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BY
A great part of the correspondence in the present volume has not
hitherto appeared in print, and has been kindly placed at my disposal by
Mrs. Bray, Mrs. Gilchrist, Mrs. Clifford, Miss Marks, Mr. William
M. Rossetti, and the late James Thomson. I have also quoted from letters addressed to Miss Phelps which were published in Harper's Magazine of March 1882, and from one or two other articles that have appeared in periodical publications. For permission to make use of this correspondence my thanks are due to Mr. C.L. Lewes.
By far the most exhaustive published account of GEORGE
ELIOT'S life and writings, and the one of which I have most
freely availed myself, is Mr. Call's admirable essay in the
Westminster Review of July 1881. Although this, as indeed
every other article on the subject, states GEORGE ELIOT'S
birthplace incorrectly, it contains many important
data not mentioned elsewhere. To the article
on GEORGE ELIOT in Blackwood's Magazine for
February 1881, I owe many interesting particulars, chiefly connected with
the beginning of GEORGE ELIOT'S literary career. Amongst
other papers consulted may be mentioned a noticeable one by Miss Simcox in
the Contemporary Review, and an appreciative notice by Mr.
Frederick Myers in Scribner's Magazine, as well as
articles in Harper's Magazine of May 1881, and
The Century of August 1882. Two quaint pamphlets,
'Seth Bede: the Methody,' and 'George Eliot in
Derbyshire,' by Guy Roslyn, although full of inaccuracies, have also
furnished some curious items of information.
MATHILDE BLIND.
The reason assigned by George Eliot for this literary superiority of
Frenchwomen consists in their having had the courage of their sex. They
thought and felt as women, and when they wrote, their books became the
fullest expression of their womanhood. And by being true to themselves, by
only seeking inspiration from their own life-experience, instead of
servilely copying that of men, their letters and memoirs, their novels and
pictures have a distinct, nay unique, value, for the student of art and
literature. Englishwomen, on the other hand, have not followed
the spontaneous impulses of nature. They have not allowed free play to the peculiarly feminine element, preferring to mould their intellectual products on the masculine pattern. For that reason, says George Eliot, their writings are "usually an absurd exaggeration of the masculine style, like the swaggering gait of a bad actress in male attire."
This novel theory, concerning a specifically feminine manifestation of
the intellect, is doubly curious when one compares it with Madame de
Staël's famous saying, "Le génie
n'a pas de sexe." But an aphorism, however brilliant,
usually contains only one half the truth, and there is every reason to
think that women have already, and will much more largely, by-and-by,
infuse into their works certain intellectual and emotional qualities which
are essentially their own. Shall we, however, admit George Eliot's
conclusion that Frenchwomen alone have hitherto shown any of this original
bias? Several causes are mentioned by her in explanation of this
exceptional merit. Among these causes there is one which would probably
occur to every one who began to reflect on this subject. The influence of
the "Salon" in developing and stimulating the finest feminine
talents has long been recognised. In this school for women the gift of
expression was carried to the utmost pitch of perfection. By their active
co-operation in the discussion of the most vital subjects, thought became
clear, luminous, and forcible; sentiment gained indescribable graces of
refinement; and wit, with its brightest scintillations, lit up the sombre
background of life.
But among other causes enumerated as accounting for that more
spontaneous productivity of Frenchwomen, attributed to them by George
Eliot, there is
one which would probably have occurred to no other mind than hers, and which is too characteristic of her early scientific tendencies to be omitted. For according to her, the present superiority of Frenchwomen is mainly due to certain physiological peculiarities of the Gallic race. Namely, to the "small brain and vivacious temperament which permit the fragile system of woman to sustain the superlative activity requisite for intellectual creativeness," whereas "the larger brain and slower temperament of the English and Germans are in the womanly organisation generally dreamy and passive. So that the physique of a woman may suffice as the substratum for a superior Gallic mind, but is too thin a soil for a superior Teutonic one."
So knotty and subtle a problem must be left to the scientist of the
future to decide. Perhaps some promising young physiologist, profiting by
the "George Henry Lewes Studentship" founded by George Eliot,
may some day satisfactorily elucidate this question. In the meanwhile it is
at least gratifying to reflect that she does not deny the future
possibilities of even English and German women. She admits that conditions
might arise which in their case also would be favourable to the highest
creative effort; conditions which would modify the existing state of things
according to which, to speak in her own scientific phraseology: "The
woman of large capacity can seldom rise beyond the absorption of ideas; her
physical conditions refuse to support the energy required for spontaneous
activity; the voltaic pile is not strong enough to produce
crystallisations."
But was the author of 'Adam Bede' not herself destined to be
a triumphant refutation of her theory?
Or had those more favourable circumstances mentioned as vague possibilities already arisen in her case? Not that we believe, for that matter, in the superior claims of illustrious Frenchwomen. It is true George Eliot enumerates a formidable list of names. But on the whole we may boast of feminine celebrities that need not shrink from the comparison.
There is, of course, much truth in the great Englishwoman's
generous praise of her French compeers. "Mme. de
Sévigné remains," she says, "the single instance
of a woman who is supreme in a class of literature which has engaged the
ambition of men; Mme. Dacier still reigns the queen of blue-stockings,
though women have long studied Greek without shame; Mme. de
Staël's name still rises to the lips when we are asked to mention
a woman of great intellectual power; Mme. Roland is still the unrivalled
type of the sagacious and sternly heroic yet lovable woman; George Sand is
the unapproached artist who, to Jean Jacques' eloquence and deep sense
of external nature, unites the clear delineation of character and the
tragic depth of passion."
Shall we be forced to admit that the representative women of England
cannot justly be placed on as high a level? Is it so certain that they,
too, did not speak out of the fulness of their womanly natures? That they
too did not feel the genuine need to express modes of thought and feeling
peculiar to themselves, which men, if at all, had but inadequately
expressed hitherto?
Was not Queen Elizabeth the best type of a female ruler, one whose keen
penetration enabled her to choose her ministers with infallible judgment
Did not Fanny Burney distil the delicate aroma of
girl-
hood in one of the most delightful of novels? Or what of Jane Austen, whose microscopic fidelity of observation has a well-nigh scientific accuracy, never equalled unless in the pages of the author we are writing of? Sir Walter Scott apparently recognised the eminently feminine inspiration of her writings, as he says: "That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements, and feelings, and characters of ordinary life, which is for me the most wonderful I ever met with. The Bow-wow strain I can do myself like any now agoing; but the exquisite touch, which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth, of the descriptions and the sentiment, is denied to me." Then turning to the Brontës, does not one feel the very heartbeats of womanhood in those powerful utterances that seem to spring from some central emotional energy? Again, does not Mrs. Browning occupy a unique place among poets? Is there not a distinctively womanly strain of emotion in the throbbing tides of her high-wrought melodious song? And, to come to George Eliot herself, will any one deny that, in the combination of sheer intellectual power with an unparalleled vision for the homely details of life, she takes precedence of all writers of this or any other country? To some extent this wonderful woman conforms to her own standard. She undoubtedly adds to the common fund of crystallised human experience, as literature might be called, something which, is specifically feminine. But, on the other hand, her intellect excels precisely in those qualities habitually believed to be masculine, one of its chief characteristics consisting in the grasp of abstract philosophical ideas. This faculty, however,
by no means impairs those instinctive processes of the imagination by which true artistic work is produced; George Eliot combining in an unusual degree the subtlest power of analysis with that happy gift of genius which enabled her to create such characters as Amos Barton, Hetty, Mrs. Poyser, Maggie, and Tom Tulliver, Godfrey Cass and Caleb Garth, which seem to come fresh from the mould of Nature itself. Indeed, she has hardly a rival among women in this power of objective imagination by which she throws her whole soul into natures of the most varied and opposite types, whereas George Sand only succeeds greatly when she is thoroughly in sympathy with her creations.
After George Eliot's eulogium of French women, one feels tempted to
institute a comparison between these two great contemporaries, who occupied
the same leading position in their respective countries. But it will
probably always remain a question of idiosyncracy which of the two one is
disposed to rank higher, George Eliot being the greatest realist, George
Sand the greatest idealist, of her sex. The works of the French writer are,
in fact, prose poems rather than novels. They are not studies of life, but
life interpreted by the poet's vision. George Sand cannot give us a
description of any scene in nature, of her own feelings, of a human
character, without imparting to it some magical effect as of objects seen
under the transfiguring influence of moonlight or storm clouds; whereas
George Eliot loves to bathe her productions in the broad pitiless midday
light, which leaves no room for illusion, but reveals all nature with
uncompromising directness. The one has more of that primitive imagination
which seizes on the elemental side of life--on the spectacle of the
starry heavens or of Alpine solitudes, on the insurrection and tumult of human passion, on the shocks of revolution convulsing the social order--while the other possesses, in a higher degree, the acute intellectual perception for the orderly sequence of life, for that unchangeable round of toil which is the lot of the mass of men, and for the earth in its homelier aspects as it tells on our daily existence. In George Sand's finest work there is a sweet spontaneity, almost as if she were an oracle of Nature uttering automatically the divine message. But, on the other hand, when the inspiration forsakes her, she drifts along on a windy current of words, the fatal facility of her pen often beguiling the writer into vague diffuseness and unsubstantial declamation.
In this respect, also, our English novelist is the opposite of George
Sand, for George Eliot invariably remains the master of her genius: indeed,
she thoroughly fulfils Goethe's demand that if you set up for an
artist you must command art. This intellectual self-restraint never
forsakes George Eliot, who always selects her means with a thorough
knowledge of the ends to be attained. The radical difference in the genius
of these two writers, to both of whom applies Mrs. Browning's apt
appellation of "large-brained woman and large-hearted man,"
extends naturally to their whole tone of thought. George Sand is
impassioned, turbulent, revolutionary, the spiritual daughter of Rousseau,
with an enthusiastic faith in man's future destiny. George Eliot,
contemplative, observant, instinctively conservative, her imagination
dearly loving to do "a little Toryism on the sly," is as yet
the sole outcome of the modern positive spirit in imaginative
literature--the sole novelist
who has incorporated in an artistic form some of the leading ideas of Comte, of Mazzini, and of Darwin. In fact, underlying all her art there is the same rigorous teaching of the inexorable laws which govern the life of man. The teaching that not liberty but duty is the condition of existence; the teaching of the incalculable effects of hereditary transmission, with the solemn responsibilities it involves; the teaching of the inherent sadness and imperfection in human nature, which render resignation the first virtue of man.
In fact, as a moral influence, George Eliot cannot so much be compared
with George Sand, or with any other novelist of her generation, as with
Carlyle. She had, indeed, a far more explicit ethical code to offer than
the author of 'Sartor Resartus.' For though the immense force
of the latter's personality, glowing through his writings, had a tonic
effect in promoting a healthy moral tone, there was little of positive
moral truth to be gathered from them. But the lessons which George Eliot
would fain teach to men were most unmistakable in their bearing--the
lessons of pitying love towards fellow-men; of sympathy with all human
suffering; of unwavering faithfulness towards the social bond, consisting
in the claims of race, of country, of family; of unflagging aspiration
after that life which is most beneficent to the community, that life, in
short, towards which she herself aspired in the now famous prayer to reach
"That purest heaven, be to other souls
The cup of strength in some great agony,
Enkindle generous ardour, feed pure love,
Beget the smiles that have no cruelty--
Be the sweet presence of a good diffused,
And in diffusion ever more intense."
and fiction. A shadowing forth of the same nature is discernible in the devotion of Stradivarius to his noble craft; and even in the tender paternity of Mr. Tulliver there are indications of another phase of the same individuality.
Like Adam Bede, Mr. Evans from carpenter rose to be forester, and from
forester to be land-agent. It was in the latter capacity alone that he was
ever known in Warwickshire. At one time he was surveyor to five estates in
the midland counties--those of Lord Aylesford, Lord Lifford, Mr.
Bromley Davenport, Mrs. Gregory, and Sir Roger Newdigate. The last was his
principal employer. Having early discerned the exceptional capacity of the
man, Sir Roger induced him to settle in Warwickshire, and take charge of
his estates. Sir Roger's seat, Arbury Hall, is the original of the
charming description of Cheverel Manor in 'Mr. Gilfil's Love
Story.' It is said that Mr. Evans's trustworthiness had become
proverbial in the county. But while faithfully serving his employers he
also enjoyed great popularity among their tenants. He was gentle, but of
indomitable firmness; and while stern to the idle and unthrifty, he did not
press heavily on those who might be behindhand with their rent, owing to
ill-luck or misfortune, on quarter days.
Mr. Evans was twice married. He had lost his first wife, by whom he had
a son and a daughter, before settling in Warwickshire. Of his second wife,
whose maiden name was Pearson, very little is known. She must, therefore,
according to Schiller, have been a pattern of womanhood; for he says that
the best women, like the best ruled states, have no history. We have it on
very good authority, however, that
Mrs. Hackit, in 'Amos Barton,' is a faithful likeness of George Eliot's mother. This may seem startling at first, but, on reflection, she is the woman one might have expected, being a strongly-marked figure, with a heart as tender as her tongue is sharp. She is described as a thin woman, with a chronic liver-complaint, of indefatigable industry and epigrammatic speech; who, "in the utmost enjoyment of spoiling a friend's self-satisfaction, was never known to spoil a stocking." A notable housewife, whose clockwork regularity in all domestic affairs was such that all her farm-work was done by nine o'clock in the morning, when she would sit down to her loom. "In the same spirit, she brought out her furs on the first of November, whatever might be the temperature. She was not a woman weakly to accommodate herself to shilly-shally proceedings. If the season didn't know what it ought to do, Mrs. Hackit did. In her best days it was always sharp weather at 'Gunpowder Plot,' and she didn't like new fashions." Keenly observant and quick of temper, she was yet full of good nature, her sympathy showing itself in the active helpfulness with which she came to the assistance of poor Milly Barton, and the love she showed to her children, who, however, declined kissing her.
Is there not a strong family resemblance between this character and Mrs.
Poyser, that masterpiece of George Eliot's art? Mary Ann's gift
of pointed speech was therefore mother-wit, in the true sense, and her rich
humour and marvellous powers of observation were derived from the same
side, while her conscientiousness, her capacity, and that faculty of taking
pains, which is so large a factor in the development of genius, came more
directly from the father.
Mr. Evans had three children by his second wife, Christiana, Isaac, and
Mary Ann. "It is interesting, I think," writes George Eliot, in
reply to some questions of an American lady, "to know whether a
writer was born in a central or border district--a condition which
always has a strongly determining influence. I was born in Warwickshire,
but certain family traditions connected with more northerly districts made
these districts a region of poetry to me in my early childhood." In
the autobiographical sonnets, entitled 'Brother and Sister,' we
catch a glimpse of the mother preparing her children for their accustomed
ramble, by stroking down the tippet and setting the frill in order; then
standing on the door-step to follow their lessening figures "with the
benediction of her gaze." Mrs. Evans was aware, to a certain extent,
of her daughter's unusual capacity, being anxious not only that she
should have the best education attainable in the neighbourhood, but also
that good moral influences should be brought to bear upon her: still, the
girl's constant habit of reading, even in bed, caused the practical
mother not a little annoyance.
The house, where the family lived at that time, and in which the first
twenty years of Mary Ann Evans's life were spent, is situated in a
rich verdant landscape, where the "grassy fields, each with a sort of
personality given to it by the capricious hedge-rows," blend
harmoniously with the red-roofed cottages scattered in a happy haphazard
fashion amid orchards and elder-bushes. Sixty years ago the country was
much more thickly wooded than now, and from the windows of Griff House
might be seen the oaks and elms that had still survived from
Shakespeare's forest of Arden. The house of the Evans family, half
manor-house,
half farm, was an old-fashioned building, two stories high, with red brick walls thickly covered with ivy. Like the Garths, they were probably "very fond of their old house." A lawn, interspersed with trees, stretched in front towards the gate, flanked by two stately Norway firs, while a sombre old yew almost touched some of the upper windows with its widespreading branches. A farm-yard was at the back, with low rambling sheds and stables; and beyond that, bounded by quiet meadows, one may still see the identical "leafy, flowery, bushy" garden, which George Eliot so often delighted in describing, at a time when her early life, with all its tenderly hoarded associations, had become to her but a haunting memory of bygone things. A garden where roses and cabbages jostle each other, where vegetables have to make room for gnarled old apple-trees, and where, amid the raspberry bushes and row of currant trees, you expect to come upon Hetty herself, "stooping to gather the low-hanging fruit."
Such was the place where the childhood of George Eliot was spent. Here
she drew in those impressions of English rural and provincial life, of
which one day she was to become the greatest interpreter. Impossible to be
in a better position for seeing life. Not only was her father's
position always improving, so that she was early brought in contact with
different grades of society, but his calling made him more or less
acquainted with all ranks of his neighbours, and, says George Eliot,
"I have always thought that the most fortunate Britons are those
whose experience has given them a practical share in many aspects of the
national lot, who have lived long among the mixed commonalty, roughing it
with them under
difficulties, knowing how their food tastes to them, and getting acquainted with their notions and motives, not by inference from traditional types in literature, or from philosophical theories, but from daily fellowship and observation."
And what kind of a child was it who loitered about the farm-yard and
garden and fields, noticing everything with grave, watchful eyes, and
storing it in a memory of extraordinary tenacity? One of her schoolfellows,
who knew her at the age of thirteen, confessed to me that it was impossible
to imagine George Eliot as a baby; that it seemed as if she must have come
into the world fully developed, like a second Minerva. Her features were
fully formed at a very early age, and she had a seriousness of expression
almost startling for her years. The records of her child-life may be
deciphered, amid some romantic alterations, in the early history of Tom and
Maggie Tulliver. Isaac and Mary Ann Evans were playmates, like these, the
latter having all the tastes of a boy; whereas her sister Chrissy, said to
be the original of Lucy Deane, had peculiarly dainty feminine ways, and
shrank from out-door rambles for fear of soiling her shoes or pinafore. But
Mary Ann and her brother went fishing together, or spinning tops, or
digging for earth-nuts; and the twice-told incident of the little girl
being left to mind the rod and losing herself in dreamy contemplation,
oblivious of her task, is evidently taken from life, and may be quoted as a
reminiscence of her own childhood:--
"One day my brother left me in high charge
To mind the rod, while he went seeking bait,
And bade me, when I saw a nearing barge,
Snatch out the line, lest he should come too late.
Page 15
Proud of the task I watched with all my might
For one whole minute, till my eyes grew wide,
Till sky and earth took on a new strange light,
And seemed a dream-world floating on some tide.
A fair pavilioned boat for me alone,
Bearing me onward through the vast unknown.
But sudden came the barge's pitch-black prow,
Nearer and angrier came my brother's cry,
And all my soul was quivering fear, when lo!
Upon the imperilled line, suspended high,
A silver perch! My guilt that won the prey
Now turned to merit, had a guerdon rich
Of hugs and praises, and made merry play
Until my triumph reached its highest pitch
When all at home were told the wondrous feat,
And how the little sister had fished well.
In secret, though my fortune tasted sweet,
I wondered why this happiness befell.
'The little lass had luck,' the gardener said;
And so I learned, luck was to glory wed."
Unlike Maggie, however, little Mary Ann was as good a hand at fishing as
her brother, only differing from him in not liking to put the worms on the
hooks.
Another incident taken from real life, if somewhat magnified, is the
adventure with the gipsies. For the prototype of Maggie also fell among
these marauding vagrants, and was detained a little time among them.
Whether she also proposed to instruct the gipsies and to gain great
influence over them by teaching them something about
"geography" and "Columbus," does not transpire.
But, indeed, most of Maggie's early experiences are autobiographic,
down to such facts as her father telling her to rub her
"turnip" cheeks
against Sally's to get a little bloom, and to cutting off one side of her hair in a passion. At a very early age Mary Ann and her brother were sent to the village free school at Colton, in the parish of Griff, a not unusual custom in those days, when the means of tuition for little children were much more difficult to procure than now. There are still old men living who used to sit on the same form with little Mary Ann Evans learning her A, B, C, and a certain William Jacques (the original of the delightfully comic Bob Jakins of fiction) remembers carrying her pick-a-back on the lawn in front of her father's house.
As the brother and sister grew older they saw less of each other, Mary
Ann being sent to a school at Nuneaton, kept by Miss Lewis, for whom she
retained an affectionate regard long years afterwards. About the same time
she taught at a Sunday-school, in a little cottage adjoining her
father's house. When she was twelve years old, being then, in the
words of a neighbour, who occasionally called at Griff House, "a
queer, three-cornered, awkward girl," who sat in corners and shyly
watched her elders, she was placed as boarder with the Misses Franklin at
Coventry. This school, then in high repute throughout the neighbourhood,
was kept by two sisters, of whom the younger, Miss Rebecca Franklin, was a
woman of unusual attainments and ladylike culture, although not without a
certain taint of Johnsonian affectation. She seems to have thoroughly
grounded Miss Evans in a sound English education, laying great stress in
particular on the propriety of a precise and careful manner of speaking and
reading. She herself always made a point of expressing herself in studied
sentences, and on one occasion, when a friend had called
to ask after a dying relative, she actually kept the servant waiting till she had framed an appropriately worded message. Miss Evans, in whose family a broad provincial dialect was spoken, soon acquired Miss Rebecca's carefully elaborated speech, and, not content with that, she might be said to have created a new voice for herself. In later life every one who knew her was struck by the sweetness of her voice, and the finished construction of every sentence, as it fell from her lips; for by that time the acquired habit had become second nature, and blended harmoniously with her entire personality. But in those early days the artificial effort at perfect propriety of expression was still perceptible, and produced an impression of affectation, perhaps reflecting that of her revered instructress. It is also believed that some of the beauty of her intonation in reading English poetry was owing to the same early influence.
Mary Ann, or Marian as she came afterwards to be called, remained about
three years with the Misses Franklin. She stood aloof from the other
pupils, and one of her schoolfellows, Miss Bradley Jenkins, says that she
was quite as remarkable in those early days as after she had acquired fame.
She seems to have strangely impressed the imagination of the latter, who,
figuratively speaking, looked up at her "as at a mountain."
There was never anything of the schoolgirl about Miss Evans, for, even at
that early age, she had the manners and appearance of a grave, staid woman;
so much so, that a stranger, happening to call one day, mistook this girl
of thirteen for one of the Misses Franklin, who were then middle-aged
women. In this, also, there is a certain resemblance to Maggie Tulliver,
who, at the age of thirteen, is
described as looking already like a woman. English composition, French and German, were some of the studies to which much time and attention were devoted. Being greatly in advance of the other pupils in the knowledge of French, Miss Evans and Miss Jenkins were taken out of the general class and set to study it together; but, though the two girls were thus associated in a closer fellowship, no real intimacy apparently followed from it. The latter watched the future "George Eliot" with intense interest, but always felt as if in the presence of a superior, though socially their positions were much on a par. This haunting sense of superiority precluded the growth of any closer friendship between the two fellow-pupils. All the more startling was it to the admiring schoolgirl, when one day, on using Marian Evans's German dictionary, she saw scribbled on its blank page some verses, evidently original, expressing rather sentimentally a yearning for love and sympathy. Under this granite-like exterior, then, there was beating a heart that passionately craved for human tenderness and companionship!
Inner solitude was no doubt the portion of George Eliot in those days.
She must already have had a dim consciousness of unusual power, to a great
extent isolating her from the girls of her own age, absorbed as they were
in quite other feelings and ideas. Strong religious convictions pervaded
her life at this period, and in the fervid faith and spiritual exaltation
which characterise Maggie's girlhood, we have a very faithful picture
of the future novelist's own state of mind. Passing through many
stages of religious thought, she was first simple Church of England, then
Low Church, then "Anti-Supernatural." In this latter
character she wore an "Anti-Supernatural" cap, in which, so says an early friend, "her plain features looked all the plainer." But her nature was a mixed one, as indeed is Maggie's too, and conflicting tendencies and inclinations pulled her, no doubt, in different directions. The self-renouncing impulses of one moment were checkmated at another by an eager desire for approbation and distinguishing pre-eminence; and a piety verging on asceticism did not exclude, on the other hand, a very clear perception of the advantages and desirability of good birth, wealth, and high social position. Like her own charming Esther in 'Felix Holt,' she had a fine sense, amid somewhat anomalous surroundings, of the highest refinements and delicacies which are supposed to be the natural attributes of people of rank and fashion. She even shared with the above-mentioned heroine certain girlish vanities and weaknesses, such as liking to have all things about her person as elegant as possible.
About the age of fifteen Marian Evans left the Misses Franklin, and soon
afterwards she had the misfortune of losing her mother, who died in her
forty-ninth year. Writing to a friend in after life she says, "I
began at sixteen to be acquainted with the unspeakable grief of a last
parting, in the death of my mother." Less sorrowful partings ensued,
though in the end they proved almost as irrevocable. Her elder sister, and
the brother in whose steps she had once followed "puppy-like,"
married and settled in homes of their own. Their different lots in life,
and the far more pronounced differences of their aims and ideas, afterwards
divided the "brother and sister" completely. This kind of
separation between people who have been friends in youth is often more
terrible to endure
than the actual loss by death itself, and doth truly "work like madness in the brain." Is there not some reference to this in that pathetic passage in 'Adam Bede:' "Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains, blends yearning and repulsion, and ties us by our heartstrings to the beings that jar us at every movement.... we see eyes--ah! so like our mother's, averted from us in cold alienation."
For some years after this Miss Evans and her father remained alone
together at Griff House. He offered to get a housekeeper, as not the house
only, but farm matters, had to be looked after, and he was always tenderly
considerate of "the little wench" as he called her. But his
daughter preferred taking the whole management of the place into her own
hands, and she was as conscientious and diligent in the discharge of her
domestic duties as in the prosecution of the studies she carried on at the
same time. One of her chief beauties was in her large, finely-shaped,
feminine hands--hands which she has, indeed, described as
characteristic of several of her heroines; but she once pointed out to a
friend at Foleshill that one of them was broader across than the other,
saying, with some pride, that it was due to the quantity of butter and
cheese she had made during her housekeeping days at Griff. It will be
remembered that this is a characteristic attributed to the exemplary Nancy
Lammetel, whose person gave one the idea of "perfect unvarying
neatness as the body of a little bird," only her hands bearing
"the traces of butter making, cheese crushing, and even still coarser
work." Certainly the description of the dairy in 'Adam
Bede,'
and all the processes of butter making, is one which only complete knowledge could have rendered so perfect. Perhaps no scene in all her novels stands out with more life-like vividness than that dairy which one could have sickened for in hot, dusty streets: "Such coolness, such purity, such fresh fragrance of new-pressed cheese, of firm butter, of wooden vessels perpetually bathed in pure water; such soft colouring of red earthenware and creamy surfaces, brown wood and polished tin, grey limestone and rich orange-red rust on the iron weights and hooks and hinges."
This life of mixed practical activity and intellectual pursuits came to
an end in 1841, when Mr. Evans relinquished Griff House, and the management
of Sir Roger Newdigate's estates, to his married son, and removed with
his daughter to Foleshill, near Coventry.
"Qu'est-ce qu'une grande vie?
Une pensée de la jeunesse, exécutée par l'âge mur."
Moreover, it is a revolutionary age. Inherited opinions that had been
accepted, as the rotation of the seasons, with unhesitating acquiescence,
become an object of speculation and passionate questioning. Nothing is
taken upon trust. The intellect, stimulated by the sense of expanding and
hitherto unchecked capacity, delights in exercising its strength by
critically passing in review the opinions, laws, institutions commonly
accepted as unalterable. And if the intellect is thus active the heart is
still more so.
This is emphatically the time of enthusiastic friendship and glowing love, if often also of cruel disenchantment and disillusion. In most biographies, therefore, this phase of life is no less fascinating than instructive. For it shows the individual while still in a stage of growth already reacting on his environment, and becoming a motive power according to the measure of his intellectual and moral endowments.
It is on this state of George Eliot's life that we are now
entering. At Foleshill she acquired that vast range of knowledge and
universality of culture which so eminently distinguished her.
The house she now inhabited though not nearly as picturesque or
substantial as the former home of the Evanses, was yet sufficiently
spacious, with a pleasant garden in front and behind it; the latter, Marian
Evans was fond of making as much like the delicious garden of her childhood
as was possible under the circumstances. In other respects she greatly
altered her ways of life, cultivating an ultra-fastidiousness in her
manners and household arrangements. Though so young she was not only entire
mistress of her father's establishment but, as his business required
him to be abroad the greater part of each week, she was mostly alone.
Her life now became more and more that of a student, one of her chief
reasons for rejoicing at the change of residence being the freer access to
books. She had, however, already amassed quite a library of her own by this
time. In addition to her private studies, she was now also able to have
masters to instruct her in a variety of subjects. The Rev. T. Sheepshanks,
headmaster of the Coventry Grammar-school, gave her
lessons in Greek and Latin, as she particularly wished to learn the former language in order to read Æschylus. She continued her study of French, German, and Italian under the tuition of Signor Brezzi, even acquiring some knowledge of Hebrew by her own unassisted efforts. Mr. Simms, the veteran organist of St. Michael's, Coventry, instructed her in the pianoforte; and probably Rosamond Vincy's teacher in 'Middlemarch' is a faithful portraiture of him. "Her master at Mrs. Lemon's school (close to a country town with a memorable history that had its relics in church and castle) was one of those excellent musicians here and there to be found in the provinces, worthy to compare with many a noted Kapellmeister in a country which offers more plentiful conditions of musical celebrity." George Eliot's sympathetic rendering of her favourite composers, particularly Beethoven and Schubert, was always delightful to her friends, although connoisseurs considered her possessed of little or no strictly technical knowledge. Be that as it may, many an exquisite passage scattered up and down her works, bears witness to her heartfelt appreciation of music, which seems to have had a more intimate attraction for her than the fine arts. She shows little feeling for archæological beauties, in which Warwickshire is so rich: in her 'Scenes of Clerical Life' dismissing a fine monument of Lady Jane Grey, a genuine specimen of old Gothic art at Astley Church, with a sneer about "marble warriors, and their wives without noses."
In spite of excessive study, this period of
Marian's life is not without faint echoes of an early love-story of
her own. In the house of one of her married half-sisters she met a young
man who promised, at that
time, to take a distinguished position in his profession. A kind of engagement, or semi-engagement, took place, which Mr. Evans refused to countenance, and finally his daughter broke it off in a letter, showing both her strong sense and profoundly affectionate nature. At this time she must have often had a painful consciousness of being cut off from that living fellowship with the like-minded so stimulating to the intellectual life. Men are not so subject to this form of soul hunger as women; for at their public schools and colleges they are brought into contact with their contemporaries, and cannot fail to find comrades amongst them of like thoughts and aspirations with themselves. A fresh life, however, at once vivifying to her intellect and stimulating to her heart, now began for Marian Evans in the friendship she formed with Mr. and Mrs. Charles Bray of Rosehill, Coventry. Rahel--the subtly gifted German woman, whose letters and memoirs are a treasury of delicate observation and sentiment--observes that people of marked spiritual affinities are bound to meet some time or other in their lives. If not entirely true, there is a good deal to be said for this comforting theory; as human beings of similar nature seem constantly converging as by some magnetic attraction.
The circle to which Miss Evans now happened to be introduced was in
every sense congenial and inspiriting. Mr. Bray, his wife, and his
sister-in-law were a trio more like some delightful characters in a
first-rate novel than the sober inhabitants of a Warwickshire country town.
Living in a house beautifully situated on the outskirts of Coventry, they
used to spend their lives in philosophical
specu-
lations, philanthropy, and pleasant social hospitality, joining to the ease and laisser aller of continental manners a thoroughly English geniality and trustworthiness.
Mr. Bray was a wealthy ribbon manufacturer, but had become engrossed
from an early age in religious and metaphysical speculation as well as in
political and social questions. Beginning to inquire into the dogmas which
formed the basis of his belief, he found, on careful investigation, that
they did not stand, in his opinion, the test of reason. His arguments set
his brother-in-law, Mr. Charles C. Hennell, a Unitarian, to examine afresh
and go carefully over the whole ground of popular theology, the consequence
of this close study being the 'Inquiry concerning the Origin of
Christianity,' a work which attracted a good deal of attention when
it appeared, and was translated into German at the instance of David
Strauss. It was published in 1838, a few years after the appearance of the
'Life of Jesus.' In its critical examination of the miracles,
and in the sifting of mythological from historical elements in the Gospels
it bears considerable analogy to Strauss's great work, although
strictly based on independent studies, being originally nothing more than
an attempt to solve the doubts of a small set of friends. Their doubts were
solved, but not in the manner originally anticipated.
Mrs. Bray, of an essentially religious nature, shared the opinions of
her husband and brother, and without conforming to the external rites and
ceremonies of a creed, led a life of saintly purity and self-devotion. The
exquisite beauty of her moral nature not only attracted Marian to this
truly amiable
woman, but filled her with reverence, and the friendship then commenced was only ended by death.
In Miss Sara Hennell, Marian Evans found another congenial companion who
became as a sister to her. This singular being, in most respects such a
contrast to her sister, high-strung, nervous, excitable, importing all the
ardour of feeling into a life of austere thought, seemed in a manner
mentally to totter under the weight of her own immense metaphysical
speculations. A casual acquaintance of these two young ladies might perhaps
have predicted that Miss Hennell was the one destined to achieve fame in
the future, and she certainly must have been an extraordinary mental
stimulus to her young friend Marian. These gifted sisters, two of a family,
all the members of which were remarkable, by some are identified as the
originals of the delightful Meyrick household in 'Daniel
Deronda.' Each member of this genial group was already, or ultimately
became, an author of more or less repute. A reviewer in the
'Westminster,' writing of Mr. Bray's philosophical
publications, some years ago, said: "If he would reduce his many
works to one containing nothing unessential, he would doubtless obtain that
high place among the philosophers of our country to which his powers of
thought entitle him." His most popular book, called 'The
Education of the Feelings,' intended for use in secular schools,
deals with the laws of morality practically applied. Mrs. Bray's
writings, on the same order of subjects, are still further simplified for
the understanding of children. She is the authoress of 'Physiology
for Schools,' 'The British Empire,' 'Elements of
Morality,' etc. Her 'Duty to Animals' has become a
class book in the schools of the midland counties, and she was one of the first among those noble-hearted men and women who have endeavoured to introduce a greater degree of humanity into our treatment of animals.
George Eliot, writing to Mrs. Bray in March 1873 on this very subject,
says:
"A very good, as well as very rich, woman, Mrs. S--, has
founded a model school at Naples, and has the sympathy of the best Italians
in her educational efforts. Of course a chief point in trying to improve
the Italians is to teach them kindness to animals, and a friend of Mrs.
S-- has confided to her a small sum of money--fifty pounds, I
think--to be applied to the translation and publication of some good
books for young people, which would be likely to rouse in them a sympathy
with dumb creatures.
"Will you kindly help me in the effort to further Mrs.
S--'s good work by sending me a copy of your book on animals, and
also by telling me the periodical in which the parts of the book first
appeared, as well as the titles of any other works which you think would be
worth mentioning for the purpose in question?
"Mrs. S-- (as indeed you may probably know) is the widow of a
German merchant of Manchester, as rich as many such merchants are, and as
benevolent as only the choicest few. She knows all sorts of good work for
the world, and is known by most of the workers. It struck me, while she was
speaking of this need of a book to translate, that you had done the very
thing."
A few days later the following highly interesting letter came from the
same source:
"Many thanks for the helpful things you have sent
me. 'The Wounded Bird' is charming. But now something very much larger of the same kind must be written, and you are the person to write it--something that will bring the emotions, sufferings, and possible consolations of the dear brutes vividly home to the imaginations of children: fitted for children of all countries, as Reineke Fuchs is comprehensible to all nations. A rough notion came to me the other day of supposing a house of refuge, not only for dogs, but for all distressed animals. The keeper of this refuge understands the language of the brutes, which includes differences of dialect not hindering communication even between birds and dogs, by the help of some Ulysses among them who is versed in the various tongues, and puts in the needed explanations. Said keeper overhears his refugees solacing their evenings by telling the story of their experiences, and finally acts as editor of their autobiographies. I imagine my long-loved fellow-creature, the ugly dog, telling the sorrows and the tender emotions of gratitude which have wrought him into a sensitive soul. The donkey is another cosmopolitan sufferer, and a greater martyr than Saint Lawrence. If we only knew what fine motives he has for his meek endurance, and how he loves a friend who will scratch his nose!
"All this is not worth anything except to make you feel how much
better a plan you can think of.
"Only you must positively write this book which everybody
wants--this book which will do justice to the share our 'worthy
fellow-labourers' have had in the groaning and travailing of the
world towards the birth of the right and fair.
"But you must not do it without the 'sustenance
of labour'--I don't say 'pay,' since there is no pay for good work. Let Mr. ... be blest with the blessing of the unscrupulous. I want to contribute something towards helping the brutes, and helping the children, especially the southern children, to be good to the creatures who are continually at their mercy. I can't write the needed book myself, but I feel sure that you can, and that you will not refuse the duty."
Mrs. Bray's answer to this humorous suggestion may be gathered from
George Eliot's amiable reply:
"I see at once that you must be right about the necessity for
being simple and literal. In fact I have ridiculous impulses in teaching
children, and always make the horizon too wide.
"'The Wounded Bird' is perfect of its kind, and that
kind is the best for a larger work. You yourself see clearly that it is an
exceptional case for any one to be able to write books for children without
putting in them false morality disguised as devout religion. And you are
one of the exceptional cases. I am quite sure, from what you have done,
that you can do the thing which is still wanted to be done. As to
imagination, 'The Wounded Bird' is full of
imagination."
These extracts pleasantly illustrate both the writer and recipient of
such humane letters; and, though written at a much later period, not only
give an idea of the nature of Mrs. Bray's literary pursuits, but of
the friendly relations subsisting to the end between her and George
Eliot.
Of Miss Hennell's work it is more difficult to speak without
entering more deeply into her subject-matter than is compatible with the
scope of the present work.
In one of her best known books, entitled 'Thoughts in Aid of Faith,' she makes the daring attempt to trace the evolution of religion, her mode of thought partaking at once of the scientific and the mystical. For the present she seems to be one of the very few women who have ventured into the arena of philosophy; and, curiously enough, her doctrine is that there should be a feminine method in metaphysics as well as a masculine, the sexes, according to this singular theory, finding their counterpart in religion and science. It may be remembered that George Eliot, in one of her essays, is of opinion that women should endeavour to make some distinctively feminine contributions to the intellectual pursuits they engage in, saying, "Let the whole field of reality be laid open to woman as well as to man, and then that which is peculiar in her mental modification, instead of being, as it is now, a source of discord and repulsion between the sexes, will be found to be a necessary complement to the truth and beauty of life. Then we shall have that marriage of minds which alone can blend all the hues of thought and feeling in one lovely rainbow of promise for the harvest of happiness." Something of the same idea lies at the root of much in Miss Hennell's mystical disquisitions.
This circumstantial account of the circle to which Miss Evans was now
introduced has been given, because it consisted of friends who, more than
any others, helped in the growth and formation of her mind. No human being,
indeed, can be fully understood without some knowledge of the companions
that at one time or other, but especially during the period of development,
have been intimately associated with his or her life. However vastly a
mountain may appear to loom
above us from the plain, on ascending to its summit one always finds innumerable lesser eminences which all help in making up the one imposing central effect. And similarly in the world of mind, many superior natures, in varying degrees, all contribute their share towards the maturing of that exceptional intellectual product whose topmost summit is genius.
The lady who first introduced Marian Evans to the Brays was not without
an object of her own, for her young friend--whose religious fervour,
tinged with evangelical sentiment, was as conspicuous as her unusual
learning and thoughtfulness--seemed to her peculiarly fitted to
exercise a beneficial influence on the Rosehill household, where generally
unorthodox opinions were much in vogue.
Up to the age of seventeen or eighteen Marian had been considered the
most truly pious member of her family, being earnestly bent, as she says,
"to shape this anomalous English Christian life of ours into some
consistency with the spirit and simple verbal tenor of the New
Testament." "I was brought up," she informs another
correspondent, "in the Church of England, and have never joined any
other religious society; but I have had close acquaintance with many
dissenters of various sects, from Calvinistic Anabaptists to
Unitarians." Her inner life at this time is faithfully mirrored in
the spiritual experiences of Maggie Tulliver. Marian Evans was not one who
could rest satisfied with outward observances and lip-worship: she needed a
faith which should give unity and sanctity to the conception of life; which
should awaken "that recognition of something to be lived for beyond
the mere satisfaction of self, which is to the moral life what the addition
of a great central ganglion is to
animal life." At one time Evangelicalism supplied her with the most essential conditions of a religious life: with all the vehemence of an ardent nature she flung her whole soul into a passionate acceptance of the teaching of Christianity, carrying her zeal to the pitch of asceticism.
This was the state of her mind, at the age of seventeen, when her aunt
from Wirksworth came to stay with her. Mrs. Elizabeth Evans (who came
afterwards to be largely identified with Dinah Morris) was a zealous
Wesleyan, having at one time been a noted preacher; but her niece, then a
rigid Calvinist, hardly thought her doctrine strict enough. When this same
aunt paid her a visit, some years afterwards, at Foleshill, Marian's
views had already undergone a complete transformation, and their
intercourse was constrained and painful; for the young evangelical
enthusiast, who had been a favourite in clerical circles, was now, in what
she afterwards described as a "crude state of freethinking." It
was a period of transition through which she gradually passed into a new
religious synthesis.
Her intimacy with the Brays began about the time when these new doubts
were beginning to ferment in her. Her expanding mind, nourished on the best
literature, ancient and modern, began to feel cramped by dogmas that had
now lost their vitality; yet a break with an inherited form of belief to
which a thousand tender associations bound her, was a catastrophe she
shrank from with dread. Hence a period of mental uncertainty and trouble.
In consequence of these inward questionings, it happened that the young
lady who had been unwittingly brought to convert her new acquaintances was
converted by them. In inter-
course with them she was able freely to open her mind, their enlightened views helping her in this crisis of her spiritual life; and she found it an intense relief to feel no longer bound to reconcile her moral and intellectual perceptions with a particular form of worship.
The antagonism she met with in certain quarters, the social persecution
from which she had much to suffer, are perhaps responsible for some of the
sharp, caustic irony with which she afterwards assailed certain theological
habits of thought. It is not unlikely that in some of her essays for the
Westminster Review she mainly expressed the thoughts which
were stirred in her by the opposition she encountered at this period of her
life--as, for example, in the brilliant paper entitled
'Worldliness and Otherworldliness,' which contains such a
scathing passage as the following:
"For certain other elements of virtue, which are of more obvious
importance to untheological minds,--a delicate sense of our
neighbour's rights, an active participation in the joys and sorrows of
our fellow-men, a magnanimous acceptance of privation or suffering for
ourselves when it is the condition of good to others, in a word, the
extension and intensification of our sympathetic nature, we think it of
some importance to contend, that they have no more direct relation to the
belief in a future state than the interchange of gases in the lungs has to
the plurality of worlds. Nay, to us it is conceivable that to some minds
the deep pathos lying in the thought of human mortality--that we are
here for a little while and then vanish away, that this earthly life is all
that is given to our loved ones, and to our many suffering fellow-men, lies
nearer the fountains of moral emotion than the conception of
ex-
tended existence.... To us it is matter of unmixed rejoicing that this latter necessity of healthful life is independent of theological ink, and that its evolution is ensured in the interaction of human souls as certainly as the evolution of science or of art, with which, indeed, it is but a twin ray, melting into them with undefinable limits."
It was, of course, inevitable that her changed tone of mind should
attract the attention of the family and friends of Marian, and that the
backsliding of so exemplary a member should afford matter for scandal in
many a clerical circle and evangelical tea-meeting. Close to the Evanses
there lived at that time a dissenting minister, whose daughter Mary was a
particular favourite of Marian Evans. There had been much neighbourly
intimacy between the two young ladies, and though there was only five
years' difference between them, Marian always inspired her friend with
a feeling of awe at her intellectual superiority. Yet her
sympathy--that sympathy with all human life which was the strongest
element of her character--was even then so irresistible that every
little trouble of Mary's life was entrusted to her keeping. But the
sudden discovery of their daughter's friend being an
"infidel" came with the shock of a thunderclap on the parents.
Much hot argument passed between the minister and this youthful
controversialist, but the former clinched the whole question by a
triumphant reference to the dispersion of the Jews throughout the world as
an irrefutable proof of the divine inspiration of the Bible. In spite of
this vital difference on religious questions, Miss Evans was suffered to go
on giving the minister's daughter lessons in German, which were
continued for two or three
years, she having generously undertaken this labour of love twice a week, because she judged from the shape of her young friend's head--phrenology being rife in those days--that she must have an excellent understanding. But, better than languages, she taught her the value of time, always cutting short mere random talk by simply ignoring it. Altogether the wonderful strength of her personality manifested itself even at this early period in the indelible impression it left on her pupil's memory, many of her sayings remaining graven on it as on stone. As, for instance, when one day twitting Mary's too great self-esteem she remarked, "We are very apt to measure ourselves by our aspiration instead of our performance." Or when on a friend's asking, "What is the meaning of Faust?" she replied, "The same as the meaning of the universe." While reading 'Wallenstein's Lager,' with her young pupil, the latter happened to say how life-like the characters seemed: "Don't say seemed," exclaimed Marian; "we know that they are true to the life." And she immediately began repeating the talk of labourers, farriers, butchers, and others of that class, with such close imitation as to startle her friend. Is not this a fore-shadowing of the inimitable scene at the 'Rainbow?'
By far the most trying consequence of her change of views was that now,
for the first time, Marian was brought into collision with her father,
whose pet she had always been. He could not understand her inward
perplexities, nor the need of her soul for complete inward unity of
thought, a condition impossible to her under the limiting conditions of a
dogmatic evangelicalism, "where folly often mistakes itself for
wisdom, ignorance gives itself airs of know-
ledge, and selfishness, turning its eyes upwards, calls itself religion." She, on the other hand, after a painful struggle, wanted to break away from the old forms of worship, and refused to go to church. Deeply attached though she was to her father, the need to make her acts conform with her convictions became irresistible. Under such conflicting tendencies a rupture between father and daughter became imminent, and for a short time a breaking up of the home was contemplated, Marian intending to go and live by herself in Coventry. One of the leading traits in her nature was its adhesiveness, however, and the threat of separation proved so painful to her that her friends, Mr. and Mrs. Bray, persuaded her to conform to her father's wishes as far as outward observances were implied, and for the rest he did not trouble himself to inquire into her thoughts or occupations.
From a letter written at this period it appears that the 'Inquiry
Concerning the Origin of Christianity' had made a most powerful
impression on her mind. Indeed, she dated from it a new birth. But so
earnest and conscientious was she in her studies, that before beginning its
longed-for perusal, she and a friend determined to read the Bible through
again from beginning to end.
The intimacy between the inmates of Rosehill and the girl student at
Foleshill meanwhile was constantly growing closer. They met daily, and in
their midst the humorous side of her nature expanded no less than her
intellect. Although striking ordinary acquaintances by an abnormal gravity,
when completely at her ease she at times bubbled over with fun and gaiety,
irradiated by the unexpected flashes of a wit whose full scope was probably
as yet unsuspected
by its possessor. Not but that Miss Evans and her friends must have been conscious, even at that early age, of extraordinary powers in her, destined some day to give her a conspicuous position in the world. For her conversation was already so full of charm, depth, and comprehensiveness, that all talk after hers seemed stale and common-place. Many were the discussions in those days between Mr. Bray and Marian Evans, and though frequently broken off in fierce dispute one evening, they always began again quite amicably the next. Mr. Bray probably exercised considerable influence on his young friend's mind at this impressible period of life; perhaps her attention to philosophy was first roused by acquaintance with him, and his varied acquirements in this department may have helped in giving a positive direction to her own thoughts.
Mr. Bray was just then working out his 'Philosophy of
Necessity,' the problems discussed being the same as those which have
occupied the leading thinkers of the day: Auguste Comte in his
'Positive Philosophy;' Buckle in his 'History of
Civilization;' and Mr. Herbert Spencer in his
'Sociology.' The theory that, as an individual and
collectively, man is as much subject to law as any of the other entities in
nature, was one of those magnificent ideas which revolutionise the world of
thought. Many minds, in different countries, of different calibre, were all
trying to systematise what knowledge there was on this subject in order to
convert hypothesis into demonstration. To what extent Mr. Bray may have
based his 'Philosophy of Necessity' on independent research, or
how much was merely assimilated from contemporary sources, we cannot here
inquire. Enough that the ideas
embodied in it represented some of the most vital thought of the age, and contributed therefore not a little to the formation of George Eliot's mind, and to the grip which she presently displayed in the handling of philosophical topics.
In 1842 the sensation created by Dr. Strauss's
Leben Jesu had even extended to so remote a
district as Warwickshire. Some persons of advanced opinions, deeply
impressed by its penetrating historical criticism, which was in fact
Niebuhr's method applied to the elucidation of the Gospels, were very
desirous of obtaining an English translation of this work; meeting at the
house of a common friend, the late Mr. Joseph Parkes of Birmingham, they
agreed, in the first blush of their enthusiasm, to raise amongst them
whatever sum might be required for the purpose. Mr. Hennell, the leading
spirit in this enterprise, proposed that the translation should be
undertaken by Miss Brabant, the accomplished daughter of Dr. Brabant, a
scholar deeply versed in theological matters, who was in friendly
correspondence with Strauss and Paulus in Germany and with Coleridge and
Grote in England. The lady in question, though still in her teens, was
peculiarly fitted for the task, as she had already translated some of
Baur's erudite writings on theological subjects into English. But when
she had done about one half of the first volume, her learned labours came
to an unexpected conclusion, as she became engaged to Mr. Hennell, who to
great mental attainments joined much winning buoyancy of manner. And on her
marriage with this gentleman she had to relinquish her task as too
laborious.
Miss Brabant's acquaintance with Marian began in
1843, and in the summer of that year the whole friendly group started on an excursion to Tenby. During their stay at this watering-place the lady who had begun, and the lady destined eventually to accomplish, the enormous labour of translating the 'Life of Jesus' gave tokens of feminine frivolity by insisting on going to a public ball, where, however, they were disappointed, as partners were very scarce. It should be remembered that Marian Evans was only twenty-three years old at this time, but, though she had not yet done anything, her friends already thought her a wonderful woman. She never seems to have had any real youthfulness, and her personal appearance greatly improved with time. It is only to the finest natures, it should be remembered, that age gives an added beauty and distinction; for the most persistent self has then worked its way to the surface, having modified the expression, and to some extent the features, to its own likeness.
There exists a coloured sketch done by Mrs. Bray about this period,
which gives one a glimpse of George Eliot in her girlhood. In those
Foleshill days she had a quantity of soft pale-brown hair worn in ringlets.
Her head was massive, her features powerful and rugged, her mouth large but
shapely, the jaw singularly square for a woman, yet having a certain
delicacy of outline. A neutral tone of colouring did not help to relieve
this general heaviness of structure, the complexion being pale but not
fair. Nevertheless the play of expression and the wonderful mobility of the
mouth, which increased with age, gave a womanly softness to the countenance
in curious contrast with its framework. Her eyes, of a grey-blue,
constantly varying in colour, striking some as intensely blue,
others as of a pale, washed-out grey, were small and not beautiful in themselves, but when she grew animated in conversation, those eyes lit up the whole face, seeming in a manner to transfigure it. So much was this the case, that a young lady, who had once enjoyed an hour's conversation with her, came away under its spell with the impression that she was beautiful, but afterwards, on seeing George Eliot again when she was not talking, she could hardly believe her to be the same person. The charm of her nature disclosed itself in her manner and in her voice, the latter recalling that of Dorothea, in being "like the voice of a soul that has once lived in an Æolian harp." It was low and deep, vibrating with sympathy.
Mr. Bray, an enthusiastic believer in phrenology, was so much struck
with the grand proportions of her head that he took Marian Evans to London
to have a cast taken. He thinks that, after that of Napoleon, her head
showed the largest development from brow to ear of any person's
recorded. The similarity of type between George Eliot's face and
Savonarola's has been frequently pointed out. Some affinity in their
natures may have led her, if unconsciously, to select that epoch of
Florentine life in which he played so prominent a part.
Though not above the middle height Marian gave people the impression of
being much taller than she really was, her figure, although thin and
slight, being well-poised and not without a certain sturdiness of make. She
was never robust in health, being delicately strung, and of a highly
nervous temperament. In youth the keen excitability of her nature often
made her wayward and hysterical. In fact her extra-
ordinary intellectual vigour did not exclude the susceptibilities and weaknesses of a peculiarly feminine organisation. With all her mental activity she yet led an intensely emotional life, a life which must have held hidden trials for her, as in those days she was known by her friends "to weep bucketfuls of tears."
A woman of strong passions, like her own Maggie, deeply affectionate by
nature, of a clinging tenderness of disposition, Marian Evans went through
much inward struggle, through many painful experiences before she reached
the moral self-government of her later years. Had she not, it is hardly
likely that she could have entered with so deep a comprehension into the
most intricate windings of the human heart. That, of course, was to a great
extent due to her sympathy, sympathy being the strongest quality of her
moral nature. She flung herself, as it were, into other lives, making their
affairs, their hopes, their sorrows her own. And this power of identifying
herself with the people she came near had the effect of a magnet in
attracting her fellow-creatures. If friends went to her in their trouble
they would find not only that she entered with deep feeling into their most
minute concerns, but that, by gradual degrees, she lifted them beyond their
personal distress, and that they would leave her presence in an ennobled
and elevated frame of mind. This sympathy was closely connected with her
faculty of detecting and responding to anything that showed the smallest
sign of intellectual vitality. She essentially resembled Socrates in her
manner of eliciting whatsoever capacity for thought might be latent in the
people she came in contact with: were it only a shoemaker or day-labourer,
she would never rest till she had
found out in what points that particular man differed from other men of his class. She always rather educed what was in others than impressed herself on them; showing much kindliness of heart in drawing out people who were shy. Sympathy was the key-note of her nature, the source of her iridescent humour, of her subtle knowledge of character, and of her dramatic genius.
(then Mr.) John Chapman in 1846. It is probably safe to assume that the composition of none of her novels cost George Eliot half the effort and toil which this translation had done. Yet so badly is this kind of literary work remunerated, that twenty pounds was the sum paid for what had cost three years of hard labour!
Indeed, by this time, most of the twelve friends who had originally
guaranteed the sum necessary for the translation and publication of the
'Life of Jesus,' had conveniently forgotten the matter; and had
it not been for the generosity of Mr. Joseph Parkes, who volunteered to
advance the necessary funds, who knows how long the MS. translation might
have lain dormant in a drawer at Foleshill? It no sooner saw the light,
however, than every one recognised the exceptional merits of the work. And
for several years afterwards Miss Evans continued to be chiefly known as
the translator of Strauss's Leben Jesu.
Soon after relieving Miss Brabant from the task of translation, Miss
Evans went to stay for a time with her friend's father, Dr. Brabant,
who sadly felt the loss of his daughter's intelligent and enlivening
companionship. No doubt the society of this accomplished scholar, described
by Mr. Grote as "a vigorous self-thinking intellect," was no
less congenial than instructive to his young companion; while her singular
mental acuteness and affectionate womanly ways were most grateful to the
lonely old man. There is something very attractive in this episode of
George Eliot's life. It recalls a frequently recurring situation in
her novels, particularly that touching one of the self-renouncing devotion
with which the ardent Romola throws herself into her afflicted father's learned and recondite pursuits.
There exists a letter written to an intimate friend in 1846, soon after
the translation of Strauss was finished, which, I should say, already shows
the future novelist in embryo. In this delightfully humorous mystification
of her friends, Miss Evans pretends that, to her gratification, she has
actually had a visit from a real live German professor, whose musty person
was encased in a still mustier coat. This learned personage has come over
to England with the single purpose of getting his voluminous writings
translated into English. There are at least twenty volumes, all
unpublished, owing to the envious machinations of rival authors, none of
them treating of anything more modern than Cheops, or the invention of the
hieroglyphics. The respectable professor's object in coming to England
is to secure a wife and translator in one. But though, on inquiry, he finds
that the ladies engaged in translation are legion, they mostly turn out to
be utterly incompetent, besides not answering to his requirements in other
respects; the qualifications he looks for in a wife, besides a thorough
acquaintance with English and German, being personal ugliness and a snug
little capital, sufficient to supply him with a moderate allowance of
tobacco and Schwarzbier, after defraying the
expense of printing his books. To find this phoenix among women he is
sent to Coventry on all hands.
In Miss Evans, so she runs on, the aspiring professor finds his utmost
wishes realised, and so proposes to her on the spot; thinking that it may
be her last chance, she accepts him with equal celerity, and her
father, although strongly objecting to a foreigner, is induced to give his consent for the same reason. The lady's only stipulation is that her future husband shall take her out of England, with its dreary climate and drearier inhabitants. This being settled, she invites her friends to come to her wedding, which is to take place next week.
This lively little jeu d'esprit is
written in the wittiest manner, and one cannot help fancying that this
German Dryasdust contained the germ of one of her very subtlest
masterpieces in characterisation, that of the much-to-be-pitied Casaubon,
the very Sysiphus of authors. In the lady, too, willing to marry her
parchment-bound suitor for the sake of co-operating in his abstruse mental
labours, we have a faint adumbration of the simple-minded Dorothea.
But these sudden stirrings at original invention did not prevent Miss
Evans from undertaking another task, similar to her last, if not so
laborious. She now set about translating Ludwig Feuerbach's
Wesen des Christenthums. This daring philosopher,
who kept aloof from professional honours, and dwelt apart in a wood, that
he might be free to handle questions of theology and metaphysics with
absolute fearlessness, had created a great sensation by his philosophical
criticism in Germany. Unlike his countrymen, whose writings on these
subjects are usually enveloped in such an impenetrable mist that their most
perilous ideas pass harmlessly over the heads of the multitude, Feuerbach,
by his keen incisiveness of language and luminousness of exposition, was
calculated to bring his meaning home to the average reader. Mr.
Garnett's account of the 'Essence of Christianity' in
the 'Encyclopædia Britannica,' admirably concise as it is, may be quoted here, as conveying in the fewest words the gist of this "famous treatise, where Feuerbach shows that every article of Christian belief corresponds to some instinct or necessity of man's nature, from which he infers that it is the creation and embodiment of some human wish, hope, or apprehension.... Following up the hint of one of the oldest Greek philosophers, he demonstrates that religious ideas have their counterparts in human nature, and assumes that they must be its product."
The translation of the 'Essence of Christianity' was also
published by Mr. Chapman in 1854. It appeared in his 'Quarterly
Series,' destined "to consist of works by learned and profound
thinkers, embracing the subjects of theology, philosophy, biblical
criticism, and the history of opinion." Probably because her former
translation had been so eminently successful, Miss Evans received fifty
pounds for her present work. But there was no demand for it in England, and
Mr. Chapman lost heavily by its publication.
About the same period Miss Evans also translated Spinoza's
De Deo for the benefit of an inquiring friend.
But her English version of the 'Ethics' was not undertaken till
the year 1854, after she had left her home at Foleshill. In applying
herself to the severe labour of rendering one philosophical work after
another into English, Miss Evans, no doubt, was bent on elucidating for
herself some of the most vital problems which engage the mind when once it
has shaken itself free from purely traditional beliefs, rather than on
securing for herself any pecuniary advantages. But her admirable
translations attracted
the attention of the like-minded, and she became gradually known to some of the most distinguished men of the time.
Unfortunately her father's health now began to fail, causing her no
little pain and anxiety. At some period during his illness she stayed with
him in the Isle of Wight, for in a letter to Mrs. Bray, written many years
afterwards, she says, "The 'Sir Charles Grandison' you
are reading must be the series of little fat volumes you lent me to carry
to the Isle of Wight, where I read it at every interval when my father did
not want me, and was sorry that the long novel was not longer. It is a
solace to hear of any one's reading and enjoying Richardson. We have
fallen on an evil generation who would not read 'Clarissa' even
in an abridged form. The French have been its most enthusiastic admirers,
but I don't know whether their present admiration is more than
traditional, like their set phrases about their own classics."
During the last year of her father's life his daughter was also in
the habit of reading Scott's novels aloud to him for several hours of
each day; she must thus have become deeply versed in his manner of telling
the stories in which she continued to delight all her life; and in speaking
of the widening of our sympathies which a picture of human life by a great
artist is calculated to produce, even in the most trivial and selfish, she
gives as an instance Scott's description of Luckie Mucklebackit's
cottage, and his story of the 'Two Drovers.'
But a heavy loss now befell Marian Evans in the death of her father,
which occurred in 1849. Long afterwards nothing seemed to afford
consolation to
her grief. For eight years these two had kept house together, and the deepest mutual affection had always subsisted between them. Marian ever treasured her father's memory. As George Eliot she loved to recall in her works everything associated with him in her childhood; those happy times when, standing between her father's knees, she used to be driven by him to "outlying hamlets, whose groups of inhabitants were as distinctive to my imagination as if they belonged to different regions of the globe." Miss Evans, however, was not suffered to mourn uncomforted. The tender friends who cared for her as a sister, now planned a tour to the Continent in hopes that the change of scene and associations would soften her grief.
So they started on their travels, going to Switzerland and Italy by the
approved route, which in those days was not so hackneyed as it now is. To
so penetrating an observer as Miss Evans there must have been an infinite
interest in this first sight of the Continent. But the journey did not seem
to dispel her grief, and she continued in such very low spirits that Mrs.
Bray almost regretted having taken her abroad so soon after her
bereavement. Her terror, too, at the giddy passes which they had to cross,
with precipices yawning on either hand--so that it seemed as if a
false step must send them rolling into the abyss--was so overpowering
that the sublime spectacle of the snow-clad Alps seemed comparatively to
produce but little impression on her. Her moral triumph over this
constitutional timidity, when any special occasion arose, was all the more
remarkable. One day when crossing the Col de Balme from Martigny to
Chamounix, one of the side-saddles was found to
be badly fitted, and would keep turning round, to the risk of the rider, if not very careful, slipping off at any moment. Marian, however, insisted on having this defective saddle in spite of the protest of Mrs. Bray, who felt quite guilty whenever they came to any perilous places.
How different is this timidity from George Sand's hardy spirit of
enterprise! No one who has read that captivating book, her
Lettres d'un Voyageur, can forget the great
Frenchwoman's description of a Swiss expedition, during which, while
encumbered with two young children, she seems to have borne all the perils,
fatigues, and privations of a toilsome ascent with the hardihood of a
mountaineer. But it should not be forgotten that, although Miss Evans was
just then in a peculiarly nervous and excitable condition, and her frequent
fits of weeping were a source of pain to her anxious fellow-travellers. She
had, in fact, been so assiduous in attendance on her sick father, that she
was physically broken down for a time. Under these circumstances an
immediate return to England seemed unadvisable, and, when her friends
started on their homeward journey, it was decided that Marian should remain
behind at Geneva.
Here, amid scenes so intimately associated with genius--where the
"self-torturing sophist, wild Rousseau," placed the home of his
'Nouvelle Héoïse,' and
the octogenarian Voltaire spent the serene Indian summer of his stirring
career; where Gibbon wrote his 'History of the Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire;' where Byron and Shelley sought refuge from the
hatred of their countrymen, and which Madame de Staël complainingly
exchanged for her beloved Rue du Bac--here the future author of
'Romola' and 'Middlemarch' gradually recovered under the sublime influences of Nature's healing beauties.
For about eight months Miss Evans lived at a boarding-house, "Le
Plongeau," near Geneva. But she was glad to find a quieter retreat in
the family of an artist, M. d'Albert, becoming much attached to him
and his wife. Established in one of the lofty upper stories of this
pleasant house, with the blue shimmering waters of the lake glancing far
below, and the awful heights of Mont Blanc solemnly dominating the entire
landscape, she not only loved to prosecute her studies, but, in isolation
from mankind, to plan glorious schemes for their welfare. During this stay
she drank deep of Rousseau, whose works, especially Les
Confessions, made an indelible impression on her. And when inciting
a friend to study French, she remarked that it was worth learning that
language, if only to read him. At the same period Marian probably became
familiarised with the magnificent social utopias of St. Simon, Proudhon,
and other French writers. Having undergone a kind of mental revolution
herself not so long ago, she must have felt some sympathy with the
thrilling hopes of liberty which had agitated the states of Western Europe
in 1849. But, as I have already pointed out, her nature had conservative
leanings. She believed in progress only as the result of evolution, not
revolution. And in one of her most incisive essays, entitled 'The
National History of German Life,' she finely points out the
"notable failure of revolutionary attempts conducted from the point
of view of abstract democratic and socialistic theories." In the same
article she draws a striking parallel between the
growth of language and that of political institutions, contending that it would be as unsatisfactory to "construct a universal language on a rational basis"--one that had "no uncertainty, no whims of idiom, no cumbrous forms, no fitful shimmer of many-hued significance, no hoary archaisms 'familiar with forgotten years'"--as abruptly to alter forms of government which are nothing, in fact, but the result of historical growth, systematically embodied by society.
Besides the fascinations of study, and the outward glory of nature, the
charm of social intercourse was not wanting to this life at Geneva. In M.
D'Albert, a very superior man, gentle, refined, and of unusual mental
attainments, she found a highly desirable daily companion. He was an artist
by profession, and it is whispered that he suggested some of the traits in
the character of the delicate-minded Philip Wakem in the 'Mill on the
Floss.' The only portrait in oils which exists of George Eliot is one
painted by M. D'Albert at this interesting time of her life. She
inspired him, like most people who came into personal contact with her,
with the utmost admiration and regard, and, wishing to be of some service,
he escorted Miss Evans to England on her return thither. Curiously enough,
M. D'Albert subsequently translated one of her works, probably
'Adam Bede,' without in the least suspecting who its real
author was.
It is always a shock when vital changes have occurred in one's
individual lot to return to a well-known place, after an absence of some
duration, to find it wearing the same unchangeable aspect. One expects
somehow that fields and streets and houses
would show some alteration corresponding to that within ourselves. But already from a distance the twin spires of Coventry, familiar as household words to the Warwickshire girl, greeted the eyes of the returning traveller. In spite of all love for her native spot of earth, this was a heavy time to Marian Evans. Her father was dead, the home where she had dwelt as mistress for so many years broken up, the present appearing blank and comfortless, the future uncertain and vaguely terrifying. The question now was where she should live, what she should do, to what purposes turn the genius whose untried and partially unsuspected powers were darkly agitating her whole being.
As has been already said, Marian Evans had a highly complex nature,
compounded of many contradictory impulses, which, though gradually brought
into harmony as life matured, were always pulling her, in those days, in
different directions. Thus, though she possessed strong family affections,
she could not help feeling that to go and take up her abode in the house of
some relative, where life resolved itself into a monotonous recurrence of
petty considerations, something after the Glegg pattern, would be little
short of crucifixion to her, and, however deep her attachment for her
native soil may have been, she yet sighed passionately to break away from
its associations, and to become "a wanderer and a pilgrim on the face
of the earth."
For some little time after her return from abroad Marian took up her
residence with her brother and his family. But the children who had toddled
hand-in-hand in the fields together had now diverged so widely that no
memories of a mutual past could
bridge over the chasm that divided them. Under these circumstances the family at Rosehill pressed her to make their home permanently hers, and for bout a year, from 1850 to 1851, she became the member of a household in fullest sympathy with her. Here Mr. Bray's many-sided mental activity and genial brightness of disposition, and his wife's exquisite goodness of heart, must have helped to soothe and cheer one whose delicately strung nature was just then nearly bending under the excessive strain of thought and feeling she had gone through. One person, indeed, was so struck by the grave sadness generally affecting her, that it seemed to him as if her coming took all the sunshine out of the day. But whether grave or gay, whether meditative or playful, her conversation exercised a spell over all who came within its reach.
In the pleasant house at Rosehill distinguished guests were constantly
coming and going, so that there was no lack of the needed intellectual
friction supplied by clever and original talk. Here in a pleasant garden,
planted with rustling acacia trees, and opening on a wide prospect of
richly-wooded, undulating country, with the fitful brightness of English
skies overhead, and a smooth-shaven lawn to walk or recline upon, many were
the topics discussed by men who had made, or were about to make, their
mark. Froude was known there. George Combe discussed with his host the
principles of phrenology, at that time claiming "its thousands of
disciples." Ralph Waldo Emerson, on a lecturing tour in this country,
while on a brief visit, made Marian's acquaintance, and was observed
by Mrs. Bray engaged in eager talk with her. Suddenly she
saw him start. Something said by this quiet, gentle-mannered girl had evidently given him a shock of surprise. Afterwards, in conversation with her friends, he spoke of her "great calm soul." This is no doubt an instance of the intense sympathetic adaptiveness of Miss Evans. If great, she was not by any means calm at this period, but inwardly deeply perturbed, yet her nature, with subtlest response, reflected the transcendental calm of the philosopher when brought within his atmosphere.
George Dawson, the popular lecturer, and Mr. Flower, were more
intimately associated with the Rosehill household. The latter, then living
at Stratford-on-Avon, where he was wont to entertain a vast number of
people, especially Americans, who make pilgrimages to Shakespeare's
birthplace, is known to the world as the benevolent denouncer of
"bits and bearing-reins." One day this whole party went to hear
George Dawson, who had made a great sensation at Birmingham, preach one of
his thrilling sermons from the text "And the common people heard him
gladly." George Eliot, alluding to these days as late as 1876, says,
in a letter to Mrs. Bray:
"George Dawson was strongly associated for me with Rosehill, not
to speak of the General Baptist Chapel, where we all heard him preach for
the first time (to us).... I have a vivid recollection of an evening when
Mr. and Mrs. F-- dined at your house with George Dawson, when he was
going to lecture at the Mechanics' Institute, and you felt
compassionately towards him, because you thought the rather riotous talk
was a bad preface to his lecture. We have a Birmingham friend, whose
acquaintance we made many years ago in Weimar, and from him
I have occasionally had some news of Mr. Dawson. I feared, what you mention, that his life has been a little too strenuous in these latter years."
On the evening alluded to in this letter Mr. Dawson was dining at Mrs.
Bray's house before giving, his lecture on 'John Wesley,'
at the Mechanics' Institute. His rich sarcasm and love of fun had
exhilarated the whole company, and not content with merely "riotous
talk," George Dawson and Mr. Flower turned themselves into lions and
wild cats for the amusement of the children, suddenly pouncing out from
under the table-cloth, with hideous roarings and screechings, till the
hubbub became appalling, joined to the delighted half-frightened
exclamations of the little ones. Mr. Dawson did the lions, and Mr. Flower,
who had made personal acquaintance with the wild cats in the backwoods of
America, was inimitable in their peculiar pounce and screech.
Thus amid studies and pleasant friendly intercourse did the days pass at
Rosehill. Still Marian Evans was restless, tormented, frequently in tears,
perhaps unconsciously craving a wider sphere, and more definitely
recognised position. However strenuously she, at a maturer time of life,
inculcated the necessity of resignation, she had not then learned to resign
herself. And now a change was impending--a change which, fraught with
the most important consequences, was destined to give a new direction to
the current of her life. Dr. John Chapman invited her to assist him in the
editorship of the Westminster Review, which passed at that
time into his hands from John Mill. They had already met, when Marian was
passing through London on her way to the Continent, on some matter of
business or other connected with
one of her translations. Dr. Chapman's proposition was accepted; and although Marian suffered keenly from the wrench of parting with her friends, the prompting to work out her powers to the full overcame the clinging of affection, and in the spring of 1851 she left Rosehill behind her and came to London.
Those were in truth the palmy days of the Westminster
Review. Herbert Spencer, G.H. Lewes, John Oxenford, James and
Harriet Martineau, Charles Bray, George Combe, and Professor Edward Forbes
were among the writers that made it the leading expositor of the
philosophic and scientific thought of the age. It occupied a position
something midway between that of the Nineteenth Century and
the Fortnightly. Scorning, like the latter, to pander to the
frivolous tastes of the majority, it appealed to the most thoughtful and
enlightened section of the reading public, giving especial prominence to
the philosophy of the Comtist School; and while not so fashionable
as the Nineteenth Century, it could boast among its contributors names quite as famous, destined as they were to become the foremost of their time and country. With this group of illustrious writers Miss Evans was now associated, and the articles she contributed from the year 1852 to 1858 are among the most brilliant examples of periodical literature. The first notice by her pen is a brief review of Carlyle's 'Life of Sterling' for January 1852, and judging from internal evidence, as regards style and method of treatment, the one on Margaret Fuller, in the next number, must be by the same hand.
To the biographer there is a curious interest in what she says in her
first notice about this kind of literature, and it would be well for the
world if writers were to lay it more generally to heart. "We have
often wished that genius would incline itself more frequently to the task
of the biographer, that when some great or good personage dies, instead of
the dreary three- or five-volumed compilations of letter, and diary, and
detail, little to the purpose, which two-thirds of the public have not the
chance, nor the other third the inclination, to read, we could have a real
"life," setting forth briefly and vividly the man's inward
and outward struggles, aims, and achievements, so as to make clear the
meaning which his experience has for his fellows. A few such lives (chiefly
autobiographies) the world possesses, and they have, perhaps, been more
influential on the formation of character than any other kind of
reading." Then again, speaking of the 'Memoirs of Margaret
Fuller,' she remarks, in reference to the same topic, "The
old-world biographies present their subjects generally as broken fragments
of humanity, noticeable because of
their individual peculiarities, the new-world biographies present their subjects rather as organic portions of society."
George Eliot's estimate of Margaret Fuller (for there can be little
doubt that it is hers) possesses too rare an interest for readers not to be
given here in her own apposite and pungent words: "We are at a loss
whether to regard her as the parent or child of New England
Transcendentalism. Perhaps neither the one nor the other. It was
essentially an intellectual, moral, spiritual regeneration--a renewing
of the whole man--a kindling of his aspirations after full development
of faculty and perfect symmetry of being. Of this sect Margaret Fuller was
the priestess. In conversation she was as copious and oracular as
Coleridge, brilliant as Sterling, pungent and paradoxical as Carlyle;
gifted with the inspired powers of a Pythoness, she saw into the hearts and
over the heads of all who came near her, and, but for a sympathy as
boundless as her self-esteem, she would have despised the whole human race!
Her frailty in this respect was no secret either to herself or her
friends..... We must say that from the time she became a mother till the
final tragedy when she perished with her husband and child within sight of
her native shore, she was an altered woman, and evinced a greatness of soul
and heroism of character so grand and subduing, that we feel disposed to
extend to her whole career the admiration and sympathy inspired by the
closing scenes.
"While her reputation was at its height in the literary circles of
Boston and New York, she was so self-conscious that her life seemed to be a
studied act, rather than a spontaneous growth; but this was the
mere flutter on the surface; the well was deep, and the spring genuine; and it is creditable to her friends, as well as to herself, that such at all times was their belief."
In this striking summing-up of a character, the penetrating observer of
human nature--taking in at a glance and depicting by a few masterly
touches all that helps to make up a picture of the real living
being--begins to reveal herself.
These essays in the Westminster Review are not only
capital reading in themselves, but are, of course, doubly attractive to us
because they let out opinions, views, judgments of things and authors,
which we should never otherwise have known. Marian Evans had not yet hidden
herself behind the mask of George Eliot, and in many of these wise and
witty utterances of hers we are admitted behind the scenes of her mind, so
to speak, and see her in her own undisguised person--before she had
assumed the rôle of the novelist,
showing herself to the world mainly through her dramatic
impersonations.
In these articles, written in the fresh maturity of her powers, we learn
what George Eliot thought about many subjects; we learn who were her
favourite authors in fiction; what opinions she held on art and poetry;
what was her attitude towards the political and social questions of the
day; what was her conception of human life in general. There is much here,
no doubt, that one might have been prepared to find, but a good deal, too,
that comes upon one with the freshness of surprise.
A special interest attaches naturally to what she has to say about her
own branch of art--the novel. Though she had probably no idea that she
was herself
destined to become one of the great masters of fiction she had evidently a special predilection for works of that kind, noticeable because hitherto her bent might have appeared almost exclusively towards philosophy. To the three-volume circulating-library novel of the ordinary stamp she is merciless in her sarcasm. One of her most pithy articles of this time, or rather later, its date being 1856, is directed against "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists." "These," she says, "consist of the frothy, the prosy, the pious, or the pedantic. But it is a mixture of all these--a composite order of feminine fatuity, that produces the largest class of such novels, which we shall distinguish as the mind and millinery species. We had imagined that destitute women turned novelists, as they turned governesses, because they had no other 'ladylike' means of getting their bread. Empty writing was excused by an empty stomach, and twaddle was consecrated by tears.... It is clear that they write in elegant boudoirs, with violet-coloured ink and a ruby pen, that they must be entirely indifferent to publishers' accounts, and inexperienced in every form of poverty except poverty of brains."
After finding fault with what she sarcastically calls the white
neck-cloth species of novel, "a sort of medical sweetmeat for
Low Church young ladies," she adds, "The real drama of
Evangelicalism, and it has abundance of fine drama for any one who has
genius enough to discern and reproduce it, lies among the middle and lower
classes. Why can we not have pictures of religious life among the
industrial classes in England, as interesting as Mrs. Stowe's pictures
of religious life among the negroes?"
She who asked that question was herself destined,
a few years later, to answer her own demand in most triumphant fashion. Already here and there we find hints and suggestions of the vein that was to be so fully worked out in 'Scenes of Clerical Life' and 'Adam Bede.' Her intimate knowledge of English country life, and the hold it had on her imagination, every now and then eats its way to the surface of her writings, and stands out amongst its surrounding matter with a certain unmistakable native force. After censuring the lack of reality with which peasant life is commonly treated in art, she makes the following apposite remarks, suggested by her own experience: "The notion that peasants are joyous, that the typical moment to represent a man in a smock-frock is when he is cracking a joke and showing a row of sound teeth, that cottage matrons are usually buxom, and village children necessarily rosy and merry, are prejudices difficult to dislodge from the artistic mind which looks for its subjects into literature instead of life. The painter is still under the influence of idyllic literature, which has always expressed the imagination of the town-bred rather than the truth of rustic life. Idyllic ploughmen are jocund when they drive their team afield; idyllic shepherds make bashful love under hawthorn bushes; idyllic villagers dance in the chequered shade and refresh themselves not immoderately with spicy nut-brown ale. But no one who has seen much of actual ploughmen thinks them jocund, no one who is well acquainted with the English peasantry can pronounce them merry. The slow gaze, in which no sense of beauty beams, no humour twinkles; the slow utterance, and the heavy slouching walk, remind one rather of that melancholy animal the camel, than of
the sturdy countryman, with striped stockings, red waistcoat, and hat aside, who represents the traditional English peasant. Observe a company of haymakers. When you see them at a distance tossing up the forkfuls of hay in the golden light, while the wagon creeps slowly with its increasing burden 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 find 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.
"The conventional countryman of the stage, who picks up
pocket-books and never looks into them, and who is too simple even to know
that honesty has its opposite, represents the still lingering mistake, that
an unintelligible dialect is a guarantee for ingenuousness, and that
slouching shoulders indicate an upright disposition. It is quite sure 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; a reaper is not given to writing begging-letters, but he
is quite capable of cajoling the dairy-maid into filling his small-beer
bottle with ale. The selfish instincts are
not subdued by the sight of buttercups, nor is integrity in the least established by that classic rural occupation, sheep-washing. To make men moral something more is requisite than to turn them out to grass."
Every one must see that this is the essay writing of a novelist rather
than of a moral philosopher. The touches are put on with the vigour of a
Velasquez. Balzac, or Flaubert, or that most terrible writer of the modern
French school of fiction, the author of 'Le Sabot Rouge,' never
described peasant life with more downright veracity. In the eyes of Miss
Evans this quality of veracity is the most needful of all for the artist.
Because "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
sentiment." For "art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode
of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men
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 conversation 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 a true one."
George Eliot afterwards faithfully adhered to the canons fixed by the
critic. Whether this consciousness
of a moral purpose was altogether a gain to her art may be more fitly discussed in connection with the analysis of her works of fiction. It is only needful to point out here how close and binding she wished to make the union between ethics and æsthetics.
Almost identical views concerning fundamental laws of Art are discussed
in an equally terse, vigorous, and pictorial manner in an article called
'Realism in Art: Recent German Fiction.' This article, however,
is not by George Eliot, but by George Henry Lewis. It was published in
October 1858, and appeared after their joint sojourn in Germany during the
spring and summer of that year. I think that if one carefully compares
'Realism in Art' with George Eliot's other articles, there
appears something like a marriage of their respective styles in this paper.
It seems probable that Lewis, with his flexible adaptiveness, had come
under the influence of George Eliot's powerful intellect, and that
many of the views he expresses here at the same time render George
Eliot's, as they frequently appear, identical with hers. In the
article in question the manner as well as the matter has a certain
suggestion of the novelist's style. For example she frequently
indicates the quality of human speech by its resemblance to musical sounds.
She is fond of speaking of "the
staccato tones of a voice," "an
adagio of utter indifference," and in
the above-mentioned essay there are such expressions as the "stately
largo" of good German prose. Again, in
the article in question, we find the following satirical remarks about the
slovenly prose of the generality of German writers: "To be gentlemen
of somewhat slow, sluggish minds is perhaps their misfortune; but to be
writers deplorably deficient in the first principles
of composition is assuredly their fault. Some men pasture on platitudes, as oxen upon meadow-grass; they are at home on a dead-level of common-place, and do not desire to be irradiated by a felicity of expression." And in another passage to the same effect the author says sarcastically, "Graces are gifts: it can no more be required of a professor that he should write with felicity than that he should charm all beholders with his personal appearance; but literature requires that he should write intelligibly and carefully, as society requires that he should wash his face and button his waistcoat." Some of these strictures are very similar in spirit to what George Eliot had said in her review of Heinrich Heine, published in 1856, where complaining of the general cumbrousness of German writers, she makes the following cutting remark: "A German comedy is like a German sentence: you see no reason in its structure why it should ever come to an end, and you accept the conclusion as an arrangement of Providence rather than of the author."
A passage in this article, which exactly tallies with George
Eliot's general remarks on Art, must not be omitted here. "Art
is a representation of Reality--a Representation inasmuch as it is not
the thing itself, but only represents it, must necessarily be limited by
the nature of its medium.... Realism is thus the basis of all Art, and its
antithesis is not Idealism but Falsism.... To misrepresent the forms of
ordinary life is no less an offence than to misrepresent the forms of ideal
life: a pug-nosed Apollo, or Jupiter in a great-coat, would not be more
truly shocking to an artistic mind than are those senseless falsifications
of Nature into which incompetence is
led under the pretence of 'beautifying' Nature. Either give us true peasants or leave them untouched; either paint no drapery at all, or paint it with the utmost fidelity; either keep your people silent, or make them speak the idiom of their class."
Among German novelists (or rather writers of short stories), Paul Heyse
is one of the few who is singled out for special praise in this review. And
it is curious that there should be a tale by this eminent author called
'The Lonely Ones' (which also appeared in 1858), in which an
incident occurs forcibly recalling the catastrophe of Grandcourt's
death in 'Daniel Deronda': the incident--although
unskilfully introduced--of a Neapolitan fisherman whose momentary
murderous hesitation to rescue his drowning friend ends in lifelong remorse
for his death.
What makes the article in question particularly interesting are the
allusions to the German tour, which give it an almost biographical
interest. As has been mentioned already, Mr. Lewis
and George Eliot were travelling in Germany in the spring of 1858, and in a
letter to a friend she writes: "Then we had a delicious journey to
Salzburg, and from thence through the Salz-Kammergut to Vienna, from Vienna
to Prague, and from Prague to Dresden, where we spent our last six weeks in
quiet work and quiet worship of the Madonna." And in his essay on Art
Mr. G.H. Lewis alludes to the most priceless
art-treasure Dresden contains, "Raphael's marvellous picture,
the Madonna di San Sisto," as furnishing the most perfect
illustration of what he means by Realism and Idealism. Speaking of the
child Jesus he says: "In the never-to-be-forgotten divine babe, we
have
at once the intensest realism of presentation with the highest idealism of conception: the attitude is at once grand, easy and natural; the face is that of a child, but the child is divine: in those eyes and in that brow there is an indefinable something which, greater than the expression of the angels, grander than that of pope or saint, is to all who see it a perfect truth; we feel that humanity in its highest conceivable form is before us, and that to transcend such a form would be to lose sight of the human nature there represented." A similar passage occurs in 'The Mill on the Floss,' where Philip Wakem says: "The greatest of painters only once painted a mysteriously divine child; he couldn't have told how he did it, and we can't tell why we feel it to be divine."
Enough has probably been quoted from George Eliot's articles to
give the reader some idea of her views on art. But they are so rich in
happy aphorisms, originality of illustration, and raciness of epithet that
they not only deserve attentive study because they were the first fruits of
the mind that afterwards gave to the world such noble and perfect works as
'The Mill on the Floss' and 'Silas Marner,' but are
well worth attention for their own sake. Indeed nothing in George
Eliot's fictions excels the style of these papers. And what a clear,
incisive, masterly style it was! Her prose in those days had a swiftness of
movement, an epigrammatic felicity, and a brilliancy of antithesis which we
look for in vain in the over-elaborate sentences and somewhat ponderous wit
of 'Theophrastus Such.'
A very vapid paper on 'Weimar and its Celebrities,' April
1859, which a writer in the Academy attributes to the same
hand, I know not on what
authority, does not possess a single attribute that we are in the habit of associating with the writings of George Eliot. That an author who, by that time, had already produced some of her very finest work, namely, the 'Scenes of Clerical Life,' and 'Adam Bede,' should have been responsible simultaneously for the trite commonplaces ventilated in this article is simply incredible. It is true that Homer is sometimes found nodding, and the right-hand of the greatest master may forget its cunning, but would George Eliot in her most abject moments have been capable of penning such a sentence as this in connection with Goethe? "Would not Fredricka or Lili have been a more genial companion than Christina Vulpius for that great poet of whom his native land is so justly proud?" It is not worth while to point out, other platitudes such as flow spontaneously from the facile pen of a penny-a-liner; but the consistent misspelling of every name may be alluded to in passing. Thus we read "Lily" for "Lely," "Zetter" for "Zelter," "Quintus Filein" for "Fixlein," "Einsedel" for "Einsiedel," etc. etc. This, in itself, would furnish no conclusive argument, supposing George Eliot to have been on the Continent and out of the way of correcting proofs. But as it happened she was in England in April 1859, and it is, therefore, on all grounds impossible that this worthless production should be hers.
Perhaps her two most noteworthy articles are the one called
'Evangelical Teaching,' published in 1855, and the other on
'Worldliness and other Worldliness,' which appeared in 1857.
This happy phrase, by the way, was first used by Coleridge, who says,
"As there is a worldliness or the too much of this life, so there
is another worldliness or rather other worldliness equally hateful and selfish with this worldliness." These articles are curious because they seem to occupy a midway position between George Eliot's earliest and latest phase of religious belief. But at this period she still felt the recoil from the pressure of a narrowing dogmatism too freshly not to launch back at it some of the most stinging shafts from the armoury of her satire. Not Heine himself, in his trenchant sallies, surpasses the irony with which some of her pages are bristling. To ignore this stage in George Eliot's mental development would be to lose one of the connecting links in her history: a history by no means smooth and uneventful, as some times superficially represented, but full of strong contrasts, abrupt transitions, outward and inward changes sympathetically charged with all the meaning of this transitional time. Two extracts from the above-mentioned articles will amply testify to what has just been said.
"Given a man with a moderate intellect, a moral standard not
higher than the average, some rhetorical affluence and great glibness of
speech, what is the career in which, without the aid of birth or money, he
may most easily attain power and reputation in English society? Where is
that Goshen of intellectual mediocrity in which a smattering of science and
learning will pass for profound instruction, where platitudes will be
accepted as wisdom, bigoted narrowness as holy zeal, unctuous egoism as
God-given piety? Let such a man become an evangelical preacher; he will
then find it possible to reconcile small ability with great ambition,
superficial knowledge with the prestige of erudition, a middling
morale with a high reputation for sanctity. Let him shun practical extremes, and be ultra only in what is purely theoretic. Let him be stringent on predestination, but latitudinarian on fasting; unflinching in insisting on the eternity of punishment, but diffident of curtailing the substantial comforts of time; ardent and imaginative on the pre-millenial advent of Christ, but cold and cautious towards every other infringement of the status quo. Let him fish for souls, not with the bait of inconvenient singularity, but with the drag-net of comfortable conformity. Let him be hard and literal in his interpretation only when he wants to hurl texts at the heads of unbelievers and adversaries, but when the letter of the Scriptures presses too closely on the genteel Christianity of the nineteenth century, let him use his spiritualising alembic and disperse it into impalpable ether. Let him preach less of Christ than of Antichrist; let him be less definite in showing what sin is than in showing who is the Man of Sin; less expansive on the blessedness of faith than on the accursedness of infidelity. Above all, let him set up as an interpreter of prophecy, rival 'Moore's Almanack' in the prediction of political events, tickling the interest of hearers who are but moderately spiritual by showing how the Holy Spirit has dictated problems and charades for their benefit; and how, if they are ingenious enough to solve these, they may have their Christian graces nourished by learning precisely to whom they may point as 'the horn that had eyes,' 'the lying prophet,' and the 'unclean spirits.' In this way he will draw men to him by the strong cords of their passions, made reason-proof by being baptized with the name of piety. In this way he may gain a metropolitan pulpit;
the avenues to his church will be as crowded as the passages to the opera; he has but to print his prophetic sermons, and bind them in lilac and gold, and they will adorn the drawing-room table of all evangelical ladies, who will regard as a sort of pious 'light reading' the demonstration that the prophecy of the locusts, whose sting is in their tail, is fulfilled in the fact of the Turkish commander having taken a horse's tail for his standard, and that the French are the very frogs predicted in the Revelations."
Even more scathing than this onslaught on a certain type of the popular
evangelical preacher, is the paper on the poet Young, one of the wittiest
things from George Eliot's pen, wherein she castigates with all her
powers of sarcasm and ridicule that class of believers who cannot vilify
this life sufficiently in order to make sure of the next, and who, in the
care of their own souls, are careless of the world's need. Her
analysis of the 'Night Thoughts' remains one of the most
brilliant criticisms of its kind. Young's contempt for this earth, of
all of us, and his exaltation of the starry worlds above, especially
provoke his reviewer's wrath. This frame of mind was always repulsive
to George Eliot, who could never sufficiently insist on the need of
man's concentrating his love and energy on the life around him. She
never felt much toleration for that form of aspiration that would soar to
some shadowy infinite beyond the circle of human fellowship. One of the
most epigrammatic passages in this article is where she says of Young,
"No man can be better fitted for an Established Church. He
personifies completely her nice balance of temporalities and
spiritualities. He is equally impressed with the momentousness of death
and of burial fees; he languishes at once for immortal life and for 'livings;' he has a fervid attachment to patrons in general, but on the whole prefers the Almighty. He will teach, with something more than official conviction, the nothingness of earthly things and he will feel something more than private disgust, if his meritorious efforts in directing men's attention to another world are not rewarded by substantial preferment in this. His secular man believes in cambric bands and silk stockings as characteristic attire for 'an ornament of religion and virtue;' he hopes courtiers will never forget to copy Sir Robert Walpole; and writes begging letters to the king's mistress. His spiritual man recognizes no motives more familiar than Golgotha and 'the skies;' it walks in graveyards, or soars among the stars.... If it were not for the prospect of immortality, he considers it would be wise and agreeable to be indecent, or to murder one's father; and, heaven apart, it would be extremely irrational in any man not to be a knave. Man, he thinks, is a compound of the angel and the brute; the brute is to be humbled by being reminded of its 'relation to the stars,' and frightened into moderation by the contemplation of deathbeds and skulls; the angel is to be developed by vituperating this world and exalting the next, and by this double process you get the Christian--'the highest style of man.' With all this our new-made divine is an unmistakable poet. To a clay compounded chiefly of the worldling and the rhetorician there is added a real spark of Promethean fire. He will one day clothe his apostrophes and objurgations, his astronomical religion and his charnel house morality, in lasting verse, which will stand, like a Juggernaut
made of gold and jewels, at once magnificent and repulsive: for this divine is Edward Young, the future author of the 'Night Thoughts.'"
It has seemed appropriate to quote thus largely from these essays,
because, never having been reprinted, they are to all intents and purposes
inaccessible to the general reader. Yet they contain much that should not
willingly be consigned to the dust and cobwebs, among which obsolete
magazines usually sink into oblivion. They may as well be specified here
according to their dates. 'Carlyle's Life of Sterling,'
January 1852; 'Woman in France: Madame de Sablé,'
October 1854; 'Evangelical Teaching: Dr. Cumming,' October
1855; 'German Wit: Heinrich Heine,' January 1856; 'Silly
Novels by Lady Novelists,' October 1856; 'The Natural History
of German Life,' July 1856; and 'Worldliness and other
Worldliness: the Poet Young,' January 1857.
Miss Evans's main employment on the Westminster
Review was, however, editorial. She used to write a considerable
portion of the summary of contemporary literature at the end of each
number. But her co-operation as sub-editor ceased about the close of 1853,
when she left Dr. Chapman's house, and went to live in apartments in a
small house in Cambridge Terrace, Hyde Park. Marian Evans was not entirely
dependent at this time on the proceeds of her literary work, her father
having settled the sum of 80l. to 100l. a year on
her for life, the capital of which, however, did not belong to her. She was
very generous with her money; and although her earnings at this time were
not considerable, they were partly spent on her poor relations.
In a letter to Miss Phelps, George Eliot touches on this rumour, after
alluding in an unmistakable manner to another great contemporary: "I
never--to answer one of your questions quite directly--I never
had any personal acquaintance with" (naming a prominent Positivist);
"never saw him to my knowledge, except
in the House of Commons; and though I have studied his books, especially his 'Logic' and 'Political Economy,' with much benefit, I have no consciousness of their having made any marked epoch in my life.
"Of Mr. ----'s friendship I have had the honour and
advantage for twenty years, but I believe that every main bias of my mind
had been taken before I knew him. Like the rest of his readers, I am, of
course, indebted to him for much enlargement and clarifying of
thought."
But there was another acquaintance which Miss Evans made during the
first year of her residence in the Strand, destined to affect the whole
future tenor of her life--the acquaintance of Mr. George Henry Lewes,
then, like her, a contributor to the Westminster Review.
George Henry Lewes was Marian's senior by two years, having been
born in London on the 18th of April, 1817. He was educated at Greenwich in
a school once possessing a high reputation for thoroughly
"grounding" its pupils in a knowledge of the classics. When his
education was so far finished, he was placed as clerk in a merchant's
office. This kind of occupation proving very distasteful, he turned medical
student for a time. Very early in life he was attracted towards philosophy,
for at the age of nineteen we find him attending the weekly meetings of a
small club, in the habit of discussing metaphysical problems in the parlour
of a tavern in Red Lion Square, Holborn. This club, from which the one in
'Daniel Deronda' is supposed to have borrowed many of its
features, was the point of junction for a most heterogeneous company. Here,
amicably seated round the fire, a speculative tailor would hob and nob with
some medical student
deep in anatomy; a second-hand bookseller having devoured the literature on his shelves, ventilated their contents for the general benefit; and a discursive American mystic was listened to in turn with a Jewish journeyman watchmaker deeply imbued with Spinozism. It is impossible not to connect this Jew, named Cohen, and described as "a man of astonishing subtilty and logical force, no less than of sweet personal worth," with the Mordecai of the novel just mentioned. However wide the after divergencies, here evidently lies the germ. The weak eyes and chest, the grave and gentle demeanour, the whole ideality of character correspond. In some respects G.H. Lewes was the "Daniel Deronda" to this "Mordecai." For he not only loved but venerated his "great calm intellect." "An immense pity," says Mr. Lewes, "a fervid indignation filled me as I came away from his attics in one of the Holborn courts, where I had seen him in the pinching poverty of his home, with his German wife and two little black-eyed children."
To this pure-spirited suffering watchmaker, Lewes owed his first
acquaintance with Spinoza. A certain passage, casually cited by Cohen,
awakened an eager thirst for more in the youth. The desire to possess
himself of Spinoza's works, still in the odour of pestilential heresy,
haunted him like a passion. For he himself, then "suffering the
social persecution which embitters any departure from accepted
creeds," felt in defiant sympathy with all outcasts. On a dreary
November evening, the coveted volumes were at length discovered on the
dingy shelves of a second-hand bookseller. By the flaring gaslight, young
Lewes, with a beating heart, read on the back of a
small brown quarto those thrilling words, 'Spinoza: Opera Posthuma!' He was poor in those days, and the price of the volume was twenty shillings, but he would gladly have sacrificed his last sixpence to secure it. Having paid his money with feverish delight, he hurried home in triumph, and immediately set to work on a translation of the 'Ethics,' which, however, he was too impatient to finish.
This little incident is well worth dwelling upon not only as being the
first introduction of a notable thinker to philosophy, but as showing the
eager impulsive nature of the man. The study of Spinoza led to his
publishing an article on his life and works in the Westminster
Review of 1843, almost the first account of the great Hebrew
philosopher which appeared in this country. This article, afterwards
incorporated in the 'Biographical History of Philosophy,'
formed the nucleus, I believe, of that "admirable piece of synthetic
criticism and exposition," as Mr. Frederic Harrison calls it; a work
which, according to him, has influenced the thought of the present
generation almost more than any single book except Mr. Mill's
'Logic.'
Before the appearance of either article or 'History of
Philosophy,' Mr. Lewes went to Germany, and devoted himself to the
study of its language and literature, just brought into fashion by Carlyle.
Returning to England in 1839, he became one of the most prolific
journalists of the day. Witty, brilliant, and many-sided, he seemed
pre-eminently fitted by nature for a press writer and
littérateur. His versatility was so
amazing, that a clever talker once said of him: "Lewes can do
everything in the world but paint: and he could do that, too, after a
week's study."
At this time, besides assisting in the editorship of the Classical Museum, he wrote for the Morning Chronicle, the Athenæum, the Edinburgh, Foreign Quarterly, British Quarterly, Blackwood, Fraser, and the Westminster Review. After publishing 'A Biographical History of Philosophy,' through Mr. Knight's 'Weekly Volumes' in 1846, he wrote two novels, 'Ranthorpe,' and 'Rose, Blanche, and Violet,' which successively appeared in 1847 and 1848. But fiction was not his forte, these two productions being singularly crude and immature as compared with his excellent philosophical work. Some jokes in the papers about "rant," killed what little life there was in "Ranthorpe." Nevertheless, Charlotte Brontë, who had some correspondence with Mr. Lewes about 1847, actually wrote about it as follows: "In reading 'Ranthorpe,' I have read a new book, not a reprint, not a reflection of any other book, but a new book." Another great writer, Edgar Poe, admired it no less, for he says of the work: "I have lately read it with deep interest, and derived great consolation from it also. It relates to the career of a literary man, and gives a just view of the true aims and the true dignity of the literary character."
'The Spanish Drama;' 'The Life of Maximilian
Robespierre, with extracts from his unpublished correspondence;'
'The Noble Heart: a Tragedy;' all followed in close succession
from the same inexhaustible pen. The last, it was said, proved also a
tragedy to the publishers. But not content with writing dramas, Mr. Lewes
was also ambitious of the fame of an actor, the theatre having always
possessed a strong fascination for him. Already as
a child he had haunted the theatres, and now, while delivering a lecture at the Philosophical Institution in Edinburgh, he shocked its staid habitués not a little by immediately afterwards appearing on the stage in the character of Shylock: so many, and seemingly incompatible, were Lewes's pursuits. But this extreme mobility of mind, this intellectual tripping from subject to subject, retarded the growth of his popularity. The present mechanical subdivision of labour has most unfortunately also affected the judgment passed on literary and artistic products. Let a man once have written a novel typical of the manners and ways of a certain class of English society, or painted a picture with certain peculiar effects of sea or landscape, or composed a poem affecting the very trick and language of some bygone medieval singer, he will be doomed, to the end of his days, to do the same thing over and over again, ad nauseam. Nothing can well be more deadening to any vigorous mental life, and Mr. Lewes set a fine example of intellectual disinterestedness in sacrificing immediate success to the free play of a most variously endowed nature.
The public too was a gainer by this. For the life of Goethe could not
have been made the rich, comprehensive, many-sided biography it is, had Mr.
Lewes himself not tried his hand at such a variety of subjects. This life,
begun in 1845, the result partly of his sojourn in Germany, did not appear
in print until 1855. Ultimately destined to a great and lasting succcss,
the MS. of the 'Life of Goethe' was ignominiously sent from one
publisher to another, until at last Mr. David Nutt, of the Strand, showed
his acumen by giving it to the reading world.
Some years before the publication of this biography Mr. Lewes had also
been one of the founders of that able, but unsuccessful weekly, the
Leader, of which he was the literary editor from 1849 to
1854. Many of his articles on Auguste Comte were originally written for
this paper, and afterwards collected into a volume for Bohn's series.
Indeed, after Mr. John Stuart Mill, he is to be regarded as the earliest
exponent of Positivism in England. He not only considered the
'Cours de Philosophie Positive' the
greatest work of this century, but believed it would "form one of the
mighty landmarks in the history of opinion. No one before M. Comte,"
he says, "ever dreamed of treating social problems otherwise than
upon theological or metaphysical methods. He first showed how possible,
nay, how imperative, it was that social questions should be treated on the
same footing with all other scientific questions. This being his object, he
was forced to detect the law of mental evolution before he could advance.
This law is the law of historical progression." But while Mr. Lewes,
with his talent for succinct exposition, helped more than any other
Englishman to disseminate the principles of Comte's philosophy in this
country, he was at the same time violently opposed to his
'Politique Positive,' with its
schemes of social reorganisation.
Even so slight a survey as this must show the astonishing discursiveness
of Mr. Lewes's intellect. By the time he was thirty he had already
tried his hand at criticism, fiction, biography, the drama, and philosophy.
He had enlarged his experience of human nature by foreign travel; he had
addressed audiences from the lecturer's platform; he had
en-
joyed the perilous sweets of editing a newspaper; he had even, it is said, played the harlequin in a company of strolling actors. Indeed, Mr. Thackeray was once heard to say that it would not surprise him to meet Lewes in Piccadilly, riding on a white elephant; whilst another wit likened him to the Wandering Jew, as you could never tell where he was going to turn up, or what he was going to do next.
In this discursiveness of intellect he more nearly resembled the
Encyclopedists of the 18th century than the men of his own time. Indeed his
personal appearance, temperament, manners, general tone of thought, seemed
rather to be those of a highly-accomplished foreigner than of an
Englishman. He was a lightly-built, fragile man, with bushy curly hair, and
a general shagginess of beard and eyebrow not unsuggestive of a Skye
terrier. For the rest, he had a prominent mouth and grey, deeply-set eyes
under an ample, finely-proportioned forehead. Volatile by nature, somewhat
wild and lawless in his talk, he in turn delighted and shocked his friends
by the gaiety, recklessness, and genial abandon of his manners
and conversation. His companionship was singularly stimulating, for the
commonest topic served him as a starting-point for the lucid development of
some pet philosophical theory. In this gift of making abstruse problems
intelligible, and difficult things easy, he had some resemblance to the
late W.K. Clifford, with his magical faculty of illuminating the most
abstruse subjects by his vivid directness of exposition.
As Lewes's life was so soon to be closely united to that of Marian
Evans, this cursory sketch of
his career will not seem inappropriate. At the time they met at Dr. Chapman's house, Mr. Lewes, who had married early in life, found his conjugal relations irretrievably spoiled. How far the blame of this might attach to one side or to the other does not concern us here. Enough that in the intercourse with a woman of such astonishing intellect, varied acquirements, and rare sympathy, Mr. Lewes discovered a community of ideas and a moral support that had been sadly lacking to his existence hitherto.
In many ways these two natures, so opposite in character, disposition,
and tone of mind, who, from such different starting-points, had reached the
same standpoint, seemed to need each other for the final fruition and
utmost development of what was best in each. A crisis was now impending in
Marian's life. She was called upon to make her private judgment a law
unto herself, and to shape her actions, not according to the recognised
moral standard of her country, but in harmony with her own convictions of
right and wrong. From a girl, it appears, she had held independent views
about marriage, strongly advocating the German divorce laws. On the
appearance of 'Jane Eyre,' when every one was talking of this
book and praising the exemplary conduct of Jane in her famous interview
with Rochester, Marian Evans, then only four-and-twenty, remarked to a
friend that in his position she coiinsidered him justified in contracting a
fresh marriage. And in an article on Madame de Sablé, written as
early as 1854, there is this significant passage in reference to the
"laxity of opinion and practice with regard to the marriage-tie in
France." "Heaven
forbid," she writes, "that we should enter on a defence of French morals, most of all in relation to marriage! But it is undeniable that unions formed in the maturity of thought and feeling, and grounded only on inherent fitness and mutual attraction, tended to bring women into more intelligent sympathy with man, and to heighten and complicate their share in the political drama. The quiescence and security of the conjugal relation are, doubtless, favourable to the manifestation of the highest qualities by persons who have already attained a high standard of culture, but rarely foster a passion sufficient to rouse all the faculties to aid in winning or retaining its beloved object--to convert indolence into activity, indifference into ardent partisanship, dulness into perspicuity."
Such a union, formed in the full maturity of thought and feeling, was
now contracted by Marian Evans and George Henry Lewes. Legal union,
however, there could be none, for though virtually separated from his wife,
Mr. Lewes could not get a divorce. Too little has as yet transpired
concerning this important step to indicate more than the bare outline of
events. Enough that Mr. Lewes appears to have written a letter in which,
after a full explanation of his circumstances, he used all his powers of
persuasion to win Miss Evans for his life-long companion; that she
consented, after having satisfied her conscience that in reality she was
not injuring the claims of others; and that henceforth she bore Mr.
Lewes's name, and became his wife in every sense but the legal
one.
This proceeding caused the utmost consternation amongst her
acquaintances, especially amongst her
friends at Rosehill. The former intimate and affectionate intercourse with Mrs. Bray and her sister was only gradually restored, and only after they had come to realise how perfectly her own conscience had been consulted and satisfied in the matter. Miss Hennell, who had already entered on the scheme of religious doctrine which ever since she has been setting forth in her printed works, "swerved nothing from her own principles that the maintenance of a conventional form of marriage (remoulded to the demands of the present age) is essentially attached to all religion, and pre-eminently so to the religion of the future."
In thus defying public opinion, and forming a connection in opposition
to the laws of society, George Eliot must have undergone some trials and
sufferings peculiarly painful to one so shrinkingly sensitive as herself.
Conscious of no wrong-doing, enjoying the rare happiness of completest
intellectual fellowship in the man she loved, the step she had taken made a
gap betveen her kindred and herself which could not but gall her clinging,
womanly nature. To some of her early companions, indeed, who had always
felt a certain awe at the imposing gravity of her manners, this dereliction
from what appeared to them the path of duty was almost as startling and
unexpected as if they had seen the heavens falling down.
How far the individual can ever be justified in following the dictates
of his private judgment, in opposition to the laws and prevalent opinions
of his time and country, must remain a question no less difficult than
delicate of decision. It is pre-
cisely the point where the highest natures and the lowest sometimes apparently meet; since to act in opposition to custom may be due to the loftiest motives--may be the spiritual exaltation of the reformer, braving social ostracism for the sake of an idea, or may spring, on the other hand, from purely rebellious promptings of an anti-social egoism, which recognises no law higher than that of personal gratification. At the same time, it seems, that no progress could well be made in the evolution of society without these departures on the part of individuals from the well-beaten tracks, for even the failures help eventually towards a fuller recognition of what is beneficial and possible of attainment. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, George Sand, the New England Transcendentalists, with their communistic experiment at Brooke Farm, all more or less strove to be path-finders to a better and happier state of society. George Eliot, however, hardly belonged to this order of mind. Circumstances prompted her to disregard one of the most binding laws of society, yet, while she considered herself justified in doing so, her sympathies were, on the whole, more enlisted in the state of things as they are than as they might be. It is certainly curious that the woman, who in her own life had followed such an independent course, severing herself in many ways from her past with all its traditional sanctities, should yet so often inculcate the very opposite teaching in her works--should inculcate an almost slavish adherence to whatever surroundings, beliefs, and family ties a human being may be born to.
I need only add here that Mr. Lewes and Marian
went to Germany soon after forming this union, which, only ending by death, gave to each what had hitherto been lacking in their lives. Many marriages solemnised in a church, and ushered in with all the ostentation of trousseau, bridesmaids, and wedding breakfast, are indeed less essentially such in all the deeper human aspects which this relation implies, than the one contracted in this informal manner. Indeed, to those who saw them together, it seemed as if they could never be apart. Yet, while so entirely at one, each respected the other's individuality, his own, at the same time, gaining in strength by the contact. Mr. Lewes's mercurial disposition now assumed a stability greatly enhancing his brilliant talents, and for the first time facilitating that concentration of intellect so necessary for the production of really lasting philosophic work. On the other hand, George Eliot's still dormant faculties were roused and stimulated to the utmost by the man to whom this union with her formed the most memorable year of his life. By his enthusiastic belief in her he gave her the only thing she wanted--a thorough belief in herself. Indeed, he was more than a husband: he was, as an intimate friend once pithily remarked, a very mother to her. Tenderly watching over her delicate health, cheering the grave tenor of her thoughts by his inexhaustible buoyancy, jealously shielding her from every adverse breath of criticism, Mr. Lewes in a manner created the spiritual atmosphere in which George Eliot could best put forth all the flowers and fruits of her genius.
In joining her life with that of Mr. Lewes, the care
of his three children devolved upon George Eliot, who henceforth showed them the undeviating love and tenderness of a mother. One of the sons had gone out to Natal as a young man, and contracted a fatal disease, which, complicated with some accident, resulted in an untimely death. He returned home a hopeless invalid, and his tedious illness was cheered by the affectionate tendance of her who had for so many years acted a mother's part towards him.
The time, however, was approaching when George Eliot was at last to
discover where her real mastery
lay. And this is the way, as the story goes, that she discovered it. They had returned from the Continent and were settled again in London, both actively engaged in literature. But literature, unless in certain cases of triumphant popularity, is perhaps the worst paid of all work. Mr. Lewes and George Eliot were not too well off. The former, infinite in resources, having himself tried every form of literature in turn, could not fail to notice the matchless power of observation, and the memory matching it in power, of the future novelist. One day an idea struck him. "My dear," he said, "I think you could write a capital story." Shortly afterwards there was some dinner engagement, but as he was preparing to go out, she said, "I won't go out this evening, and when you come in don't disturb me. I shall be very busy." And this was how the 'Scenes of Clerical Life' came first to be written! On being shown a portion of the first tale, 'Amos Barton,' Mr. Lewes was fairly amazed.
Stories are usually fabricated after the event; but, if not true, they
often truly paint a situation. And the general testimony of friends seems
to agree that it was Mr. Lewes who first incited the gifted woman, of whose
great powers he was best able to form a judgment, to express herself in
that species of literature which would afford the fullest scope to the
creative and dramatic faculties which she so eminently possessed. Here,
however, his influence ended. He helped to reveal George Eliot to herself,
and after that there was little left for him to do. But this gift of
stimulating another by sympathetic insight and critical appreciation is
itself of priceless value. When Schiller died, Goethe said, "The half
of my existence is gone
from me." A terrible word to utter for one so great. But never again, he knew, would he meet with the same complete comprehension, and, lacking that, his genius itself seemed less his own than before.
There is an impression abroad that Mr. Lewes, if anything, did some
injury to George Eliot from a literary point of view; that the nature of
his pursuits led her to adopt too technical and pedantic a phraseology in
her novels. But this idea is unjust to both. In comparing her earliest with
her latest style, it is clear that from the first she was apt to cull her
illustrations from the physical sciences, thereby showing how much these
studies had become part of herself. Indeed, she was far more liable to
introduce these scientific modes of expression than Mr. Lewes, as may be
easily seen by comparing his 'Life of Goethe,' partly
re-written in 1854, with some of her essays of the same date. As to her
matter, it is curious how much of it was drawn from the earliest sources of
memory--from that life of her childhood to which she may sometimes
have turned yearningly as to a long-lost Paradise. Most of her works might,
indeed, not inaptly be called 'Looking Backward.' They are a
half-pathetic, half-humorous, but entirely tender revivification of the
"days that are no more." No one, however intimate, could really
intermeddle with the workings of a genius drawing its happiest inspiration
from the earliest experiences of its own individual past.
Nothing is more characteristic of this obvious tendency than the first
of the 'Scenes of Clerical Life,' 'The Sad Fortunes of
the Rev. Amos Barton.' At Chilvers Coton the curious in such matters
may still see the identical church where the incumbent of
Shep-
perton used to preach sermons shrewdly compounded of High Church doctrines and Low Church evangelicalism, not forgetting to note "its little flight of steps with their wooden rail running up the outer wall, and leading to the school-children's gallery." There they may still see the little churchyard, though they may look in vain for the "slim black figure" of the Rev. Amos, "as it flits past the pale gravestones," in "the silver light that falls aslant on church and tomb." And among the tombs there is one, a handsome substantial monument, overshadowed by a yew-tree, on which there is this inscription:
This Emma Gwyther is none other than the beautiful Milly, the wife of Amos, so touchingly described by George Eliot, whose mother, Mrs. Evans, was her intimate friend. George Eliot would be in her teens when she heard the story of this sweet woman: heard the circumstantial details of her struggles to make the two ends of a ridiculously small income meet the yearly expenses: heard her mother, no doubt (in the words of Mrs. Hackit) blame her weak forbearance in tolerating the presence in her house of the luxurious and exacting countess, who, having ingratiated herself
HERE LIES,
WAITING THE SUMMONS OF THE ARCHANGEL'S TRUMPET,
ALL THAT WAS MORTAL OF
THE BELOVED WIFE OF THE
REV. JOHN GWYTHER, B.A.,
CURATE OF THIS PARISH,
NOV. 4TH, 1836,
AGED THIRTY-FOUR YEARS,
LEAVING A HUSBAND AND SEVEN CHILDREN.
with the gullible Amos by her talk of the "livings" she would get him, gave much scandal in the neighbourhood: heard of the pathetic death-bed, when, worn by care and toil, the gentle life ebbed quietly away, leaving a life-long void in her husband's heart and home. All this was the talk of the neighbourhood when George Eliot was a girl; and her extraordinary memory allowed nothing to escape.
On the completion of 'Amos Barton,' Mr. Lewes, who, as
already mentioned, was a contributor to 'Maga.' sent the MS. to
the editor, the late Mr. John Blackwood, as the work of an anonymous
friend. This was in the autumn of 1856. The other scenes of 'Clerical
Life' were then unwritten, but the editor was informed that the story
submitted to his approval formed one of a series. Though his judgment was
favourable, he begged to see some of the other tales before accepting this,
freely making some criticisms on the plot and studies of character in
'Amos Barton.' This, however, disheartened the author, whose
peculiar diffidence had only been overcome by Mr. Lewes's hearty
commendation. When the editor had been made aware of the injurious effect
of his objections, he hastened to efface it by accepting the tale without
further delay. It appeared soon afterwards in Blackwood's
Magazine for January 1857, where it occupied the first place. This
story, by some considered as fine as anything the novelist ever wrote, came
to an end in the next number. 'Mr. Gilfil's Love Story,'
and 'Janet's Repentance' were written in quick succession,
and the series was completed in November of the same year.
Although there was nothing sufficiently sensational in these
'Scenes' to arrest the attention of that great
public which must be roused by something new and startling, literary judges were not slow to discern the powerful realism with which the author had drawn these uncompromising studies from life. After the appearance of 'Amos Barton,' Mr. Blackwood wrote to the anonymous author: "It is a long time since I have read anything so fresh, so humorous, and so touching. The style is capital, conveying so much in so few words." Soon afterwards he began another letter: "My dear Amos, I forget whether I told you or Lewes that I had shown part of the MS. to Thackeray. He was staying with me, and having been out at dinner, came in about eleven o'clock, when I had just finished reading it. I said to him, 'Do you know that I think I have lighted upon a new author, who is uncommonly like a first-class passenger.' I showed him a page or two, I think the passage where the curate returns home and Milly is first introduced. He would not pronounce whether it came up to my ideas, but remarked afterwards that he would have liked to have read more, which I thought a good sign."
Dickens, after the publication of the 'Scenes,' sent a
letter to the unknown writer through the editor, warmly expressing the
admiration he felt for them. But he was strongly of opinion from the first
that they must have been written by a woman. In the meanwhile the tales
were reprinted in a collected form, and they were so successful that the
editor, writing to Mr. Lewes at the end of January 1858, when the book had
hardly been out a month, was able to say, "George Eliot has fairly
achieved a literary reputation among judges, and the public must follow,
although it may take time." And in a letter to George Eliot herself,
he wrote in February: "You will recollect, when we proposed to reprint, my impression was that the series had not lasted long enough in the magazine to give you a hold on the general public, although long enough to make your literary reputation. Unless in exceptional cases, a very long time often elapses between the two stages of reputation--the literary and the public. Your progress will be sure, if not so quick as we could wish."
While the sketches were being re-issued in book form, Messrs. Blackwood
informed its author that they saw good cause for makling a large increase
in the forthcoming reprint, and their anticipations were fully justified by
its success. All sorts of rumours were abroad as to the real author of
these clerical tales. Misled by a hint, calculated to throw him off the
real scent, Mr. Blackwood was at first under the impression that they were
the work of a clergyman, and perhaps this may have been the origin of a
belief which lingered till quite recently, that George Eliot was the
daughter of a clergyman, a statement made by several of the leading daily
papers after her death. Abandoning the idea of the clergyman, Mr. Blackwood
next fixed upon a very different sort of person, to wit, Professor Owen,
whom he suspected owing to the similarity of handwriting and the scientific
knowledge so exceptional in a novelist. No less funny was the supposition
held by others of Lord Lytton--who more than once hoaxed the public
under a new literary disguise--having at last surpassed himself in the
sterling excellence of these tales. Now that Bulwer has gone the way of all
fashions, it seems incredible that the most obtuse and slow-witted of
critics should have mistaken for a moment his high-flown
senti-
mental style for the new author's terse, vigorous and simple prose.
It was impossible, however, for an author to remain a mere nameless
abstraction. An appellation of some kind became an imperative necessity,
and, during the passage of 'Mr. Gilfil's Love Story'
through the press, the pseudonym of "George Eliot"--a name
destined to become so justly renowned--was finally assumed.
The 'Scenes of Clerical Life' were to George Eliot's
future works what a bold, spirited sketch is to a carefully elaborated
picture. All the qualities that distinguished her genius may be discovered
in this, her first essay in fiction. With all Miss Austen's matchless
faculty for painting commonplace characters, George Eliot has that other
nobler faculty of showing what tragedy, pathos, and humour may be lying in
the experience of a human soul "that looks out through dull grey
eyes, and that speaks in a voice of quite ordinary tones." While
depicting some commonplace detail of every day life, she has the power to
make her reader realise its close relation to the universal life. She never
gives you the mere dry bones and fragments of existence as represented in
some particular section of society, but always manages to keep before the
mind the invisible links connecting it with the world at large. In
'Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story' there is a passage as beautiful
as any in her works, and fully illustrating this attitude of her mind. It
is where Tina, finding herself deceived in Captain Wybrow, gives way to her
passionate grief in solitude.
"While this poor little heart was being bruised with a weight too
heavy for it, Nature was holding on her calm inexorable way, in unmoved and
terrible beauty.
The stars were rushing in their eternal courses; the tides swelled to the level of the last expectant weed; the sun was making brilliant day to busy nations on the other side of the swift earth. The stream of human thought and deed was hurrying and broadening onward. The astronomer was at his telescope; the great ships were labouring over the waves; the toiling eagerness of commerce, the fierce spirit of revolution, were only ebbing in brief rest; and sleepless statesmen were dreading the possible crisis of the morrow. What were our little Tina and her trouble in this mighty torrent, rushing from one awful unknown to another? Lighter than the smallest centre of quivering life in the water-drop, hidden and uncared for as the pulse of anguish in the breast of the tiniest bird that has fluttered down to its nest with the long-sought food, and has found the nest torn and empty."
There is rather more incident in this story of Mr. Gilfil than in either
of the two other 'Scenes of Clerical Life.' In 'Amos
Barton' the narrative is of the simplest, as has already been
indicated; and the elements from which 'Janet's
Repentance' is composed are as free from any complex entanglement ot
plot. The author usually describes the most ordinary circumstances of
English life, but the powerful rendering of the human emotions which spring
from them takes a most vivid hold of the imagination: 'Mr.
Gilfil's Love-Story,' however, seems a little Italian romance
dropped on English soil.
It is, in brief, the narration of how Sir Christopher Cheverel and his
wife, during their residence at Milan, took pity on a little orphan girl,
"whose large dark
eyes shone from out her queer little face like the precious stones in a grotesque image carved in old ivory." Caterina, or Tina as she is called, taken back to Cheverel Manor, grew up under the care of the Baronet's wife, to whom she became endeared by her exceptional musical talent. Sir Christopher had no children, but had chosen his nephew, Captain Wybrow, for his heir, and planned a marriage between him and Miss Assher, the handsome and accomplished owner of a pretty estate. Another marriage, on which he has equally set his heart, is that between his ward Maynard Gilfil, an open-eyed manly young fellow destined for the Church, and the mellow-voiced, large-eyed Tina, for whom he has long nursed an undeclared passion. But alas, for the futility of human plans! Tina, to whom the elegant Anthony Wybrow has been secretly professing love, suffers tortures of jealousy when he and Miss Assher, to whom he has dutifully become engaged, come on a visit to Cheverel Manor. The treacherous Captain, to lull the suspicions of his betrothed, insinuates that poor Miss Sarti entertains a hopeless passion for him, which puts the poor girl, who gets an inkling of this double-dealing, into a frenzy of indignation. In this state she possesses herself of a dagger, and as she is going to meet the Captain by appointment, dreams of plunging the weapon in the traitor's heart. But on reaching the appointed spot, she beholds the false lover stretched motionless on the ground already--having suddenly died of heart disease. Tina's anguish is indescribable: she gives the alarm to the household, but stung by remorse for a contemplated revenge of which her tender-hearted nature was utterly in-
capable, she flies unperceived from the premises at night. Being searched for in vain, she is suspected of having committed suicide. After some days of almost unbearable suspense, news is brought that Tina is lying ill at the cottage of a former maid in the household. With reviving hopes her anxious lover rides to the farm, sees the half-stunned, unhappy girl, and, after a while, manages to remove her to his sister's house. She gradually recovers under Mrs. Heron's gentle tendance, and one day a child's accidental striking of a deep bass note on the harpsichord suddenly revives her old passionate delight in music. And 'the soul that was born anew to music was born anew to love.' After a while Tina agrees to become Mr. Gilfil's wife, who has been given the living at Shepperton, where a happy future seems in store for the Vicar. "But the delicate plant had been too deeply bruised, and in the struggle to put forth a blossom it died.
"Tina died, and Maynard Gilfil's love went with her into deep silence for evermore."
of laughter very near to tears; never going out of her way for the eccentric and peculiar in human nature, seeing that human nature itself appears to her as the epitome of all incongruity. It is this breadth of conception and unerringness of vision piercing through the external and accidental to the core of man's mixed nature which give certain of her creations something of the life-like complexity of Shakespeare's.
Her power of rendering the idiom and manners of peasants, artisans, and
paupers, of calling up before us the very gestures and phrases of parsons,
country practitioners, and other varieties of inhabitants of our provincial
towns and rural districts, already manifests itself fully in these clerical
stories. Here we find such types as Mr. Dempster, the unscrupulous, brutal,
drunken lawyer; Mr. Pilgrim, the tall, heavy, rough-mannered, and
spluttering doctor, profusely addicted to bleeding and blistering his
patients; Mr. Gilfil, the eccentric vicar, with a tender love-story hidden
beneath his rugged exterior; the large-hearted, unfortunate Janet, rescued
from moral ruin by Mr. Tryan, the ascetic evangelical clergyman, whose
character, the author remarks, might have been found sadly wanting in
perfection by feeble and fastidious minds, but, as she adds, "The
blessed work of helping the world forward happily does not wait to be done
by perfect men; and I should imagine that neither Luther nor John Bunyan,
for example, would have satisfied the modern demand for an ideal hero, who
believes nothing but what is true, feels nothing but what is exalted, and
does nothing but what is graceful. The real heroes of God's making are
quite different: they have their natural heritage of love and conscience,
which they
drew in with their mother's milk; they know one or two of those deep spiritual truths which are only to be won by long wrestling with their own sins and their own sorrows; they have earned faith and strength so far as they have done genuine work, but the rest is dry, barren theory, blank prejudice, vague hearsay."
George Eliot's early acquaintance with many types of the clerical
character, and her sympathy with the religious life in all its
manifestations, was never more fully shown than in these
'Scenes.' In 'Janet's Repentance' we already
discover one of George Eliot's favourite psychological
studies--the awakening of a morally mixed nature to a new, a spiritual
life. This work of regeneration Mr. Tryan performs for Janet, Felix Holt
for Esther, and Daniel Deronda for Gwendolen. Her protest against the
application of too lofty a moral standard in judging of our
fellow-creatures, her championship of the "mongrel, ungainly dogs who
are nobody's pets," is another of the prominent qualities of her
genius fully expressed in this firstling work, being, indeed, at the root
of her humorous conception of life. One of the finest bits of humour in the
present volume is the scene in 'Amos Barton,' which occurs at
the workhouse, euphemistically called the "College." Mr.
Barton, having just finished his address to the paupers, is thus accosted
by Mr. Spratt, "a small-featured, small-statured man, with a
remarkable power of language, mitigated by hesitation, who piqued himself
on expressing unexceptionable sentiments in unexceptionable language on all
occasions.
"'Mr. Barton, sir--aw--aw--excuse my
trespassing on your time--aw--to beg that you will administer
a rebuke to this boy; he is--aw--aw--most inveterate in ill-behaviour during service-time.'
"The inveterate culprit was a boy of seven, vainly contending
against 'candles' at his nose by feeble sniffing. But no sooner
had Mr. Spratt uttered his impeachment than Mrs. Fodge rushed forward, and
placed herself between Mr. Barton and the accused.
"'That's my child, Muster Barton,'
she exclaimed, further manifesting her maternal instincts by applying her
apron to her offspring's nose. 'He's aly's
a-findin' faut wi' him, and a-poundin' him for nothin'.
Let him goo an' eat his roost goose as is a-smellin' up in our
noses while we're a-swallering them greasy broth, an' let my boy
alooan.'
"Mr. Spratt's small eyes flashed, and he was in danger of
uttering sentiments not unexceptionable before the clergyman; but Mr.
Barton, foreseeing that a prolongation of this episode would not be to
edification, said 'Silence!' in his severest tones.
"'Let me hear no abuse. Your boy is not likely to behave
well, if you set him the example of being saucy.' Then stooping down
to Master Fodge, and taking him by the shoulder, 'Do you like being
beaten?'
"'No--a.'
"'Then what a silly boy you are to be naughty. If you were
not naughty, you wouldn't be beaten. But if you are naughty, God will
be angry, as well as Mr. Spratt; and God can burn you for ever. That will
be worse than being beaten.'
"Master Fodge's countenance was neither affirmative nor
negative of this proposition.
"'But,' continued Mr. Barton, 'if you will be a
good boy, God will love you, and you will grow up to be a good man. Now,
let me hear next Thursday that you have been a good boy.'
"Master Fodge had no distinct vision of the benefit that would
accrue to him from this change of courses."
Compared with such qualifications who among novelists could compete?
What could a Dickens, or a Thackeray himself, throw into the opposing
scale? Lewes, indeed, was a match for her in variety of attainments, but he
had made several attempts at fiction, and the attempts had proved failures.
When at last, in the maturity of her powers, George Eliot produced
'Adam Bede,' she produced a novel in which the amplest results
of knowledge and meditation were so happily blended with instinctive
insight into life and character, and the rarest dramatic
imagi-
nation, as to stamp it immediately as one of the great triumphs and masterpieces in the world of fiction.
It is worth noticing that in 'Adam Bede' George Eliot
fulfils to the utmost the demands which she had been theoretically
advocating in her essays. In some of these she had not only eloquently
enforced the importance of a truthful adherence to nature, but had pointed
out how the artist is thus in the very vanguard of social and political
reforms; as in familiarising the imagination with the real condition of the
people, he did much towards creating that sympathy with their wants, their
trials, and their sufferings, which would eventually effect external
changes in harmony with this better understanding. Such had been her
teaching. And in Dickens she had recognised the one great novelist who, in
certain respects, had painted the lower orders with unerring truthfulness.
His "Oliver Twists," his "Nancys," his
"Joes," were terrible and pathetic pictures of the forlorn
outcasts haunting our London streets. And if, as George Eliot says, Dickens
had been able to "give us their psychological character, their
conception 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." Now George Eliot absolutely
does what Dickens aimed at doing. She not merely seizes the outward and
accidental traits of her characters: she pierces with unerring vision to
the very core of their nature, and enables us to realise the peculiarly
subtle relations between character and circumstance. Her primary object is
to excite our sympathy with the most ordinary aspects of human
life, with the people that one may meet any day in the fields, the workshops, and the homes of England. Her most vivid creations are not exceptional beings, not men or women pre-eminently conspicuous for sublime heroism of character or magnificent mental endowments, but work-a-day folk,
"Not too fine or good
For human nature's daily food."
To this conscientious fidelity of observation and anxious endeavour to
report the truth and nothing but the truth, as of a witness in a court of
justice, are owing that life-like vividness with which the scenery and
people in 'Adam Bede' seem projected on the reader's
imagination. The story, indeed, is so intensely realistic as to have given
rise to the idea that it is entirely founded on fact. That there is such a
substratum is hardly a matter of doubt, and there have been various
publications all tending to prove that the chief characters in 'Adam
Bede' were not only very faithful copies of living people, but of
people closely connected with its author. To some extent this is
incontrovertible. But, on the other hand, there is a likelihood of the
fictitious events having in their turn been grafted on to actual personages
and occurrences, till the whole has become so fused together as to lead
some persons to the firm conviction that Dinah Morris is absolutely
identical with Mrs. Elizabeth Evans, the Derbyshire Methodist. Such a
supposition would help to reconcile the conflicting statements respectively
made by the great novelist and the writers of two curious little books
entitled 'Seth Bede, the Methody, his Life and Labours,'
chiefly written by
himself, and 'George Eliot in Derbyshire,' by Guy Roslyn.
From these brochures one gathers that Hayslope, where the rustic drama
of 'Adam Bede' unfolds itself, is the village of Ellaston, not
far from Ashbourne in Staffordshire. This village is so little altered that
the traveller may still see the sign-board of the "Donnithorne
Arms," and the red brick hall, only with windows no longer unpatched.
Samuel, William, and Robert Evans (the father of the novelist) were born in
this place, and began life as carpenters, as their father before them.
Samuel Evans became a zealous Methodist, and was rather laughed at by his
family in consequence, for he says, "My elder brothers often tried to
tease me; they entertained High Church principles. They told me what great
blunders I made in preaching and prayer; that I had more zeal than
knowledge." In this, as in other respects, he is the prototype of
Seth, as Adam resembles Robert Evans, one of the more secular elder
brothers, only that in real life it was Samuel who married Elizabeth, the
Dinah Morris of fiction.
Much has been written about this Elizabeth Evans (the aunt of George
Eliot, already spoken of): indeed, her life was one of such rare devotion
to an ideal cause, that even such imperfect fragments of it as have been
committed to writing by herself or her friends are of considerable
interest. Elizabeth was born at Newbold in Leicestershire, and left her
father's house when little more than fourteen years old. She joined
the Methodists in 1797, after which she had entirely done with the
pleasures of the world and all her old companions. "I saw it my
duty," she says, "to leave off all my superfluities of dress;
hence I pulled off all my bunches, cut off my curls, left off my lace, and in this I found an unspeakable pleasure. I saw I could make a better use of my time and money than to follow the fashions of a vain world." While still a beautiful young girl, attired in a quaker dress and bonnet, she used to walk across those bleak Derbyshire hills looking so strangely mournful in their treeless nudity, with their bare stone fences grey against a greyer sky. Here she trudged from village to village gathering the poor about her; and pouring forth words of such earnest conviction that, as she says, "Many were brought to the Lord." The points of resemblance between her career and that of Dinah Morris cannot fail to strike the reader, even their phraseology being often singularly alike, as when Mrs. Evans writes in the short account of what she calls her "unprofitable life:" "I saw it my duty to be wholly devoted to God, and to be set apart for the Master's use;" while Dinah says: "My life is too short, and God's work is too great for me to think of making a home for myself in this world." It must be borne in mind, however, that these similarities of expression are natural enough when one considers that Dinah is a type of the same old-fashioned kind of Methodism to which Mrs. Evans belonged. What is perhaps stranger is, that the account given by George Eliot of her various meetings with her aunt, Mrs. Elizabeth Evans, should differ considerably from what the latter herself remembered or has stated about them. Shortly after the appearance of 'Adam Bede,' attention had been publicly called to the identity of the heroine of fiction with the Methodist preacher. This conviction was so strong in Wirksworth, that a number of friends placed a
memorial tablet in the Methodist chapel at Wirksworth with the following inscription:--
In order to give a correct notion of the amount of truth in her novel, George Eliot wrote in the following terms to her friend Miss Hennell on the 7th of October, 1859: "I should like, while the subject is vividly present with me, to tell you more exactly than I have ever yet done, what I knew of my aunt, Elizabeth Evans. My father, you know, lived in Warwickshire all my life with him, having finally left Staffordshire first, and then Derbyshire, six or seven years before he married my mother. There was hardly any intercourse between my father's family, resident in Derbyshire and Staffordshire, and our family--few and far between visits of (to my childish feeling) strange uncles and aunts and cousins from my father's far-off native county, and once a journey of my own, as a little child, with my father and mother, to see my uncle William (a rich builder) in Staffordshire--but not my uncle and aunt Samuel, so far as I can recall the dim outline of things--are what I remember of northerly relatives in my childhood.
ERECTED BY GRATEFUL FRIENDS,
In Memory of
MRS. ELIZABETH EVANS,
(KNOWN TO THE WORLD AS "DINAH BEDE")
WHO DURING MANY YEARS PROCLAIMED ALIKE IN THE
OPEN AIR, THE SANCTUARY, AND FROM HOUSE
TO HOUSE,
THE LOVE OF CHRIST:
SHE DIED IN THE LORD, MAY 9TH, 1849; AGED 74 YEARS.
"But when I was seventeen or more--after my
sister was married, and I was mistress of the house--my father took a journey into Derbyshire, in which, visiting my uncle and aunt Samuel, who were very poor, and lived in a humble cottage at Wirksworth, he found my aunt in a very delicate state of health after a serious illness, and, to do her bodily good, he persuaded her to return with him, telling her that I should be very, very happy to have her with me for a few weeks. I was then strongly under the influence of evangelical belief, and earnestly endeavouring to shape this anomalous English-Christian life of ours into some consistency with the spirit and simple verbal tenor of the New Testament. I was delighted to see my aunt. Although I had only heard her spoken of as a strange person, given to a fanatical vehemence of exhortation in private as well as public, I believed that I should find sympathy between us. She was then an old woman--above sixty--and, I believe, had for a good many years given up preaching. A tiny little woman, with bright, small dark eyes, and hair that had been black, I imagine, but was now grey--a pretty woman in her youth, but of a totally different physical type from Dinah. The difference--as you will believe--was not simply physical; no difference is. She was a woman of strong natural excitability, which I know, from the description I have heard my father and half-sister give, prevented her from the exercise of discretion under the promptings of her zeal. But this vehemence was now subdued by age and sickness; she was very gentle and quiet in her manners, very loving, and (what she must have been from the very first), a truly religious soul, in whom the love of God and love of man were fused together. There was nothing rightly distinctive in
her religious conversation. I had had much intercourse with pious dissenters before; the only freshness I found in her talk came from the fact that she had been the greater part of her life a Wesleyan, and though she left the society when women were no longer allowed to preach, and joined the New Wesleyans, she retained the character of thought that belongs to the genuine old Wesleyan. I had never talked with a Wesleyan before, and we used to have little debates about predestination, for I was then a strong Calvinist. Here her superiority came out, and I remember now, with loving admiration, one thing which at the time I disapproved; it was not strictly a consequence of her Arminian belief, and at first sight might seem opposed to it, yet it came from the spirit of love which clings to the bad logic of Arminianism. When my uncle came to fetch her, after she had been with us a fortnight or three weeks, he was speaking of a deceased minister once greatly respected, who, from the action of trouble upon him, had taken to small tippling, though otherwise not culpable. 'But I hope the good man's in heaven for all that,' said my uncle. 'Oh yes,' said my aunt, with a deep inward groan of joyful conviction, 'Mr. A.'s in heaven, that's sure.' This was at the time an offence to my stern, ascetic, hard views--how beautiful it is to me now!
"As to my aunt's conversation, it is a fact that the only two
things of any interest I remember in our lonely sittings and walks are her
telling me one sunny afternoon how she had, with another pious woman,
visited an unhappy girl in prison, stayed with her all night, and gone with
her to execution; and one or two accounts of supposed miracles in which she
believed, among the rest, the face with the crown of
thorns seen in the glass. In her account of the prison scenes I remember no word she uttered; I only remember her tone and manner, and the deep feeling I had under the recital. Of the girl she knew nothing, I believe, or told me nothing, but that she was a common, coarse girl, convicted of child-murder. The incident lay in my mind for years on years, as a dead germ, apparently, till time had made my mind a nidus in which it could fructify; it then turned out to be the germ of 'Adam Bede.'
"I saw my aunt twice after this. Once I spent a day and night with
my father in the Wirklsworth cottage, sleeping with my aunt, I remember.
Our interview was less interesting than in the former time; I think I was
less simply devoted to religious ideas. And once again she came with my
uncle to see me, when father and I were living at Foleshill;
then there was some pain, for I had given up the form of
Christian belief, and was in a crude state of free-thinking. She stayed
about three or four days, I think. This is all I remember distinctly, as
matter I could write down, of my dear aunt, whom I really loved. You see
how she suggested 'Dinah;' but it is not possible you should
see, as I do, how entirely her individuality differed from
'Dinah's.' How curious it seems to me that people should
think 'Dinah's' sermon, prayers, and speeches were
copied, when they were written with hot tears as they surged
up in my own mind!
"As to my indebtedness to facts of local and personal history of a
small kind connected with Staffordshire and Derbyshire, you may imagine of
what kind that is, when I tell you that I never remained in either of those
counties more than a few
days together, and of only two such visits have I more than a shadowy, interrupted recollection. The details which I know as facts, and have made use of for my picture, were gathered from such imperfect allusion and narrative as I heard from my father in his occasional talk about old times.
"As to my aunt's children or grandchildren saying, if they
did say, that 'Dinah' is a good portrait of my
aunt, that is simply the vague, easily-satisfied notion
imperfectly-instructed people always have of portraits. It is not
surprising that simple men and women, without pretension to enlightened
discrimination, should think a generic resemblance constitutes a portrait,
when we see the great public, so accustomed to be delighted with
mis-representations of life and character, which they accept
as representations, that they are scandalised when art makes a nearer
approach to truth.
"Perhaps I am doing a superfluous thing in writing all this to
you, but I am prompted to do it by the feeling that in future years
'Adam Bede,' and all that concerns it, may have become a dim
portion of the past, and that I may not be able to recall so much of the
truth as I have now told you."
Nothing could prove more conclusively how powerful was the impression
which 'Adam Bede' created than this controversy concerning the
amount of truth which its characters contained. But, as hinted before, it
seems very likely that some of the doings and sayings of the fictitious
personages should have been attributed, almost unconsciously, to the real
people whom they resembled. How quick is the popular imagination in
effecting these transformations came only quite recently under my notice,
when some English tra-
vellers, while visiting Château d'If, were taken by the guide in perfect good faith to see the actual dungeon where Monte Christo was imprisoned! Similarly, one would think, that the moving sermon preached by Dinah on the Green at Hayslope had been afterwards erroneously ascribed to Mrs. Elizabeth Evans. But an account recently published in the Century Magazine by one who had long known the Evanses of Wirksworth, seems irreconcilable with such a supposition. According to this writer it would appear that besides the visits to her aunt at Wirksworth, of which George Eliot speaks in the letter just quoted, there was one other of which no mention is made. This visit, which she paid her cousin, Mr. Samuel Evans, occurred in 1842, when she remained a week at his house in Wirksworth. The aunt and niece were in the habit of seeing each other every day for several hours at this time. They usually met at the house of one of the married daughters of Mrs. Elizabeth Evans, holding long conversations while sitting by themselves in the parlour. "These secret conversations," says the writer of the article, "excited some curiosity in the family, and one day one of the daughters said, 'Mother, I can't think what thee and Mary Ann have got to talk about so much.' To which Mrs. Evans replied: 'Well, my dear, I don't know what she wants, but she gets me to tell her all about my life and my religious experience, aud she puts it all down in a little book. I can't make out what she wants it for.' "After her departure, Mrs. Evans is reported to have said to her daughter, "Oh dear, Mary Ann has got one thing I did not mean her to take away, and that is the notes of the first sermon I preached at Ellaston Green." According to the
same authority, Marian Evans took notes of everything people said in her hearing: no matter who was speaking, down it went into the note-book, which seemed never out of her hand; and these notes she is said to have transcribed every night before going to bed. Yet this habit was foreign to her whole character, and the friends who knew her most intimately in youth and later life never remember seeing her resort to such a practice. Be that as it may, there can be no doubt that the novelist very freely used many of the circumstances connected with her aunt's remarkable career. How closely she adhered to nature is shown by the fact that in Mrs. Poyser and Bartle Massey she retained the actual names of the characters portrayed, as they happened to be both dead. Bartle Massey, the village cynic, had been the schoolmaster of her father, Robert Evans. How accurately the latter, together with all his surroundings, was described is shown by the following anecdote. On its first appearance 'Adam Bede' was read aloud to an old man, an intimate associate of Robert Evans in his Staffordshire days. This man knew nothing concerning either author or subject beforehand, and his astonishment was boundless on recognising so many friends and incidents of his own youth portrayed with unerring fidelity. He sat up half the night listening to the story in breathless excitement, now and then slapping his knee as he exclaimed, "That's Robert, that's Robert to the life."
Although Wirksworth is not the locality described in 'Adam
Bede,' it contains features recalling that quaint little market-town,
where over the door of one of the old-fashioned houses may be read the name
made illustrious by the inimitable Mrs. Poyser. In
the neighbourhood, too, are "Arkwiright's mills there at Cromford," casually alluded to by Adam Bede; and should the tourist happen to enter one of the cottages of grey stone, with blue-washed door and window-frames, he may still alight on specimens of Methodism, as devout as Seth Bede, eloquently expounding the latest political event by some prophecy of Daniel or Ezekiel. In short, one breathes the atmosphere in which such characters as Dinah and Seth actually lived and had their being. This uncompromising Realism, so far from detracting, only enhances the genius of this powerful novel. A thousand writers might have got hold of these identical materials: a George Eliot alone could have cast these materials into the mould of 'Adam Bede.' Let any one glance at the account of their religious experiences, as given by Elizabeth or Samuel Evans, and he will realise all the more strongly how great was the genius of her who transfused these rambling, commonplace effusions into such an artistic whole. I have entered so minutely into this question of the likeness between the actual characters and those in the novel purely on account of the biographical interest attaching to it. In judging of 'Adam Bede' as a work of art these facts possess next to no importance. If we could trace the characters in any one of Shakespeare's plays to human beings actually connected with the poet, we should consider such a discovery immensely valuable as throwing new light on his own life, though it would hardly affect our critical estimate of the drama itself.
So much has been said already about the characters in 'Adam
Bede' in connection with the real people they resemble, that little
need be added here about
them. Dinah Morris--the youthful preacher, whose eloquence is but the natural, almost involuntary manifestation in words, of a beautiful soul; whose spring of love is so abundant that it overflows the narrow limits of private affection, and blesses multitudes of toiling, suffering men and women with its wealth of pity, hope, and sympathy--was a new creation in the world of fiction. Some writer has pointed out a certain analogy between the sweet Derbyshire Methodist and the gentle pietist whose confessions form a very curious chapter of 'Wilhelm Meister.' But the two characters are too dissimilar for comparison. The German heroine is a dreamy, passive, introspective nature, feeling much but doing little; whereas the English preacher does not inquire too curiously into the mysteries of her faith, but moved by the spirit of its teaching goes about actively, participating in the lives of others by her rousing words and her acts of charity. Only a woman would or could have described just such a woman as this: a woman whose heart is centred in an impersonal ideal instead of in any individual object of love; whereas a man's heroine always has her existence rooted in some personal affection or passion, whether for parent or lover, child or husband. This makes Dinah less romantically interesting than Hetty Sorrel, the beautiful, kittenlike, self-involved creature with whom she is so happily contrasted. George Eliot never drew a more living figure than this of Hetty, hiding such a hard little heart under that soft dimpling beauty of hers. Again, I think that only a woman would have depicted just such a Hetty as this. The personal charms of this young girl are drawn in words that have the glow of life itself; yet while intensely
conscious of her beauty, we are kept aware all the time that, to use one of the famous Mrs. Poyser's epigrammatic sayings, Hetty is "no better nor a cherry wi' a hard stone inside it." George Eliot is never dazzled or led away by her own bewitching creation as a man would have been. There is a certain pitilessness in her analysis of Hetty's shallow, frivolous little soul, almost as if she were saying--See here, what stuff this beauty which you adore is made of in reality! To quote her own subtle, far-reaching interpretation of beauty: "Hetty's face had a language that transcended her feelings. There are faces which nature charges with a meaning and pathos not belonging to the simple human soul that flutters beneath them, but speaking the joys and sorrows of foregone generations; eyes that tell of deep love which doubtless has been and is somewhere, but not paired with these eyes, perhaps paired with pale eyes that can say nothing, just as a national language may be instinct with poetry unfelt by the lips that use it."
The sensation created by 'Adam Bede' was
shown in other ways besides the claim of some to have discovered the
original characters of this striking novel. The curiosity of the public was
naturally much exercised as to who the unknown author could possibly be,
who had so suddenly leaped into fame. And now there comes on the scene an
individual who does not claim to be the living model of one of the
characters portrayed, but to be the author of the book himself. And the
name of this person was Liggins!
While the 'Scenes of Clerical Life' were yet appearing in
Blackwood's Magazine the inhabitants of Nuneaton and
its neighbourhood were considerably perplexed and excited to find
well-known places and
persons touched off to the life. In Amos Barton they recognised the incumbent of Coton Church, in Mr. Pilgrim a medical man familiar to every child in the town, and indeed in every one of the characters an equally unmistakable portrait. Clearly no one but a fellow-townsman could have hit off these wonderful likenesses. Literary talent not being too abundant, their choice of an author was limited. The only man who by any stretch of imagination seemed to have the making of a man of letters in him was this above-mentioned Liggins. To have studied at Cambridge, gallantly run through a fortune, and be in very needy circumstances, were exactly the qualifications to be expected in a man of genius. Further evidence seeming unnecessary, the real authorship of the 'Scenes' was now revealed in an Isle of Man paper. At first the reputed author gently denied the impeachment, but on the appearance of 'Adam Bede' he succumbed to the temptation. To be fêted at dinner parties as a successful author, and to have a subscription set on foot by enthusiastic lady-admirers and fellow-townsmen, in whose eyes he was a sadly unrequited genius, proved irresistible. A local clergyman even wrote to the Times stating Liggins to be the real surname of "George Eliot!" The latter wrote, of course, denying the statement, and challenging the pretender to produce some specimen of his writing in the style of 'Adam Bede.' But the confidence of the Nuneaton public in their hero Liggins was not to be so easily shaken. Two dissenting ministers from Coventry went over to Attleborough to call upon the "great author," and to find out if he really did write 'Adam Bede.' Liggins evaded their questions, indirectly admitting that he did; but when
they asked him point blank, "Liggins, tell us, did you write 'Adam Bede'?" he said, "If I didn't, the devil did!" and that was all they could get out of him. Another clergyman was much less sceptical, assuring every one that he was positive as to Liggins being the author, as he had seen the MS. of 'Adam Bede' in his hands. To this day there lives in the Isle of Man a certain venerable old gentleman who has never lost his faith in Liggins, but, when George Eliot is mentioned, gravely shakes his head, implying that there is more in the name than meets the eye of the superficial observer. But a heavy retribution befell the poor pseudo-author at last, for when his false pretences to favour were fully manifest he fell into utter neglect and poverty, ending his days in the workhouse.
This foolish misrepresentation hastened the disclosure of George
Eliot's real personality and name, which occurred on the publication
of the 'Mill on the Floss.' Shortly before that, Mr. Blackwood,
who had long entertained the wish to know the author of the 'Scenes
of Clerical Life' and of 'Adam Bede,' was invited by
Lewes to meet him at last. No one was present at the dinner-table besides
Mr. Lewes, Marian, and Mr. Blackwood himself. The dinner was an extremely
pleasant one, but when it was over, the guest could not help expressing his
regret that George Eliot himself should not have been present. "Here
he is," said Lewes, introducing the quiet, low-spoken lady who had
presided at table, not without enjoyment at the sensation he produced as
the astonished publisher shook hands with his contributor.
When the 'Mill on the Floss' appeared, however, the veil was
lifted, and people heard that George Eliot had once been a Miss Marian
Evans, who came from the neighbourhood of Nuneaton in Warwickshire. To her
brother Isaac alone this was no news, as he had detected his sister in the
first of the 'Scenes.' The child-life of Tom and Maggie
Tulliver was in many respects an autobiography; and no biographer can ever
hope to describe the early history of George
Eliot as she herself has done in the 'Mill on the Floss.' How many joys and griefs of those happy careless days must have been recalled to her brother--those days when little Mary Ann had sat poring over Daniel Defoe's 'History of the Devil'--or sought refuge in the attic at Griff house, after a quarrel with him: "This attic was Maggie's favourite retreat on a wet day, when the weather was not too cold; here she fretted out all her ill-humours, and talked aloud to the worm-eaten floors and the worm-eaten shelves, and the dark rafters festooned with cobwebs; and here she kept a Fetish which she punished for all her misfortunes. This was the trunk of a large wooden doll, which once stared with the roundest of eyes above the reddest of cheeks, but was now entirely defaced by a long career of vicarious suffering. Three nails driven into the head commemorated as many crises in Maggie's nine years of earthly struggle, that luxury of vengeance having been suggested to her by the picture of Jael destroying Sisera in the old Bible."
Again, at some fields' distance from their old home there had been
a "Round Pool" called "The Moat," "almost a
perfect round, framed in with willows and tall reeds, so that the water was
only to be seen when you got close to the brink." This was a
favourite resort of Isaac and Mary Ann, as also of Tom and his sister when
they went fishing together, and "Maggie thought it probable that the
small fish would come to her hook and the large ones to Tom's."
The "Red Deeps," too, where Maggie loved to walk in June, when
the "dog-roses were in their glory," and where she lived
through many phases of her shifting inner life was in the same vicinity,
and at one time a beloved haunt of the future novelist.
But although some of the spots mentioned in the 'Mill on the
Floss' have been easily identified as connected with George
Eliot's early home, the scenery of that novel is mainly laid in
Lincolnshire. St. Oggs, with "its red-fluted roofs and broad
warehouse gables," is the ancient town of Gainsborough. The Floss is
a tidal river like the Trent, and in each case the spring-tide, rushing up
the river with its terrific wave and flooding the land for miles round, is
known as the Eagre, a name not a little descriptive of the thing
itself.
The 'Mill on the Floss' (a title adopted by the author at
the suggestion of Mr. Blackwood in preference to 'Sister
Maggie') is the most poetical of George Eliot's novels. The
great Floss, hurrying between green pastures to the sea, gives a unity of
its own to this story, which opens to the roar of waters, the weltering
waters which accompany it at the close. It forms the elemental background
which rounds the little lives of the ill-starred family group nurtured on
its banks. The childhood of Tom and Maggie Tulliver is inextricably blended
with this swift river, the traditions of which have been to them as fairy
tales; its haunting presence is more or less with them throughout their
chequered existence; and when pride and passion, when shame and sorrow have
divided the brother and sister, pursued as by some tragic fate, the Floss
seems to rise in sympathy, and submerges them in its mighty waters to unite
them once more "in an embrace never to be parted." It cannot
fail to strike the reader that in almost every one of George Eliot's
novels there occurs a death by drowning: as in the instance of Thias Bede,
of Dunstan Cass, of Henleigh Grandcourt, and nearly in
that of Tito. This may be accounted for by the fact that as a child the novelist became acquainted with the sudden death of a near relative who had accidentally fallen into a stream: an incident which sunk deeply into her retentive mind.
Fate plays a very conspicuous part in this as in most of George
Eliot's novels. But it is not the Fate of the Greeks, it is not a
power that affects human existence from without: it rather lies at the root
of it, more or less shaping that existence according to obscure inherited
tendencies, and in the collision between character and circumstance,
between passion and law, potent only in proportion as the individual
finally issues conquered or a conqueror from the struggle of life. This
action of character on circumstance, and of circumstance on character is an
ever-recurring motif with George Eliot. We
constantly see adverse circumstances modifying and moulding the lives of
the actors in her stories. She has hardly, if ever, therefore, drawn a hero
or heroine, for these, instead of yielding, make circumstances yield to
them. Dorothea and Lydgate in abandoning their striving after the highest
kind of life; Tito in invariably yielding to the most pleasurable prompting
of the moment; Gwendolen in being mainly influenced by circumstances acting
on her, without her reacting on them, are all types of this kind.
Maggie belongs, on the whole, to the same type. She, too, is what Goethe
calls a problematic nature, a nature which, along with vast possibilities
and lofty aspirations, lacks a certain fixity of purpose, and drifting
helplessly from one extreme to another, is shattered almost as soon as it
has put out of port. In Maggie's case this evil springs from the very
fulness of her
nature; from the acuteness of an imagination which the many-sidedness of life attracts by turns in the most opposite directions. Tom, on the other hand, with his narrow practical understanding, entirely concentrated on the business in hand, swerves neither to right nor left, because he may be said to resemble a horse with blinkers, in that he sees only the road straight ahead. Maggie, with all her palpable weaknesses and startling inconsistencies, is the most adorable of George Eliot's women. In all poetry and fiction there is no child more delicious than the "little wench" with her loving heart and dreamy ways, her rash impulses and wild regrets, her fine susceptibilities and fiery jets of temper--in a word, her singularly fresh and vital nature. The same charm pervades every phase of her life. In her case the child, if I may so far modify Wordsworth's famous saying, is eminently the mother of the woman.
Profoundly affectionate by nature, and sympathising as she does with her
father in his calamity, she cannot help rebelling at the sordid narrowness
of her daily life, passionately craving for a wider field wherein to
develop her inborn faculties. In this state of yearning and wild unrest,
her accidental reading of Thomas à Kempis forms a crisis in her
life, by bringing about a spiritual awakening in which Christianity, for
the first time, becomes a living truth to her. Intense as she is, Maggie
now throws all the ardour of her nature into renunciation and
self-conquest. She seeks her highest satisfaction in abnegation of all
personal desire, and in entire devotion to others. In her young asceticism
she relinquishes a world of which she is ignorant, stifling every impulse,
however innocent, that seems opposed to her new faith.
But Maggie has more actual affinity with poets and artists than with
saints and martyrs. Her soul thrills like a finely-touched instrument to
the beauty of the world around her, and though she doubts whether there may
not even be a sinfulness in the indulgence of this enjoyment, yet the
summer flowers and the summer sunshine put her scruples to flight. And
then, when, through the intervention of Philip Wakem, the enchantments of
romance and poetry are brought within her reach, the glory of the world
again lays hold of her imagination, and a fresh conflict is begun in her
soul. Thus she drifts from one state into another most opposed to it, and
to an outside observer, such as Tom, her abrupt transitions are a sign that
she is utterly wanting in moral stamina.
Not only Tom, but many eminent critics, who have descanted with fond
partiality on Maggie's early life, seem to be shocked by that part of
her story in which she allows herself to fall passionately in love with
such an ordinary specimen of manhood as Stephen Guest. The author has even
been accused of violating the truth of Nature, inasmuch as such a
high-minded woman as Maggie could never have inclined to so vulgar, so
commonplace a man as her lover. Others, while not questioning the truth of
the character, find fault with the poor heroine herself, whom they
pronounce an ineffective nature revealing its innate unsoundness by the
crowning error of an abject passion for so poor a creature as the dandy of
St. Oggs. This contention only proves the singular vitality of the
character itself, and nothing is more psychologically true in George
Eliot's studies of character than this love of the high-souled heroine
for a man who has no corresponding
fineness of fibre in his nature, his attraction lying entirely in the magnetism of mutual passion. This vitality places Maggie Tulliver by the side of the Juliets, the Mignons, the Consuelos, the Becky Sharps and other airy inheritors of immortality. It is curious that Mr. Swinburne, in view of such a character as this, or, indeed, bearing in mind a Silas Marner, a Dolly Winthrop, a Tito, and other intrinsically living reproductions of human nature, should describe George Eliot's as intellectually constructed characters in contrast to Charlotte Brontë's creations, the former, according to him, being the result of intellect, the latter of genius. If ever character came simply dropped out of the mould of Nature it is that of Maggie. His assumption, that the 'Mill on the Floss' can in any sense have been suggested by, or partially based upon, Mrs. Gaskell's story of 'The Moorland Cottage,' seems equally baseless. There is certainly the identity of name in the heroines, and some resemblance of situation as regards portions of the story, but both the name and the situation are sufficiently common not to excite astonishment at such a coincidence. Had George Eliot really known of this tale--a tale feebly executed at the best--she would obviously have altered the name so as not to make her obligation too patent to the world. As it is, she was not a little astonished and even indignant, on accidentally seeing this opinion stated in some review, and positively denied ever having seen the story in question.
Indeed when one knows how this story grew out of her own experience, how
its earlier portions especially are a record of her own and her
brother's childhood--how even Mrs. Glegg and Mrs. Pullet were
only
too faithfully done from the aunts of real life, one need not go far afield to seek for its origin. Every author usually writes one book, which he might more or less justly entitle 'My Confessions,' into which he pours an intimate part of his life under a thin disguise of fiction, a book invariably exciting a unique kind of interest in the reader be he conscious or not of the presence of this autobiographical element. Fielding's 'Amelia,' Thackeray's 'Pendennis,' Dickens's 'David Copperfield,' Charlotte Brontë's 'Villette,' are cases in point. The 'Mill on the Floss' is a work of similar nature. Maggie Tulliver is George Eliot herself, but only one side, one portion, one phase of George Eliot's many-sided, vastly complex nature. It is George Eliot's inner life in childhood and youth as it appeared to her own consciousness. We recognise in it her mental acuteness, her clinging affectionateness, her ambition, her outlook beyond the present, her religious and moral preoccupations, even her genius is not so much omitted as left in an undeveloped, rudimentary state. While her make-believe stories, her thirst for knowledge, her spiritual wrestlings, and the passionate response of her soul to high thinking, noble music, and the beautiful in all its forms, show that the making of genius was there in germ. Much in the same manner Goethe was fond of partitioning his nature, and of giving only the weaker side to his fictitious representatives. Conscious in himself of fluctuations of purpose which he only got the better of by his indomitable will, he usually endowed these characters with his more impulsive, pliant self, as manifested in Werther, in Tasso, in Edward of the 'Elective Affinities.' In this sense also Maggie Tulliver resembles George Eliot. She is her poten-
tial self, such as she might have been had there not been counterbalancing tendencies of unusual force, sufficient to hold in check all erratic impulses contrary to the main direction of her life.
While tempted to dwell largely on Maggie Tulliver, the central figure of
'The Mill on the Floss,' it would be very unfair to slur over
the other admirably drawn characters of this novel. Her brother Tom,
already repeatedly alluded to, is in every sense the counterpart of
"Sister Maggie." Hard and narrow-minded he was from a boy,
"particularly clear and positive on one point, namely, that he would
punish everybody who deserved it: why, he wouldn't have minded being
punished himself, if he deserved it; but, then, he never did
deserve it." This strikes the key-note of a character whose stern
inflexibility, combined with much practical insight and dogged persistence
of effort, is at the same time dignified by a high, if somewhat narrow,
sense of family honour. Conventional respectability, in fact, is Tom
Tulliver's religion. He is not in any sense bad, or mean, or sordid;
he is only so circumscribed in his perceptive faculties, that he has no
standard by which to measure thoughts or feelings that transcend his own
very limited conception of life.
Both by his good and his bad qualities, by his excellencies and his
negations, Tom Tulliver proves himself what he is--a genuine sprig of
the Dodson family, a chip of the old block! And the Dodson sisters are, in
their way, among the most amazingly living portraitures that George Eliot
ever achieved. Realism in art can go no further in this direction. These
women, if present in the flesh, would not be so distinctively vivid as when
beheld
through the transfixing medium of George Eliot's genius. For here we have the personages, with all their quaintnesses, their eccentricities, their odd, old-fashioned twists and ways--only observed by fragments in actual life--successfully brought to a focus for the delight and amusement of generations of readers. There is nothing grotesque, nothing exaggerated, in these humorous figures. The comic effect is not produced, as is often the case with the inventions of Dickens, by some set peculiarity of manner or trick of speech, more in the spirit of caricature. On the contrary, it is by a strict adherence to the just mean of nature, by a conscientious care not to overstep her probabilities, that we owe these matchless types of English provincial life. And the genuine humour of these types verges on the pathetic, in that the infinitely little of their lives is so magnified by them out of all proportion to its real importance. Mrs. Glegg, with her dictatorial ways, her small economies, her anxiety to make a handsome figure in her will, and her invariable reference to what was "the way in our family," as a criterion of right behaviour on all occasions: Mrs. Pullet, the wife of the well-to-do yeoman-farmer, bent on proving her gentility and wealth by the delicacy of her health, and the quantity of doctor's stuff she can afford to imbibe: Mrs. Tulliver, the good, muddle-headed woman, whose husband "picked her from her sisters o' purpose, 'cause she was a bit weak, like," and for whom the climax of misery in bankruptcy is the loss of her china and table-linen: these, as well as the hen-pecked Mr. Glegg, and the old-maidish Mr. Pullet, are worthy pendants to Mrs. Poyser and Dolly Winthrop.
Whether too great a predominance may not be given to the narrow, trivial
views of these people, with their prosaic respectability, is a nice
question, which one is inclined to answer in the negative on reading such a
conjugal scene as that between Mr. and Mrs. Glegg, after the latter's
quarrel with Mr. Tulliver:
"It was a hard case that a vigorous mood for quarrelling, so
highly capable of using any opportunity, should not meet with a single
remark from Mr. Glegg on which to exercise itself. But by-and-by it
appeared that his silence would answer the purpose, for he heard himself
apostrophised at last in that tone peculiar to the wife of one's
bosom.
"'Well, Mr. Glegg! it's a poor return I get for making
you the wife I've made you all these years. If this is the way
I'm to be treated, I'd better ha' known it before my poor
father died, and then when I'd wanted a home, I should ha' gone
elsewhere--as the choice was offered me.'
"Mr. Glegg paused from his porridge and looked up, not with any
new amazement, but simply with that quiet, habitual wonder with which we
regard constant mysteries.
"'Why, Mrs. G., what have I done now?'
"'Done now, Mr. Glegg? done now? ... I'm
sorry for you.'
"Not seeing his way to any pertinent answer, Mr. Glegg reverted to
his porridge.
"'There's husbands in the world,' continued Mrs.
Glegg, after a pause, 'as 'ud have known how to do something
different to siding with everybody else against their own wives. Perhaps
I'm wrong, and you can teach me better. But I've allays heard as
it's
the husband's place to stand by the wife, instead of rejoicing and triumphing when folks insult her."
"'Now what call have you to say that?' said Mr. Glegg
rather warmly, for, though a kind man, he was not as meek as Moses.
'When did I rejoice or triumph over you?'
"'There's ways o' doing things worse than speaking
out plain, Mr. Glegg. I'd sooner you'd tell me to my face as you
make light of me, than try to make as everybody's in the right but me,
and come to your breakfast in the morning, as I've hardly slept an
hour this night, and sulk at me as if I was the dirt under your
feet.'
"'Sulk at you?' said Mr. Glegg, in a tone of angry
facetiousness. 'You're like a tipsy man as thinks
everybody's had too much but himself.'
"'Don't lower yourself with using coarse language to
me, Mr. Glegg! It makes you look very small, though you
can't see yourself,' said Mrs. Glegg, in a tone of energetic
compassion. 'A man in your place should set an example, and talk more
sensible.'"
After a good deal of sparring in the same tone Mr. Glegg at last bursts
forth: "'Did ever anybody hear the like i' this parish? A
woman with every thing provided for her, and allowed to keep her own money
the same as if it was settled on her, and with a gig new stuffed and lined
at no end o' expense, and provided for when I die beyond anything she
could expect ... to go on i' this way, biting and snapping like a mad
dog! It's beyond everything, as God A'mighty should ha' made
women so.' (These last words were uttered in a tone of
sorrowful agitation. Mr. Glegg pushed his tea from him, and tapped the
table with both his hands.)
"'Well, Mr. Glegg! if those are your feelings, it's
best they should be known,' said Mrs. Glegg, taking off her napkin,
and folding it in an excited manner. 'But if you talk o' my
being provided for beyond what I could expect, I beg leave to tell you as
I'd a right to expect a many things as I don't find. And as to my
being like a mad dog, it's well if you're not cried shame on by
the country for your treatment of me, for it's what I can't bear,
and I won't bear.'...
"Here Mrs. Glegg's voice intimated that she was going to cry,
and, breaking off from speech, she rang the bell violently.
"'Sally,' she said, rising from her chair, and
speaking in rather a choked voice, 'light a fire upstairs, and put
the blinds down. Mr. Glegg, you'll please order what you like for
dinner. I shall have gruel.'"
Equally well drawn in their way, though belonging to a different class
of character, are Maggie's cousin, the lovely, gentle, and refined
Lucy; Philip Wakem, whose physical malformation is compensated by
exceptional culture and nobility of nature; Mr. Tulliver, the headstrong,
violent, but withal generous, father of Maggie, and his sister Mrs. Moss,
whose motherliness and carelessness of appearances form a striking foil to
the Dodson sisters. Indeed, 'The Mill on the Floss' is so rich
in minor characters that it is impossible to do more than mention such
capital sketches as that of Bob Jakin and his dog Mumps, or of Luke, the
head miller, who has no opinion of reading, considering that
"There's fools enoo--an' rogues enoo--wi'out
lookin' i' books for 'em."
The distinguishing feature of this novel, however,
lies not so much in its wealth of portraiture or freshness of humour as in a certain passionate glow of youth, which emanates from the heroine, and seems to warm the story through and through. For passion, pathos, and poetic beauty of description, 'The Mill on the Floss' is certainly unique among George Eliot's works.
This was the most productive period of George Eliot's life. In
three successive years she published 'Adam Bede,' 'The
Mill on the Floss,' and 'Silas Marner,' the last story
appearing in 1861. When the amount of thought, observation, and wisdom
concentrated in these novels is taken into consideration, it must be
admitted that her mental energy was truly
astonishing. But it was the accumulated experience of her whole past, the first abundant math borne by the springtide of life which was garnered up in these three remarkable works. Afterwards, when she came to write her next book, 'Romola,' she turned to entirely fresh fields of inspiration; indeed, already at this date her mind was occupied with the idea of an Italian novel of the time of Savonarola.
In the meanwhile she produced her most perfect work. She wrote
'Silas Marner, the Weaver of Raveloe.' I call 'Silas
Marner' her most perfect work, not only because of the symmetry with
which each part is adjusted in relation to the whole, nor because of the
absence of those partly satirical, partly moral reflections with which
George Eliot usually accompanies the action of her stories, but chiefly on
account of the simple pathos of the central motive into which all the
different incidents and characters naturally converge. How homely are the
elements from which this work of art is constructed, and how matchless the
result!
Nothing but the story of a humble weaver belonging to a small dissenting
community which assembled in Lantern Yard, somewhere in the back streets of
a manufacturing town; of a faithless love and a false friend, and the loss
of trust in all things human or divine. Nothing but the story of a lone,
bewildered man, shut out from his kind, concentrating every baulked passion
into one--the all-engrossing passion for gold. And then the sudden
disappearance of the hoard from its accustomed hiding-place, and in its
stead the startling apparition of a golden-haired little child, found one
snowy winter's night sleeping on the floor in front of the glimmering
hearth. And the gradual reawakening of love in the heart of the solitary man, a love "drawing his hope and joy continually onward beyond the money," and once more bringing him into sympathetic relations with his fellow-men.
"In old days," says the story, "there were angels who
came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of
destruction. We see no white-winged angels now. But yet men are led away
from threatening destruction; a hand is put into theirs, which leads them
forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more
backward, and the hand may be a little child's."
Curiously enough, I came quite recently upon a story which in its
leading features very closely resembles this tale of the 'Weaver of
Raveloe.' It is called 'Jermola the Potter,' and is
considered the masterpiece of J.I. Kraszewski, the Polish novelist, author
of at least one hundred and fifty works in different branches of
literature. 'Jermola,' the most popular of them all, has been
translated into French, Dutch, and German. It gives an extraordinarily
vivid picture of peasant life in a remote Polish village, and not only of
peasant life, but of the manners and habits of the landed proprietor, the
Jew, the artisan, and the yeoman, in a community whose modes of life have
undergone but little modification since the Middle Ages. These pictures,
though not elaborated with anything like the minute care of George
Eliot's descriptions of English country life, yet from their extreme
simplicity produce a most powerful impression on the reader.
The story, in brief, is that of Jermola, the body servant of a Polish
nobleman in Volhynia, whom he
has served with rare devotion during the greater part of his life. Left almost a beggar at his master's death, without a single human tie, all he can get for years of faithful service is a tumble-down, forsaken old inn, where he manages to keep body and soul together in a dismantled room that but partly shelters him from the inclemency of the weather. Hopeless, aimless, loveless, he grows old before his time, and the passing of the days affects him hardly more than it does a stone. But one evening, as he is sitting in front of a scanty fire repeating the Lord's Prayer, the cry as of a little child startles him from his devotion. Going to look what can be the meaning of such unusual sounds, he soon discovers an infant in linen swaddling-clothes wailing under an old oak tree. He takes the foundling home, and from that moment a new life enters the old man's breast. He is rejuvenated by twenty years. He is kept in a constant flutter of hope, fear, and activity. A kind-hearted woman, called the Kozaczicha, tenders him her services, but he is so jealous of any one but himself doing aught for the child, that he checks her advances, and by hook or by crook obtains a goat from an extortionate Jew, by the help of which he rears the boy satisfactorily. Then, wishing to make a livelihood for the child's sake, he inclines at first to the craft of the weaver, but finally turns potter in his old age. Love sharpening his wits, he plies quite a thriving trade in time, and the beautiful boy brings him into more friendly relations with his neighbours. But one day, when Radionek, who has learned Jermola's trade, is about twelve years old, the real parents appear and claim him as their own. They had never dared to acknowledge their marriage till the father, who had
threatened to disinherit his son in such an event, had departed this life. Now, having nothing more to fear, they want to have their child back, and to bring him up as befits their station in life. Jermola suffers a deadly anguish at this separation; the boy, too; is in despair, for he clings fondly to the old man who has reared him with more than a father's love. But the parents insisting on their legal rights, Radionek is at last carried off to their house in town, to be turned into a gentleman, being only grudgingly allowed to see Jermola from time to time. The boy pines, however, for the dear familiar presence of his foster-father, and the free outdoor life, and at last, after some years of misery, he appears one day suddenly in Jermola's hut, who has given up his pottery in order to be secretly near the child he is afraid to go and see. The piteous entreaties of Radionek, and the sight of his now sickly countenance, induce the old man to flee into the pathless forests, where the two may escape unseen, and reach some distant part of the country to take up their old pleasant life once more. But the hardships and fatigues of the journey are too much for the boy's enfeebled health, and just as they come within sight of human dwellings, he is seized with a fever which cuts his young life short, leaving Jermola nearly crazy with anguish. Long afterwards a little decrepit old man was to be seen by churchgoers sitting near a grave, whom the children mocked by calling the "bony little man," because he seemed to consist of nothing but bones.
Such is the bare outline of a story whose main idea, that of the
redemption of a human soul from cold, petrifying isolation, by means of a
little child, is unquestionably the same as in 'Silas Marner.'
Other
incidents, such as that of the peasant woman who initiates Jermola into the mysteries of baby management, and the disclosure of the real parents after a lapse of years, wanting to have their child back, suggest parallel passages in the English book. But coincidences of this kind are, after all, natural enough, considering that the circle of human feeling and action is limited, and that in all ages and countries like conditions must give rise to much the same sequence of events. It is therefore most likely that George Eliot never saw, and possibly never even heard of, 'Jermola the Potter.'
The monotonous tone in the narrative of this Polish novel is in strong
contrast, it may be observed, to George Eliot's vivid and varied
treatment of her subject. This monotony, however, suits the local colouring
of 'Jermola,' by suggesting the idea of the league-long expanse
of ancient forests whose sombre solitudes encompass with a mysterious awe
the little temporary dwellings of men. But if the foreign story surpasses
'Silas Marner' in tragic pathos, the latter far excels it in
the masterly handling of character and dialogue, in the underlying breadth
of thought, and, above all, in the precious salt of its humour.
Indeed, for humour, for sheer force, for intense realism, George Eliot,
in the immortal scene at the "Rainbow," may be said to rival
Shakespeare. Her farriers, her butchers, her wheelwrights, her tailors,
have the same startling vitality, the same unmistakable accents of nature,
the same distinctive yet unforced individuality, free from either
exaggeration or caricature. How delicious is the description of the party
assembled in the kitchen of that inn, whose landlord--a strong
advocate for compromising whatever differ-
ences of opinion may arise between his customers, as beings "all alike in need of liquor"--clinches all arguments by his favourite phrase--"You're both right and you're both wrong, as I say." How admirably comic are these villagers, invariably beginning their nightly sittings by a solemn silence, in which one and all puff away at their pipes, staring at the fire "as if a bet were depending on the first man who winked." And when they begin at last, how rich is the flavour of that talk, given with an unerring precision that forthwith makes one acquainted with the crass ignorance and shrewdness, the mother-wit and superstition, so oddly jumbled together in the villager's mind. What sublime absence of all knowledge of his native land is shown by the veteran parish clerk, Mr. Macey, in speaking of a person from another county which apparently could not be so very different "from this country, for he brought a fine breed o' sheep with him, so there must be pastures there, and everything reasonable." Yet the same man can put down youthful presumption pretty sharply, as when he remarks: "There's allays two 'pinions; there's the 'pinion a man has o' himsen, and there's the 'pinion other folks have on him. There'd be two 'pinions about a cracked bell, if the bell could hear itself."
Dolly Winthrop, the wife of the jolly wheelwright who makes one of the
company at the "Rainbow," is no less admirable. She is not cut
after any particular pattern or type of human nature, but has a distinctive
individuality, and is full of a freshness and unexpectedness which sets
foregone conclusions at defiance. A notable woman, with a boundless
appetite for work, so that, rising at half-past four, she has "a bit
o' time to spare most days, for when one gets up
betimes i' the morning the clock seems to stan' still tow'rt ten, afore it's time to go about the victual." Yet with all this energy she is not shrewish, but a calm, grave woman, in much request in sick rooms or wherever there is trouble. She is good-looking, too, and of a comfortable temper, being patiently tolerant of her husband's jokes, "considering that 'men would be so,' and viewing the stronger sex 'in the light of animals whom it pleased Heaven to make troublesome like bulls or turkey cocks.'"
Her vague idea, shared indeed by Silas, that he has quite another faith
from herself, as coming from another part of the country, gives a vivid
idea of remote rural life, as well as her own dim, semi-pagan but
thoroughly reverential religious feelings, prompting her always to speak of
the Divinity in the plural, as when she says to Marner: "I've
looked for help in the right quarter, and give myself up to Them as we must
all give ourselves up to at the last; and if we'n done our part, it
isn't to be believed as Them as are above us 'ull be worse nor we
are, and come short o' Theirn."
The humour shown in these scenes and characters, or, more properly
speaking, George Eliot's humour in general, belongs to the highest
order, the same as Shakespeare's. It is based on the essential
elements of human nature itself, on the pathetic incongruities of which
that "quintessence of dust," man, is made up, instead of
finding the comic in the purely accidental or external circumstances of
life, as is the case with such humourists as Rabelais and Dickens. These
latter might find a good subject for their comic vein in seeing the Venus
of Milo's broken nose, which a mischievous urchin had again stuck on
the wrong side upwards--a sight to send the ordinary spectator into fits of laughter. But the genuine humourist sees something in that feature itself, as nature shaped it, to excite his facetiousness. In 'A Minor Prophet' some lines occur in which a somewhat similar view of the genuine source of humour is pithily put:
"My yearnings fail
To reach that high apocalyptic mount
Which shows in bird's-eye view a perfect world,
Or enter warmly into other joys
Than those of faulty, struggling human kind.
That strain upon my soul's too feeble wing
Ends in ignoble floundering: I fall
Into short-sighted pity for the men
Who, living in those perfect future times,
Will not know half the dear imperfect things
That move my smiles and tears--will never know
The fine old incongruities that raise
My friendly laugh; the innocent conceits
That like a needless eyeglass or black patch
Give those who wear them harmless happiness
The twists and cracks in our poor earthenware,
That touch me to more conscious fellowship
(I am not myself the finest Parian)
With my coevals."
Again, in her essay on 'Heinrich Heine,' George Eliot thus
defines the difference between humour and wit: "Humour is of earlier
growth than wit, and it is in accordance with this earlier growth that it
has more affinity with the poetic tendencies, while wit is more nearly
allied to the ratiocinative intellect. Humour draws its materials from
situations and characteristics; wit seizes on unexpected and complex
relations.... It is only the ingenuity, condensation, and instantaneousness
which lift some witticisms from reasoning
into wit; they are reasoning raised to its highest power. On the other hand, humour, in its higher forms and in proportion as it associates itself with the sympathetic emotions, continually passes into poetry: nearly all great modern humorists may be called prose poets."
The quality which distinguishes George Eliot's humour may be said
to characterise her treatment of human nature generally. In her
delineations of life she carefully eschews the anomalous or exceptional,
pointing out repeatedly that she would not, if she could, be the writer,
however brilliant, who dwells by preference on the moral or intellectual
attributes which mark off his hero from the crowd instead of on those which
he has in common with average humanity. Nowhere perhaps in her works do we
find this tendency so strikingly illustrated as in the one now under
consideration; for here we have the study of a human being who, by stress
of circumstances, developes into a most abnormal specimen of mankind, yet
who is brought back to normal conditions and to wholesome relations with
his fellow-men by such a natural process as the re-awakening of benumbed
sympathies through his love for the little foundling child. The scene where
he finds that child has only been touched on in a passing allusion, yet
there is no more powerfully-drawn situation in any of her novels than that
where Silas, with the child in his arms, goes out into the dark night, and,
guided by the little footprints in the virgin snow, discovers the dead
mother, Godfrey Cass's opium-eating wife, lying with "her head
sunk low in the furze and half covered with the shaken snow." There
is a picture of this subject by the young and singularly gifted artist, the
late Oliver Madox Brown, more generally known as a novelist, which is one of the few pictorial interpretations that seem to completely project on the canvas a visible embodiment of the spirit of the original. The pale, emaciated weaver, staring with big, shortsighted eyes at the body of the unconscious young woman stretched on the ground, clutching the lusty, struggling child with one arm, while with the other he holds a lantern which throws a feeble gleam on the snow--is realised with exceptional intensity.
The exquisite picture of Eppie's childhood, the dance she leads her
soft-hearted foster-father are things to read, not to describe, unless one
could quote whole pages of this delightful idyl, which for gracious charm
and limpid purity of description recalls those pearls among prose-poems,
George Sand's 'François le Champi' and 'La
Mare au Diable.'
The first section of 'Romola' appeared in the
Cornhill Magazine for the summer of 1862, and, running its course in that popular periodical, was finished in the summer of the following year. Mr. Lewes, in a letter writen from 16 Blandford Square, July 5, 1862, to some old friends of George Eliot, makes the following remarks in reference to this new form of publication: "My main object in persuading her to consent to serial publication, was not the unheard-of magnificence of the offer, but the advantage to such a work of being read slowly and deliberately, instead of being galloped through in three volumes. I think it quite unique, and so will the public when it gets over the first feeling of surprise and disappointment at the book not being English, and like its predecessor." And some time afterwards he wrote to the same friends: "Marian lives entirely in the fifteenth century, and is much cheered every now and then by hearing indirectly how her book is appreciated by the higher class of minds, and some of the highest; though it is not, and cannot be popular. In Florence we hear they are wild with delight and surprise at such a work being executed by a foreigner; as if an Italian had ever done anything of the kind!"
Before writing 'Romola' George Eliot had spent six weeks in
Florence in order to familiarise herself with the manners and conversation
of its inhabitants, and yet she hardly caught the trick of Italian speech,
and for some time afterwards she hung back from beginning her story, as her
characters not only refused to speak Italian to her, but would not speak at
all, as we can well imagine Mrs. Poyser, Bartle Massey, and Maggie to have
done. These recalcitrant spirits were at last brought to order, and she
succeeded so well, especially in her delineation of the lower classes,
that they have been recognised by Italians as true to the life.
It should, however, be mentioned that the greatest modern Italian,
Giuseppe Mazzini, found fault with the handling, and, indeed, with the
introduction into this novel of the great figure of Savonarola. He
considered that it compared unfavourably with 'Adam Bede,' a
novel he genuinely admired, all but the marriage of Adam with Dinah Morris,
which, he said, shocked his feelings, not having any conception that the
taste of the novel-reading public demands a happy ending whatever may have
been the previous course of the three volumes. Another illustrious man,
D.G. Rossetti, whose judgment on such a subject carries peculiar weight,
considered George Eliot to have been much less successful in
'Romola' than in her novels of English country life. He did not
think that the tone and colour of Italian life in the fifteenth century
were caught with that intuitive perception of a bygone age characteristic
of a Walter Scott or a Meinhold. The Florentine contemporaries of
"Fra Girolamo" seemed to him Nineteenth Century men and women
dressed up in the costume of the Fifteenth. The book, to use his
expression, was not "native."
It is a majestic book, however: the most grandly planned of George
Eliot's novels. It has a certain architectural dignity of structure,
quite in keeping with its Italian nationality, a quality, by the way,
entirely absent from the three later novels. The impressive historical
background is not unlike one of Mr. Irving's magnificently wrought
Italian stage-effects, rich in movement and colour, yet helping to throw
the chief figures into greater relief. The
erudition shown in this work; the vast yet minute acquaintance with the habits of thought, the manners, the very talk of the Florentines of that day are truly surprising; but perhaps the very fact of that erudition being so perceptible shows that the material has not been absolutely vitalised. The amount of labour George Eliot expended on 'Romola' was so great, that it was the book which, she remarked to a friend, "she began a young woman and ended an old one." The deep impression her works had made upon the public mind heightened her natural conscientiousness, and her gratitude for the confidence with which each fresh contribution from her pen was received, increased her anxiety to wield her influence for the highest ends.
But her gratitude to the public by no means extended to the critics. She
recoiled from them with the instinctive shrinking of the sensitive plant.
These interpreters between author and public were in her eyes a most
superfluous modern institution: though at one time she herself had not
scorned to sit in the critic's seat. It is well-known that G.H. Lewes
acted as a kind of moral screen protecting her from every gust or breath of
criticism that was not entirely genial. One lady, after reading 'The
Mill on the Floss,' had written off in the heat of the moment, and,
with the freedom of old friendship, while expressing the warmest admiration
for the beauty of the first two volumes, she had ventured to find fault
with part of the third. This letter was returned by Lewes, who begged her
at the same time never to write again in this strain to George Eliot, to
whom he had not ventured to show it for fear it should too painfully affect
her. In a letter to the American lady already
mentioned, George Eliot, after referring to this habit of Mr. Lewes, says: "In this way I get confirmed in my impression that the criticism of any new writing is shifting and untrustworthy. I hardly think that any critic can have so keen a sense of the shortcomings in my works as that I groan under in the course of writing them, and I cannot imagine any edification coming to an author from a sort of reviewing which consists in attributing to him or her unexpressed opinions, and in imagining circumstances which may be alleged as petty private motives for the treatment of subjects which ought to be of general human interest.... I have been led into this rather superfluous sort of remark by the mention of a rule which seemed to require explanation."
And again on another occasion to the same effect: "But do not
expect criticism from me. I hate 'sitting in the seat of
judgment,' and I would rather impress the public generally with the
sense that they may get the best result from a book without necessarily
forming an 'opinion' about it, than I would rush into stating
opinions of my own. The floods of nonsense printed in the form of critical
opinions seem to me a chief curse of our times--a chief obstacle to
true culture."
In spite of these severe strictures on the critics and their opinions,
an "opinion" must now be given about 'Romola.' This
novel may really be judged from two entirely different points of view,
possibly from others besides, but, as it appears to me, from two. One may
consider it as an historical work, with its moving pageants, its civic
broils, its church festivals, its religious revival, its fickle populace,
now siding with the Pope, and now with the would-be
reformer of the Papacy. Or again one may regard the conjugal relations between Romola and Tito, the slow spiritual growth of the one, and the swifter moral disintegration of the other, as one of the subtlest studies in psychology in literature.
To turn to the scenic details which form a considerable element of this
historical picture, I have already hinted that they are not without a taint
of cumbrousness and pedantry. The author seems to move somewhat heavily
under her weight of learning, and we miss that splendid natural swiftness
and ease of movement which Shakespere, Goethe, and Hugo know how to impart
to their crowds and spectacular effects. If, instead of the people, one
examines the man who dominated the people, the large, massive, imposing
figure of Savonarola, one must admit that the character is very powerfully
and faithfully executed but not produced at one throw. He does not take the
imagination by storm as he would have done had Carlyle been at his
fashioning. With an epithet or two, with a sharp, incisive phrase, the
latter would have coinjured the great Dominican from his grave, and we
should have seen him, or believed at least that we saw him, as he was in
the flesh when his impassioned voice resounded through the Duomo, swaying
the hearts of the Florentine people with the force of a great conviction.
That he stands out thus tangibly in 'Romola' it would be futile
to assert: nevertheless, he is a noble, powerful study, although one has
laboriously to gather into one's mind the somewhat mechanical
descriptions which help to portray his individuality. The idea underlying
the working out of this grand character is the same which Goethe had once
proposed to himself in his projected,
but unfortunately never executed, drama of 'Mahomet.' It is that of a man of moral genius, who, in solitude and obscurity, has conceived some new, profounder aspect of religious truth, and who, stirred by a sublime devotion, now goes forth among men to bless and regenerate them by teaching them this higher life. But in his contact with the multitude, in his efforts at influencing it, the prophet or preacher is in his turn influenced. If he fails to move by the loftiest means, he will gradually resort to the lower in order to effect his purpose. The purity of his spirit is tarnished, ambition has crept in where holiness reigned, and his perfect rectitude of purpose will be sacrificed so that he may but rule.
Such are the opposing tendencies co-existing in Savonarola's mixed
but lofty nature. For "that dissidence between inward reality and
outward seeming was not the Christian simplicity after which he had striven
through years of his youth and prime, and which he had preached as a chief
fruit of the Divine life. In the heat and stress of the day, with cheeks
burning, with shouts ringing in the ears, who is so blest as to remember
the yearnings he had in the cool and silent morning, and know that he has
not belied them?" And again: "It was the habit of
Savonarola's mind to conceive great things, and to feel that he was
the man to do them. Iniquity should be brought low; the cause of justice,
purity, and love should triumph, and it should triumph by his voice, by his
work, by his blood. In moments of ecstatic contemplation, doubtless, the
sense of self melted in the sense of the Unspeakable, and in that part of
his experience lay the elements of genuine self-abasement; but in the
presence of his fellow-men for whom he
was to act, pre-eminence seemed a necessary condition of life." But, as George Eliot says, "Power rose against him, not because of his sins, but because of his greatness; not because he sought to deceive the world, but because he sought to make it noble. And through that greatness of his he endured a double agony; not only the reviling, and the torture, and the death-throe, but the agony of sinking from the visior of glorious achievement into that deep shadow where he could only say, 'I count as nothing: darkness encompasses me; yet the light I saw was the true light.'"
But after all, in George Eliot's story the chief interest attaching
to "Fra Girolamo" consists in his influence on Romola's
spiritual growth. This may possibly be a blemish; yet in most novels the
fictitious characters eclipse the historical ones. The effect produced by
the high-souled Romola is not unlike that of an antique statue, at once
splendidly beautiful and imposingly cold. By the side of Tito she reminds
one of the pure whiteness of marble sculpture as contrasted with the rich
glowing sensuousness of a Venetian picture.
It is difficult to analyse why the proud, loving, single-hearted Romola,
who has something of the fierceness and impetuosity of the old "Bardo
blood" in her, should leave this impression of coldness; for in spite
of her acts of magnanimity and self-devotion, such, curiously enough, is
the case. Perhaps in this instance George Eliot modelled the character too
much according to a philosophical conception instead of projecting it,
complete in its incompleteness, as it might have come from the hand of
Nature. Another objection sometimes brought forward, of Romola
having but little resemblance to an Italian woman of the fifteenth century, seems to me less relevant. The lofty dignity, the pride, the intense adhesion to family traditions were, on the contrary, very marked attributes of a high national type during the period of Italian supremacy. In fact, the character is not without hints and suggestions of such a woman as Vittoria Colonna, while its didactic tendency slightly recalls "those awful women of Italy who held professorial chairs, and were great in civil and canon law." In one sense Romola is a true child of the Renaissance. Brought up by her father, the enthusiastic old scholar, in pagan ideas, she had remained aloof from Roman Catholic beliefs and superstitions, and even when transformed by the mighty influence of Savonarola into a devoted Piagnone, her attitude always remains more or less that of a Protestant, unwilling to surrender the right of private judgment to the Church.
The clash of character when a woman like Romola finds herself chained in
a life-long bond to such a nature as Tito's--the beautiful, wily,
insinuating Greek--is wrought out with wonderful skill and matchless
subtlety of analysis. Indeed Tito is not only one of George Eliot's
most original creations, he is a unique character in fiction. Novelists, as
a rule, only depict the full-blown villain or traitor, their virtuous and
wicked people being separated from each other by a hard and fast line much
like the goats and sheep. They continually treat character as something
permanent and unchangeable, whereas to George Eliot it presents itself as
an organism flexible by nature, subject to change under varying conditions,
liable on the one hand to disease and
deterioration, but on the other hand no less capable of being rehabilitated, refined, or ennobled. This is one of the most distinctive notes of George Eliot's art, and gives a quickening, fructifying quality to her moral teaching. But it is an artistic no less than a moral gain, sharpening the interest felt in the evolution of her fictitious personages. For this reason Tito, the creature of circumstances, is perhaps the most striking of all her characters in the eyes of the psychologist. We seem to see the very pulse of the human machine laid bare, to see the corroding effect of self-indulgence and dread of pain on a nature not intrinsically wicked, to see at last how, little by little, weakness has led to falsehood, and falsehood to infamy. And yet this creature, who, under our eyes, gradually hardens into crime, is one so richly dowered with rare gifts of person and mind, that in spite of his moral degeneracy, he fascinates the reader no less than the men and women supposed to come into actual contact with him. His beauty is described with the same life-like intensity as Hetty's: the warm glow of colour in his perfectly-moulded face, with its dark curls and long agate-like eyes; his sunny brightness of look, the velvet softness of a manner with which he ingratiates himself with young and old, and the airy buoyancy of his whole gracious being, are as vividly portrayed as the quick talent to which everything comes natural, the abundant good-humour, the acuteness of a polished intellect, whose sharp edge, will, at need, cut relentlessly through every tissue of sentiment.
From Melema's first uneasy debate with himself, when, in his
splendid, unsoiled youth, he enters Florence a shipwrecked stranger--a
debate, that is,
as to whether he is bound to go in search of Baldassare, who has been as a father to him--to the moment when his already blunted conscience absolves him from such a search, and again, on to that supreme crisis when, suddenly face to face with his benefactor, he denies him, and so is inevitably urged from one act of baseness and cruelty to another still blacker--we have unfolded before us, by an unshrinking analyzer of human nature, what might not inappropriately be called "A Soul's Tragedy." The wonderful art in the working out of this character is shown in the fact that one has no positive impression of Tito's innate badness, but, on the contrary, feels as if, after his first lapses from truth and goodness, there is still a possibility of his reforming, if only his soft, pleasure-loving nature were not driven on, almost in spite of himself, by his shuddering dread of shame or suffering in any form. "For," writes George Eliot, "Tito was experiencing that inexorable law of human souls, that we prepare ourselves for sudden deeds by the reiterated choice of good or evil which gradually determines character."
The description of the married life of Romola and Tito is unsurpassed in
George Eliot's novels for subtlety and depth of insight: notably the
young wife's fond striving after complete inner harmony, her first,
faint, unavowed sense of something wanting, her instinctive efforts to keep
fast hold of her love and trust, and her violent, irrevocable recoil on the
discovery of Tito's first faithless action. Perhaps there is something
cold, almost stern, in Romola's loathing alienation from her husband,
and the instantaneous death of her passionate love. One cannot quite hinder
the impression that a softer woman might have
forgiven and won from him a confession of his wrong-doing; a confession which would have averted the committal of his worst and basest deeds. Indeed, it is Tito's awe of his grand, noble wife, and his dread of her judgment, which first of all incite him to prevarication and lies.
It is curious to compare George Sand's theory of love, in this
instance, with George Eliot's. In 'Leon Leoni,' and in
many of her novels besides, the Frenchwoman seems to imply that for a woman
to love once is to love always, and that there is nothing so base, or mean,
or cruel, but she will forgive the man on whom she has placed her
affections. In the story mentioned above she has worked out this idea to an
extent which, in many of its details, is simply revolting. Love is there
described as a magnetic attraction, unresisted and irresistible, to which
the heroine absolutely surrenders pride, reason, and conscience. Just the
opposite kind of love is that which we find portrayed in
'Romola:' it is a love identical with the fullest belief in the
truth and goodness of the beloved object, so that at the first realisation
of moral obliquity the repulsion created extinguishes that love, although
there is no outward severance of the marriage bond.
This great novel closes with these significant words, which Romola
addresses to Lillo, Tito's child, but not her own:
"And so, my Lillo, if you mean to act nobly, and seek to know the
best things God has put within reach of man, you must learn to fix your
mind on that end, and not on what will happen to you because of it. And
remember, if you were to choose something lower, and make it the rule of
your life to seek
your own pleasure and escape from what is disagreeable, calamity might come just the same; and it would be calamity falling on a base mind, which is the one form of sorrow that has no balm in it, and that may well make a man say, 'It would have been better for me if I had never been born!'"
In the course of the same year Mr. and Mrs. Lewes moved from 16
Blandford Square to the Priory, a commodious house in North Bank, St.
John's Wood, which has come to be intimately associated with the
memory of George Eliot. Here, in the pleasant dwelling-rooms decorated by
Owen Jones, might be met, at her Sunday afternoon receptions, some of the
most eminent men in literature, art, and science. For the rest, her life
flowed on its even tenor, its routine being rigidly regulated. The morning
till lunch time was invariably devoted to writing: in the afternoon she
either went out for a quiet drive of about two hours, or she took a walk
with Lewes in Regent's Park. There the strange-looking
couple--she with
a certain weird, sibylline air, he not unlike some unkempt Polish refugee of vivacious manners--might be seen, swinging their arms, as they hurried along at a pace as rapid and eager as their talk. Besides these walks, George Eliot's chief recreation consisted in frequenting concerts and picture galleries. To music she was passionately devoted, hardly ever failing to attend at the Saturday afternoon concerts at St. James's Hall, besides frequenting various musical réunions, such as the following extract from one of her letters will show: "The other night we went to hear the Bach choir--a society of ladies and gentlemen got together by Jenny Lind, who sings in the middle of them, her husband acting as conductor. It is pretty to see people who might be nothing but simply fashionables taking pains to sing fine music in tune and time, with more or less success. One of the baritones we know is a G--, who used to be a swell guardsman, and has happily taken to good courses while still quite young. Another is a handsome young G--, not of the unsatisfactory Co., but of the R-- G-- kin. A soprano is Mrs. P--, wife of the Queen's Secretary, General P--, the granddaughter of Earl Grey, and just like him in the face--and so on. These people of 'high' birth are certainly reforming themselves a little."
She likewise never omitted to visit the "Exhibition of Old
Masters" at Burlington House. To most people few things exercise so
great a strain on their mental and physical powers of endurance as the
inspection of a picture gallery, with its incessant appeal to the most
concentrated attention. Yet, in spite of physical weakness, George Eliot
possessed such inexhaustible mental energy that she could go
on, hour after hour, looking with the same unflagging interest at whatever possessed any claim to attention, tiring out even vigorous men that were in her company. In her works the allusions to art are much less frequent than to music; but from a few hints here and there, it is possible to form some idea of her taste, one very significant passage in 'Adam Bede' showing her peculiar love of Dutch paintings, and her readiness to turn without shrinking "from cloud-borne angels, from prophets, sibyls, and heroic warriors, to an old woman bending over her flower-pot, or eating her solitary dinner, while the noonday light, softened perhaps by a screen of leaves, falls on her mob-cap, and just touches the rim of her spinning-wheel and her stone jug, and all those cheap common things which are the precious necessaries of life to her."
Another favourite resort of George Eliot's was the Zoological
Gardens. She went there a great deal to study the animals, and was
particularly fond of the "poor dear ratel" that used to turn
somersaults. In fact her knowledge of, and sympathy with, animals was as
remarkable as that which she showed for human nature. Thus she astonished a
gentleman farmer by drawing attention to the fine points of his horses. Her
intimate acquaintance with the dog comes out in a thousand touches in her
novels, and her humorous appreciation of little pigs led her to watch them
attentively, and to pick out some particular favourite in every litter. In
her country rambles, too, she was fond of turning over stones to inspect
the minute insect life teeming in moist, dark places; and she was as
interested as Lewes himself in the creatures, frogs, etc., he kept for
scientific pur-
poses, and which would sometimes, like the frog in the fairy tale, surprise the household by suddenly making their entrance into the dining-room. Her liking for the "poor brutes," as she calls them, had its origin no doubt in the same source of profound pity which she feels for "the twists and cracks" of imperfect human beings.
Her evenings were usually passed at home, and spent in reading, or in
playing and singing; but she and Lewes used to go to the theatre on any
occasion of special interest, as when Salvini appeared in
'Othello,' a performance attended repeatedly by both with
enthusiastic delight. Otherwise they rarely left home, seldom visiting at
other people's houses, although they made an exception in the case of
a favoured few.
They were both fond of travelling, and, whenever it was possible, would
take trips to the Continent, or seek some quiet English rural retreat away
from the sleepless tumult of London. "For," says Lewes
incidentally in a letter, "Mrs. Lewes never seems at home except
under a broad sweep of sky and the greenth of the uplands
round her." So we find them frequently contriving a change of scene;
and the visits to foreign countries, the pleasant sauntering on long summer
days through Continental towns, "dozing round old cathedrals,"
formed delightful episodes in George Eliot's strenuously active life.
The residence in Germany in 1854, and again in 1858, has already been
alluded to. Now, in the year 1865, they paid a short visit to France, in
the course of which they saw Normandy, Brittany, and Touraine, returning
much refreshed at the beginning of the autumn. Two years afterwards they
went to
Spain, a country that must have possessed a peculiar interest for both; for in 1846 Lewes had published a charming, if one-sided, little book on 'The Spanish Drama,' with especial reference to Lope de Vega and Calderon; and in 1864, only a year after the appearance of 'Romola,' George Eliot produced the first draught of 'The Spanish Gypsy.' On becoming personally acquainted with this land of "old romance," however, her impressions were so far modified and deepened that she re-wrote and amplified her poem, which was not published till 1868.
The subject of the gypsies was probably suggested to George Eliot by her
own memorable adventure in childhood, which thus became the germ of a very
impressive poem. Be that as it may, it is worth noticing that the
conception of 'The Spanish Gypsy' should have followed so
closely on the completion of the Italian novel, both being foreign
subjects, belonging to much the same period of history. In both the
novelist has departed from her habitual track, seeking for "pastures
new" in a foreign soil. After inculcating on the artist the
desirability of giving "the loving pains of a life to the faithful
representation of commonplace things," she remarks in 'Adam
Bede' that "there are few prophets in the world, few sublimely
beautiful women, few heroes," and that we cannot afford to give all
our love and reverence to such rarities. But having followed this rule, and
given the most marvellously truthful delineations of her fellow-men as they
are ordinarily to be met with, she now also felt prompted to draw the
exceptional types of human character, the rare prophets, and the sublime
heroes.
To her friend Miss Simcox, George Eliot one day
mentioned a plan of giving "the world an ideal portrait of an actual character in history, whom she did not name, but to whom she alluded as an object of possible reverence unmingled with disappointment." This idea was never carried out, but at any rate Dinah Morris, Savonarola, Zarca, and Mordecai are all exceptional beings--beings engrossed by an impersonal aim, having the spiritual or national regeneration of their fellow-men for its object. Dinah and Savonarola are more of the nature of prophets; Zarca and Mordecai of that of patriots. Among these the fair Methodist preacher, whose yearning piety is only a more sublimated love of her kind, is the most vividly realised; while Mordecai, the patriot of an ideal country, is but the abstraction of a man, entirely wanting in that indefinable solidity of presentation which gives a life of its own to the creations of art.
On the whole, Zarca, the gipsy chief, is perhaps the most vividly drawn
of George Eliot's purely ideal characters--characters which never
have the flesh-and-blood reality of her Mrs. Poysers, her Silas Marners,
and her dear little Totties and Eppies. Yet there is an unmistakable
grandeur and power of invention in the heroic figure of Zarca, although, in
spite of this power, we miss the convincing stamp of reality in him, and
not only in him, but more or less in all the characters of the
'Spanish Gypsy.' George Eliot's feeling for the
extraordinary and romantic was very subordinate to that which she
entertained for the more familiar aspects of our life. For, although she
here chose one of the most romantic of periods and localities, the Spain of
Ferdinand and Isabella, with the mingled horror and magnificence
of its national traditions, she does not really succeed in resuscitating the spirit which animated those devout, cruel, fanatical, but ultra-picturesque times. The Castilian noble, the Jewish astrologer, Zarca, and the Spanish Inquisitor, even the bright, gloriously-conceived Fedalma herself, think and speak too much like sublimated modern positivists. For example, would, could, or should any gipsy of the fifteenth century have expressed himself in the following terms:
The poetic mode of treatment corresponds to the exalted theme of the 'Spanish Gypsy,' a subject certainly more fitted for drama or romance rather than for the novel, properly so called. Nothing could apparently be better adapted for the purposes of a
"Oh, it is a faith
Taught by no priest, but by this beating heart:
Faith to each other: the fidelity
Of fellow-wanderers in a desert place,
Who share the same dire thirst, and therefore share
The scanty water: the fidelity
Of men whose pulses leap with kindred fire,
Who in the flash of eyes, the clasp of hands,
The speech that even in lying tells the truth
Of heritage inevitable as birth,
Nay, in the silent bodily presence feel
The mystic stirring of a common life
Which makes the many one: fidelity
To the consecrating oath our sponsor Fate
Made through our infant breath when we were born
The fellow-heirs of that small island, Life,
Where we must dig and sow and reap with brothers.
Fear thou that oath, my daughter--nay, not fear,
But love it; for the sanctity of oaths
Lies not in lightning that avenges them,
But in the injury wrought by broken bonds
And in the garnered good of human trust."
noble, historical poem than the conception of a great man such as Zarca, whose aim is nothing less than the fusion of the scattered, wandering, lawless gypsy tribes into one nation, with common traditions and a common country: the romantic incident of the discovery of his lost daughter in the affianced bride of Silva, Duke of Bedmar: the supreme conflict in Fedalma's breast between love and duty, her renunciation of happiness in order to cast in her lot with that of her outcast people: Silva's frantic grief, his desertion of his country, his religion, and all his solemn responsibilities to turn gypsy for Fedalma's sake, and having done so, his agony of remorse on seeing the fortress committed to his trust taken by the gypsies he has joined, his dearest friends massacred, his nearest of kin, Isidor, the inquisitor, hanged before his very eyes, a sight so maddening that, hardly conscious of his act, he slays Zarca, and so divides himself for ever, by an impassable gulf, from the woman for whose sake he had turned apostate.
Clearly a subject containing the highest capabilities, and, if great
thoughts constituted a great poem, this should be one of the greatest. But
with all its high merits, its sentiments imbued with rare moral grandeur,
its felicitous descriptions, the work lacks that best and incommunicable
gift which comes by nature to the poet. Here, as in her novels, we find
George Eliot's instinctive insight into the primary passions of the
human heart, her wide sympathy and piercing keenness of vision; but her
thoughts, instead of being naturally winged with melody, seem mechanically
welded into song. This applies to all her poetic work, although some of it,
especially the 'Legend of Jubal,' reaches a much higher degree
of
metrical and rhythmical excellence. But although George Eliot's poems cannot be considered on a par with her prose, they possess a distinctive interest, and should be carefully studied by all lovers of her genius, as affording a more intimate insight into the working of her own mind. Nowhere do we perceive so clearly as here the profound sadness of her view of life; nowhere does she so emphatically reiterate the stern lesson of the duty of resignation and self-sacrifice; or that other doctrine that the individual is bound absolutely to subordinate his personal happiness to the social good, that he has no rights save the right of fulfilling his obligations to his age, his country, and his family. This idea is perhaps more completely incorporated in Fedalma than in any other of her characters--Fedalma, who seems so bountifully endowed with the fullest measure of beauty, love and happiness, that her renunciation may be the more absolute. She who, in her young joy suddenly knows herself as "an aged sorrow," exclaiming:
"I will not take a heaven
Haunted by shrieks of far-off misery.
This deed and I have ripened with the hours:
It is a part of me--a wakened thought
That, rising like a giant, masters me,
And grows into a doom. O mother life,
That seemed to nourish me so tenderly,
Even in the womb you vowed me to the fire,
Hung on my soul the burden of men's hopes,
And pledged me to redeem!--I'll pay the debt.
You gave me strength that I should pour it all
Into this anguish. I can never shrink
Back into bliss--my heart has grown too big
With things that might be."
This sacrifice is the completer for being without
hope; for not counting "on aught but being faithful;" for resting satisfied in such a sublime conviction as--
"The grandest death, to die in vain--for love
Greater than sways the forces of the world."
Limit forbids me dwell longer on this poem, which contains infinite
matter for discussion, yet some of the single passages are so full of fine
thoughts felicitously expressed that it would be unfair not to allude to
them. Such a specimen as this exposition of the eternal dualism between the
Hellenic and the Christian ideals, of which Heine was the original and
incomparable expounder, should not be left unnoted:
And again how full of deep mysterious suggestion is this line--
"For evermore
With grander resurrection than was feigned
Of Attila's fierce Huns, the soul of Greece
Conquers the bulk of Persia. The maimed form
Of calmly-joyous beauty, marble-limbed,
Yet breathing with the thought that shaped its limbs,
Looks mild reproach from out its opened grave
At creeds of terror; and the vine-wreathed god
Fronts the pierced Image with the crown of thorns."
And this grand saying--
"Speech is but broken light upon the depth
Of the unspoken."
Quotations of this kind might be indefinitely multiplied; while showing that exaltation of thought properly belonging to poetry, they at the same time indubitably prove to the delicately-attuned ear the
"What times are little? To the sentinel
That hour is regal when he mounts on guard."
absence of that subtle intuitive music, that "linked sweetness" of sound and sense which is the birthright of poets. If an intimate and profound acquaintance with the laws and structure of metre could bestow this quality, which appertain to the elemental, George Eliot's verse ought to have achieved the highest success. For in mere technical knowledge concerning rhyme, assonance, alliteration, and the manipulation of blank verse according to the most cunning distribution of pauses, she could hold her own with the foremost contemporary poets, being no doubt far more versed than either Shelley or Byron in the laws governing these matters.
How incalculable she felt the poet's influence to be, and how fain
she would have had him wield this influence only for the loftiest ends, is
well shown in a beautiful letter, hitherto unpublished, now possessing an
added pathos as addressed to one who has but lately departed, at the very
time when his rare poetic gifts were beginning to be more widely
recognised. James Thomson, the author of "The City of Dreadful
Night," a poem which appeared first in the pages of the
'National Reformer,' with the signature of "B.V.,"
was thus addressed by George Eliot:
"DEAR POET,--I cannot rest satisfied without telling
you that my mind responds with admiration to the distinct vision and grand
utterance in the poem which you have been so good as to send me.
"Also, I trust that an intellect informed by so much passionate
energy as yours will soon give us more heroic strains, with a wider embrace
of human fellowship, such as will be to the labourers of the world what the
Odes of Tyrtæus were to the
Spartans, thrilling them with the sublimity of the social order and the courage of resistance to all that would dissolve it. To accept life and write much fine poetry, is to take a very large share in the quantum of human good, and seems to draw with it necessarily some recognition, affectionate, and even joyful, of the manifold willing labours which have made such a lot possible."
These words are of peculiar interest, because, although the writer of
them is almost as much of a pessimist as its recipient, they are so with a
difference. The pessimism of "The City of Dreadful Night," in
its blank hopelessness, paralyses the inmost nerve of life by isolating the
individual in cold obstruction. Whereas George Eliot, while recognising to
the utmost "the burthen of a world, where even the sunshine has a
heart of care," insists the more on the fact that this common
suffering binds man more indissolubly to man; that so far from justifying
him in ending his life "when he will," the groaning and
travailing generations exact that he should stand firm at his post,
regardless of personal consideration or requital, so long only as he can
help towards making the fate of his fellow mortals less heavy for them to
bear. In fact, the one is a theory of life, the other a disease of the
soul.
The same stoic view, in a different form, finds expression in this
answer to a dear friend's query: "I cannot quite agree that it
is hard to see what has been the good of your life. It seems to me very
clear that you have been a good of a kind that would have been sorely
missed by those who have been nearest to you, and also by some who are more
distant. And it is this kind of good which must
reconcile us to life, and not any answer to the question, 'What would the universe have been without me?' The point one has to care for is, 'Are A, B, and C the better for me?' And there are several letters of the alphabet that could not have easily spared you in the past, and that can still less spare you in the present."
This lesson of resignation, which is enforced more and more stringently
in her writings, is again dwelt upon with peculiar emphasis in the
interesting dramatic sketch entitled 'Armgart.' The problem
here is not unlike that in 'Silas Marner.' It is that of an
individual, in exceptional circumstances, brought back to the average
condition of humanity; but whereas Silas, having sunk below the common
standard, is once more united to his fellow-men by love, the magnificently
endowed Armgart, who seems something apart and above the crowd, is reduced
to the level of the undistinguished million by the loss of her peerless
voice. 'Armgart' is the single instance, excepting, perhaps,
the Princess Halm-Eberstein, where George Eliot has attempted to depict the
woman-artist, to whom life's highest object consists in fame--
But in the intoxicating flush of success, the singer, who has refused the love of one for that "sense transcendent which can taste the joy of swaying multitudes," loses her glorious gift, and so sinks irretrievably to a "drudge among the crowd." In the first delirium of despair she longs to put an end to herself, "sooner than bear the yoke of thwarted life;"
"The benignant strength of one, transformed
To joy of many."
but is painfully startled from her defiant mood by the indignant query of Walpurga, her humble cousin--
"Where is the rebel's right for you alone?
Noble rebellion lifts a common load;
But what is he who flings his own load off
And leaves his fellows toiling? Rebel's right?
Say rather the deserter's. Oh, you smiled
From your clear height on all the million lots
Which yet you brand as abject."
It may seem singular that having once, in 'Armgart,' drawn a
woman of the highest artistic aims and ambitions, George Eliot should imply
that what is most valuable in her is not the exceptional gift, but rather
that part of her nature which she shares with ordinary humanity. This is,
however, one of her leading beliefs, and strongly contrasts her, as a
teacher, with Carlyle. To the author of 'Hero Worship' the
promiscuous mass--moiling and toiling as factory hands and artisans,
as miners and labourers--only represents so much raw material, from
which is produced that final result and last triumph of the combination of
human forces--the great statesman, great warrior, great poet, and so
forth. To George Eliot, on the contrary--and this is the democratic
side of her nature--it is the multitude, so charily treated by
destiny, which claims deepest sympathy and tenderest compassion; so that
all greatness, in her eyes, is not a privilege, but a debt, which entails
on its possessor a more strenuous effort, a completer devotion to the
service of average humanity.
body politic and what has to be endured. She dwells once again, with solemn insistence, on the "aged sorrow," the inheritance of evil transmitted from generation to generation, an evil too intimately entwined with the complex conditions of society to be violently uprooted, but only to be gradually eradicated by the persistent cultivation of knowledge, industry, judgment, sobriety, and patience.
"This is only one example," she says, "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
blamable 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. Everybody now sees an example
of it in the case of Ireland. We who are living now are sufferers by the
wrong-doing of those who lived before us; we are sufferers by each
other's wrongdoing; and the children who come after us will be
sufferers from the same causes."
To remedy this long-standing wrong-doing and suffering, so argues Felix
Holt, is not in the power of any one measure, class, or period. It would be
childish folly to expect any Reform Bill to possess the magical property
whereby a sudden social transformation could be accomplished. On the
contrary, abrupt transitions should be shunned as dangerous to order and
law, which alone are certain to insure a steady collective progress; the
only means to this end consisting in the general spread of education, to
secure which, at least for his children, the working man should spare no pains. Without knowledge, the writer continues, no political measures will be of any benefit, ignorance with or without vote always of necessity engendering vice and misery. But, guided by a fuller knowledge, the working classes would be able to discern what sort of men they should choose for their representatives, and instead of electing "platform swaggerers, who bring us nothing but the ocean to make our broth with," they would confide the chief power to the hands of the truly wise, those who know how to regulate life "according to the truest principles mankind is in possession of."
The "Felix Holt" of the story is described by George Eliot
as shaping his actions much according to the ideas which are here
theoretically expressed. His knowledge and aptitude would enable him to
choose what is considered a higher calling. But he scorns the vulgar
ambition called "getting on in the world;" his sense of
fellowship prompting him to remain a simple artisan that he may exert an
elevating influence on the class to which he belongs. Class differences, so
argues this Radical-Conservative, being inherent in the constitution of
society, it becomes something of a desertion to withdraw what abilities one
may have from the medium, where they are urgently needed, in order to join,
for the sake of selfish aims, some other body of men where they may be
superfluous.
The other distinctive feature of 'Felix Holt' consists in
its elaborate construction, ranking it, so to speak, amongst sensation
novels. As a rule, George Eliot's stories have little or no plot, the
incidents seeming not so much invented by the writer for the
sake of producing an effective work, as to be the natural result of the friction between character and circumstance. This simplicity of narrative belongs, no doubt, to the highest class of novel, the class to which 'The Vicar of Wakefield,' 'Waverley,' and 'Vanity Fair' belong. In 'Felix Holt,' however, the intricate network of incident in which the characters seem to be enmeshed, is not unlike the modern French art of story-telling, with its fertility of invention, as is also the strangely repellent intrigue which forms the nucleus of the whole. All the elements which go to make up a thrilling narrative--such as a dubious inheritance, the disappearance of the rightful claimant, a wife's guilty secret, the involvements of the most desperate human fates in a perplexing coil through sin and error--are interwoven in this story of 'Felix Holt the Radical.'
Though ingeniously invented, the different incidents seem not so much
naturally to have grown the one from the other as to be constructed with
too conscious a seeking for effect. There is something forced, uneasy, and
inadequate in the laborious contrivance of fitting one set of events on to
another, and the machinery of the disputed Transome claim is so involved
that the reader never masters the "ins" and "outs"
of that baffling mystery. Still, the groundwork of the story is deeply
impressive: its interest is, notwithstanding the complex ramification of
events, concentrated with much power upon a small group of personages, such
as Mrs. Transome, her son Harold, the little dissenting minister, Rufus
Lyon, Esther, and Felix Holt. Here, as elsewhere, the novelist reveals the
potent qualities of her genius. Not only does this story contain
such genuine humorous portraiture as the lachrymose Mrs. Holt, and the delightfully quaint Job Tudge, but it is also enriched by some descriptions of rural scenery and of homely existence in remote country districts as admirable as any to be found in her writings. Rufus Lyon is a worthy addition to that long gallery of clerical portraits which are among the triumphs of George Eliot's art. This "singular-looking apostle of the meeting in Skipper's Lane"--with his rare purity of heart, his unworldliness, his zeal in the cause of dissent, his restless argumentative spirit, and the moving memories of romance and passion hidden beneath the odd, quaint physique of the little minister encased in rusty black--is among the most loving and lovable of characters, and recalls more particularly that passage in the poem entitled 'A Minor Prophet,' which I cannot but think one of the author's finest, the passage beginning--
"The pathos exquisite of lovely minds
Hid in harsh forms--not penetrating them
Like fire divine within a common bush
Which glows transfigured by the heavenly guest,
So that men put their shoes off; but encaged
Like a sweet child within some thick-walled cell,
Who leaps and fails to hold the window-bars,
But having shown a little dimpled hand,
Is visited thenceforth by tender hearts
Whose eyes keep watch about the prison walls."
Esther, on the other hand, is one of those fortunate beings whose lovely
mind is lodged in a form of corresponding loveliness. This charming Esther,
though not originally without her feminine vanities and worldly desires, is
one of those characters dear to
George Eliot's heart, who renounce the allurements of an easy pleasurable existence for the higher satisfations of a noble love or a nobler ideal. It is curious to notice that Eppie, Esther, Fedalma, and Daniel Deronda are all children that have been reared in ignorance of their real parentage, and that to all of them there comes a day when a more or less difficult decision has to be made, when for good or evil they have to choose, once for all, between two conflicting claims. Like Eppie, Esther rejects the advantages of birth and fortune, and elects to share the hard but dignified life of the high-minded Felix. But this decision in her case shows even higher moral worth, because by nature she is so keenly susceptible to the delicate refinements and graceful elegancies which are the natural accompaniment of rank and wealth.
The most curious feature of this book consists, perhaps, in its original
treatment of illicit passion. Novelists, as a rule, when handling this
subject, depict its fascinations in brilliant contrast to the sufferings
and terrors which follow in its train. But George Eliot contents herself
with showing us the reverse side of the medal. Youth has faded, joy is
dead, love has turned to loathing, yet memory, like a relentless fury,
pursues the grey-haired Mrs. Transome, who hides within her breast such a
heavy load of shame and dread. The power and intensity with which this
character of the haughty, stern, yet inwardly quailing woman is drawn are
unsurpassed in their way, and there is tragic horror in the recoil of her
finest sensibilities from the vulgar, mean, self-complacent lawyer, too
thick-skinned ever to know that in his own person he is a daily judgment on
her whose life has been
made hideous for his sake. Never more impressively than here does the novelist enforce her teaching that the deed follows the doer, being imbued with an incalculable vitality of its own, shaping all after life, and subduing to its guise the nature that is in bondage to it. Like those fabled dragon's teeth planted by Cadmus, which sprung up again as armed men, spreading discord and ruin, so a man's evil actions seem endowed with independent volition, and their consequences extend far beyond the individual life where they originated.
If 'Felix Holt' is the most intricately constructed of
George Eliot's novels, 'Middlemarch,' which appeared five
years afterwards, is, on the other hand, a story without a plot. In fact,
it seems hardly appropriate to call it a novel. Like Hogarth's serial
pictures representing the successive stages in their progress through life
of certain typical characters, so in this book there is unrolled before us,
not so much the history of any particular individual, as a whole phase of
society portrayed with as daring and uncompromising a fidelity to Nature as
that of Hogarth himself. In 'Middlemarch,' English provincial
life in the first half of the nineteenth century is indelibly fixed in
words "holding a universe impalpable" for the apprehension and
delight of the furthest generations of English-speaking nations. Here, as
in some kind of panorama, sections of a community and groups of character
pass before the mind's eye. To dwell on the separate,
strongly-individualised figures which constitute this great crowd would be
impossible within the present limits. But from the county people such as
the Brookes and Chettams, to respectable middle-class families of the Vincy
and Garth type, down to
the low, avaricious, harpy-tribes of the Waules and Featherstones, every unit of this complex social agglomeration, is described with a life-like vividness truly amazing, when the number and variety of the characters especially are considered. I know not where else in literature to look for a work which leaves such a strong impression on the reader's mind of the intertexture of human lives. Seen thus in perspective, each separate individuality, with its specialised consciousness, is yet as indissolubly connected with the collective life as that of the indistinguishable zoophyte which is but a sentient speck necessarily moved by the same vital agency which stirs the entire organism.
Among the figures which
stand out most prominently from the crowded background are Dorothea,
Lydgate, Casaubon, Rosamond Vincy, Ladislaw, Bulstrode, Caleb, and Mary
Garth. Dorothea belongs to that stately type of womanhood, such as Romola
and Fedalma, a type which seems to be specifically George Eliot's own,
and which has perhaps more in common with such Greek ideals as Antigone and
Iphigenia, than with more modern heroines. But Dorothea, however lofty her
aspirations, has not the Christian heroism of Romola, or the antique
devotion of Fedalma. She is one of those problematic natures already spoken
of; ill-adjusted to her circumstances, and never quite adjusting
circumstances to herself. It is true that her high aims and glorious
possibilities are partially stifled by a social medium where there seems no
demand for them: still the resolute soul usually finds some way in which to
work out its destiny.
"Many 'Theresas'" says George Eliot, "have
been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet, and sank unwept into oblivion. With dim lights and tangled circumstance they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but, after all, to common eyes, their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness; for these later-born 'Theresas' were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul.
"Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to the
inconvenient indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has fashioned the
natures of women; if there were one level of feminine incompetence as
strict as the ability to count three and no more, the social lot of woman
might be treated with scientific certitude. Meanwhile the indefiniteness
remains, and the limits of variation are really much wider than any one
would imagine from the sameness of women's coiffure, and the favourite
love stories in prose and verse."
Such a life of mistakes is that of the beautiful Dorothea, the
ill-starred wife of Casaubon. In his way the character of Casaubon is as
great a triumph as that of Tito himself. The novelist seems to have crept
into the inmost recesses of that uneasy consciousness, to have probed the
most sensitive spots of that diseased vanity, and to lay bare before our
eyes the dull labour of a brain whose ideas are stillborn. In an article by
Mr. Myers it is stated,
however incredible it may sound, that an undiscriminating friend once condoled with George Eliot on the melancholy experience which, from her knowledge of Lewes, had taught her to depict the gloomy character of Casaubon; whereas, in fact, there could not be a more striking contrast than that between the pedant groping amid dim fragments of knowledge, and the vivacious littérateur and thinker with his singular mental energy and grasp of thought. On the novelist's laughingly assuring him that such was by no means the case, "From whom, then," persisted he, "did you draw 'Casaubon'?" With a humorous solemnity, which was quite in earnest, she pointed to her own heart. She confessed, on the other hand, having found the character of Rosamond Vincy difficult to sustain, such complacency of egoism, as has been pointed out, being alien to her own habit of mind. But she laid no claim to any such natural magnanimity as could avert Casaubon's temptations of jealous vanity, and bitter resentment.
If there is any character in whom one may possibly trace some
suggestions of Lewes, it is in the versatile, brilliant, talented Ladislaw,
who held, that while genius must have the utmost play for its spontaneity,
it may await with confidence "those messages from the universe which
summon it to its peculiar work, only placing itself in an attitude of
receptivity towards all sublime chances." But however charming, the
impression Ladislaw produces is that of a somewhat shallow, frothy
character, so that he seems almost as ill-fitted for Dorothea as the dreary
Casaubon himself. Indeed the heroine's second marriage seems almost as
much a failure as the stultifying union of Lydgate with Rosamond Vincy, and
has
altogether a more saddening effect than the tragic death of Maggie, which is how much less pitiful than that death in life of the fashionable doctor, whose best aims and vital purposes have been killed by his wife.
Much might be said of Bulstrode, the sanctimonious hypocrite, who is yet
not altogether a hypocrite, but has a vein of something resembling goodness
running through his crafty character; of Farebrother, the lax, amiable,
genuinely honourable vicar of St. Botolph's; of Mrs. Cadwallader, the
glib-tongued, witty, meddling rector's wife, a kind of Mrs. Poyser of
high life; of Caleb Garth, whose devotion to work is a religion, and whose
likeness to Mr. Robert Evans has already been pointed out; of the
wholehearted, sensible Mary, and of many other supremely vivid characters,
whom to do justice to would carry us too far.
'Middlemarch' is the only work of George Eliot's, I
believe, in which there is a distinct indication of her attitude towards
the aspirations and clearly formulated demands of the women of the
nineteenth century. Her many sarcastic allusions to the stereotyped theory
about woman's sphere show on which side her sympathies were enlisted.
On the whole, she was more partial to the educational movement than to that
other agitation which aims at securing the political enfranchisement of
women. How sincerely she had the first at heart is shown by the donation of
50l. "From the author of 'Romola,'"
when Girton College was first started. And in a letter to a young lady who
studied there, and in whose career she was much interested, she says,
"the prosperity of Girton is very satisfactory." Among her most
intimate friends,
too, were some of the ladies who had initiated and organised the Women's Suffrage movement. Likewise writing to Miss Phelps, she alludes to the Woman's Lectureship in Boston, and remarks concerning the new University: "An office that may make a new precedent in social advance, and which is at the very least an experiment that ought to be tried. America is the seed-ground and nursery of new ideals, where they can grow in a larger, freer air than ours."
In 1871, the year when 'Middlemarch' was appearing in parts,
George Eliot spent part of the spring and summer months at Shottermill, a
quaint Hampshire village situated amid a landscape that unites beauties of
the most varied kind. Here we may imagine her and Mr. Lewes, after their
day's work was done, either seeking the vast stretch of heath and
common only bounded by the horizon, or strolling through the deep-sunk
lanes, or finding a soothing repose in "places of nestling green for
poets made." They had rented Brookbank, an old-fashioned cottage with
tiled roof and lattice-paned windows, belonging to Mrs. Gilchrist, the
widow of the distinguished biographer of William Blake.
The description of Mrs. Meyrick's house in 'Daniel
Deronda' "where the narrow spaces of wall held a world-history
in scenes and heads," may have been suggested by her present abode,
rich in original drawings by Blake, and valuable prints, and George Eliot
writes: "If I ever steal anything in my life, I think it will be the
two little Sir Joshuas over the drawing-room mantelpiece." At this
time she and Mr. Lewes also found intense interest in reading the
'Life of Blake.' Some correspondence, kindly placed at my
disposal by Mrs. Gilchrist, passed between this lady
and the Leweses in connection with the letting of the house, giving interesting glimpses into the domesticities of the latter. Their habits here, as in London, were of clockwork regularity, household arrangements being expected to run on wheels. "Everything," writes George Eliot, "goes on slowly at Shottermill, and the mode of narration is that typified in 'This is the house that Jack built.' But there is an exquisite stillness in the sunshine and a sense of distance from London hurry, which encourages the growth of patience.
"Mrs. G--'s" (their one servant) "pace is
proportionate to the other slownesses, but she impresses me as a worthy
person, and her cooking--indeed, all her attendance on us--is of
satisfactory quality. But we find the awkwardness of having only one person
in the house, as well as the advantage (this latter being quietude). The
butcher does not bring the meat, everybody grudges selling new milk, eggs
are scarce, and an expedition we made yesterday in search of fowls, showed
us nothing more hopeful than some chickens six weeks old, which the good
woman observed were sometimes 'eaten by the gentry with
asparagus.' Those eccentric people, the gentry!
"But have we not been reading about the siege of Paris all the
winter, and shall we complain while we get excellent bread and butter and
many etceteras? ... Mrs S-- kindly sent us a dish of asparagus, which
we ate (without the skinny chicken) and had a feast.
"You will imagine that we are as fond of eating as Friar
Tuck--I am enlarging so on our commissariat. But you will also infer
that we have no great evils to complain of, since I make so much of the
small."
George Eliot rarely went out in the day-time during her stay at
Shottermill, but in the course of her rambles she would sometimes visit
such cottagers in remote places as were not likely to know who she was. She
used also to go and see a farmer's wife living at a short distance
from Brookbank, with whom she would freely chat about the growth of fruits
and vegetables and the quality of butter, much to the astonishment of the
simple farm people. Speaking of her recollection of the great novelist to
an American lady by whom these facts are recorded, the old countrywoman
remarked: "It were wonderful, just wonderful, the sight o' green
peas that I sent down to that gentleman and lady every week."
After the lapse of a few months spent in this sweet rural retreat,
George Eliot again writes to Mrs. Gilchrist: "I did not imagine that
I should ever be so fond of the place as I am now. The departure of the
bitter winds, some improvement in my health, and the gradual revelation of
fresh and fresh beauties in the scenery, especially under a hopeful sky
such as we have sometimes had--all these conditions have made me love
our little world here, and wish not to quit it until we can settle in our
London home. I have the regret of thinking that it was my original
indifference about it (I hardly ever like things until they are familiar)
that hindered us from securing the cottage until the end of
September."
George Eliot's conscientiousness and precision in the small affairs
of life are exemplified in her last note to Mrs. Gilchrist: "After
Mr. Lewes had written to you, I was made aware that a small dessert or
bread-and-butter dish had been broken. That arch-sinner, the cat, was
credited with the guilt. I am assured by
Mrs. G-- that nothing else has been injured during her reign, and Mrs. L-- confirmed the statement to me yesterday. I wish I could replace the unfortunate dish.... This note, of course, needs no answer, and it is intended simply to make me a clean breast about the crockery."
About this time George Eliot was very much out of health: indeed, both
she and Lewes repeatedly speak of themselves as "two nervous,
dyspeptic creatures, two ailing, susceptible bodies," to whom slight
inconveniences are injurious and upsetting. Although it was hot summer
weather, Mrs. Lewes suffered much from cold, sitting always with artificial
heat to her feet. One broiling day in August, after she had left Brookbank,
and taken another place in the neighbourhood, an acquaintance happening to
call on her, found her sitting in the garden writing, as was her wont, her
head merely shaded by a deodara, on the lawn. Being expostulated with by
her visitor for her imprudence in exposing herself to the full blaze of the
midday sun, she replied, "Oh, I like it! To-day is the first time I
have felt warm this summer."
They led a most secluded life, George Eliot being at this time engaged
with the continuation of 'Middlemarch;' and Lewes, alluding to
their solitary habits, writes at this date: "Work goes on smoothly
away from all friendly interruptions. Lord Houghton says that it is
incomprehensible how we can live in such Simeon Stylites fashion, as we
often do, all alone--but the fact is we never are alone
when alone. And I sometimes marvel how it is I have contrived to get
through so much work living in London. It's true I'm a London
child." Occasionally, however, they would
go and see Tennyson, whose house is only three miles from Shottermill, but the road being all uphill made the ride a little tedious and uncomfortable, especially to George Eliot who had not got over her old nervousness. The man who used to drive them on these occasions was so much struck by this that he told the lady who has recorded these details in the Century Magazine: "Withal her being such a mighty clever body, she were very nervous in a carriage--allays wanted to go on a smooth road, and seemed dreadful feared of being thrown out." On one of these occasional meetings with Tennyson, the poet got involved in a conversation with the novelist concerning evolution and such weighty questions. They had been walking together in close argument, and as the Poet-Laureate bade George Eliot farewell, he called to her, already making her way down the hill, "Well, good-by, you and your molecules!" And she, looking back, said in her deep low voice (which always got lower when she was at all roused), "I am quite content with my molecules."
The country all around Shottermill with its breezy uplands, its
pine-clad hills, its undulating tracts of land purpled with heath in the
autumn, became more and more endeared to George Eliot, who, indeed, liked
it better than any scenery in England. Here she could enjoy to the full
that "sense of standing on a round world," which, she writes to
Mrs. Gilchrist who had used the phrase, "was precisely what she most
cared for amongst out-of-door delights." Some years afterwards we
find her and Mr. Lewes permanently taking a house not far off, at Witley in
Surrey, which has the same kind of beautiful open scenery. Writing from her
town residence about it to
her old friend Mrs. Bray, George Eliot says: "We, too, are thinking of a new settling down, for we have bought a house in Surrey about four miles from Godalming on a gravelly hill among the pine-trees, but with neighbours to give us a sense of security. Our present idea is that we shall part with this house and give up London except for occasional visits. We shall be on the same line of railway with some good friends at Weybridge and Guildford."
These observations are valuable as affording a key to the leading motive
of 'Daniel Deronda.' Mordecai's ardent desire to found a
new national state in Palestine is not simply the author's dramatic
realisation of the feeling of an enthusiast, but expresses her own very
definite sentiments on the subject. The Jewish apostle is, in fact, more or
less the mouthpiece of George Eliot's own opinions on Judaism. For so
great a master in the art of creating character, this type of the loftiest kind of man is curiously unreal. Mordecai delivers himself of the most eloquent and exalted views and sentiments, yet his own personality remains so vague and nebulous that it has no power of kindling the imagination. Mordecai is meant for a Jewish Mazzini. Within his consciousness he harbours the future of a people. He feels himself destined to become the saviour of his race; yet he does not convince us of his greatness. He convinces us no more than he does the mixed company at the "Hand and Banner," which listens with pitying incredulity to his passionate harangues. Nevertheless the first and final test of the religious teacher or of the social reformer is the magnetic force with which his own intense beliefs become binding on the consciences of others, if only of a few. It is true Mordecai secures one disciple--the man destined to translate his thought into action, Daniel Deronda, as shadowy, as puppet-like, as lifeless as Ezra Mordecai Cohen himself. These two men, of whom the one is the spiritual leader and the other the hero destined to realise his aspirations, are probably the two most unsuccessful of George Eliot's vast gallery of characters. They are the representatives of an idea, but the idea has never been made flesh. A succinct expression of it may be gathered from the following passage:
"Which among the chief of the Gentile nations has not an ignorant
multitude? They scorn our people's ignorant observance; but the most
accursed ignorance is that which has no observance--sunk to the
cunning g eed of the fox, to which all law is no
more than a trap or the cry of the worrying hound. There is a
degradation deep down below the memory that has withered into superstition. For the multitude of the ignorant on three continents who observe our rites and make the confession of the Divine Unity the Lord of Judaism is not dead. Revive the organic centre: let the unity of Israel which has made the growth and form of its religion be an outward reality. Looking towards a land and a polity, our dispersed people in all the ends of the earth may share the dignity of a national life which has a voice among the peoples of the East and the West; which will plant the wisdom and skill of our race, so that it may be, as of old, a medium of transmission and understanding. Let that come to pass, and the living warmth will spread to the weak extremities of Israel, and superstition will vanish, not in the lawlessness of the renegade, but in the illumination of great facts which widen feeling, and make all knowledge alive as the young offspring of beloved memories."
This notion that the Jews should return to Palestine in a body, and once
more constitute themselves into a distinct nation, is curiously repugnant
to modern feelings. As repugnant as that other doctrine, which is also
implied in the book, that Jewish separateness should be still further
insured by strictly adhering to their own race in marriage--at least
Mirah, the most faultless of George Eliot's heroines, whose character
expresses the noblest side of Judaism, "is a Jewess who will not
accept any one but a Jew."
Mirah Lapidoth and the Princess Halm-Eberstein, Deronda's mother,
are drawn with the obvious purpose of contrasting two types of Jewish
women. Whereas the latter, strictly brought up in the belief and most
minute observances of her Hebrew father,
breaks away from the "bondage of having been born a Jew," from which she wishes to relieve her son by parting from him in infancy, Mirah, brought up in disregard, "even in dislike of her Jewish origin," clings with inviolable tenacity to the memory of that origin and to the fellowship of her people. The author leaves one in little doubt as towards which side her own sympathies incline to. She is not so much the artist here, impartially portraying different kinds of characters, as the special pleader proclaiming that one set of motives are righteous, just, and praiseworthy, as well as that the others are mischievous and reprehensible.
This seems carrying the principle of nationality to an extreme, if not
pernicious length. If there were never any breaking up of old forms of
society, any fresh blending of nationalities and races, we should soon
reduce Europe to another China. This unwavering faithfulness to the
traditions of the past may become a curse to the living. A rigidity as
unnatural as it is dangerous would be the result of too tenacious a
clinging to inherited memories. For if this doctrine were strictly carried
out, such a country as America, where there is a slow amalgamation of many
allied and even heterogeneous races into a new nation, would practically
become impossible. Indeed, George Eliot does not absolutely hold these
views. She considers them necessary at present in order to act as a drag to
the too rapid transformations of society. In the most interesting paper of
'Theophrastus Such,' that called 'The Modern Hep! Hep!
Hep!' she remarks: "The tendency of things is towards quicker
or slower fusion of races. It is impossible to arrest this tendency; all we
can do is to moderate its course
so as to hinder it from degrading the moral status of societies by a too rapid effacement of those national traditions and customs which are the language of the national genius--the deep suckers of healthy sentiment. Such moderating and guidance of inevitable movement is worthy of all effort."
Considering that George Eliot was convinced of this modern tendency
towards fusion, it is all the more singular that she should, in
'Daniel Deronda,' have laid such stress on the reconstruction,
after the lapse of centuries, of a Jewish state; singular, when one
considers that many of the most eminent Jews, far from aspiring towards
such an event, hardly seem to have contemplated it as a desirable or
possible prospect. The sympathies of Spinoza, the Mendelssohns, Rahel,
Meyerbeer, Heine, and many others, are not distinctively Jewish but
humanitarian. And the grandest, as well as truest thing that has been
uttered about them is that saying of Heine's: "The country of
the Jews is the ideal, is God."
Indeed, to have a true conception of Jewish nature and character, of its
brilliant lights and deep shadows, of its pathos, depth, sublimity,
degradation, and wit; of its infinite resource and boundless capacity for
suffering--one must go to Heine and not to 'Daniel
Deronda.' In 'Jehuda-ben-Halevy' Heine expresses the love
and longing of a Jewish heart for Jerusalem in accents of such piercing
intensity that compared with it, "Mordecai's" fervid
desire fades into mere abstract rhetoric.
Nature and experience were the principal sources of George Eliot's
inspiration. And though she knew a great deal about the Jews, her
experience had not become sufficiently incorporated with her
conscious-
ness. Otherwnvise, instead of portraying such tame models of perfection as Deronda and Mirah, she would have so mixed her colours as to give us that subtle involvement of motive and tendency--as of cross-currents in the sea--which we find in the characters of nature's making and in her own finest creations, such as Maggie, Silas Marner, Dorothea Casaubon, and others.
In turning to the English portion of the story there is at once greater
play of spontaneity in the people depicted. Grandcourt, Gascoigne, Rex,
Mrs. Davilow, Sir Hugh Mallinger, and especially Gwendolen, show all the
old cunning in the psychological rendering of human nature. Curiously
enough, this novel consists of two perfectly distinct narratives; the only
point of junction being Daniel Deronda himself, who, as a Jew by birth and
an English gentleman by education, stands related to both sets of
circumstances. The influence he exerts on the spiritual development of
Gwendolen seems indeed the true motif of the
story. Otherwise there is no intrinsic connection between the group of
people clustering round Mordecai, and that of which Gwendolen is the
centre: unless it be that the author wished to show the greater intensity
of aim and higher moral worth of the Jews as contrasted with these
purposeless, worldly, unideal Christians of the nineteenth century.
Compared with the immaculate Mirah, Gwendolen Harleth is a very naughty,
spoiled, imperfect specimen of maidenhood. But she has life in her; and one
speculates as to what she will say and do next, as if she were a person
among one's acquaintances. On that account most readers of
'Daniel Deronda' find their
interest engrossed by the fate of Gwendolen, and the conjugal relations between her and Grandcourt. This is so much the case, that one suspects her to have been the first idea of the story. She is at any rate its most attractive feature. In Gwendolen, George Eliot once remarked, she had wished to draw a girl of the period. Fascinating, accomplished, of siren-like beauty, she has every outward grace combined with a singular inward vacuity. The deeper aspects of life are undreamed of in her philosophy. Her religion consists in a vague awe of the unknown and invisible, and her ambition in the acquisition of rank, wealth, and personal distinction. She is selfish, vain, frivolous, worldly, domineering, yet not without sudden impulses of generosity, and jets of affection. Something there is in her of Undine before she had a soul--something of a gay, vivacious, unfeeling sprite, who recks nothing of human love or of human misery, but looks down with utter indifference on the poor humdrum mortals around her, whom she inspires at once with fear and fondness: something, also, of the "princess in exile, who in time of famine was to have her breakfast-roll made of the finest bolted flour from the seven thin ears of wheat, and in a general decampment was to have her silver fork kept out of the baggage."
How this bewitching creature, whose "iridescence of
character" makes her a psychological problem, is gradually brought to
accept Henleigh Grandcourt, in spite of the promise she has given to Lydia
Glasher (his discarded victim), and her own fleeting presentiments, is
described with an analytical subtlety unsurpassed in George Eliot's
works. So, indeed, is the whole episode of the married life of Grandcourt.
This territorial magnate, who possesses every worldly advantage that Gwendolen desired, is worthy, as a study of character, to be placed beside that of Casaubon himself. Gwendolen's girlish type of egoism, which loves to be the centre of admiration, here meets with that far other deadlier form of an "exorbitant egoism," conspicuous for its intense obstinacy and tenacity of rule, "in proportion as the varied susceptibilities of younger years are stripped away." This cold, negative nature lies with a kind of withering blight on the susceptible Gwendolen. Roused from the complacent dreams of girlhood by the realities of her married life, shrinking in helpless repulsion from the husband whom she meant to manage, and who holds her as in a vice, the unhappy woman has nothing to cling to in this terrible inward collapse of her happiness, but the man, who, from the first moment when his eye arrests hers at the gaming table at Leubronn, becomes, as it were, a conscience visibly incarnate to her. This incident, which is told in the first chapter of the novel, recalls a sketch by Dante Rossetti, where Mary Magdalene, in the flush of joyous life, is held by the Saviour's gaze, and in a sudden revulsion from her old life, breaks away from companions that would fain hold her back, with a passionate movement towards the Man of Sorrow. This impressive conception may have unconsciously suggested a somewhat similar situation to the novelist, for that George Eliot was acquainted with this drawing is shown by the following letter addressed in 1870 to Dante Rossetti:
"I have had time now to dwell on the photographs. I am especially
grateful to you for giving me the head marked June 1861: it is exquisite.
But I am glad
to possess every one of them. The subject of the Magdalene rises in interest for me, the more I look at it. I hope you will keep in the picture an equally passionate type for her. Perhaps you will indulge me with a little talk about the modifications you intend to introduce."
The relation of Deronda to Gwendolen is of a Christlike nature. He is
her only moral hold in the fearful temptations that assail her now and
again under the intolerable irritations of her married life, temptations
which grow more urgent when Grandcourt leads his wife captive, after his
fashion, in a yacht on the Mediterranean. For "the intensest form of
hatred is that rooted in fear, which compels to silence, and drives
vehemence into a constructive vindictiveness, an imaginary annihilation of
the detested object, something like the hidden rites of vengeance, with
which the persecuted have made a dark vent for their rage, and soothed
their suffering nto dumbness. Such hidden rites went
on in the secrecy of Gwendolen's mind, but not with soothing
effect--rather with the effect of a struggling terror. Side by side
with dread of her husband had grown the self-dread which urged her to flee
from the pursuing images wrought by her pent-up impulse."
The evil wish at last finds fulfilment, the murderous thought is
outwardly realised. And though death is not eventually the result of the
criminal desire, it yet seems to the unhappy wife as if it had a
determining power in bringing about the catastrophe. But it is precisely
this remorse which is the redeeming quality of her nature, and awakens a
new life within her. In this quickening of the moral consciousness through
guilt we are reminded, although in a different
man-
ner, of a similar process, full of pregnant suggestions, described in Nathaniel Hawthorne's 'Transformation.' It will be remembered that Donatello leads a purely instinctive, that is to say animal, existence, till the commission of a crime awakens the dormant conscience, and a soul is born in the throes of anguish and remorse.
In 'Daniel Deronda' there is an entire absence of that rich,
genial humour which seemed spontaneously to bubble up and overflow her
earlier works. Whether George Eliot's conception of the Jews as a
peculiarly serious race had any share in bringing about that result, it is
difficult to say. At any rate, in one of her essays she remarks that,
"The history and literature of the ancient Hebrews gives the idea of
a people who went about their business and pleasure as gravely as a society
of beavers." Certainly Mordecai, Deronda, and Mirah, are
preternaturally solemn, even the Cohen family are not presented with any of
those comic touches one would have looked for in this great humorist: only
in the boy Jacob are there gleams of drollery, such as in this description
of him by Hans Meyrick: "He treats me with the easiest familiarity,
and seems in general to look at me as a second-hand Christian commodity,
likely to come down in price; remarking on my disadvantages with a
frankness which seems to imply some thoughts of future purchase. It is
pretty, though, to see the change in him if Mirah happens to come in. He
turns child suddenly--his age usually strikes one as being like the
Israelitish garments in the desert, perhaps near forty, yet with an air of
recent production."
A certain subdued vein of humour is not entirely absent from the
portraiture of the Meyrick family,
a delightful group, who "had their little oddities, streaks of eccentricity from the mother's blood as well as the father's, their minds being like mediæval houses with unexpected recesses and openings from this into that, flights of steps, and sudden outlooks." But on the whole, instead of the old humour, we find in 'Daniel Deronda' a polished irony and epigrammatic sarcasm, which were afterwards still more fully developed in the 'Impressions of Theophrastus Such.'
Soon after the publication of this novel, we find the following allusion
to it in one of George Eliot's letters to Mrs. Bray: "I
don't know what you refer to in the Jewish World.
Perhaps the report of Dr. Hermann Adler's lecture on
'Deronda' to the Jewish working-men, given in the
Times. Probably the Dr. Adler whom you saw is Dr.
Hermann's father, still living as Chief Rabbi. I have had some
delightful communications from Jews and Jewesses, both at home and abroad.
Part of the Club scene in 'D.D.' is flying about in the Hebrew
tongue through the various Hebrew newspapers, which have been copying the
'Maga.' in which the translation was first sent to me three
months ago. The Jews naturally are not indifferent to
themselves."
This Club scene gave rise at the time to quite a controversy. It could
not fail to be identified with that other club of philosophers out at
elbows so vividly described by G.H. Lewes in the 'Fortnightly
Review' of 1866. Nor was it possible not to detect an affinity
between the Jew Cohen, the poor consumptive journeyman watchmaker, with his
weak voice and his great calm intellect, and Ezra Mordecai Cohen, in
precisely similar conditions; the difference being that the one is
penetrated by the philosophical idea of
Spinozism, and the other by the political idea of reconstituting a Jewish State in Palestine. This difference of mental bias, no doubt, forms a contrast between the two characters, without, however, invalidating the surmise that the fictitious enthusiast may have been originally suggested by the noble figure of the living Jew. Be that as it may, Lewes often took the opportunity in conversation of "pointing out that no such resemblance existed, Cohen being a keen dialectician and a highly impressive man, but without any specifically Jewish enthusiasm."
When she undertook to write about the Jews, George Eliot was deeply
versed in Hebrew literature, ancient and modern. She had taught herself
Hebrew when translating the Leben Jesu, and this
knowledge now stood her in good stead. She was also familiar with the
splendid utterances of Jehuda-ben-Halevy; with the visionary speculations
of the Cabbalists, and with the brilliant Jewish writers of the
Hispano-Arabic epoch. She had read portions of the Talmud, and remarked one
day in conversation that Spinoza had really got something from the Cabbala.
On her friend humbly suggesting that by ordinary accounts it appeared to be
awful nonsense, she said "that it nevertheless contained fine ideas,
like Plato and the Old Testament, which, however, people took in the lump,
being accustomed to them."
This singular diffidence, arising from a sense of the tremendous
responsibility which her position entailed, was one of the most noticeable
characteristics of this great woman, and struck every one who came in
contact with her. Her conscientiousness made her
even painfully anxious to enter sympathetically into the needs of every person who approached her, so as to make her speech a permanently fruitful influence in her hearer's life. Such an interview, for example, as that between Goethe and Heine--where the younger poet, after thinking all the way what fine things to say to Goethe, was so disconcerted by the awe-inspiring presence of the master, that he could find nothing better to say than that the plums on the road-side between Jena and Weimar were remarkably good--would have been impossible with one so eager always to give of her best.
This deep seriousness of nature made her Sunday afternoon receptions,
which became more and more fashionable as time went on, something of a tax
to one who preferred the intimate converse of a few to that more
superficially brilliant talk which a promiscuous gathering brings with it.
Among the distinguished visitors to be met more or less frequently at the
Priory may be mentioned Mr. Herbert Spencer, Professor Huxley, Mr. Frederic
Harrison, Professor Beesly, Dr. and Mrs. Congreve, Madame Bodichon, Lord
Houghton, M. Tourguénief, Mr. Ralston, Sir Theodore and Lady Martin
(better known as Helen Faucit), Mr. Burton of the National Gallery, Mr.
George Howard and his wife, Mr. C.G. Leland, Mr. Moncure Conway, Mr. Justin
McCarthy, Dr. Hueffer; Mr. and Mrs. Buxton Forman, Mr. F. Myers, Mr. Sully,
Mr. Du Maurier, Mr. and Mrs. Mark Pattison, Mr. and Mrs. Clifford, Lady
Castletown and her daughters, Mr. and Mrs. Burne Jones, Mr. John Everett
Millais, Mr. Robert Browning, and Mr. Tennyson.
Persons of celebrity were not the only ones, however, that were made
welcome at the Priory. The
liveliest sympathy was shown by both host and hostess in many young people as yet struggling in obscurity, but in whom they delighted to recognise the promise of some future excellence. If a young man were pursuing some original scientific inquiry, or striking out a new vein of speculation, in all London there was none likely to enter with such zest into his ideas as G.H. Lewes. His generous appreciation of intellectual gifts is well shown in the following lines to the late Professor W.K. Clifford:
"Few things have given us more pleasure than the intimation in
your note that you had a fiancée. May
she be the central happiness and motive force of your career, and, by
satisfying the affections, leave your rare intellect free to
work out its glorious destiny. For, if you don't become a glory to
your age and time, it will be a sin and a shame. Nature doesn't often
send forth such gifted sons, and when she does, Society usually cripples
them. Nothing but marriage--a happy marriage--has seemed to Mrs.
Lewes and myself wanting to your future."
On the Sunday afternoon receptions just mentioned, G.H. Lewes acted, so
to speak, as a social cement. His vivacity, his ready tact, the fascination
of his manners, diffused that general sense of ease and
abandon so requisite to foster an harmonious flow of
conversation. He was inimitable as a
raconteur, and Thackeray, Trollope, and
Arthur Helps were fond of quoting some of the stories which he would
dramatise in the telling. One of the images which, on these occasions,
recurs oftenest to George Eliot's friends, is that of the
frail-looking woman who would sit with her chair drawn close to the fire,
and whose winning womanliness of bearing and manners struck every one
who had the privilege of an introduction to her. Her long, pale face, with its strongly-marked features, was less rugged in the mature prime of life than in youth, the inner meanings of her nature having worked themselves more and more to the surface, the mouth, with its benignant suavity of expression, especially softening the too prominent under-lip and massive jaw. Her abundant hair, untinged with grey, whose smooth bands made a kind of frame to the face, was covered by a lace or muslin cap, with lappets of rich point or Valenciennes lace fastened under her chin. Her grey-blue eyes, under noticeable eyelashes, expressed the same acute sensitiveness as her long, thin, beautifully-shaped hands. She had a pleasant laugh and smile, her voice being low, distinct, and intensely sympathetic in quality: it was contralto in singing, but she seldom sang or played before more than one or two friends. Though her conversation was perfectly easy, each sentence was as finished, as perfectly formed, as the style of her published works. Indeed, she laid great stress on the value of correct speaking and clearness of enunciation; and in 'Theophrastus Such' she laments "the general ambition to speak every language except our mother English, which persons 'of style' are not ashamed of corrupting with slang, false foreign equivalents, and a pronunciation that crushes out all colour from the vowels, and jams them between jostling consonants."
Besides M. d'Albert's Genevese portrait of George Eliot, we
have a drawing by Mr. Burton, and another by Mr. Lawrence, the latter taken
soon after the publication of 'Adam Bede.' In criticising the
latter likeness, a keen observer of human nature remarked that it conveyed
no indication of the infinite depth of her
observant eye, nor of that cold, subtle, and unconscious cruelty of expression which might occasionally be detected there. George Eliot had an unconquerable aversion to her likeness being taken: once, however, in 1860, she was photographed for the sake of her "dear sisters" at Rosehill. But she seems to have repented of this weakness, for, after the lapse of years, she writes: "Mr. Lewes has just come to me after reading your letter, and says, 'For God's sake tell her not to have the photograph reproduced!' and I had nearly forgotten to say that the fading is what I desired. I should not like this image to be perpetuated. It needs the friendly eyes that regret to see it fade, and must not be recalled into emphatic black and white for indifferent gazers. Pray let it vanish."
Those who knew George Eliot were even more struck by the force of her
entire personality than by her writings. Sympathetic, witty or learned in
turn, her conversation deeply impressed her hearers, being enriched by such
felicities of expression as: "The best lesson of tolerance we have to
learn is to tolerate intolerance." In answer to a friend's
surprise that a clever man should allow himself to be contradicted by a
stupid one, without dropping down on him, she remarked: "He is very
liable to drop down as a baked apple would." And of a very plain
acquaintance she said: "He has the most dreadful kind of ugliness one
can be afflicted with, because it takes on the semblance of
beauty."
Poetry, music, and art naturally absorbed much attention at the Priory.
Here Mr. Tennyson has been known to read 'Maud' aloud to his
friends: Mr. Browning expatiated on the most recondite metrical rules: and
Rossetti sent presents of poems and photo-
graphs. In the following unpublished letters George Eliot thanks the latter for his valued gifts--"We returned only the night before last from a two months' journey to the Continent, and among the parcels awaiting me I found your generous gift. I am very grateful to you both as giver and poet.
"In cutting the leaves, while my head is still swimming from the
journey, I have not resisted the temptation to read many things as they
ought not to be read--hurriedly. But even in this way I have received
a stronger impression than any fresh poems have for a long while given me,
that to read once is a reason for reading again. The sonnets towards
'The House of Life' attract me peculiarly. I feel about them as
I do about a new cahier of music which I have been 'trying'
here and there with the delightful conviction that I have a great deal to
become acquainted with and to like better and better." And again, in
acknowledgment of some photographs: "The 'Hamlet' seems
to me perfectly intelligible, and altogether admirable in conception,
except in the type of the man's head. I feel sure that
'Hamlet' had a square anterior lobe.
"Mr. Lewes says, this conception of yours makes him long to be an
actor who has 'Hamlet' for one of his parts, that he might
carry out this scene according to your idea.
"One is always liable to mistake prejudices for sufficient
inductions, about types of head and face, as well as about all other
things. I have some impressions--perhaps only prejudices dependent on
the narrowness of my experience--about forms of eyebrow and their
relation to passionate expression. It is possible that such a supposed
relation has a real anatomical basis.
But in many particulars facial expression is like the expression of hand-writing: the relations are too subtle and intricate to be detected, and only shallowness is confident."
George Eliot read but little contemporary fiction, being usually
absorbed in the study of some particular subject. "For my own
spiritual good I need all other sort of reading," she says,
"more than I need fiction. I know nothing of contemporary English
novelists with the exception of ----, and a few of --'s
works. My constant groan is that I must leave so much of the greatest
writing which the centuries have sifted for me unread for want of
time." For the same reason, on being recommended by a literary friend
to read Walt Whitman, she hesitated on the ground of his not containing
anything spiritually needful for her, but, having been induced to take him
up, she changed her opinion and admitted that he did contain
what was "good for her soul." As to lighter reading, she was
fond of books of travel, pronouncing "'The Voyage of the
Challenger' a splendid book." Among foreign novelists she was
very partial to Henry Gréville, and speaks of 'Les
Koumiassine' as a pleasant story.
Persons who were privileged enough to be admitted to the intimacy of
George Eliot and Mr. Lewes could not fail to be impressed by the immense
admiration which they had for one another. Lewes's tenderness, always
on the watch lest the great writer, with her delicately poised health,
should over-exert herself, had something of doglike fidelity. On the other
hand, in spite of George Eliot's habitually retiring manner, if any
one ever engaged on the opposite side of an argument to that maintained by
the brilliant
savant, in taking his part, she usually had the best of it, although in the most gentle and feminine way.
Although there was entire oneness of feeling between them, there was no
unanimity of opinion. George Eliot had the highest regard for Lewes's
opinions, but held to her own. One of the chief subjects of difference
consisted in their attitude towards Christianity: whereas he was its
uncompromising opponent, she had the greatest sympathy with its various
manifestations from Roman Catholic asceticism to Evangelical austerity and
Methodist fervour. Her reverence for every form of worship in which mankind
has more or less consciously embodied its sense of the mystery of all
"this unintelligible world" increased with the years. She was
deeply penetrated by that tendency of the Positivist spirit which
recognises the beneficial element in every form of religion, and sees the
close, nay indissoluble, connection between the faith of former generations
and the ideal of our own. She herself found ample scope for the needs and
aspirations of her spiritual nature in the religion of humanity. As has
already been repeatedly pointed out, there runs through all her works the
same persistent teaching of "the Infinite Nature of Duty." And
with Comte she refers "the obligations of duty, as well as all
sentiments of devotion, to a concrete object, at once ideal and real; the
Human Race, conceived as a continuous whole, including the past, the
present, and the future."
Though George Eliot drew many of her ideas of moral cultivation from the
doctrines of Comte's Philosophie Positive,
she was not a Positivist in the strict sense of the word. Her mind was far
too
creative by nature to give an unqualified adhesion to such a system as Comte's. Indeed, her devotion to the idea of mankind, conceived as a collective whole, is not so much characteristic of Positivists as of the greatest modern minds, minds such as Lessing, Bentham, Shelley, Mill, Mazzini, and Victor Hugo. Inasmuch as Comte co-ordinated these ideas into a consistent doctrine, George Eliot found herself greatly attracted to his system; and Mr. Beesly, after an acquaintance of eighteen years, considered himself justified in stating that her powerful intellect had accepted the teaching of Auguste Comte, and that she looked forward to the reorganisation of belief on the lines which he had laid down. Still her adherence, like that of G.H. Lewes, was only partial, and applied mainly to his philosophy, and not to his scheme of social policy. She went farther than the latter, however, in her concurrence. For Mr. Lewes, speaking of the Politique Positive in his 'History of Philosophy,' admits that his antagonistic attitude had been considerably modified on learning from the remark of one very dear to him, "to regard it as an Utopia, presenting hypotheses rather than doctrines--suggestions for future inquiries rather than dogmas for adepts."
On the whole, although George Eliot did not agree with Comnte's
later theories concerning the reconstruction of society, she regarded them
with sympathy "as the efforts of an individual to anticipate the work
of future generations." This sympathy with the general Positivist
movement she showed by subscribing regularly to Positivist objects,
especially to the fund of the Central Organisation presided over by M.
Laffitte, but she invariably refused all membership with the
Positivist community. In conversation with an old and valued friend, she also repeatedly expressed her objection to much in Comte's later speculations, saying on one occasion, "I cannot submit my intellect or my soul to the guidance of Comte." The fact is that, although George Eliot was greatly influenced by the leading Positivist ideas, her mind was too original not to work out her own individual conception of life.
What this conception is has been already indicated, so far as space
would permit, in the discussion of her successive works. Perhaps in the
course of time her moralising analytical tendency encroached too much on
the purely artistic faculty. Her eminently dramatic genius--which
enabled her to realise characters the most varied and opposite in type,
somewhat in the manner of Shakespeare--became hampered by theories and
abstract views of life. This was especially shown in her latest work,
'The Impressions of Theophrastus Such,' a series of essays
chiefly satirising the weaknesses and vanities of the literary class. In
these unattractive "impressions" the wit is often laboured, and
does not play "beneficently round the changing facets of egoism,
absurdity, and vice, as the sunshine over the rippling sea or the dewy
meadows." Its cutting irony and incisive ridicule are no longer
tempered by the humorous laugh, but have the corrosive quality of some
acrid chemical substance.
One of the papers, however, that entitled 'Debasing the Moral
Currency,' expresses a strongly marked characteristic of George
Eliot's mind. It is a pithy protest against the tendency of the
present generation to turn the grandest deeds and noblest works of art into
food for laughter. For she hated nothing so
much as mockery and ridicule of what other people reverenced, often remarking that those who considered themselves freest from superstitious fancies were the most intolerant. She carried this feeling to such a pitch that she even disliked a book like 'Alice in Wonderland' because it laughed at the things which children had had a kind of belief in. In censuring this vicious habit of burlesquing the things that ought to be regarded with awe and admiration, she remarks, "Let a greedy buffoonery debase all historic beauty, majesty and pathos, and the more you heap up the desecrated symbols, the greater will be the lack of the ennobling emotions which subdue the tyranny of suffering, and make ambition one with virtue."
'Looking Backward' is the only paper in 'Theophrastus
Such' quite free from cynicism. It contains, under a slightly veiled
form, pathetically tender reminiscences of her own early life. This volume,
not published till May 1879, was written before the incalculable loss which
befell George Eliot in the autumn of the preceding year.
After spending the summer of 1878 in the pleasant retirement of Witley,
Lewes and George Eliot returned to London. A severe cold taken by Lewes
proved the forerunner of a serious disorder, and, after a short illness,
this bright, many-sided, indefatigable thinker, passed away in his
sixty-second year. He had frequently said to his friends that the most
desirable end of a well-spent life was a painless death; and although his
own could not be called painless, his sufferings were at least of short
duration. Concerning the suffering and anguish of her who was left behind
to mourn him, one may most fitly say, in her own words, that, "for
the first sharp pangs there
is no comfort--whatever goodness may surround us, darkness and silence still hang about our pain." In her case, also, the "clinging companionship with the dead" was gradually linked with her living affections, and she found alleviation for her sorrow in resuming those habits of continuous mental occupation which had become second nature with her. In a letter addressed to a friend, who, only a few short months afterwards, suffered a like heavy bereavement, there breathes the spirit in which George Eliot bore her own sorrow: "I understand it all.... There is but one refuge--the having much to do. You have the mother's duties. Not that these can yet make your life other than a burden to be patiently borne. Nothing can, except the gradual adaptation of your soul to the new conditions.... It is among my most cherished memories that I knew your husband, and from the first delighted in him.... All blessing--and even the sorrow that is a form of love has a heart of blessing--is tenderly wished for you."
On seeing this lady for the first time after their mutual loss, George
Eliot asked her eagerly; "Do the children help? Does it make any
difference?" Some help there was for the widowed heart of this
sorrowing woman in throwing herself, with all her energies, into the work
which Lewes had left unfinished at his death, and preparing it for
publication, with the help of an expert. Another subject which occupied her
thoughts at this time, was the foundation of the "George Henry Lewes
Studentship," in order to commemorate the name of one who had done so
much to distinguish himself in the varied fields of literature, science,
and philosophy. The value of the studentship is slightly under £200 a
year.
It is worth noticing that persons of both sexes are received as candidates. The object of the endowment is to encourage the prosecution of original research in physiology, a science to whose study Lewes had devoted himself most assiduously for many years. Writing of this matter to a young lady, one of the Girton students, George Eliot says: "I know ... will be glad to hear also that both in England and Germany the type, or scheme, on which the studentship is arranged has been regarded with satisfaction, as likely to be a useful model."
Amid such preoccupations, and the preparation of 'Theophrastus
Such' for the press, the months passed on, and George Eliot was
beginning to see her friends again, when one day she not only took the
world, but her intimate circle by surprise, by her marriage with Mr. John
Walter Cross, on the 6th of May, 1880. The acquaintance with this
gentleman, dating from the year 1867, had long ago grown into the warmest
friendship, and his boundless devotion to the great woman whose society was
to him as his daily bread, no doubt induced her to take a step which could
not fail to startle even those who loved her the most. But George
Eliot's was a nature that needed some one especially to love. And
though that precious companionship, at once stimulating and sympathetic,
which she had so long enjoyed, was taken from her, she could still find
comfort during the remainder of her life in the love, the appreciation, and
the tender care which were proffered to her by Mr. Cross. Unfortunately her
life was not destined to be prolonged.
Although seeming fairly well at this date, George Eliot's health,
always delicate, had probably received
a shock, from which it never recovered. Only six months before her marriage three eminent medical men were attending her for a painful disease. However, there seemed still a prospect of happiness for her when she and Mr. Cross went for a tour in Italy, settling, on their return, at her favourite country house at Witley. In the autumn they once more made their home in London, at Mr. Cross's town house at 4 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, and Mrs. Cross, who was again beginning to receive her friends, seemed, to all appearances, well and happy, with a prospect of domestic love and unimpaired mental activity stretching out before her. But it was not to be. On Friday, the 17th of December, George Eliot attended a representation of the 'Agamemnon,' in Greek, by Oxford undergraduates, and was so stirred by the grand words of her favourite Æschylus, that she was contemplating a fresh perusal of the Greek dramatists with her husband. On the following day she went to the Saturday popular concert, and on returning home played through some of the music she had been hearing. Her fatal cold was probably caught on that occasion, for, although she received her friends, according to custom, on the Sunday afternoon, she felt indisposed in the evening, and on the following day an affection of the larynx necessitated medical advice. There seemed no cause for alarm at first, till on Wednesday it was unexpectedly discovered that inflammation had arisen in the heart, and that no hope of recovery remained. Before midnight of the 22nd of December, 1880, George Eliot, who died at precisely the same age as Lewes, had passed quietly and painlessly away; and on Christmas Eve the announcement of her death was
received with general grief. She was buried by the side of George Henry Lewes, in the cemetery at Highgate.
George Eliot's career has been habitually described as uniform and
uneventful. In reality nothing is more misleading. On the contrary, her
life, from its rising to its setting, describes an astonishingly wide
orbit. If one turns back in imagination from the little Staffordshire
village whence her father sprang, to the simple rural surroundings of her
own youth, and traces her history to the moment when a crowd of mourners,
consisting of the most distinguished men and women in England, followed her
to the grave, one cannot help realising how truly eventful was the life of
her who now joined in spirit the
"Choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence: live
In pulses stirred to generosity,
In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn
For miserable aims that end in self,
In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars,
And with their mild persistence urge man's search
To vaster issues."
LONDON: PRINTED BY W.H. ALLEN AND CO., 13 WATERLOO PLACE
S.W.
THE PROPHECY OF SAINT ORAN: AND OTHER POEMS. By MATHILDE BLIND.
--Times.
"Apart from the sonorous beauty of her lines, there is in her diction a straightforwardness and simplicity, and an entire absence of affectation and false sentiment, which, combined with considerable power of characterization, make her volume a remarkable contribution to English literature."
--Athenæum.
"Directness of style and lucidity of narrative are the characteristic excellences of the poem. There are few contemporary poets who could have done so much dramatic business in so few lines. In each of the sonnets there is a thought that is well expressed, and worth expressing."
--Academy.
"The most mature of all recent first efforts, even of established rank."
--Pall Mall Gazette.
"In the choice of a subject for her chief poem she has been singularly fortunate.... That a story such as this is full of poetical suggestiveness is obvious, and Miss Blind has proved herself equal to the occasion. She has avoided writing anything approaching to a
'tendency poem.' She metes out justice with an equal hand to all her characters. The genuine enthusiasm and religious zeal of the monks are set forth in language as inspired as is the final protest of St. Oran against their narrow fanaticism; and one of the best passages in the book is indeed the Sermon in which St. Columba announces the Gospel of love and redemption to the islanders."
--British Mail
"'The Street Children's Dance' not unworithily ranks with some of the touching pieces of Hood, Mrs. Barrett Browning, and others."
--Daily Telegraph.
"Miss Blind's poem, wherein the spectacle of poor children dancing round a barrnel organ is pathetically moralised, is as tender and full of loving pity as Mrs. Browning's 'Cry of the Children.'"
--The Spectator.
"Verse which is both melodious and strong."
--Le Livre.
"Le récit du poème d'ouverture est grand et fort, la manière de raconter est pleine de poésie et d'effet. Depuis la mort de Mrs. Barrett Browning, nous n'avons point eu de poésie aussi hautement inspirée qui ait jaillie d'une source feminine."
--Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung.
"Die bedeutendste Erscheinung auf dem Gebiete der Poesie dieser Tage ist "The Prophecy of St. Oran and other Poems." Dem heiligen Oran werden die Lehren der englischen Positivisten in den Mund gelegt, sodass auch diese Dichtung ihre Tendenz hat und ein Lehrgedicht geworden ist, dem es indessen ebenso wenig wie dem des Lucrez an Schwung und Schönheit gebricht."
--Die Gegewart.
"Das einleitende, ziemilich umfangreiche Gedicht "St. Oran".... ist geschickt erzählt and kernig, schwungvoll geschreiben; in den prächtigen Naturschilderungen, in der richtigen Charakterzeichnung, in der Behandlmg der schwerigsten situationen zeigt sich eine geübte Hand, eine Kühne, unverkumbar bedeutende Begabung."