seemed to proceed so entirely from within. Nay, the inward beauty would +sometimes quite transform the external harshness; there would be moments +when the thin hands that entwined themselves in their eagerness, the +earnest figure that bowed forward to speak and hear, the deep gaze +moving from one face to another with a grave appeal,--all these seemed +the transparent symbols that showed the presence of a wise, benignant +soul.' As a wise, benignant soul George Eliot will still remain for all +right-judging men and women. + + + + + +End of Project Gutenberg's Critical Miscellanies (Vol 3 of 3), by John Morley + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CRITICAL MISCELLANIES (VOL 3 OF 3) *** + +***** This file should be named 17954.txt or 17954.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + http://www.gutenberg.org/1/7/9/5/17954/ + +Produced by Paul Murray, Graeme Mackreth and the Online +Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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