h Fiction) JAMES ASH CROFT NOBLE. i).\E ^HIL \ING. CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY ENGLISH COLLECTION THE GIFT OF JAMES MORGAN HART PROFESSOR OF ENGUSH Cornell University Library PR 830.E7N74 Morality in English fiction. 3 1924 013 275 957 a Cornell University S Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31 92401 3275957 7z-ca^ CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY ENGLISH COLLECTION THE GIFT OF JAMES MORGAN HART PROFKSSOR OF ENGUSH MORALITY IN ENGLISH FICTION. Priwted by W. It J. AKNOLD, 18. REDCKOSS STREET, LIVERPOOL. 1-12-1886. MORALITY IN ENGLISH FICTION, By JAMES ASHCROFT NOBLE. AUTHOR OF "THE PELICAN PAPERS," Liverpool : w. & j. arnold, i8. redcross street. London : simpkin,. marshall & co., 4, stationers' hall court. TO THE HONOURED AND BELOVED MEMORY I OF GEORGE ELIOT, ■ / ' GREAT AS A LITERARY ARTIST, EQUALLY GREAT AS AN ETHICAL INSPIRER, I DEDICATE THIS ESSAY. Thy prayer is answered : thou hast joined the choir Invisible ;— the choir whose music malces Of life's shrill discords harmonies, and takes Us unawares with sounds that are as fire AndJight and melody in one. We tire -~ Of weary noon and night, of dawn that breaks. Only to bring again the cares, the aches, ^ The meannesses that drag us to the mire : — When lo ! atiaid life's din we catch thy clear Large utterance from the.lucid upper air, Bidding us wipe aw^y the miry stain, ■ '•''''• •'■ ~ And scale the stainless stars, and have no fear Save the one dread of forfeiting our sh&re y J; In the deep joy that follows noble pain. JAMES ASHCROFT NOBLE. southport. September, 1886. NOTE. Though this essay is here repi-inted from the pages of a httle monthly jna^azine, which had a shorter life than it deserved, it was origin- ally written not to be read but to be heard, and^ was as a matte/ of fact delivered as a lecture in various towns in the North of England. This will explain the presence of limitations which, in a serious contribution to literature, would be defect's. Other defects it may have : these it mi/si have ; and. being fully conscious of them I printed ' it for the -sake of some who, having listened to the lecture, wished ^to possess it in a permapent form. I may add, in explanation .of what will seem to many a curious omission, that the remarks I have made concerning Scott , seem to me to apply equally to his great con- temporary, Jane Austen. J.A.N. SOUTHPOKT, SEPTEiaBER, 1886. MORALITY IN ENGLISH FICTION (1741-1885.) " Art for Art's sake " which was at one time, not so very long ago, a novel maxim, not devoid of useful suggestiveness, has latterly become one of the most wearisome commonplaces of criti- cism. Many fairly patient pisople are so tired of being told again and again- that art and morality occupy different worlds, that the painter must not preach nor the poet prophesy, and that in so far as art is didactic it ceases to be art at all, that they are tempted to rebel in sheer perversity and to declare that if this be critical orthodoxy they will have none of it. , As, however,^ this is not a very rational impulse one hopes that in the majority of cases it is but momentary. There is a soul of truth in the maxim ; perhaps as much truth as there is in most maxims ; and he is but a popr thing who finds satisfaction in proclaiming that two and two make five, simply because he . is too proud to echo those who have declared that they make only four. The moralist and the artist will each undoubtedly perform his own special work best in proportion to the clearness with,. to Morality in English Fiction. which he sees that it is a special work, with very palpable if not very well defined boundaries ; and particularly will the success of the latter depend upon his faithfulness to Art — the one master whom he has chosen to serve ; — the faithfulness of the single eye which, being always lovingly fixed upon some ideal which he must needs em- body, has no inclination to wander in search of some duty to enforce, some dogma to defend. I,' for one, feel so drawn to the real truth which the maxim endeavours to express that I often fancy I detect .violations of the spirit of its teaching in quarters where even -fanatical reverence is paid to the letter of it, and am inclined to think, for instance, that the poems in which Mr. Swinburne makes his melodious assaults upon ,the theological and ethical notions of the majority of his country- men are, so far as this one matter is concerned, as truly inartistic as the metrical compositions in which Cowper inculcates his tea-table moralities or the little hymns in which Dr. Watts expounds his Sunday School pieties. " Art for Art's sake " vas,-^ be consiclered an esoteric doctrine. The ordinary Philistine knows nothing abojit ' it, and perhaps would not even understand an explanation of it, but in expressing " his opinions he will not infrequently betray ' an unconscious adherence to its teaching. Even people who enjoy sermons which are sermons and do not pretend to be anything else will avow their distaste for those portions of Paradiie Lost Morality in English Fiction. ii which are cast in a homiletical mould ; and even the most orthodox Athanasiari finds their prosi- ness — that is, their want of true art — much more offensive than their heretical Arianism. , And may we riot say, on the other hand, that the universal popularity of Shakspere among the highest and the lowest is largely owing to the fact' that he never troubles us with his " views," that he simply shows us his men and women acting and speaking before us, and leaves to Dryasdust commentators the exposition of his philosophy and his theology? . Of course every now and then an artistic work of the propagandist order does succeed in winning the suffrages of the populace. Thousands have crowded to see The Worship of Bacchus, and the tears of millions have fallen on the pages of Uncle Tom's Cabin ; but Mr. Cruikshank's marvellous graphic power and Mrs. Stowe's singular gift of narration are in themselves sufficient to atone for even greater artistic crimes than they have committed. The broad fact, however, remains that, as a rule, pic- torial temperance lectures and philanthropic novels are drugs upon the market which are destitute of appeal save to persons for whom they are not intended. Shall it then be said that morality and art stand entirely unrelated to one another, or that to speak of the morality of a truly artistic work is a necessary absurdity .'' By no means. Art springs from emotion and appeals to emotion, and 12 Morality in English Fiction. as the emotions can hardly ever be absolutely unmoral it is almost , a necessity that a work of even the purest art, from which didacticism is altogether excluded, should bring with it breathed suggestions of the moral atmosphere in which it was produced — that it should either exhale a perfume of the heather and the hay-field, or recall the sickening odours of the tavern and the charnel-house. This is felt even in an art like painting ' which deals with the mere external surfaces of things ; and we recognise by an unerring spiritual instinct the transition from the moral world of Teniers to the moral world of Fra Angelico, Literature has, of course, ,a wider range than painting and a more extended expres- sional gamut ; it can show us the realities that lie behind the appearances which to the painter are all in all ; and as a necessary consequence the moral emanation — the aura^s Swedenborg would have called it — is even more palpable and more impressive. II. Most noticeably does this aura manifest itself in fiction. The novel writer takes humanity as his province ; he sjets himself to shew us his vision of the world of men and women ; and in proportion to the distinctness of the picture is its power to bring us into rapport with the writer's own moral nature, to excite the moral sensibilities which in him are acute and to deaden those which in him Morality in English Fiction. 13 are dormant. And as, with the passage of time, the art- of the novelist, Hke the art of the musician, becomes more and njore- complex, as the mere story teller develops into the student of human nature, and incident is .increasingly subordinated to character, it is inevitable that the work produced should become more fully saturated with the moral sentiment, and so acquire a deeper interest for the moral phidosopher. No one, for instance, can fail to- see how much fuller of ethical significance is such a typical nineteenth century novel as Adam Bede than such an equally typical eighteenth century novel as- Tl^e Vicar of Wakefield ; and this not because, the former is more didactic than the latter, but because the life which it depicts is so much wider and deeper, the situations so much less simple, the moral issues raised so much more profound. There is morality enough in the older works ; indeed what is called the "moral" is often made ludicrously and inattistically obvious, all the good people going off the stage at the closej^ith'a flourish of trumpets, and all the bad<,'ires being visited according to their deserts_irramost edifying and satisfactory mann^c^f^ut it is morality of a somewhat elemMi,t^J3?^nd childish sort — a morality whi£tL-j«¥rr~t>esummed up in maxims as easy to master, and as devoid of stimulation when mastered, as the indubitable but barren mathematical state- ments that the three angles of a triangle are tc-, gether equal to two right angles, and that parallel lines cannot enclose a space. The ethical canons Missing Page l6 Morality in English Fiction. a foregone moral verdict ; but both unmistakably preach/ and take special care that we shall not miss the application of the sermon. III. A few more words may bc'devoted to these , two men, for they are really representative figures. Their works are, perhaps the best because the most truly characteristit imaginative embodiments of the morality of Philistia and that of Bohemia. Richardsofi was a Philistine to the back-bone, commonplace and respectable, worshipping the great goddess Dagon under her modern name of Propriety. 'Propriety, our being's end ^nd aim,' might have been chosen as a suitable motto for the title pages of any or all of his works. Pamela. j-epresents the triumph of prdpi'iety in the realm of comedy ; Clarissa Harlowe the same triumph repeated in the gloomier sphere of tragedy ; and Sir Charles Grandison is simply a representation of propriety incarnate-^ishe awful duty herself in' the garb of a fine gentleman of the eighteenth century. To ^xtrkct the moral element from works like these and precipitate it for purposes of analysis needs, no ve,ry profound study of intellectual chemistry. Richardson has a certain standard, the standard of the respectability of the day, and . he tries to raise his readers, to it both by shqwing , them what a fine thing his ideal looks when it is endowed, with life, and by pointing out that the Morality in English Fiction. ly path of virtue is the path of safety, which cannot be forsaken without peril of imminent disaster. Unfortunately Richardson spoils by his eagerness the moral as well as the artistic effect of his books. He is so bent on showing us that virtue is intrin- sically admirable and. a good investment into the bargain that he becomes absolutely incredible, and we laugh instead of being convinced. His most morally impressive book is that which is also artistically the greatest — the book which telling of the heroic virtue of Clarissa shows us how it found its reward not in the cheap splendours amidst which we, bid, farewell to his earliest heroine, but in the solemn quiet of the grave, where the wicked Lovelace can no more trouble her, and she, the weary one, may lie at rest. Fielding, like Richardson, appropriates rather than evolves an ideal, but he goes to a different world to find his ethical standard — that curious world of Bohemia where the Philistine virtues so dear to Richardson and his admirers are laughed at rather than respected, their place being filled by other qualities which though not indeed al- together incompatible with respectability^ are sHghtingly thought of in circles where conven- tional propriety is recognised as the one thing needful. The difference between the two writers- is perhaps felt most strikingly,in passing at once from Pamela to Joseph Andrews, a sensation easily though not altogether adequately accounted for by, the fact that the latter was at any rate 1 8 Morality in English Fiction, begun as an avowed burlesque upon the former-^ a character it would doubtless have maintained throughout had not Fielding's newly discovered creative instinct proved too insatiable to find food for itself in the narrow field of mere travesty. So long, however, as the story remains a burlesque it is wonderfully successful, both as a satire upon the milk andwater morality of the Cockney bookseller, and as an exposition of the writer's own robuster but certainly less refined and, from a merely logical point of view, less defensible ethical system. Even during the perusal' of Pamela wd feel that there is a certain mawkishness about the picture which it presents to us ; but when in the pages oi Joseph Andrews we see the same picture, with the position of the characters reversed and the adventitious- sentimental elements removed, we perhaps for the first time fully recognise the thinness and want of ideality characterising a piece of moral portraiture which, by ^uch -simple means as those employed by Fielding could be tra-ns- formed into so ludicrous a burlesque extravaganza. Of course any work can be parodied, but when real nobility of ethical motiye is obviously present the parodist is practically powerless. No parody can make any work seem absurd unless some gleam of genuine absurdity has been lurking in it un- perceived ; and in reading Joseph Andrews we do not nierely laugh at the humorous conception of the young footman placed in the same equivocal position as the prudent waiting maid ; we also Morality in English Fiction. 19 discern that the stolidity of Joseph and his utter blindness to the meaning of Lady Booby's ad- vances have quite as much- — or as little — of the ideal about them, and might appeal just as strongly to a genuine ethical enthmsiast, as the judicious and unimpassioned taste for respectability and anxiety for her reputation which constituted the moral stock-in-trade of his sister Pamela. Fielding seems to say "Take care of yourself by all means ; be as respectable as you please if your taste leads you in that direction; but, for Heaven's sake, no canting protestations that this kind of thing is worthy of being called virtue. We are, none of us, particularly virtuous, but if I want some one to admire I must have some one more human than your priggish Grandison and your prudish Pamela. I nvust have men and women with- generous impulses — honest, coura- geous, faithful; and I am not sure that I do not like them all the better for those slips and pecca- dilloes which harm nobody and show that they haveotherinstincts than those of self-preservation." Fielding's moral strength lay in the keen insight which enabled him to detect, and the healthy common sense which prompted him to spurn a false, artificial,- and altogether inadequate ideal ; his weakness lay in a certain want of elevation, which expressed itself in an implied denial of any ideal whatsoever. His theory of life seems to have been that men and women are weak creatui-es ; that any very, lofty code of morals is nothing but 20 Morality in English Fiction. a collection of counsels of perfection altogether unrealizable in life ; and that the highest, possi- bilities of virtue are attained by the man who enjoys himself honestly with the least harm to any one, and is always ready to be charitable to the frailties of others because he knows he has so many of his own. His creed is, in fact, that of the average man of the world in all ages : it is not elfevited but it is at least sincere ; and if we cannot pay to those who hold it the compliment implied' by a large moral demand we can at least say of them that they practise what they preach, and we can acquit them of the too common crime of poisoning the moral atmosphere of the world with the stench of whited sepulchre. s IV. Briefly, then the morality which is to be extracted from the fiction of the eighteenth cen- tury is a morality of acquiescence in certain current standards. To men like Richardson the standard was supplied by society, the word society being used sometimes in a more and sometimes in a less restricted sense; while in the case of Fielding and his followers it was the outcome of a natural and healthy though somewhat unregenerate instinct. The years which have passed between their age and ours have witnessed a great political^ social, and intellectual revolution, and the air is hardly yet free from the smoke of its camp-fires and the , Morality in English Fiction. • 21 dying echoes of its heavy artillery. A vehicle of thought and emotion so sensitive as fiction could not possibly remain uninfluenced by the new spirit of the age, and accordingly we are not surprised to find that the note of adquiescence has given place to the note of rebellion. Perhaps I ought rather to say oi dissatisfaction,ior when one speaks of rebellion against a current ethical code people are led to infer that it is a rebellion against its -supposed undue strictness, whereas dissatisfaction suggests the truer idea of a protest which may take any form, and is as likely to be against laxity as in favour of it. When the critic attempts a contrast between the ethics of contemporary society and those of contemporary fiction he can hardly say that the circumference of the boundary lines in the one has a broadei;' or a narrower sweep than the other; but he may say that they enclose dif5Fering areas, and that each circle must seem iriore or less inclusive according to the point of view from which it is regarded. I do n6t of course mean that the note of which I have spoken is heard everywhere with equal distinctness. The novels of Mr. Thackeray, for example, might be quoted by not undiscerning critics as ethically acquiescent after the same fashion as the novels of Fielding for whom he had so hearty an appre- ciation, and whom in so many vital points he^ so closely resembled. Such a verdict would be in , large measure just, but the modern master wearS' his acquiescence "with a difference" ; and it is a 22 Morality in Bnglish Fiction. difference which is easily appreciable by all who are Sufficiently sensitive to be impressed by those nuances of treatment which are almost too, delicate • for defiiution, but which gp to make up that unde- finable something which we call a moral tone. ' >In , no single essay would it be possible to traverse the whole field of nineteenth -century fiction, and it therefore becomes a matter of necessity to select from the crowd of novelists a few nanies which may be .taken as fairly repre-: sentative. The -authors whose writings seena to me most full of ethical suggestiveness are. William -Makepeace Thackeray, Charles Dickens, Charles' , Kingsley, Charlotte Bronte, and Gewhere axioms hostile to their own found constant utterance ; and, though a strong individuality will not suffer itself to be overborne by the pressure of a throng, the necessity for diminishing friction to the great- est possible extent must result in a gradual adapt- ation to a hostile environment, in the course of which the dissenter from current modes of thought and feeling ceases to be an armed rebel and becomes a constitutional leader of opposition, having some common ground with his opponents, and being always ready to exchange with them the courtesies of civilized conflict. Charlotte Bronte on the other hand was a woman of singu- larly intense nature, living far from the madding crowd ; knowing practically as little of what is thought and felt there as an infant ; having an eye keen to discern a social anomaly, and a heart quick to feel sympathetically the pain inflicted by a social wrong ; but without any real experience of that beneficent working of things by which in actual, life anorrialies lose much of their absurdity, and undeserved pangs have a tendency to become less frequent and less severe. A social theorist who forms his theories from the materials provided by study and introspection rather than by experi- ence is certain, to be a revolutionist, because in the view of the world which presents itself to him the something amiss — the startling and perplexing element — acquires a distinctness and prominence 4-6 Morality in English Fiction. which does not of right belong to it, just as in a poor photograph the unpleasing pecuharity of feature which in the living face is conquered almost' out of recognition by some perennial gleam of vigour or glance of sweetness is rnade the presiding demon of the countenance. When, too, we • re- member that the cartoons on the walls of Charlotte Bronte's chamber of imagery were supplemented only by her small but strange collection of living models — her father, her brother Branwell, her sister Emily, and the wild dwellers on the wild Yorkshire moors — we can hardly wonder that her habitual attitude with regard to society was an attitude of revolt. ; It has often struck me that in spite of many surface differences, which ho one can miss, there was a strong emotional affinity between the natures 'of Charlotte Bronte and Percy Bysshe Shelley ; and I am rather surprised that, the resemblance has not been noticed even by Mr. Swinburne, whose admiration for both writers, based on true' sympathy, is so profound - that its expression - frequently passes the limits of true literary sanity. Whenever I read Charlotte Bronte's expressed or implied denunciations of the conventionalities of which she knew so- little, I am forcibly reminded of Shelley's shrieks against the •' anarch custom," , the nature of whose power he so entirely mis- understood. The unhealthy and, we may surely say unnatural, passion of Laon and Cythna in the first edition of the poem now called The Revolt of Morality in English Fiction. 47 Islam finds its equivalent in the scenes in whicli Rochester confides the story of his amours to the youthful governess of his ward. There was, how- ever, even in this matter a notable diflTerence between the poet and the novelist. Shelley was a conscious rebel, and gloried in his rebellion : Charlotte Bronte was to an almost incredible extent unconscious of her own revolt from accepted trad- itions ; and nothing could be, niore huniorous.were it not so pathetic, than the letter which she wrote to a friend anxiously enquiring whether there really were anything so very wrong in Jane Eyre. Some injustice has, I think, been done to the early adverse critics of that remarkable novel. They were wrong ; but they were not wrong without reasons which were, to a certain extent, good reasons. It is, absurd to judge them by the light of our knowledge and to speak of them as it would be just to speak if they had knowingly and wilfully maligned a purd and noble being. To declare, as a reviewer in the Quarterly declared that the writer of Jane Eyre must be a woman who had forfeited the society of her sex was wan- ton and brutal ; but if the critic had simply said that it was hardly a book to be placed in the hands of a girl of eighteen with a turn of casuist- ical subtleties I do not know that the judgment could have been reasonably complained of In speaking here. of Charlotte Bronte I shall confine myself to this one book, partly for the sake of brevity ; partly because in it, as in many 48 Morality in English Fiction. ^ first books, the leading outlines of its author's mind are most clearly discernible ; and partly because I do not find in Shirley and Villefte any new ethical element which stands in need of ex- position. I hope I shall not be called a Puritan or a Philistine if I say that the morality of Charlotte Bronte's work alwaysstrikes me as being radically unhealthy. The ethical quality of the productions of any novelist whose experience of life was so narrow and so painful as hers must be either morbidness or Weakness ; and it is hard to see how Jane Eyre can be considered anything but' morbid in spite of its singular power. The objection to its whole conception is that the ab- normal is treated as if it were the normal, and the reader is led to make wide ethical generalizations from a series of really exceptional instances. The relations between Jane and Rochester, and between Jane and St. John Rivers, are treated not as curious examples of what life, the great surpriser, may have in store for us, but as matters of course, presenting problems to be solved not only by rarely tried spirits but by the generality of ordin- ary men and women. The hackneyed objection to fiction made by our serious grandmothers, that it gave false views of life, is really valid when urged against such a book as this ; and the false conception is rendered all the more delusive by the impressive vigour of the portraiture which makes Jane and Rochester so much more living and realisable to us than many other characters of Mvrality in English Fiction. 49 fiction who are, as the common phrase has it, truer to nature. In Jane Eyre the furnace of emotion is heated seven timfes more than it is wont to be heated in the healthy life of every day ; the atmosphere is that of a Turkish bath, but there is no welcome douche to brace up the relaxed tissues of'feehng. The domain of the novelist is of course as wide as life itself, and in life we all with Robert Browning, can " discern Infinite passion, and the pain Of finite hearts that yearn." But life 'has other elements than these infinite passions and painful yearnings, arid a story in which the heart-strings are throughout stretched to the point of breaking, in which the emotional strain is never relaxed, is a story to which it is impossible tb attribute a large imaginative grasp, howsoever frequently in single passages we may come across gleams of true imaginative insight ; and as imagination is not only a delight-giving but a really sanative quality, the absence of its higher manifestations implies a lack of whole- someness as well as of pleasantness. In speaking of the ethical aspect of Charlotte Bronte's works I have endeavoured rather to indicate the nature of their moral atmosphere than to extract from them any definite teaching, and indeed when this nature is once apprehended the character of any special verdict may be confidently predicted. If passion fill so large a space in life it is clear that its sway must be coterminous 50 Morality in English Fiction. with its territory; and although the great emotional crisis of the book to which reference has all along been made is the renunciation by Jahe of the' delights of love in obedience to the higher call of conscience, the author's passionate instincts bverpower Jier deliberate intent, and while the story inspires us with a certain cold admiration' for the self-abnegating heroine, our sympathy in spite of ourselves goes out to Rochester, deprived by a cruel blow of the solacing and restoring^ draught for which, through all his warped and wasted life, he had thirsted in vain. It is quite possible for a man or a woman of the highest and purest morality to hold the opinion that a person situated as Rochester was situated is justified in ignoring such ceremonial ties as those by which he was bound, but a person who does hold it must expect rough handling frorri the crowd, which settles all delicate cases of con- science either by rule of thumb or by conven- tional law ; and even those who feel inclined to sympathise with the answer which Jane Eyre undoubtedly suggests may be of opinion that a work of art is hardly the place in which the ques- tion should be put. This ■ is certainly the view which appeals to me. There are moral problems' which any of us may, in some supreme moment be called upon to solve ; but they are problems from which we would escape if we could, and few healthy minds would care to ante-date them in imaginative anticipation. This is what such a Morality in English Fiction. 51 book as Jane Eyre compels us to do. For the time being we speculate and doubt and agonise with Jane and with Rochester, and, whatever the decision at which we arrive, the result is a loss of emotional force for which we have no compen- sation. We have not even established a precedent for future use, for every case of conscience has its own special difficulties ; and if the general circumstances should ever happen to repeat them- selves in our own personal history, there would certainly be particular features which would deprive our ready-made conclusion of all practical ' value, and compel us to tread once more th? weary round of speculation and doubt and agony. IX. Let me tise once more that metaphor of the moral atmosphere. It is not new, but it is con- venient and comprehensible, and it will serve to point a contrast between the author oi Jane Eyre and the next and last of the writers chosen as representative English novelists. Most of us have known what it is to step out of the heated ball-room, with its glare of gas and scraping of catgut and hum of talk and ripple of laughter, or from the bright study fireside where in an atmos- phere of cigar smoke the weighty argument has been parried by the happy jest, and the strife of tongues has waxed fast and furious, into the spacious darkness and impressive silence of the open street or lane, where the clear air of night is 52 Morality in English Fiction. keen and bracing, and tranquil stars look down. The emotion which comes at such a moment is vivid and rememtlerable, and it is in all essential respects the analogue of the feeling with which we pass from the books of Charlotte Bronte. to those of George Eliot. Let me chose as the first point of view one from which the contrast between the ethical treatment of the two writers is most plainly discernible, before passing to others from which can be better observed the whole course of the ethical current which flows through George Eliot's books. I have said that in the writings of Charlotte Bronte — and notably in her first and most popular work — the crises almost always ' turn on the solution of " cases of conscience," and they are cases in which the difficulty is to settle the opposing claims of passion and duty. Now, in George Eliot's books there are also, such cases, and in observing the method of their presentation and settlement we are able to feel most keenly, the difference, in the elements of the two atmos- ', pheres, between the depressing carbonic acid of of the one and the invigorating ozone of the other. In the third volume of The Mill on the Floss, to take one instance out of several, Maggie Tulliver finds herself in a position similar in many essential respects to that occupied - by Jane Eyre at the great turning point of her history. A master . passion has laid hold upon her, and not only the ' hand of love but the equally strong hand of fateful circumstance draws her towards a fair land Morality in English Fiction. 53 of promise to which she has come near enough to catch a sight of its fair meadows, a breath of the odour of its fragrant flowers. But another hand still stronger, still diviner, is held out to her ; a voice speaks to her heart more loudly, more in- sistently than the pleading voice of Stephen speaks to her ear, and she is fain to follow the higher leading. So far as the broad external features of the two stories are concerned they are identical. Both Jane and Maggie are tempted by love to forsake duty, and both with s^d firmness follow duty and turn their backs on love. But what different moral impressions are left behind by the contemplation of the two conflicts. Of one I have already gpoken, and have striven to show that the chapters which tell the story of Jane Eyre's parting from Rochester are ethically unsatisfying, not only because the case is treated after the narrow manper of the casuist rather than after the broad manner of the moral philosopher, the renunciation being thus made a matter of purely individual interest with but little power of general stimulation ; but also because the result is to le%ve a sense of jarring discord between our judgment and our emotions — a discord so marked that most of us are satisfied to accord to the dutiful Jane the tribute of a cold approval, reserving for the suffering Rochester the richer gift of the heart's sympathy. In George Eliot's story all is changed. The record of Maggie's decision has the force of a moral tonic, because, without any of the direct 54 Morality in English Fiction. didacticism which is always an artistic blot, we are able to discern behind the mere history ' the presence of those great laws of obligation which, . because of their inclusive simplicity, are universally applicable. Maggie's moral insight enables her to discern not merely the right for herself and Tor the moment, but for all persons and for all times ; and her cry from the depths is not a mere individual . utteratjce, but the call of the universal soul when it hears the summons to leave the valleys of ease for the mount of painful renunciation. The passionate conviction which lies behind all great surrenders, whatsoever, be the special circumstances amid which they are achieved, iinds expression in Maggie's memorable and inspiring words :-^" Faithfulness and cbnstancy mean something else besides doing ^yhat is easiest and pleasantest to ourselves. They mean i;e- nouncing whatever is opposed to the reliance- others have in us— whatever would cause misery to those whom the course of our lives has made dependent on us . We can't chose happi- ness either for ourselves or for others : we can't tell where that will lie. We can only, choose whether we will indulge ourselves in the present rhoment, or whether we will renounce that for the sake of obeying the divine voice within us, for the sake of beingtrue to all the motives that sanctify our lives."' The moral significance of such a struggle and such a victory as this is practically inexhaustible, and to be permitted to witness it is to have in Morality in English Fiction. ' 55 the heart henceforward a stimulating and quick- . ening memory. And just because of the nature of the conflict ; ' because we see that Maggie yields not to some dead external law which happens to oppose itself to the living forces of passion, but to a vital something within her wjiich lies deeper, and is a more constant element of her nature, a truer part of herself, than even her love for Stephen, we follow her along the dreary road of xenunciation, not with a sigh of regret for a sweet joy slain, but with a low song of triumph for the dearer joy which has been achieved. There is all the differ- ence in the world between the spectacle of duty recognised and obeyed with a stoical submission ' which confers strength for the strangling in cold bloo'd of a full-grown passion, and that other spectacle of duty recognised with a thrill of rapture as a thing to be loved eveii more than love ; as an ineffable, all controlling, all worshipful loveliness to, which the cherished passion is, tearfully but un- ' falteringly offered not as a murdered darling but as .a living sacrifice. George Eliot is no more insensitive than Charlotte Bronte to the psing which the high rapture of a passionate renuncia- tion brings with it, but even this pang^ is some- thing else than mere pain, and in the final analysis we can always " tell it from pain by its being what we would choose before anything else because our souls see that it is good.'' Ordinary novelists have two ways of appealing to the moral sensibilities of their readers. The 56 Morality in English Fiction. first is the old expedient of poetical justice, by means, of which the perplexities and anxieties which distress us through two volumes are abun- dantly compensated for by the union of virtue and prosperity in the , third. This is the appeal through the avenue of pleasure. .The second is the more modern plan, principally favoured by femin- ine writers, t)f harrowing our souls by the spectacle of virtue trampled upon by victorious vice, of suffering goodness crying in agony, ' How long, O Lord ! how long ? ' and getting no answer to its piteous pleading. This is the appeal through the avenue of pain. Neither of these expedierits suiifices for George Eliot. She is too keen an observer and too veracious a painter to give as a fair representation of reality the picture of good- ness crowned with flowers, for she knows too well how often it has to wear through life the thorny coronal ; but she has too clear an imaginative in- sight, too strong a faith that the governing laws of th6 world are not mechanical but moral, too ardent and unconquerable a trust in the something which makes for righteousness, to allow her to draw a picture in which no ray of divine light falls upon the sufferer's face, to sing a song the last note of which is indistinguishable from a wail of despair. She can feel the burden and the mystery of life ; but she knows how even if the burden remain unlifted it can be borne with a d,eep, still joy which renders the bearer' half un- conscious of the weight ; how the mystery has a Morality in English Fiction. 57 [vine clue which may be discerned in hours of isight and held tenaciously through houi^s of loom. The verdict we sometimes hear passed — that •eorge Eliot's books are melancholy is of all ossible criticisms the most irrelevant and point- :ss. Life is melancholy to everyone who can rasp its larger aspects, though there is room in for childish laughter and manhood's solemn )ys ; and the true philosophy is found not by lose who deny its sadneSiS but by those who dis- 3ver its possibilities of conquering rapture. It is ) the story of Middlemarch that perhaps the reatest number of objections on this score have een made. The book is sad enough, but in spite f its sadness it is healthy to the core, and leaves ihipression of morbidness behind it, because le writer makes us feel that she paints life with passionate accuracy ; that the tone of sober jlour is local, not reflected ; that it is inherent 1 the facts themselves, and not imparted by the ersonal atmosphere through which she surveys lem. The higher lives in Middlemarch, as in ^he Mill on the Floss and Romola, are more or ss failures ; the grand ideals cherished so stren- Dusly and pursued so persistently are never ;alised ; and the only careers which seem in any idasure rounded and complete are those of the arrow and superficial souls upon whom the iadow of a great purpose or an exalted aim has ever been cast. The marvel of the book lies in 5 8 Morality in English Fiction. the fact that when we have been shewn all this — and' shewn with such terrible insistent power — we are left with the conviction that the higher life, the life of great ideals never attained and of divine hopes never fulfilled, is, in spite of all its failures and disappointments, not merely the higher but also the, preferable life^ — that we would rather ten thousand times be Dorothea and Lydgalte with their wrecked, broken careers than we would be Celia and Sir James Chettam and Mn Brooke with their placidly fulfilled existence and their commonplace contents. There is, perhaps, a certain sense in which it is true that the sadness of life looms larger in the pages of George Eliot than it ought to do in a picture professing to be a literal transcript of reality. In one of her shorter stories she makes use of a. striking and eminently characteristic phrase, "the painful right"; and there may be some ethical exaggeration in the constancy with which in her books the highest life is represented as necessarily a life of agonising renunciation. Here and there we see a nobly moulded figure such as Adam Bede, Dinah Morris, or Daniel Deronda, who seems to have, as it were, a genius for goodness ; who can always say to Duty, the stern lawgiver^— / " thou dost wear The Godhead's, most benignant grace, Nor know we anything so fair As is the smile upon thy face " ; but by far the greater number of her most Morality in English Fiction. 59 memorable creations are men an4 women for whom the pathway of purity lies not through the green pastures and beside the still waters, but along the stony highway and in the midst of the purgatorial fire, to whom the inward peace of a nature at harmony with itself and with its high ideal can only come after a terrible inward conflict which leaves scars long visible, and tender places which thrill at the slightest touch with a sharp sickening pang. On such a point the most competent will be also the most cautious critic ; and unhappily with few of us are the moOds of strenuous aspiration either Sufficiently frequent or sufficiently ' ifttense to enable us to gauge the pain which must be theirs who with unwavering constancy press towards the mark of some divine calling. But one may state an impression where it would be presumptuous to pronounce a verdict ; and it does seem to me that in George Eliot's works, taken as a whole,, there is rather too emphatic dwelling or* the association of high aims and terrible sur- renders ; that the simple pleasures which the performance of duty so often brings to those who are graciously natured and nurtured are unduly ignored in order to bring into stronger relief the grander, more solemn joys which ai-e the crown of heartrending agonies. We have, ' however, the virtues of our defects as well, as the defects of our virtues ; and if this peculiarity of George Eliot's presentations qf life be a defect it is one to which 6o Morality in English Fiction. they owe much of their ethically bracing character. The air which blows through her books may be too keen for tender constitutions, but it is clear and pure ; and those who can endure it feel that their pyes are purged, their pulse quickened, their vitality intensified — that they have ascended to a region in which from the heart they can say " It is good, to be here." Then, lastly, one dannot refrain from noting the peculiar, and one may say unique, ethical char- acter which is given to George Eliot's work by her constant and apparently instinctive habit of connecting the life of the individual with the life of humanity, and of associating a great moral exaltation or regeneration with the recognition by any individual human being of the ties which bind him to his fellows and make him a member of a body. With all her strong faculty of individual- ization, which makes her separate creations more vivid and realizable than any which have appeared' in English literature since the days of Shakspere, she never ignores what Emerson calls the over- soul, the humanity which belongs to no single man but only to the race, the something which we do not possess but of which we are possessed, the - great background upon which the lines of char- acter are drawn. The noblest of her men and women live nobly from the first, or obtain nobility at the last by a conscious grasp of the infinite obligations laid upon them by the far reaching ties of human brptherhood. In Dinah Morris, Morality in English. Fiction. 6i upon whose heart night and day lies the burden of the poor hungering souls to whom it has been given her to break the bread of life ; in Romola, awakened by the voice at the roadside to the sight of a wider world than that filled by her own happiness or her own agony ; in Danifel Deronda, to whom the fuller and the richer life comes through the discovery of the bond of kinship which gives him an interest in the glorious tradi- tions and the high anticipations of his nation ; in these, and in such widely opposed creations as Hetty, Tito, and Rosamund Vincy, we are made to feel the infinite moral difference which is involved in the recognition or non-recognition of the solid- arity of the race, of the truth that if one member suffer all other niembers suffer with it, that the glad shout of every moral victory, the sad wail of every defeat, has echoes which may resound through the ages, that the growing good of the world is evermore " partly dependent upon un- historic acts," and that so, to continue her own words, the fact " that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in xinvisited tombs." This constant apprehension and clear pre- sentation of the wider issues which life involves ; this large outlook in virtue of which the writer takes the world — not the narrow world of society novelists but that in which divine laws have room to play — for her stage, as John Wesley took it for 62 Morality in English Fiction. his parish, gives to her books a certain ethical grandeur for ' which in most work of a similar character we look in vain. In much of the fiction of our day we have ' fair pictures of the dim cloisters, the tenderly tinted-troudoirs, the trimly kept gardens, the luxuriantimeadow lands of life ; in hers alone we never lose. sight of the solemn sky bending down to far horizons >vith haunting suggestions of a wider world beyond. Having thus followed the course of the ethical current in English fiction from its far-off sources to the familiar bankg on which we stand to watch the wavelets, it is natural to ask what is likely to be the direction of its future flow. To this question, however, it is impossible to return an adequate answer. One thing only can with certainty be affirmed, that in the future as in the past its onward progress ^yill be marked by a 'deepening of its channel and a widening of its' stream. We can no more return in fiction to the uncomplicated .^sop-like ethics of our earlier novelists than in music we can return to' the simple melodies and harmonies which satisfied the first masters. Life has become so intertwined with complicated moral problems, problems which every day become more numerous and more per- plexing, that any picture of life in which they- are ignored — to which they do not give a tone where they fail to provide a motive — roust be regarded Morality in. English Fiction. 63 as frankly diecorative work, devoid of any natural- istic aim.' That such work will be produced is certain, and it is equally certain that it will fail to impress the world or to touch any who are out- side the coterie of mere literary connossieurs. It is never necessary that art should be didactic, but it is always necessary that it should be veracious, and henceforward veracity will be unattainable by the novelist who leaves ' unregarded those in- sistent moral issues which give to human life its highest and its deepest interest.