# Literary studies by Joseph Jacobs/George Eliot

GEORGE ELIOT
December 22, 1880
GEORGE ELIOT
EVENTEEN years ago the Christmas week was darkened by the death of Thackeray. Once again the festive season has been saddened in many a household by the knowledge that George Eliot was no more. It is not too much to say that with many her works have been far more than novels; they have formed an animating principle co-operating with some of the most powerful spiritual influences of the time. It appears, therefore, to be an appropriate occasion to pass in critical review the works she has left behind her and to estimate their importance.
As is well known, her earlier productions were translations of German works on the metaphysics of religion. Strauss's Life of Jesus appeared in an English form in 1846, and Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity in 1853. As translations they were excellent, but it cannot be said that they have had any ​influence on English speculation. Their chief interest consists in the evidence they give of George Eliot's early devotion to 'advanced' thinking and absorbing interest in the philosophy of religion.
Her importance in the history of English literature rests upon the series of fictions commenced in 1857 with the Scenes of Clerical Life, and concluded in 1876 by Daniel Deronda. It is not difficult to discern in these works two widely varying sets of artistic motives. The Scenes, Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Felix Holt, and Middlemarch are all clearly connected by their subject-matter, and, in large measure, by their style of treatment. In them she went back to the scenes and days of her childhood. It has been often remarked that the plastic period of the literary artist, when impressions are retained with that minute observation necessary for the novel, ceases at an extremely early age. Dickens was only at home in the England of coaches and among the lower classes. George Eliot was most happy when recalling mid-England in the days before the Reform Bill. Her father was a land surveyor, and she thus came in contact with all classes of provincial society, so that her pictures are far more complete than either Dickens's or Thackeray's accounts of London ​life. Both George Eliot and George Sand had learned that provincial life is more intense, if more monotonous and simple, than the busy life of towns. Amid the turmoil of cities, existence passes through a series of shallows, as it were; whereas in the country the emotions are collected into one deep pool, which pours forth tumultuously if once disturbed. Throughout these novels of memory, as they may be termed, the incidents and tone have a tragic ring about them which is wanting in the majority of novels dealing with London life. Only in the Brontës, and perhaps in Mrs. Gaskell, do we find anything like the depth of earnestness displayed in these novels of George Eliot. Much of their piquancy depends on the contrast between the subject-matter and the manifold reflections to which it gives rise. While the subject is entirely obsolete, the reflections are in accord with the most advanced thought of the day. Every one knows something of the scenery and the characters amid which these novels are placed. The rich fields of Loamshire and their owners and cultivators in the early years of this century form the common background of these tragedies of human life. Generally speaking, they treat of the influence of adverse circumstance on the inner life of the actors. ​It is essentially the spiritual life of her heroes and heroines which interests the writer. It is characteristic that she has introduced the religious life as a leading motive of the novel. Dinah Morris's spiritual experiences and exhortations, Maggie Tulliver's conversion by Thomas à Kempis, even Mr. Bulstrode's wrestlings of the spirit, are themes which only the deepest spiritual sympathy could have handled adequately. Not that she is deficient in the lighter qualities of the novelist's art. No one has described English scenery with more accurate touch or displayed a more Shakespearean sense of humour. Mrs. Poyser and Bartle Massey are unequalled creations. In the delineation of children's character she stands almost on a level with Victor Hugo. Altogether, in range of sympathy, in nobility of tone, in fertility of reflection, and in subtlety of insight these novels of memory are unique in the history of fiction. Opinion will differ as to their comparative merits, and each has its distinctive qualities. Yet it is probable that Adam Bede will always retain a certain supremacy; there is a freshness of tone as if the writer were luxuriating in new-found powers. The unsavoury motif of Felix Holt places it out of competition; Silas Marner, finished as it is, is on a smaller scale; and the concluding part ​of The Mill on the Floss destroys the almost perfect 'artistry' of the story of Tom and Maggie Tulliver. Middlemarch remains, and as 'a study in provincial life' is complete; yet the deficiencies in the plot and a certain undercurrent of social protest counterbalance its other advantages, and the palm is left to George Eliot's first and probably greatest work. The subject of Adam Bede required extreme delicacy of treatment; but all such requirements are satisfied. The shallowness of Hetty's character removes from her that sympathy which would otherwise render her fate too sad for the imagination; but her history illustrates the lesson which all these novels were consciously made to teach. They aided the great work of Wordsworth in educating the emotions to sympathise with the fundamental joys and sorrows of human life in all social spheres. And in the fine words of Wordsworth about his own works, 'They will co-operate with the benign tendencies in nature and society, and will, in their degree, be efficacious in making men wiser, better, and happier.'
The remaining novels, Romola, The Spanish Gypsy (apart from its unfortunate form), and Daniel Deronda, deal with an entirely different range of interests. They are romances of the historic imagination, consciously creative in​stead of being, as in the other novels, unconsciously reproductive. The first two dealt with the history of the past, and one cannot help thinking that The Spanish Gypsy would have been almost as successful a reproduction as Romola if it had been written in a congenial medium. In these laborious research did the work that loving memory effected in the other novels. As the artist went to work more consciously, so the motive principle of her work came more to the surface. The leading conception of modern science as applied to man, the influence of hereditary transmission, was transmuted into the moral principle of the claims of race. In the novels of memory this had been disguised under the simpler form of family love. Maggie Tulliver's action at the end of The Mill on the Floss is entirely based on the claims of family as opposed to personal affection for Stephen Guest. 'Love is not enough' is the refrain, and this comes out still more strongly on the broader historic canvas of Romola and The Spanish Gypsy. The point of Tito Melema's treachery is the absence of hereditary connection with Florentine politics. Fedalma sacrifices everything to the claims of race. In Daniel Deronda the difficult task was attempted of raising contemporary events to a quasi-historic level. By the mere force of genius George Eliot strove ​to create a personality which she deliberately asserted to be on a level with the great spiritual leaders of mankind. We have reasons for saying that the identification of the Jewish prophet of Daniel Deronda with a philosophic Jew described by Mr. G. H. Lewes in the Fortnightly Review is erroneous. The Jews give the greatest example in modern times of fidelity to the claims of race, and it was natural that George Eliot should have sympathised with Jewish aspirations. In The Spanish Gypsy she had already portrayed a fine figure in the Jew Sephardo. In Mordecai Cohen she attempted to idealise the history of this remarkable race, and by so doing destroyed the chances of success for her most elaborate production. Want of knowledge and want of sympathy with the Jewish ideal will probably always be an effectual bar to the appreciation of Daniel Deronda, and the hero plays the difficult part of irradiating sympathy instead of doing noble deeds. Yet it would be rash to assert that, if the Jewish race again became prominent as a nationality, Daniel Deronda may not ultimately figure as one of the favourite books of the Chosen People. Even as it is, it must be recognised that the conception of such a character as the principal Jew of the book shows singular artistic daring.
​While Romola and Daniel Deronda are of a different genre from the other novels,, they have a share of their excellences of style and characterisation. Since attention was first drawn to the point, too much stress has been laid on the 'scientific technicalities' of her style of late years. She would not have been the foremost woman of her age if she had not been influenced by one of its greatest movements. Yet the evidences of this are as clear in her earliest as in her latest works. In Janet's Repentance we read that 'the idea of duty ... is to the moral life what the addition of a great central ganglion is to animal life.' In the second page of Adam Bede, Seth's 'coronal arch' becomes a prominent feature in his portrait. In The Mill on the Floss George Eliot cannot let us know the ingenious trick by which Bob Jakin gains a couple of inches in measuring out his flannel without referring to his thumb as the 'mark of difference between the man and the monkey.' It is not quite correct to say that her style became more scientific in her last two novels; it would be more exact to say that it became more complex. As her thoughts became more subtle, her sentences naturally became more complex, and it would be difficult to determine the limits beyond which subtlety and complexity become inartistic. Allied to ​this error is the statement, frequently repeated in the obituary notices of the newspapers, that George Eliot was essentially an analytic genius, and that she constructed her characters out of analytic materials. The idea immediately suggested by this curiously uncritical assertion is that the perusal of Mr. Bain's works is the best propædeutic for the creation of a character like Dolly Winthrop. It would be far more correct to say that George Eliot's genius was essentially constructive, and that her analytic comments are the results of her training and experience. Like all great moderns, George Eliot possessed the power of feeling deeply and of simultaneously intellectualising her feelings; this is the most characteristic note of the modern mind. In this regard it is interesting to notice her accuracy and completeness, which at first sight appear peculiarly scientific. Yet it is the selective accuracy of the artist, not the exhaustive exactness of the savant, that she displays. When Cabel Garth's eyebrows 'make their pathetic angle' we have this trait alone given, and not a paragraph from Mr. Darwin's Expression of the Emotions. It would perhaps be more appropriate to point to her stern adherence to the fact of human nature as answering to the accuracy and impartiality of the scientific mind. Maggie ​Tulliver's sudden love for a dandy like Stephen Guest may grate against Mr. Swinburne's critical feelings, but is, no doubt, true to human nature. It is this fidelity to the facts of life that gives the prominent sadness to her works. She has chosen tragic themes, and tragic events are apt to be sad. Perhaps the most dominant idea of her Weltanschauung is the conception of law in human character.
Our deeds still travel with us from afar, And what we have been makes us what we are,
might stand as a motto to all her works.
It is character in process of change that engages all her interest. Hence there is less of the conventional, less of the worldly, in her work than in most great novelists. We have soul speaking to soul: Dinah to Hetty, Savonarola to Romola, Felix to Esther, Dorothea to Ladislaw, Mordecai to Deronda. When the conventional is introduced it is chiefly for humorous purposes; the humour of the immortal scene at the Rainbow Inn in Silas Marner consists in its archaic conventionality. Interest of character is, however, the predominant interest of George Eliot's work. Nearly one-half of Adam Bede is taken up by the first week of the action, during which we learn to know the chief characters. The ​rest of the book hurries through nearly two years before Adam is united to Dinah. This attention to characterisation has exercised a somewhat deleterious effect on her plots; so long as we know what her characters are and have become,, it does not so much matter what becomes of them. Hence the frequent resource to the Deus ex machinâ of sudden death; it is astonishing how many of her characters are snatched from our view in this way. Death by drowning seems to be the favourite method: Dunstan Cass, Tom and Maggie Tulliver, Tito Melema, Grandcourt, all disappear in this abrupt way. It would be unjust to pass from this aspect of her work without a word of praise to her admirable range of power, and to the marvellous ability she possessed of giving life to her minor characters. The moral earnestness of her work is another prominent 'note.' With her the novel was morality teaching by example. And the teaching was of an unusually lofty character. Renunciation of self, subordination to the social life, were the great texts. Egoism is the canker of the soul: Hetty, Tito Melema, Grandcourt, are prominent examples. Still more noteworthy is the terrible example of the crippling of another's life by one's egoism, as in Rosamund Vincy and Lydgate, to whom Casaubon and Doro​thea form so fine a parallel and contrast. The moral of The Spanish Gypsy lies in the ruin wrought to the great schemes of Zarca by the egoistic loves of Silva and Fedalma. The whole aim of the novel as George Eliot wrote it might be summed up in the words, κάθαρσις of egoism.
The whole artistic career was dominated by these ethical aims; in her last work. The Impressions of Theophrastus Such, she applied herself consciously to direct ethical teaching. The book consists of disconnected examples of popular moral errors from which George Eliot would free the world, 'debasing the moral currency,' 'the modern Hep! Hep! Hep!' and so on. As a consequence, the artistic merits of Theophrastus Such were far below those of her other books, and it will never have much more than a pathological interest for the student of her works.
It remains to speak of her attempts in verse. George Eliot will always afford a striking example of the truth that the essential quality of the poet is the gift of song. All the other qualities required for poetry were possessed by her in high measure, yet it is granted on all sides that her poetical attempts were failures. The 'brother and sister' sonnets and the Comtean hymn, 'O may I join the choir invisible!' in the Jubal ​volume, a speech of Zarca's ('Nay, never falter'), and a fine description of Truth by Sephardo in The Spanish Gypsy, with, perhaps, Ladislaw's song, 'Oh me, oh me, what frugal cheer my love doth feed upon!'—these may find a place in anthologies, but that is all.
Writing now with the sense of her loss still fresh, it is impossible to forget that, for those who knew her personally, she herself was her greatest work. By her own training she made herself probably the most accomplished woman the century has seen. She brought to the world of art a greater extent of culture than any predecessor, with the possible exception of Goethe. Not alone was she a veritable pundit in languages, with mastery of French, German, and Italian, and serviceable knowledge of Latin, Greek, Spanish, and Hebrew; she was widely learned in science and philosophy, and deeply read in history; her works teem with evidence of her intimate knowledge of music and painting. Add to all these accomplishments a width of sympathy and acuteness of observation seldom equalled, and one can form some idea of the rich nature just taken from us. She could draw such characters as Maggie Tulliver and Dorothea Brooke, Mary Garth and Gwendolen Harleth, Fedalma and Romola, because she ​herself had much that was present in them. She has done a great deal for the cause of woman by direct teaching, but she has done most by giving the world assurance of the possibilities of woman's excellence.
'THEOPHRASTUS SUCH'
NY new book of George Eliot has to encounter the formidable rivalry of her earlier productions. In this age of competitive examinations it is inevitable that some attempt should be made to 'place' the new work in its 'order of merit.' Such a test, however, tells with crushing force against the Impressions of Theophrastus Such, which is slighter in conception, less finished in execution, and altogether of less artistic value than any other work that has appeared under her name. In it are seen all the characteristics of her later 'manner' which critics have had to deprecate. The scientific interest and tone of her second period culminate in these studies of mental pathology. The consummate literary artist has degenerated into the student of social psychology.
George Eliot's literary development falls clearly and sharply into two stages. In the earlier period, from the Scenes of Clerical Life to Felix Holt (with the exception of Romola, which stands apart in a sphere of its own, ​where The Spanish Gypsy, had it been written in a natural medium, might have joined it), she went back with loving memory to the days and scenes of her childhood. In that wonderful series of works she produced living pictures of mid-England in the pre-Reform days before old Leisure was dead, and while the modern spirit was unborn. For width of conception, for accuracy of touch, for nobility of tone, those works have a place apart in English fiction. The next two novels, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, displayed a new set of literary motives in their composition. The loving interest of the artist in human nature was fused with the intellectual interest of the scientific observer of the social organism. The tales moved in a larger sphere, had a wider scope, and also a deeper background than the earlier works. A new view of the relations of man and society, and with it a new philosophy of history, informed every page and set every incident in a new light. Along with this change or development of tone there went a noticeable change of manner. Dealing with conceptions novel to her readers, George Eliot had to put them directly before their eyes in passages only interesting from a speculative point of view. But this very need of explanation argued incomplete 'artistry' (to use a word of Mr. ​Browning's); there was evidently not that direct rapport with her audience which is a necessary pre-requisite of all great literary art. However well suited Comtean conceptions may be for appeals to the literary emotions, such appeals cannot fail to be less telling when accompanied by elaborate explanations of the conceptions upon which their efficacy depends. This reflective or scientific side of her later works has seriously diminished their effectiveness, and the attempt to rouse an interest in the history of modern Judaism in Daniel Deronda was, with the ordinary reader, a complete failure. And it must be remembered that in really great works of art the decision rests with the 'ordinary reader'; success is here the real test of merit. No poem is great if only a small coterie admire it. What is to be the decision on George Eliot's last two great works depends upon the future of the speculative system with which they are connected. If the social philosophy there taught be that of the future, then Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda may become as gospels. But the risk has been run of subordinating the eternal truths of art to what may be the temporary opinions of science; and, in any case, the presence of the purely analytical element in her later works must necessarily detract from ​their artistic value as indicating a certain spiritual divergence of George Eliot from her readers. As a matter of fact, the intellectual or scientific element in the last two works did alienate her audience's sympathy, and thus frustrated the artist's function, to 'arrest, arouse, and excite.'
This scientific element comes to a head in Theophrastus Such. Instead of a new novel, George Eliot has given us some careful but unsympathetic analyses of certain phases of human character: admirable dissections, no doubt; but life has fled under the scalpel. Our emotions refuse to be moved by a description of Aliquis or Quispiam; and, what is more, the author herself fails to feel the artist's sympathy with her creations. The pathos of Merman's struggle against the errors of Grampus, in the section entitled 'How we encourage Research,' is nullified by a certain kindly contempt which finds expression in some rather Teutonic or 'cetacean' witticisms. And throughout there is a tendency to harshness in censure which is not to be found in the writer's more extended works. The whole book is devoted to the foibles and failings of man, and thus leaves an unpleasant feeling. The head, not the heart, has produced this book, the reader feels, and his heart fails to respond to pure intellect. It is worthy of note that most of the sketches ​deal with phases of literary life which have been the object of George Eliot's mature and conscious observation. It would seem that the novelist's plastic period closes at an early age: Dickens was never at home with railways, George Eliot as an artist feels strange after the Reform Bill is passed. Of later London life she has, no doubt, been an observant spectator, but there is the greatest possible difference shown in the reproductions in her earliest and latest work: spontaneous art in the Scenes of Clerical Life, conscious effort in these Sketches of Literary Life. And in her latest book the nearest approach to the manner of her first period is displayed in the supposed autobiographical recollections of Mr. Such when he is 'looking back' to 'the time when the fitful gleams of a spring day used to show me my own shadow as that of a small boy on a small pony, riding by the side of a larger cob-mounted shadow over the breezy uplands which we used to dignify with the name of hills, or along by-roads with broad grassy borders and hedgerows reckless of utility, on our way to outlying hamlets, whose groups of inhabitants were as distinct to my imagination as if they had belonged to different regions of the globe.'
The passages descriptive of earlier England in the same section are in her very best style, ​and contrast markedly with the first section, 'Looking Inward.' where the pseudonymous writer analyses with subtle skill his claims as a scientific observer and describer of other men's failings. The following quotation shows the old manner:—
'Our rural tracts—where no Babel-chimney scales the heavens—are without mighty objects to fill the soul with the sense of an outer world unconquerably aloof from our efforts. The wastes are playgrounds (and let us try to keep them such for the children's children who will inherit no other sort of demesne); the grasses and reeds nod to each other over the river, but we have cut a canal close by; the very heights laugh with corn in August or lift the plough-team against the sky in September. Then comes a crowd of burly navvies with pickaxes and barrows, and while hardly a wrinkle is made in the fading mother's face or a new curve of health in the blooming girl's, the hills are cut through or the breaches between them spanned, we choose our level, and the white steam-pennon flies along it. But because our land shows this readiness to be changed, all signs of permanence upon it raise a tender attachment instead of awe: some of us, at least, love the scanty relics of our forests, and are thankful if a bush is left of the old ​hedgerow. A crumbling bit of wall where the delicate ivy-leafed toad-flax hangs its light branches, or a bit of grey thatch with patches of dark moss on its shoulder and a troop of grass-stems on its ridge, is a thing to visit. And then the tiled roof of cottage and homestead, of the long cow-shed where generations of the milky mothers have stood patiently, of the broad-shouldered barns where the old-fashioned flail once made resonant music, while the watch-dog barked at the timidly venturesome fowls making pecking raids on the outflying grain—the roofs that have looked out from among the elms and walnut-trees, or beside the yearly group of hay and corn stacks, or below the square stone steeple, gathering their grey or ochre-tinted lichens and their olive-green mosses under all ministries,—let us praise the sober harmonies they give to our landscape, helping to unite us pleasantly with the elder generations who tilled the soil for us before we were born, and paid heavier and heavier taxes, with much grumbling, but without that deepest root of corruption—the self-indulgent despair which cuts down and consumes and never plants.'
The next quotation illustrates the new style:—
'Introspection which starts with the pur​pose of finding out one's own absurdities is not likely to be very mischievous, yet of course it is not free from dangers any more than breathing is, or the other functions that keep us alive and active. To judge of others by one's-self is in its most innocent meaning the briefest expression for our only method of knowing mankind; yet we perceive it has come to mean in many cases either the vulgar mistake which reduces every man's value to the very low figure at which the valuer himself happens to stand; or else, the amiable illusion of the higher nature misled by a too generous construction of the lower. One cannot give a recipe for wise judgment: it resembles appropriate muscular action, which is attained by the myriad lessons in nicety of balance and of aim that only practice can give. The danger of the inverse procedure, judging of self by what one observes in others, if it is carried on with much impartiality and keenness of discernment, is that it has a laming effect, enfeebling the energies of indignation and scorn, which are the proper scourges of wrong-doing and meanness, and which should continually feed the wholesome restraining power of public opinion.'
In terming these Impressions scientific, we do not mean to say that they are written ​in any scientific jargon; indeed, we have less of sesquipedalian technicalities than in Daniel Deronda; but the whole tone is scientific. Without indulging in any such elaborate antitheses as are the glory of the schoolboy's essay, it may be said that the artistic and scientific modes of treating human nature differ in this, that science seeks to find general analogies, while art aims at individual realities. The sketchy character of these studies no doubt brings into greater prominence their want of artistic reality. If the author had elaborated any of them into novels or even into 'scenes,' the artist instinct would have given life to the dead bones of scientific analysis. And what is more, the reader would have been spared that unsympathy with her own puppets which may be scientific impartiality, but is certainly inartistic harshness. Humour would then have dealt tenderly with those deficiencies which wit, and that of a somewhat lumbering character, now mercilessly exposes. One of the sections deals with the habit of scoffing and parody as 'debasing the moral currency,' yet what is it but debasing the artistic currency to ring the changes on Grampus, Lord Narwhal, Prof. Sperm N. Whale, Dugong, and Butzkopf (=Delphinus orca)? The name Merman brings into humorous contrast his more human qualities; but is ​not the 'ancient and fish-like smell' with which Teutonic erudition is, by implication, connected in these appellatives, just a case of 'debasing the moral currency' in its depreciation of the minute accuracy and unselfish devotion of German scholarship? Indeed, the names throughout throw much light on the characters of the book. In most cases they represent exactly that particular phase of a character which is brought forward, the limb which is to represent the whole figure. We can all guess beforehand to what sort of characters names like Touchwood, Mordax, and Scintilla will be applied. The more individual the name the more of the uncertainty of real life about the character: that will be found to be a good working test. Thus Pummel, who serves in some inexplicable way as a 'watchdog of knowledge.' stands out well defined. 'What is the cause of the tides, 'Pummel?' 'Well, sir, nobody rightly knows. 'Many gives their opinion, but if I was to give mine, it 'ud be different.' That is a touch worthy of the hand that drew Mrs. Poyser and Dolly Winthrop.
And as the scientific spirit shows itself in these unreal abstractions of truncated characters, so we have it again in the manner of their presentation. The inordinate length of the sentences and the frequent obscurity of ​sense are other symptoms of the same characteristic. Science abhors the epigram; its half-truth, though it may be the better half of truth, is repugnant to the exactness of science. For purposes of science we must have all the amplifications and exceptions necessary for accuracy, and consequently we must have long and unwieldy sentences. In Theophrastus Such we have noticed one sentence dragging its laborious length over twenty-two lines, and we reckon the average length at about eight lines. In one place it takes two whole pages (pp. 288, 289) to complete four sentences. Another 'note' of the scientific style is its tendency to draw out all the attenuated meaning of a sentence. We have many instances of sentences which contain truths that are tolerably obvious, in phraseology by no means obvious to a first reading. The book throughout is hard reading, and the style at times harsh in the extreme; what a falling off from the limpid truths of her earlier books! Even in Daniel Deronda the reader comes across such fine things as 'Those who trust us educate us'—a noble truth, nobly expressed. He will have difficulty in finding a single sentence in this book which is worthy to be put by its side.
The artistic value of the book is further spoiled by its evident didactic purpose. If the characters here delineated do not 'adorn ​a tale,' they are certainly intended to 'point a moral.' Throughout George Eliot's literary career ethical interests have been predominant. With her the novel has been morality teaching by example. But hitherto she has been content with the subtle insinuation of the artist, and has left alone the direct assault of the preacher; she has given texts, not sermons. But in her last book there is rather too much direct preaching; it might be a little hard, but it would not be altogether untrue, to call the Impressions skeleton sermons. Even from the ethical point of view the result is unsatisfactory; how much less effective a lesson is taught by Mixtus than by Lydgate in Middlemarch, though this is partly due to necessarily lighter treatment. With the character of her teaching every one is now familiar. Subordinate yourself to the social organism, suppress self; this is her ever-recurring cry. All honour to the nobleness and purity of the teaching. After all, that is the characteristic which raises this book above all other descriptions of 'characters,' from the second book of Aristotle's Rhetoric to La Bruyère; but it comes too often to the surface, is pressed too markedly upon our notice.
Nowhere does the inferior effectiveness of the intellectual as compared with the artistic treatment of a subject come into greater ​prominence than in the last chapter of the book 'The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!' (the rallying cry of the persecutions of the Jews by the Crusaders). That George Eliot should feel tempted to defend her choice of a subject in Daniel Deronda is only natural; but the striking thing is how far inferior is this defence, appealing to the intellect, when compared with exactly the same arguments as urged by the passionate rhetoric of Mordecai in the book itself. Ignorance of, and want of sympathy with, modern Judaism may blind the reader to the extraordinary power of Mordecai's orations, perhaps the greatest tour de force of their author; but any one can see how much more effective, even from an argumentative point of view, are the passionate utterances of the latest prophet than the calm reasoning of his creator.
We have dealt with Impressions of Theophrastus Such in comparison with its author's other works, and it is clear that it cannot, in conception, style, or effectiveness, stand the test. It may consequently appear somewhat unfair to upbraid the book for failing to be what it does not profess to be. But a great artist owes duties to the world as much as deserves gratitude from it. When one who has it in her power to add to the world's wealth of beauty turns aside from the arduous ​conception of a great work to execute preparatory sketches not worthy of mention by the side of her other works, it is impossible to refrain from deploring the loss to the world. Let others take upon themselves to compare these 'characters' with similar literary productions; for us none but herself can be her parallel. Others may take up the half-disguised challenge of the motto from Phædrus (3 Prol. 45-50); we do not care to discuss whether Pepin is Mr. Gladstone or Dugong Du Bois-Reymond.
For us, the chief interest in George Eliot's new work has been that which we are confident will be its chief interest to the future students of her works. The light thrown by it on the scientific strain in her literary character, the light thrown upon the workmanship of her second period, give the book a sort of pathological interest to the student of literature. The choice of the autobiographical form (used only once before, in the remarkable sketch à la E. A. Poe, The Lifted Veil) may have its significance for the next generation. But, apart from these points of view, the studies are but chips from the workshop, which might well have been left on the ground, only to be lifted thence at the time when everything of the author shall become precious.
'ESSAYS'
HESE essays will not add to the reputation of their author. Reprinted chiefly from the Westminster Review, it would be difficult to say that they stand prominently above the general average of such essays. Each of the quarterlies has created for itself a type, and these reviews are of the type familiar to us in such writers as the late W. R. Greg. They date from the period before Mr. Matthew Arnold had imported the method of Sainte-Beuve into English criticism, and in consequence they suffer by comparison with later work of a more subtle and artistic character. George Eliot's essays have not sufficient individuality to deserve new life for their own sake; on the other hand, they throw valuable light on certain problems connected with her art, and on this account merit republication.
The collection inevitably raises what must be the chief critical problem in connection with the literary career of George Eliot. How is it, the reader is impelled to ask, that a mind which produced these essays chiefly ​during the years 1855 and 1856 could have given the Scenes of Clerical Life to the world a year later? What was the determining motive which changed the translator of Strauss and Feuerbach and the writer of these essays into the loving creator of Mr. Gilfil, of Bartle Massey, and of Dinah Morris? It is not so much the late flowering of her genius that is noteworthy. The end of the 'thirties' seems the appropriate period for a novelist's debut. Both Thackeray and Miss Austen were thirtyseven (the same age as George Eliot in 1857) when Vanity Fair and Sense and Sensibility respectively appeared; Trollope was thirtynine when The Warden was published; and Walter Scott was as old as forty-three when Waverley first delighted the world. But all these had given indication in one way or another of their powers, and had certainly not given indication of ability of quite a different calibre and in quite an opposite tendency of mind; whereas George Eliot up to her first appearance as a novelist had shown marked capacity for abstract thought, the very antithesis of the concrete imagination essential for the novelist.
Up to the age of thirty-seven what do we find in George Eliot's writings? A vivid appreciation of the course of religious thought, a considerable power of social generalisation, ​and, above all, a deep interest in the scientific and philosophic speculations of her time. If any one had ventured a prophecy of her future career, he would surely have anticipated some incursion into the region of religious reconstruction, as was the case with her friend Miss Hennell. He might have foreseen in her another Harriet Martineau, with a deeper ethical basis, but with the same tendency to pure reason. The last thought that would have entered the minds of her most intimate friends up to that date would have been that Marian Evans would revive in the enduring form of art the reminiscences of her early days, which she seemed to have left so far behind her.
Certainly the essays before us indicated no such future. One of them, indeed, dealing with the Natural History of German Life, proves that George Eliot had observed as closely the English peasant as her author Riehl had studied the German species. Take the following picture:—
'Observe a company of haymakers. When you see them at a distance, tossing up the forkfuls of hay in the golden light, while the waggon creeps slowly with its increasing burthen over the meadow, and the bright green space which tells of work done gets larger and larger, you pronounce the scene ​"smiling," and you think these companions in labour must be as bright and cheerful as the picture to which they give animation. Approach nearer, and you will certainly find that haymaking time is a time for joking, especially if there are women among the labourers; but the coarse laugh that bursts out every now and then, and expresses the triumphant taunt, is as far as possible from your conception of idyllic merriment. That delicious effervescence of the mind which we call fun has no equivalent for the northern peasant, except tipsy revelry; the only realm of fancy and imagination for the English clown exists at the bottom of the third quart-pot.'
This passage certainly shows observation, but for all one can tell it may merely be the scientific observation of the psychologist, not the sympathetic reproduction of the artist. As yet it lacks the concretising touch. Similarly, when the writer goes on to remark, 'It is quite true that a thresher is likely to be innocent of any adroit arithmetical cheating, but he is not the less likely to carry home his master's corn in his shoes and pocket,' we have no warranty that this could be expanded into the Ben Tholoway of Adam Bede. And even when George Eliot notices the custom of distinguishing cousins by refer​ring them to their father's name, we cannot deduce the figure of Timothy's Bess's Ben in the same novel. Observation is, indeed, needed for the novel, but some kinds of observation are destructive of all individualising. Tell a painter to observe his hand as he paints and the result will be disastrous. Similarly, if a writer consciously notices the processes which make up his creations, they are doomed as artistic presentations. Observation must have become unconscious and ingrained in the artist's mind before it can aid in giving the realistic details of the novel.
And further, the novelist requires something more than keen observation of the workings of human nature; this is useless without the power and the love of story-telling. Nothing in these essays, nothing in the impression George Eliot made on her friends, indicated her possession of the faculty that builds up incident and character into a story. To the last she was somewhat deficient in this, as is shown by the fact that she displays none of the worker's joy in her own production. To tell a story requires that one should have lived a story. And it was probably the exceptional nature of her relations with George Henry Lewes, which commenced in 1854, that brought about the change in George Eliot which we have been attempting ​to point out. Without going into the merits of the case, for which there are at present no trustworthy data, it is clear that to George Eliot the anti-social attitude which circumstances caused her to take up brought a complete revolution in her whole moral being, which was shaken to the depths. The modern novel is one of problem, not of action, and her own problematic position rendered her the more sensitive to the artistic side of this form of the novel.
These remarks may serve to illustrate a remarkable passage in the same essay from which the previous quotations were taken. George Eliot's theory of the function of the novel is there given, as well as her view of Dickens's art, which was developed by George Henry Lewes in the Fortnightly Review after Dickens's death. The whole passage deserves quotation:—
'The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies. Appeals founded on generalisations and statistics require a sympathy ready-made, a moral sentiment already in activity; but a picture of human life such as a great artist can give surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of ​moral sentiment. When Scott takes us into Luckie Mucklebackit's cottage, or tells the story of The Two Drovers,—when Wordsworth sings to us the reverie of Poor Susan,—when Kingsley shows us Alton Locke gazing yearningly over the gate which leads from the highway into the first wood he ever saw,—when Hornung paints a group of chimney-sweepers,—more is done towards linking the higher classes with the lower, towards obliterating the vulgarity of exclusiveness, than by hundreds of sermons and philosophical dissertations. Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellowmen beyond the bounds of our personal lot. All the more sacred is the task of the artist when he undertakes to paint the life of the People. Falsification here is far more pernicious than in the more artificial aspects of life. It is not so very serious that we should have false ideas about evanescent fashions—about the manners and conversations of beaux and duchesses; but it is serious that our sympathy with the perennial joys and struggles, the toil, the tragedy, and the humour in the life of our more heavily laden fellow-men, should be perverted, and turned towards a false object instead of the true one. This perversion is not the less fatal because ​the misrepresentation which gives rise to it has what the artist considers a moral end. The thing for mankind to know is, not what are the motives and influences which the moralist thinks ought to act on the labourer or the artisan, but what are the motives and influences which do act on him. We want to be taught to feel, not for the heroic artisan or the sentimental peasant, but for the peasant in all his coarse apathy, and the artisan in all his suspicious selfishness. We have one great novelist who is gifted with the utmost power of rendering the external traits of our town population; and if he could give us their psychological character—their conceptions of life, and their emotions—with the same truth as their idiom and manners, his books would be the greatest contribution Art has ever made to the awakening of social sympathies. But while he can copy Mrs. Plornish's colloquial style:with the delicate accuracy of a sun-picture, while there is the same startling inspiration in his description of the gestures and phrases of "Boots," as in the speeches of Shakespeare's mobs or numskulls, he scarcely ever passes from the humorous and external to the emotional and tragic, without becoming as transcendent in his unreality as he was a moment before in his artistic truthfulness. ​But for the precious salt of his humour, which compels him to reproduce external traits that serve, in some degree, as a corrective to his frequently false psychology, his preternaturally virtuous poor children and artisans, his melodramatic boatmen and courtesans, would be as noxious as Eugene Sue's idealised proletaires in encouraging the miserable fallacy that high morality and refined sentiment can grow out of harsh social relations, ignorance, and want; or that the working classes are in a condition to enter at once into a millennial state of altruism, wherein every one is caring for every one else, and no one for himself.'
The frequent reference to psychology in this passage is significant, and indicates the dangerous tendency in George Eliot's own art which led to the psychological strain in Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, and finally resulted in the psychological scarecrows of Theophrastus Such. To the novelist 'the curtain is the picture,' and if he turns to the psychologist to analyse the painting, only the canvas and frame remain intact. There is too great a tendency for the psychological novelist to regard his characters as so many corpora vilia for his scientific theories. Luckily for George Eliot her interests were ethical rather than psychological, and if she ever does violence to ​art, it is in the interest of morality rather than of science.
And this leads us to discuss for a moment the need of culture for the novelist. Obviously intellectual training is not alone sufficient. George Henry Lewes was exactly on a par with George Eliot in this regard, yet his Ranthorpe was deservedly a failure. Nor is culture combined with observation a complete equipment for the novelist. Riehl is allowed by George Eliot herself to have had a complete knowledge of the German peasant, and was besides a man of great culture; yet his Culturgeschichtliche Novellen, though republished by the Pitt Press, can scarcely rank as classic. On the other hand, Auerbach and George Eliot show that wide culture is no necessary bar to sympathetic delineation of the life furthest removed from culture. In so far as culture is real and has become instinctive and unconscious, it undoubtedly tends to give a wider background to the artistic picture and to affect us at more various points of contact. But observation, psychology, and culture can only increase the artistic value of the novel in so far as they are unconsciously applied and subordinated to the interest of character and incident. The selective principle with regard to the latter cannot be of an intellectual, conscious kind at all: it must clearly be ​of an emotional nature akin to the moral faculty.
It is at this point that we touch the secret spring of George Eliot's art: her whole work is imbued with ethical notions. The novel is, no less than the poem, a criticism of life; and the remarkable influence of George Eliot's novels has been mainly due to the consistent application of moral ideas to the problems set by each novel. Their stimulative effect was due to the fact that her ethical views were in consonance with some of the most advanced ideas of the age. The three chief principles which dominated her thinking were the reign of law in human affairs, the solidarity of society, and the constitution of society as incarnate history (the phrase is Riehl's). Flowing from these were the ethical laws which rule the world of her novels, the principle summed up in Novalis's words, 'Character is Fate,' the radiation of good and evil deeds throughout society, and the supreme claims of family or race. Add to these the scientific tone of impartiality, with its moral analogue, the extension of sympathy to all, and we have exhausted the idées mères of George Eliot's ethical system, which differentiates her novels from all others of the age.
These general remarks on George Eliot's art have been suggested by the essay on ​Riehl's studies of the natural history of German life, in which the author gives at once her theory of the function of the novelist and her general agreement with Riehl on the psychology of the peasants who were to form the main subjects of her novels. Other essays in this volume are similarly interesting,, owing to the light they throw on her religious views. Two of them—on the poet Young and on Dr. Cumming—deal with the chief moral defects she had found in the religion in which she had been brought up. In the former she deals with the Divine Policeman theory of virtue, which was so favoured by Voltaire and was the chief argument formerly used to defend the immortality of the soul. It is impossible to mistake the personal tone of the following protest against this theory:—
'We can imagine the man who "denies his soul immortal" replying, "It is quite possible that you would be a knave, and love yourself alone, if it were not for your belief in immortality; but you are not to force upon me what would result from your own utter want of moral emotion. I am just and honest, not because I expect to live in another world, but because, having felt the pain of injustice and dishonesty towards myself, I have a fellow-feeling with other men, who would suffer the same pain if I were unjust or dis​honest towards them. Why should I give my neighbour short weight in this world, because there is not another world in which I should have nothing to weigh out to him? I am honest because I don't like to inflict evil on others in this life, not because I 'm afraid of evil to myself in another. The fact is, I do not love myself alone, whatever logical necessity there may be for that conclusion in your mind. I have a tender love for my wife, and children, and friends, and through that love I sympathise with like affections in other men. It is a pang to me to witness the suffering of a fellow-being, and I feel his suffering the more acutely because he is mortal—because his life is so short, and I would have it, if possible, filled with happiness and not misery. Through my union and fellowship with the men and women I have seen, I feel a like, though a fainter, sympathy with those I have not seen; and I am able so to live in imagination with the generations to come that their good is not alien to me, and is a stimulus to me to labour for ends which may not benefit myself, but will benefit them. It is possible that you might prefer to 'live the brute.' to sell your country, or to slay your father, if you were not afraid of some disagreeable consequences from the criminal laws of another world; but even if I could con​ceive no motive but by my own worldly interest or the gratification of my animal desires, I have not observed that beastliness, treachery, and parricide are the direct way to happiness and comfort on earth."'
Again, in the scathing review of Dr. Cumming's sermons, George Eliot protests with equal energy against the older Evangelical teaching that all virtue is useless unless done ad majorem Dei gloriam (p. 192). We thus see that it was disagreement with the ethical foundations of the current theology of her time which caused her revolt from it. Again, the chief interest of a somewhat unsympathetic review of Mr. Lecky's History of Rationalism consists in a passage at the end, in which she calls attention to 'the supremely important fact' that science had brought about a conception of the orderly action of law on human nature, a conception which, as has been seen, dominated her whole thought.
The only paper of purely literary interest in this volume is one on Heine, which is for the most part made up of translations of autobiographic fragments. It contains, indeed, an elaborate contrast of wit and humour, which is hardly more successful than the many other attempts in the same direction, and an antithesis of French wit and German humour, which is merely an expansion of a popular prejudice. ​One fine illustration redeems the essay, however; George Eliot gives as a specimen of a Heinesque lyric Wordsworth's She dwelt among the untrodden ways, the last line of which is exactly in the manner of Heine. For the rest one is surprised at the very ordinary and external character of her criticism. Her mind was clearly constructive, not critical, and it is a fundamental error to suppose that her genius was analytical.
An Address to Working Men, by Felix Holt, and an account of a three-months' stay at Weimar complete the essays. The former repeats at some length the political harangues in the novel. When Mr. Lowe said, 'Come, let us educate our new masters,' George Eliot, in the character of a working man, said, 'Come, let us educate ourselves.' Her intensely conservative feeling comes out strongly in her appeals for the preservation of social order; the notion that society is incarnate history was sufficient to condemn with her any sudden alteration in social relations. The chief point of practical advice in the address is, however, the recognition of the need of culture and opportunities for culture by the masses. Of the account of Weimar it is sufficient to say that it might have been written by any English lady of education.
Attached to these essays are a few Leaves ​from a Note-Book that might very well have been omitted. They are of the period and the type of Theophrastus Such, and their style is of the same harsh character, as may be judged by the opening sentence:—
'To lay down in the shape of practical moral rules courses of conduct only to be made real by the rarest states of motive and disposition, tends not to elevate but to degrade the general standard, by turning that rare attainment from an object of admiration into an impossible prescription, against which the average nature first rebels and then flings out ridicule,'
Of course a mind of the power of George Eliot's could not have been occupied with such varied subjects without hitting upon some novel points of view or felicitous phrases. Of the latter we may pick out the reference of Young's faults to a 'pedagogic fallacy,' akin to Mr. Ruskin's 'pathetic fallacy.' Again, the following points are well put:—
'Virtue, with Young, must always squint—must never look straight towards the immediate object of its emotion and effort. Thus, if a man risks perishing in the snow himself rather than forsake a weaker comrade, he must either do this because his hopes and fears are directed to another world, or because he desires to applaud ​himself afterwards! Young, if we may believe him, would despise the action as folly, unless it had these motives. Let us hope he was not so bad as he pretended to be! The tides of the divine life in man move under the thickest ice of theory.'
Love does not say, "I ought to love"–it loves. Pity does not say, "It is right to be pitiful"—it pities. Justice does not say, "I am bound to be just"—it feels justly. It is only where moral emotion is comparatively weak that the contemplation of a rule or theory habitually mingles with its action; and in accordance with this, we think experience, both in literature and life, has shown that the minds which are predominantly didactic are deficient in sympathetic emotion. A man who is perpetually thinking in monitory apophthegms, who has an unintermittent flux of rebuke, can have little energy left for simple feeling.'
'The deepest curse of wrong-doing, whether of the foolish or wicked sort, is that its effects are difficult to be undone. I suppose there is hardly anything more to be shuddered at than that part of the history of disease which shows how, when a man injures his constitution by a life of vicious excess, his children and grandchildren inherit diseased bodies and minds, and how the ​effects of that unhappy inheritance continue to spread beyond our calculation. This is only one example of the law by which human lives are linked together: another example of what we complain of when we point to our pauperism, to the brutal ignorance of multitudes among our fellow-countrymen, to the weight of taxation laid on us by blameable wars, to the wasteful channels made for the public money, to the expense and trouble of getting justice, and call these the effects of bad rule. This is the law that we all bear the yoke of, the law of no man's making, and which no man can undo.'
But such passages are few and far between, and the general impression is left, how much the hack-work of genius resembles that of ordinary mortals. And though not all signs of genius are wanting, these articles are essentially unfinished studies and give no foreshadowing of the finished product. Their interest is purely relative to the light they throw on George Eliot's mental development.
CROSS'S 'LIFE'
HESE long-expected volumes have been compiled with great tact. Mr. Cross has aimed at making them a self-revelation of his wife's career and character, and he has been for the most part successful in the discharge of this difficult undertaking. Some slight confusion may be at times caused by the uninterrupted printing of extracts of diverse tone, date, and subject; this might have been obviated by judicious 'spacing' between the successive entries. There are obviously many omissions, and some of the materials already utilised in Miss Blind's little book would have borne repetition. At times, too, the reader may feel the need of comment or illustration, while the continental descriptions might have been curtailed. But, these slight deductions made, the book is remarkably satisfactory in tone, and is especially noteworthy for a rigid abstinence from anything that could pander to mere curiosity. ​The novel method of extracts arranged in order of time tells the tale spontaneously, and George Eliot the woman stands forth revealed to the world in all the strength and refinement of her intellect, in all the clinging trustfulness of her moral and emotional nature. And as regards George Eliot the writer we learn as much as it is needful to know about the motives and processes of her art and the outward circumstances of her activity as author. The interest of the work naturally divides into the personal and the artistic sides of her life. By a kind of coincidence these are chiefly represented in the first and third volumes respectively, while the intermediate one is a sort of glorified Baedeker, giving George Eliot's impressions of her foreign travels between I860 and 1870. The modern interest in development causes us in the first instance to concentrate our attention on the first volume, dealing with the life up to the production of the first book, Scenes of Clerical Life, including the difficult problem of her relations with George Henry Lewes. We see there a drama of religious development which is peculiarly significant, a display of intellectual precocity and progress, and, above all, a peculiarly sensitive affectionateness, which rules throughout the life and forms its most distinctive as well as most novel feature.
​The peculiarity of the religious development which strikes one most prominently in reading the earlier letters is that, in advancing towards wider views than her earlier Calvinism, George Eliot still found objects for the religious emotion that moved her so strongly in her young days. She 'found religion,' as the ascetics say, in the later forms of her belief as in the earlier, and consecrated her life to the highest and the best equally in the days of Comtism and of Calvinism. This predominantly religious tone gives an emotional unity to her life which might be easily missed, but is really the key to its various seeming fluctuations. Beginning with the conventional expressions of self-conscious humility, 'Oh that I might be made as useful in my lowly and obscure station!' (i. 43) it is seen throughout life in her high ideal of her artistic mission, and finds a final utterance in her characteristic hymn., 'O may I join the choir invisible!' Even in the first revulsion from the old faith she felt the connection between that and the new, as the following passage shows:
'For my part, I wish to be among the ranks of that glorious crusade that is seeking to set Truth's Holy Sepulchre free from a usurped domination. We shall then see her resurrection! Meanwhile, although I cannot ​rank among my principles of action a fear of vengeance eternal, gratitude for predestined salvation, or a revelation of future glories as a reward, I fully participate in the belief that the only heaven here, or hereafter, is to be found in conformity with the will of the Supreme; a continual aiming at the attainment of the perfect ideal, the true logos that dwells in the bosom of the one Father.' And in a very remarkable essay on conformity and compromise, written when she was only twenty-three, the reason of the connection is fully grasped and explained:—
'Agreement between intellects seems unattainable, and we turn to the truth of feeling as the only universal bond of union. We find that the intellectual errors which we once fancied were a mere incrustation have grown into the living body, and that we cannot in the majority of cases wrench them away without destroying vitality. We begin to find that with individuals, as with nations, the only safe revolution is one arising out of the wants which their own progress has generated. It is the quackery of infidelity to suppose that it has a nostrum for all mankind, and to say to all and singular, "Swallow my opinions and you shall be whole." If, then, we are debarred by such considerations from trying to reorganise ​opinions, are we to remain aloof from our fellow-creatures on occasions when we may fully sympathise with the feelings exercised, although our own have been melted into another mould? Ought we not on every opportunity to seek to have our feelings in harmony, though not in union, with those who are often richer in the fruits of faith, though not in reason, than ourselves?'
One thing is clear and instructive. The transition, brought about in the main by the Hennells, took a grievous weight from off her spirits. Whereas before the change we find her saying, 'I am aweary, aweary—longing for rest,' and speaking of herself as 'alone in the world,' so soon as the change comes, 'I can rejoice,' she says, 'in all the joys of humanity'; and she soon speaks of the duty of finding happiness and of learning how to be happy in a most satisfactory way. She is speaking from experience when in 1847 she suggests as a subject she should like to work out, 'the superiority of the consolations of philosophy to those of (so-called) religion.' It is curious to contrast all this with the totally dissimilar behaviour of Carlyle, who became the more morose the more widely he departed from ancestral faith. And there is plenty of evidence in these volumes that George Eliot's bodily sufferings began as early and were ​probably as acute as Carlyle's. Before she is nineteen we hear of sick-headaches, and these follow any unusual exertion throughout life. Her gentle heroism under this infliction contrasts favourably with Carlyle's apostrophes to gods and men on the ills of dyspepsia.
Of equal interest is it in this first volume to follow the rapid growth of George Eliot's intellectual power. Very few details are given here of the actual character of her studies in early days. But here and there her thirst for knowledge makes itself seen even in the days of Calvinistic strictness. At times we catch glimpses of the artistic preparation. A world of her own creation is referred to opprobriously, and her imagination is her enemy in the days when all fiction was pernicious, as is stated in one of the first letters to Miss Lewis—an amusing bit of irony, in the old Greek sense. Very soon the tendency to scientific illustration comes, and the following passage shows the power of description as early as 1841:—
'The birds are consulting about their migrations, the trees are putting on the hectic or the pallid hues of decay, and begin to strew the ground, that one's very footsteps may not disturb the repose of earth and air, while they give us a scent that is a perfect anodyne to the restless spirit.'
​And somewhat later there is a fine passage descriptive of fireworks seen on the Lake of Geneva, with 'the pale moon looking at it all with a sort of grave surprise.' We may notice the strain of ethical reflection so characteristic of the novels in the recognition of the purgative effect of war, in the. maxim, 'Live and teach,' proposed as a substitute for the proverbial 'Live and learn,' in her estimate of trouble as being a deepened gaze into life. Among the chief intellectual influences before her father's death in 1849, which formed the first great crisis in her life, we can trace George Sand, Carlyle, Rousseau, and Spinoza, and, above all, the converse with the Hennells and the work at Strauss which resulted from this. But perhaps the chief impression of power is left by a few brief but weighty remarks on the men she came in contact with, even before she left the provincial circles. George Dawson she estimates at once as 'not a great man,' whereas Emerson is appreciated as the first man she had known. The same with men known through their writings. Disraeli has 'good veins, as Bacon would say, but there is not enough blood in them.' Hannah More was that most disagreeable of all monsters, a blue-stocking. Somewhat later, when on the Westminster staff, she rated J. S. Mill at something more nearly his true value ​than most of her contemporaries, and was among the first to welcome the promise of Mr. Herbert Spencer. Of all the chief gifts of intellect displayed in her works we find adumbrations before she left Coventry. We miss, however, every indication of wit or humour till the life of the capitals is reached in Geneva and London. The spirit of observation becomes self-conscious,, and Lewes is hit off as a 'sort of miniature Mirabeau,' Alboni as 'a very fat siren,' Combe as 'an apostle with a front and back drawing-room.' Leroux 'disagrees with all but Pierre Leroux.' In short, we have all the indications of George Eliot the novel-writer except the novels. And even about these there is a remarkable quotation from a letter of Mrs. Bray to her sister on September 25th, 1846, exactly ten years before Amos Barton: 'Miss Evans looks very brilliant just now. We fancy she must be writing her novel.' Yet this must have only been an Ahnung—as Mr. Cross is fond of saying—for no people were more surprised at the revelation of George Eliot's abilities as a novelist than the Brays a dozen years after.
Her relation to the Brays is in many respects decisive and typical. We come to the secret recesses of her being, to the key of all that is problematic in her career and character, when we encounter the remarkable union of ​hard-headed intellect and impetuous affection, such as we see in her letters to the Brays. Nor does this die away with youth: the same gushing tone there is no other word for it is kept up with Miss Hennell to the last, and is even adopted with friends gained in the decline of life. This stern independence of intellect combined with a complete dependence on others for the emotional life, gives the characteristic tone throughout her life, and we are continually coming across a severe philosophical disquisition side by side with an outburst of uncontrollable affection or longing. She has doubtless portrayed this side of her nature in Maggie Tulliver with her impulsive affection, her emotional dependence on others. But she had recognised it much earlier when speaking of herself as 'ivy-like as I am by nature,' and in this peculiarly womanly quality she remained a very woman to the last. Manly intellect and girlish heart were united in her to an unusual degree.
This problematic nature serves to explain—so far as it bears explanation—he crux of her life—her union with George Henry Lewes. Mr. Cross, with much tact and wisdom, refuses to discuss the question. The only contribution he gives to its solution is a letter addressed to Mrs. Bray a year after the 'union' was entered upon. Here the question is made ​to turn on a difference of opinion as to the marriage laws, and George Eliot's only defence, if any, is that she has not entered on ' light and easily broken ties.' But as a matter of fact she would have herself owned that this was no defence against setting herself at variance with the moral instincts of ail whom she held dear. It is true that six years before she had said, à propos of Jane Eyre:—
'All self-sacrifice is good, but one would like it to be in a somewhat nobler cause than that of a diabolical law which chains a man soul and body to a putrefying carcass,'
But that would be at best an excuse for Lewes, not for herself. As a matter of fact there was no excuse, and in a very significant letter to Mrs. Taylor she practically surrenders any pleas as regards the iniquity of the marriage laws, and desires the legal title she should theoretically have despised:—
'For the last six years I have ceased to be "Miss Evans" for any one who has personal relations with me—having held myself under all the responsibilities of a married woman. I wish this to be distinctly understood; and when I tell you that we have a great boy of eighteen at home who calls me "mother," as well as two other boys, almost as tall, who write to me under the same name, you will understand that the ​point is not one of mere egoism or personal dignity, when I request that any one who has a regard for me will cease to speak of me by my maiden name.'
In reality, however, the clue to her conduct is to be sought in the girlish impulsiveness of her affectionate nature, which seems so hard to connect with her accuracy and independence of thought. She speaks of Lewes having 'quite won my liking in spite of myself' a year before their flight, and her hurried letter to the Brays at the last moment shows that the momentous decision was the work of impulse. She had evidently found in him some one to cling to amid the dreary solitude of life in London lodgings, and Lewes took the responsibility of accepting her sacrifice.
In justice to Lewes it must be remembered that he could have had no idea of the transcendent nature of the woman whose life he was accepting. Mr. F. W. Myers tells a story of some impudent ass who wrote to George Eliot after Middlemarch condoling with her for being mated to a Casaubon. There would have been less incongruity if Lewes had been compared to Ladislaw, who was, one feels, almost equally unworthy of Dorothea. Lewes is gradually being rated at his true worth: a philosopher among journalists, a journalist among philosophers, he has left behind him ​nothing that will live, not even the overrated Life of Goethe, the critical portions of which are very thin. But George Eliot was herself one of the first to protest against the habit of mind which requires equality of gifts in husband and wife, and we cannot hope that every Elizabeth Barrett will find her Robert Browning.
And it must be owned that, once the lapse committed, Lewes did all in his power to keep at a distance every bad influence. He encouraged her first writing, and checked by his vivacity the tendency to over-seriousness which came to her with the knowledge of her powers and responsibilities. All the petty details of life were warded off from her by Lewes with watchful care. The somewhat unreasoning sensibility to adverse criticism was carefully considered by Lewes, who acted as her private secretary. And all this was effected through long years often filled with illness of his own. He may have encouraged in later years the psychological strain of her work to its detriment, and whatever glimpses we have of his critical influence in early years seem by no means fortunate: it was through him, e.g., that Dinah was made to marry Adam Bede.
And, above all, the lapse must be forgiven or forgotten which led to that fusion of the ​intellect and the emotions necessary to the artistic impulse. Everything seems to show that George Eliot's memories of her home life would have slumbered for ever but for this moral crisis in her own life, which stirred her to the depths of her being and withdrew her from the conventions of society. There is not the slightest indication throughout the biography, except the chance shot of Mrs. Bray mentioned above, which could lead her friends to imagine any other future for George Eliot than one similar to that of her friend Miss Sara Hennell. Her attitude of moral defiance to the world threw her back on the resources of her own life and gave birth to the peculiarities of her art. What those peculiarities are, and the light thrown upon them by the book before us, must now demand our attention.
The problem of George Eliot's life is to explain how a mind of so eminently a speculative turn should have shown the artistic impulse for creation so late in life and should have succeeded so eminently. The characteristics of her art show us the reverse of this difficulty. We have to reconcile her distinct power of realising her characters with her equally marked capacity for what we may term moralising them. A well-known example will illustrate the union, in this case ​the fusion, of the two modes of work. In the catastrophe of The Mill on the Floss the novelist describes the mass of broken timber bearing down upon the brother and sister (physicists say the boat would always keep ahead). Tom sees it, cries, 'It is coming, Maggie!' clasps her, and they meet their fate. For the artist who only wished to realise the scene this would suffice. But with George Eliot there is the equal need to 'moralise' it, and so she continues: 'The boat reappeared—but brother and sister had gone down in an embrace never to be parted: living through again in one supreme moment the days when they had clasped their little hands in love and roamed the daisied fields together.' The beauty of this passage must not blind us to its inartistic, or rather extra-artistic, character. The emotions, æsthetic or moral, which the artist desired to produce by this reference to childhood's days ought to have been produced spontaneously by the catastrophe itself if the previous presentation of their childhood had been artistically effective. But it is George Eliot's peculiarity that she tries to bring into consciousness those feelings which her narrative ought to have produced by itself. She makes two attempts to produce her effect—by artistic presentation and by philosophic reflection. By so endeavouring she practically ​confesses the failure of her art to do its work unaided. But much of that failure consists in the nature of the work which she wished to do with her novels.
Before she had written any work of imagination, Lewes expressed his doubts whether she had the power of dramatic presentation, though she might have 'wit, description, and philosophy.' As it turned out, she possessed the power of dramatic presentation in a very high degree; the breakfast at which Arthur Donnithorne did not confess to Parson Irwine, the last meeting between Dorothea and Rosamund, Tulliver's inscription in the family Bible, the appearance of Silas Marner at the Rainbow, Klesmer's visit to the Meyricks, may be instanced as examples of this. But the power of imaginative presentation, though it must have always existed, came to her late in life. It was most probably aroused by the attitude of moral defiance toward the world which her relations to Lewes had brought about. But there is also evidence in these volumes that the process of artistic assimilation was with her unusually slow, as she recognised in an interesting letter to Madame Bodichon:—
'I do wish much to see more of human life—how can one see enough in the short years one has to stay in the world? But I meant ​that at present my mind works with the most freedom and the keenest sense of poetry in my remotest past, and there are many strata to be worked through before I can begin to use, artistically, any material I may gather in the present. Curiously enough, à propos of your remark about Adam Bede, there is much less "out of my own life" in that book—i.e. the materials are much more a combination from imperfectly-known and widely-sundered elements than the Clerical Scenes.'
But while her imagination was thus ruminating, as it were, her whole spiritual life was taken up with an entirely different order of interests. Beginning with that thirst of knowledge for its own sake which goes to make the great scholar, it was soon diverted into the two chief channels of intellectual interest which characterised her age—the decay of the older religious ideals and the growth of a scientific conception of the universe, including man. And with her these two branches of speculation were reconciled by her recognition of the facts of human emotion underlying both. The following passage from an instructive note on The Spanish Gypsy, unfortunately too long to quote in its entirety, puts the germ of George Eliot's reconciliation of religion and science:—
'There is really no moral "sanction" but ​this inward impulse. The will of God is the same thing as the will of other men, compelling us to work and avoid what they have seen to be harmful to social existence. Disjoined from any perceived good, the divine will is simply so much as we have ascertained of the facts of existence which compel obedience at our peril.'
These facts which compel obedience are declared to be 'the part which is played in the general human lot by hereditary conditions in the largest sense and the fact that what we call duty is entirely made up of such conditions.' The scientific conception of law in human nature was combined by her with the moral or religious fact of duty. Besides this the Comtist view of society as an organism was translated into the ethical consideration of the radiation of good and evil deeds throughout society. The moral progress of the world would depend, according to her, upon the degree in which men's minds were trained to see the consequences of their egoistic impulses. In an interesting correspondence with the Hon. Mrs. Ponsonby, where she sharply distinguishes her theory from the physical Positivism of Professor Tyndall and others, she clearly puts this aspiration:—
'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.'
It is impossible to say with what success she would have handled these views in the connected exposition of a philosophical work. As all the world now knows, she chose to expound them in the form of fiction, and determined to make the novel what history is said to be—philosophy teaching by example. At first she was not conscious of any such aim. When the Scenes were completed she felt only 'a deep satisfaction in having done a piece of faithful work that will perhaps remain like a primrose root in the hedgerow and gladden and chasten human hearts in years to come.' Nor is there any hint of conscious motive in Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss, her two greatest works. But immediately after the great success of Adam Bede the sense of her responsibilities settled upon her with only too heavy pressure. She feels it her 'vocation to ​speak to one's fellow-men' and make her work 'an instrument of culture.' And henceforward this motive was conscious with her, and in each of her creations she looks round for some idea which the fiction shall embody. The process begins with Silas Marner, which grew from the merest millet-seed of thought.' Of this she says: 'It sets—or is intended to set—in a strong light the remedial influences of pure, natural human relations.' And in Silas Marner the balance between artistic creation and philosophic construction is most evenly held of all her books, of which it is in a way the quintessence. Henceforth, however, the philosophic interest is predominant, and her words are intended more to point a moral than to adorn a tale. Romola has its moral summed up in the last words of the book, and in an elaborate letter to Mr. R. H. Hutton she avows her intention of expressing certain truths by the relations of Baldo and Baldassare, of Tito and his patrons, and seems to be chiefly interested in Romola herself as presenting a moral problem. The elaborate note on The Spanish Gypsy before referred to gives the motif of the work as the clashing of individual desires and hereditary claims. Middlemarch, as its Proem states, is a contribution towards the woman question, though its scale happily caused it to overflow into a study of provincial ​life. Deronda was intended to ennoble Judaism in the estimation of Christians and of Jews, and it would almost seem from a letter to Professor Kaufmann, couched in extravagant terms, that the only object in introducing Grandcourt and Gwendolen was to contrast Christian society with Jewish family life, to the disadvantage of the former. In all these later works the novel in George Eliot's hand had become the Tendenz-roman, not alone the philosophic novel, as Mr. Shorthouse, for example, conceives it, but philosophy in the form of the novel.
It is not our intention to discuss here the artistic value of the Tendenz-roman. The function of criticism is to classify and analyse much more than to judge. Its artistic limitations are obvious: with the whole field of life before it, the Tendenz-roman has to confine itself to its Tendenz. Its artistic value is dependent in large measure on its philosophic truth. The temptation to philosophise formally has its dangers, as George Eliot recognised when she wrote to Mr. Blackwood that she is in danger of refining where novel-readers only think of skipping. But the point that comes out with most fulness in this Life is the high function which such writing must claim for itself, 'the high responsibilities of literature that undertakes to represent life.' The following catena of passages from the book ​before us will show the sacredness which attached to George Eliot's calling as she viewed its functions:—
'My function 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. It is one thing to feel keenly for one's fellow-being; another to say, "This step, and this alone, will be the best to take for the removal of particular calamities."'
'The things you tell me are just such as I need to know—I mean about the help my book is to the people who read it. The weight of my 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 think æsthetic teaching is the highest of all teaching, because it deals with life in its highest complexity. But if it ceases to be purely æsthetic—if it lapses anywhere from the picture to the diagram—it becomes the most offensive of all teaching.'
This lofty sense of the sacredness of her ​calling may in some measure account for the sensitiveness which she showed towards adverse criticism. When a writer is advocating a doctrine it is natural that he should be disappointed if his views are not even seen. And certainly by couching her opinions in the form of novels George Eliot did her best to withhold them from all but the most thoughtful. Hence a continual feeling—often expressed in her diary—that her efforts had been vain, a 'horrible scepticism' as to the effectiveness of her work. Lewes used to keep from her all critical notices except those that were favourable. The Athenæum is considered to have given 'the best literary critique' of The Spanish Gypsy, while, on the other hand, certain expressions in a letter to Mr. Charles Lewes show that our review of Theophrastus Such displeased her. And, indeed, as was but natural, she got to know of most unfavourable criticisms, notwithstanding all her contempt for 'damnatory praise from ignorant journalists.' Her answers to those criticisms are often of interest; thus she informs one of her correspondents that there is not one thing put into Mr. Poyser's mouth that is due to memory. If so, it is curious that she should make Parson Irwine say of one of them that it is as good as a fable of Æsop. So, too, we learn that there is not a single portrait in Adam Bede—a statement ​that depends very much on the exact meaning to be attached to the term 'portrait.' This excessive sensibility is seen at its maximum intensity in connection with the imposture attempted by Mr. Liggins of Nuneaton. One would have thought that a woman possessed of such powers of humour would have been more impressed by the ridiculous than by the serious aspect of the incident. But George Eliot returns again and again to the subject in a tone of sincere annoyance.
And finally, the predominance of the philosophic over the artistic spirit in George Eliot has tended to make these volumes, containing the record of her private life, rather dull and—dare we say it?—commonplace. She was a great woman, but this is not a great book. Like all thinkers, she tended to weave a web of theory between herself and life, and seemed to reserve all her humour and liveliness for her books. It is possible that Mr. Cross has created this impression by an ill-judged excision of anything that does not display his wife on the stilts of philosophy and ethics. But as he claims vivacity as one of her prominent qualities, it is more likely that it did not display itself in her letter-writing. And the tendency to abstract theorising has removed from these volumes almost all personal traits of the many distinguished men and ​women with whom George Eliot came in contact. Even the personal details of her own life had, for the most part, been discounted in the articles that appeared after her death. What we chiefly notice are some of her literary opinions and prejudices. Byron was the most vulgar-minded genius that ever lived, the Iliad is a semi-savage poem, Père Goriot a hateful book (i.e. has no Tendenz), the Origin of Species will not produce much effect because ill arranged, but expresses the adhesion of a well-known naturalist (this on the appearance of the book). Before the Vie de Jésus she felt more kinship with Renan than with any other contemporary writer, but afterwards she gives up her high estimate of Renan. At times we may see bits of the novels in the making. Overbeck at Rome clearly suggested Neumann in Middlemarch, Mr. Frederic Harrison seems to have suggested the Legend of Jubal and supplied the legal technicalities of Felix Holt. We may catch the origin of the opening scene of Deronda in the girl gambler described here (iii. 171). A sensible letter to Mrs. Beecher Stowe on spiritualism may be recommended to the notice of the Society for Psychical Research. Mr. Cross has given with admirable taste a few Boswellisms. His wife told him that Romola found her young and left her old. The interview between Dorothea and Rosamund was ​written off in a fever of excitement, and stands now as at first written. But these items of interest are few and far between, and the book as a whole might more easily be the record of a savant than of a literary artist. In every way the total impression is sad and sombre. And so we lay down these volumes with the impression of a life disfigured by one great lapse that overshadowed it to the end, but ennobled by high gifts devoted with self-denying thoroughness to a lofty conception of the function of the depicter of human life. The novelist's art has never been made so sacramental as by George Eliot.