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GEORGE E//07

N O V E LIST :
El TLecture
BY
J A M E S B E L L,
A B E R D E E N.
ABERIDEEN : WALKER & COMPANY.
LONDON : HAMILTON, ADAMS, AND CO.
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PREFATORY NOTE.
º
THE following essay was given originally as two lectures
before the Skene Street Congregational Church Guild,
Aberdeen. With the exception of a few alterations,
mainly verbal, it is printed as delivered. It does not
claim to be exhaustive either as an exposition or a
criticism of its subject, but only a modest contribution
to the study of one of the great spirits of our time.
J. B.
GEORGE ELIOT AS A NOWELIST,
** writer known to all the world as GEORGE
ELIOT may fairly be called the most Shakes-
pearian woman in English Literature; and it was in
keeping with the natural fitness of things that she
should have sprung from Shakespeare's own midland
county of Warwick. It may be said, of course, by
grudging critics that the authoress of Romola and
Daniel Deronda was a very feminine Shakespeare
indeed, lacking in things much more important than
the great dramatist's manly garments; still, on the
other hand, with the varied evidence of her best
work before us, it is possible to believe in her intel-
lectual kinship to one of the mightiest of the sons of
men. At any rate, if one might be allowed to
conceive of Shakespeare's spirit as wishing to re-visit
the glimpses of the moon and the troubled ways of
human life, under the guise and conditions of female
incarnation, where could it have found, within the
four seas of Britain, a form of womanly embodiment
more rich and manifold than in the heart whence
Milly Barton and Dinah Morris and Dolly Winthrop
issued full of genuine lovéliness of soul—the wit
that produced Mrs. Hackit and Mrs. Poyser, Mr. Craig
and Mr. Massey—the imagination that created and
*-
6
permeates Middlemarch Without question, George
Eliot possessed a quite Shakespearian range and
balance of qualities; and it is often hard to say
whether the masculine strength or the feminine
delicacy observable in her was the more remarkable.
She combined in her character elements rarely found
together in the same person; her nature seemed at
not a few points to overlap the ordinary frontiers of
manhood and womanhood—to unite a heart of the
keenest sensitiveness with a brain of the toughest
texture and the largest grasp.
Warwickshire, therefore, occupies a place of
singular honour among the counties of England, and
in the illustrious annals of our literature is consecrated
to renown. But as if not content with rearing the
prime of English men, the poet, whose all-conquering
genius has explored alike the highest heaven of inven-
tion and the familiar commonplaces of this earthly
lot, it has again become distinguished in these latter
days by producing one of the first of women. For
after critics of a certain class and tendency have said
their worst by way of objection and depreciation,
after all possible abatements have been made from the
value of her accomplished work on the score of defects
in style or method, there still remains more than a
sufficiency of magnificent achievement to entitle
George Eliot to a foremost place among women of
genius—to rank her with the few immortals of her
generation. Silas Marner is surely as secure of
immortality as Sartor Resartus, Pickwick, or Esmond;
or, to go back further yet, even as the Bride of Lam-
mermoor. No doubt, in some respects, George Eliot
is inferior to such worthy compeers in fame as Jane
7
Austen and Charlotte Brontë — inferior in some
isolated qualities of individual genius or of literary
art, but in certain other respects, especially in her
remarkable scope and combination of characteristics.
seldom found united to the same degree, in her con-
joined width and subtlety of vision, her philosophical
grasp of principles and mastery of details, her intel-
lectual versatility and erudition, the authoress of
Adam Bede is just as unquestionably their superior,
possessed at once of an ampler culture and a richer
personality. At all events, whatever place shall ulti-
mately be assigned to George Eliot as a literary artist,
whether she is destined to be rated higher or lower
than contemporary criticism has estimated her,ethere
can be no doubt that she is too great a figure to be
ignored by the student of modern literature. Whether
for praise or blame, she commands attention, and must
be dealt with as one of the few really great representa-
tive writers of her time, embodying certain character-
istics and reflecting certain tendencies of the age in a
way quite peculiar to herself, and ranking alongside of
Thomas Carlyle—perhaps the austerest and strangest
of all men of letters—as a moral force of exceptional
magnitude. In the region of fiction George Eliot was
an originator of unusual capacity and resource—a
discoverer quite as original in her own way as Sir
Walter Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, were in theirs;
contributing new elements to the investigation of
character and conduct, enlarging the moral scope and
significance of the Novel. More than any other—
with the exception perhaps of Thomas Hardy—she
has penetrated the rustic stolidity of farmers, common
day labourers, villagers, unfolding their possibilities of
* ,
Jº
8
joy and sorrow, their loves and hates, revealing the
tender charities and doleful tragedies of the most
ordinary home, disclosing in the persons of high and
low alike the action of the same unsleeping Nemesis.
And though she deliberately renounced the present
consolations and future hopes of her early faith,
though she became more and more affected by
influences, scientific and philosophical, which placed a
whole world of difference between her and the religion
of her fathers, it may yet be truthfully affirmed that
few prophets have ever laboured more strenuously
and conscientiously under the sense of a great moral
mission than did George Eliot. As she grew in years
and work, this sense seemed almost to become oppres-
sive in its intensity, affecting the substance and
structure of her books more and more. With all her
positivist modes of thought, she associated as a
quenchless fire of inspiration the prophet's passion for
duty. Duty under these earthly conditions became
more and more with her a faith and a religion. “The
only ardent hope,” she says herself, “I have for my
future life is to have given to me some woman's duty,
some possibility of devoting myself where I may see
a daily result of pure calm blessedness in the life of
another.” Instead of relaxing her faculties as she
advanced in life, trying to take things more easily
and enjoy the mere act of daily existence, she seemed
rather to increase in intensity of moral purpose and in
conscientious severity of work. The burden lay more
and more heavy on her soul, and her deliverances
assumed more and more a didactic form. Her earlier
manner—the manner so finely exemplified in Silas
Marnerſ. most purely and faultlessly beautiful of
a'ſ
y
º
9
| her books—with its easy flow of narrative, its unfailing
|
humour, its poetic felicities, ceased to characterise at
least in the same degree her later writings—seemed to
shrink and stiffen in presence of the development of
other qualities, the increasing ascendency of which
some critics declare to have seriously injured her art.
But to critics of a different mould, the loss, while
frankly acknowledged by them, has been replaced by
greater gain. “The manner,” says Professor Dowden,
“of few great artists—if any — becomes simpler as
they advance in their career, that is, as their ideas
multiply, as their emotions receive more numerous
affluents from the other parts of their being, and as the
vital play of their faculties with one another becomes
swifter and more intricate. The later sonatas of
Beethoven still perplex facile and superficial musi-
cians. . . . The difference between the languid
and limpid fluency of the style of The Two Gentle-
mem of Verona, and the style of Shakespeare's
later plays, so compressed, so complex, so live with
breeding imagery, is great. Something is lost but
more has been gained. When the sustained largo of
the sentences of Daniel Deromóla is felt after the crude
epigrammatic smartnesses of much of the writing in
Scenes of Clerical Life, we perceive as great a difference
and as decided a preponderance of gain over loss.”
Such is the deliberate opinion of a critic who has
made for himself an honourable name in literature;
and, in so far as it tends to justify the change that
took place in George Eliot's treatment of the Novel,
it deserves to be considered in opposition to the ad-
verse verdict pronounced by critics of a different
School and order. Still, when all has begm: said on
:
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§
one side and the other, it must be confessed that, in
George Eliot's latest productions, there is much more
of stress and strain, more of elaborate-reflection and
moralising, and less of easy, freedom of descriptive
narrative, less of sparkling wit—and illuminative
humour—natural as the prattle of brooks, or the
voice of birds, or the scent of flowers—than in the
books of her morning prime as an artist; but whether
this shall be deemed a preponderance of gain over
loss, in view of the massive weight, the intellectual
vigour, the ethical passion of Romola or of Daniel
Deromda, will always depend very largely on the
dominant temper and attitude of the individual
critic. Let the critics, who live by exploring the
merits and sins of authors, settle to their own satis-
faction this question among themselves, if such a
settlement be at all possible. Happily those of us,
to whom the potent inspirations and the stirring
tones of genius are more necessary to life than even
limitless bread and butter, need not await the ultimate
agreement of discordant critics, in order to appreciate
and enjoy the splendid series of Novels which has
made the name of George Eliot renowned for high
thinking and noble purpose.
I.—HIER EARLY DEVELOPMENT.
It is always interesting and instructive to mark
as far as possible the formative influences which have
prepared the way for actual greatness of work in any
field of endeavour. Of course there is always need to
make a large margin of allowance for the native
powers and possibilities of genius, inasmuch as with-
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out the presence of genius itself—genius requiring to
be quickened, educated, developed—the most elabo-
rate preparations would be of little or no avail; but,
on the other hand, experience teaches how little the
untutored and unformed genius can of itself effect in
durability of result on the higher planes of activity.
The primary influences of birth and upbringing, and
the penetrative discipline of human fellowship, have
much to do with the most successful self-realisation of
even the finest natural genius. It requires no very
profound insight to discern that to trace out the
various environment in which genius grew te, the
gradual consciousness and possession of itself, and was
trained and equipped for original production, is really
to illuminate the secret workings of genius, and in-
crease our own ability to appreciate whatever it has
accomplished. And to do this—to mark the main
influences that determine the lines of true work—is
in the case of George Eliot, almost more necessary, if
possible, than in the case of other writers of any-
thing like equal genius; for she was unusually late in
coming to a knowledge of her best powers, in begin-
ning to reap the finest harvest of her mind. She
needed the stimulus of discerning encouragement from
without ; and George Henry Lewes supplied at length
the guiding and sympathetic pressure which was
awanting to urge her into the appointed path. She
was a doubter even of her own self, and had a deep
streak of timidity mingling with all her courageous
self-assertion. To the initiative of Lewes we owe
the last influence that was needed to awaken the
authoress of Adam Bede to the fertile consciousness
of her true genius; in his sympathetic society, in his
12
delicate supervision and practical tact, was found the
encouragement necessary to her continuance in the
line of her proper work.
The purpose of the present discourse does not
require a minute account of George Eliot's career, nor
a detailed description of the successive events in her
literary life. It will be enough to review with a
glance more or less rapid what seem the formative
epochs in her history—to trace the main factors in the
development of her character and thought, up till the
time of her appearance as a writer of fiction.
Mary Ann Evans was born November 22nd,
1819, at Arbury Farm, about a mile from Griff,
Nuneaton, Warwickshire; and thus belonged to the
northern, whilst Shakespeare belonged to the southern,
part of the county. At her death in December, 1880,
she had attained her 61st year, thereby exceeding in
age her illustrious predecessor, who was only 52 years
of age when he died in 1616. Marian—the form her
baptismal name took in conversation — was the
youngest child of Robert Evans by his second
marriage, and in the Church at Chilvers Coton
received baptism, November 29th. This Church
is now famous as Shepperton Church in Scenes
of Clerical Life. It was where Amos Barton
underwent his sad fortunes ; where, in the exer-
cise of his ministry, he exposed himself to the
caustic criticisms of Mr. Pilgrim and Mrs. Hackit.
The building is described “with its outer coat
of rough stucco, its red-tiled roof, its hetero-
geneous windows patched with desultory bits
of painted glass, and its little flight of steps with
their wooden rail running up the outer wall, and
13
leading to the school children's gallery. Then inside,
what dear old quaintnesses which I began to look at
with delight, even when I was so crude a member of
the congregregation that my nurse found it necessary
to provide for the re-inforcement of my devotional
patience by smuggling bread-and-butter into the
sacred edifice " . . . “No benches in those days;
but large roomy pews, round which devout church-
goers sat during “lessons, trying to look anywhere
else than into each other's eyes.” The whole de-
scription is felt to be bright and mellow with the
loving memory of the past, the affectionate clinging
to old scenes, which characterised the writer till the
very last. Robert Evans is reputed to have been a
remarkable man, and, along with his second wife, who
was possessed of an unusual amount of natural force,
must be regarded as himself perhaps the mightiest
influence that entered into the formation of George
Eliot's character. It is believed that Adam Bede and
Caleb Garth owe to him some of their noblest
qualities as practical men. Robert Evans was a
workman needing not to be ashamed, and from him
George Eliot derived her thorough conscientiousness
and faculty of taking pains; as from her mother, who
was of the order of Mrs. Hackit or Mrs. Poyser, she
derived her power of incisive, pungefit, epigrammatic
speech. There is recorded in Middlemarch a
memorable conversation between Caleb Garth and
Fred Wincy, which doubtless owes not a little to the
writer's grateful and proud memory of her father.
“‘You do think I could do some good at it, if I were
to try said Fred, more eagerly. ‘That depends,’
said Caleb, turning his head on one side and lowering
14
his voice, with the air of a man who felt himself to be
saying something deeply religious. “You must be
sure of two things : you must love your work, and
not always be looking over the edge of it, wanting
your play to begin. And the other is, you must not
be ashamed of your work, and think it would be more
honourable to you to be doing something else. You
must have a pride in your own work, and in learning
to do it well, and not be always saying, there's this
and there's that—if I had this or that to do, I might
make Something of it. No matter what a man is—I
wouldn't give twopence for him '—here Caleb's mouth
looked bitter, and he snapped his fingers—‘whether
he was the prime minister or the rick-thatcher, if he
didn't do well what he undertook to do.’” Such,
according to all accounts, was the strain of manhood
to which Robert Evans belonged; and the same noble
pride in work well and faithfully done—the same
earnestness in the pursuit of excellence rising almost
to the fervour of religion—was also a very noticeable
feature in the character of his more famous daughter.
“In March, 1820," says Mr. Cross, “when the baby
girl was only four months old, the Evans family
removed to Griff, a charming red-brick, ivy-covered
house on the Arbury estate — ‘the warm little nest
where her affections were fledged –and there George
Eliot spent the first twenty-one years of her life.”
She never lost her love for the dewy places of her
youth ; that love followed her and clung to her
through all the changes of her experience, binding her
by her heart-strings to those early memories in spite of
discarded beliefs and intellectual alienation, making
the fields in which she first played amid the daisies
15
and the scented clover, shine as with the brightness,
of Eden's eternal prime. The dawn of her life, the , 2
familiar scenes consecrated by her budding affections, º
never lost their charm for her tenacious heart; the
bright new-birth of her human joy in beauty, the
radiant freshness of the morning of her experience of
nature's changeful moods, seemed to her unfadingly
lovely, and continue to be lovely in some of the finest
portions of her works. “But my eyes,” says the
true woman's voice through the mask of Theo-
phrastus Such; “but my eyes at least have kept
their early affectionate joy in our native landscape,
which is one deep root of our national life and
language. And I often smile at my consciousness
that certain conservative prepossessions have mingled
themselves for me with the influences of our midland
scenery, from the top of the elms down to the butter-
cups and the little wayside vetches.” “I cherish my
childish love,” says the same voice again—“the
memory of that warm nest where my affections were
fledged.” These last words remind us of another
influence that went to the shaping of the future
George Eliot—an influence made prominent and
famous in some of her best writings. I refer to the
little girl's almost deifying affection for her brother,
an affection passing the love of sisters. George Eliot
was always subject to a great hungering need of
loving some one, and of receiving the inspiration of
returned affection; and had, in no small measure, a
noble woman's passion for self-sacrifice—for self-
renunciation. The most questionable act of her whole
career, from a moral point of view—namely, her
union with Lewes—can be somewhat understood, if
16
it cannot be excused, only in reference to this her
power of self-sacrifice, her need of the sustaining
strength of another's love. It was done in no mood
of cool calculation; in acting as she did, however
serious her error when regarded from the ground of
social requirements, she believed herself to be obeying
her best impulse of love—the impulse that seeks to
Satisfy itself in working out another's good. Her
great lesson of self-renunciation, which she is never
weary of inculcating in her books, was not unlearned
or unpractised by herself. She began the practice of
it early in life, as her childish relations with her
brother are sufficient to show ; of which reminiscences
of more or less autobiographic value are embodied in
the Mill on the Floss, and in the series of sonnets
entitled Brother and Sister. The early story of
Maggie Tulliver and her brother Tom seems to be
modelled on her own girlish experiences. Maggie, of
course, is no mere literal transcription of herself as
she was in the unspent morning of life, but a great
effort of the creative imagination, in which some of
her own girlhood's memories, joys, chagrins, satisfac-
tions, disappointments, are transfigured in an ideal
character remarkable alike for its psychological
subtlety and its vivid reality. Maggie Tulliver is a
girl of vigorous loves and hates; alternately strong
and weak, obstinate and submissive, passionate at
once in her self-assertion and self-abasement. How
real is the conflict waged incessantly by her fighting
soul against contradictions within and without ! how
life-like and impressive the whole various portraiture
The same, and yet not the same, as her creator's,
Maggie's heart throbs with the pulsations of George
17
Eliot's own experience. Genius transforms the
real, idealises the actual, confers an ideal value on
every streak or fragment of truthful reminiscence.
Maggie Tulliver is Mary Ann Evans subjected to the
conditions of literary art, transfigured in the lime-
light of the imagination. At any rate, Maggie
represents the author in her girlish love of her
brother. She used, it is said, to be always at his
heels, insisting on doing whatever he did. “In her
moral development,” says Mr. Cross, “she showed,
from the earliest years, the trait that was most
marked in her all through life—namely, the absolute
need of some one person who should be all in all to
her, and to whom she should be all in all. Very
jealous in her affections, and easily moved to smiles
or tears, she was of a nature capable of the keenest
enjoyment and the keenest suffering, ‘knowing all the
wealth and all the woe of a pre-eminently exclusive
disposition. She was affectionate, proud, and sen-
sitive in the highest degree.” From the sonnets
called Brother and Sister, we learn how much there
really is of auto-biographic element in the account of
Maggie Tulliver's early life. The fishing expedition
and the picturesque visit to the gipsy camp, as
well as the love for her brother, are drawn—with
whatever modifications—from George Eliot's own
experiences as a girl. Isaac Evans, her brother,
remembers his little sister's delight at his home-
coming for the holidays, and her anxious curiosity
to know all that he had been doing and learning.
Long afterwards, in the first sonnet on Brother and
Sister, she herself wrote—
I8
22.
*
“I cannot choose but think upon the time
When our two lives grew like two buds that kiss
At lightest thrill from the bee's swinging chime,
Because the one so near the other is.
“I held him wise, and when he talked to me
Of snakes and birds, and which God loved the best,
I thought his knowledge marked the boundary
Where men grew blind, though angels knew the rest.”
And in the last sonnet of the series it is written—
“School parted us ; we never found again
That childish world where our two spirits mingled
Like scents from varying roses that remain
One sweetness, nor can evermore be singled.
But were another childhood-world my share,
I would be born a little sister there.”
Her school-days lie between this and the next
main influence that helped to shape her destiny—
namely, the influence of her Coventry friends, the
Brays and their associates. At school she was not, at
first, precocious in learning; “mere sharpness,” it is
said, “was not a characteristics of her mind.” But
when placed, after one or two changes of school, with
the Misses Franklin of Coventry as a boarder, she
increased rapidly in such learning as was to be had
then at a ladies' boarding school. By one observer
she is described as, at that time, “a queer, three cor-
nered, awkward girl.” She was also very religious,
according to the low evangelical sense ; given to
holding prayer-meetings with her fellow-scholars, an
admirer of Hannah More and her works, deficient in
charity for those who happened to differ from herself
in religious opinion, “carrying her zeal to the pitch of
19
asceticism.” Miss Mathilde Blind says that “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.” Sympathy, in after years,
became one of the finest traits in George Eliot's
character, sympathy with the peculiar difficulties and
even prejudices of others, but as yet it had not—in
the case of the undeveloped Miss Evans—grown suffi-
ciently to be able to render her superior to a belief in
her own infallibility of opinion. Only the insight of
loving sympathy with the thoughts and perplexities
of our fellows can save us from the dangers of our
own inevitable limitations, Marian Evans soon after-
wards changed her creed, but not at once could she
change the conditions of her moral judgment: the
very convinced conscientiousness of her thinking and
conduct tended to restrict for a time the range of her
sympathy, and was itself a sufficient reason for iso-
lated action even at the risk of giving pain to her
nearest and dearest relative. With a precipitancy
which seems most startling, she veered round to the
opposite point of the theological compass, accepting
sentiments and views antagonistic to her familiar
evangelicalism ; and proceeded to act promptly on the
revolutionary change that had occurred in her theo-
logical position, going to the regrettable length of
quarrelling with her father in regard to the matter of
attendance at church. The spirit thus manifested of
her newly accepted philosophism was as narrow as the
20
spirit of her rejected evangelicalism; for intolerance,
however various or unlike the forms of its manifesta-
tion, however it may disguise itself behind the masks
of opposing creeds, is everywhere and always the
same in principle. But even before her transforma-
tion under the influence of the Brays and Hennells
at Coventry, before the casting aside of her evangelical
faith, she was not completely absorbed in reading
Hannah More and attending prayer-meetings. She
had to manage household affairs at Griff in the days
prior to her settlement near Coventry; she knew
about practical farm-work and the anxieties of butter-
making, as the description of Mrs. Poyser's dairy is
enough to prove. But, amid all her duties as the
manager of her father's house, she did not neglect the
claims of her mental and moral nature. Her inner
and deeper life, however unobserved by the conven-
tional methods of religious self-analysis, had begun to
move vaguely and confusedly; but the main thing
was the actual beginning, not mere drift or swayings
of motion. For to begin to move at all, if so the
movement be real, holds the prophecy of the whole
future. In thinking, therefore, of George Eliot as she
was at this time, let us conceive of her under the
description which she has herself given of Maggie
Tulliver. “A creature full of eager, passionate
longings for all that was beautiful and glad ; thirsty
for all knowledge ; with an ear straining after
dreamy music that died away and would not come
to her ; with a blind unconscious yearning for some-
thing that would link together the wonderful
impressions of this mysterious life, and give her
soul a sense of home in it. No wonder, when there
A
21
is this contrast between the outward and the inward,
that painful collisions come of it.” Do we not hear in
these words echoes of memory—reminiscences of the
writer's already distant youth—a voice telling of the
struggles of vanished disciplines and dim experiences
of her own soul ?
The removal from Griff to Coventry, in March,
1841, was charged with the gravest consequences for
Miss Evans. It marked the beginning of a new era
in her life, and initiated the revolution which took
place, with more or less of rapidity, in her attitude
towards religion and philosophy. She then came
first under the direct influence of those forces and
ideas which were at once an effect and a cause of the
prevailing science of the time, and which she was
herself destined to embody in works of fictive art.
It was after the removal of Robert Evans and his
daughter to a house on the Foleshill Road, Coventry,
that the disagreement already mentioned took place
between them, for which she afterwards expressed
regret. “The friendships now formed,” says Mr.
Cross, “with Mr. and Mrs. Bray, and Miss Sara
Hennell particularly, and the being brought within
reach of a small circle of cultivated people generally,
render this change of residence an exceedingly im-
portant factor in George Eliot's development.” Mr.
Bray was a ribbon manufacturer of a rather excep-
tional kind. He was a thinker himself, a man
smitten with a love &f philosophic speculation, and
gathered around him thoughtful people of similar
intellectual aims and sympathies. At his residence,
in 1848, Marian Evans met Emerson, and went with
him and the Brays to Stratford-on-Avon. This, the
B
22 \-J
13th day of July, was a memorable day in her ex-
perience; she called it herself “the Emerson day” to
distinguish it from the crowd of common days. “I
have seen Emerson,” she writes in a letter to Miss
Sara Hennell—“the first man. I have ever seen.”
Mr. Bray's brother-in-law, Charles C. Hennell, in
1838, published a book called Inquiry concerning the
Origin of Christianity, the reading of which is said
to have marked an epoch in George Eliot's develop-
ment. It was greatly admired by Strauss, and, at
his instance, was translated into German. This
action on the part of Strauss may be said to have
been returned in kind, when Marian Evans completed
the translation into English of the Leben Jesu,
which had been relinquished by a Miss Brabant on
her marriage with the author of the Inquiry con-
cerning the Origin of Christianity. Miss Evans laid
at this time the foundations of her large and various
culture; translating Strauss mainly as a proof of
esteem for her Coventry friends, but none the less
displaying thereby her own erudition and power of
careful work. Whatever she undertook, she did her
best to do it well, as became the child of her father.
From her intercourse with the Brays and their as-
sociates, she took a ply which was never again undone,
and entered decisively on the line of philosophic
thought that she pursued till the end. There occurred
no other intellectual break or revolution in her life ;
the rest was a matter mainly of continuous logical
development. Mr. Bray was then labouring at his
Philosophy of Necessity, which dealt—as Miss Blind
has observed—with the same problems as Comte's
Positive Philosophy, Buckle's History of Civilisation,
23
Herbert Spencer's Sociology. It contemplated man
under his inescapable subjection to law, as a part of
Nature's order within whose restraining conditions
life such as his is alone possible; and thus emphasised
the leading ideas of the scientific school of thought to
which George Eliot ever afterwards belonged. She
had grasped the main principles of her subsequent
thinking before she joined the staff of the Westminster
Review, or became personally intimate with Herbert
Spencer or George Henry Lewes. --
But, before going further, let us try to get a
picture of Marian Evans as she appeared to her friends
prior to her father's death in 1849. “There exists,”
says Miss Blind, “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. e
The charm of her nature disclosed itself in her manner
24
and in her voice, the latter recalling that of Dorothea,
in being ‘lil ! voice of a soul that has once lived
in an harp.” It was low and deep, vibrating
with sympathy.” . This last sentence reminds us of
poor distracted Lear's words over the dead Cordelia—

“Her voice was ever soft,
Gentle and low, an excellent thing in wongan.”
Such, inwardly and outwardly, was the young lady
who was soon to leave behind her native Warwick-
shire, with its daisied fields and quiet farms, as yet
unconscious of prolonged agricultural depression and
steadily falling rents, its deep-rooted village customs
and social novelties of the town, and to enter the
roaring maelstrom of London life, carrying in her
tenacious nature, unknown to herself, memories,
impressions, spiritual sympathies, inherited moral
capital, which were destined in due time to come to
such a rich fruition. Her father died, as has been said,
in the year 1849, and his death was the cause of a
great change in her life. She was set free to pursue
unhampered her own career—to follow the calls of
duty or obey the promptings of genius. “It
fortunately happened,” says Mr. Cross, “that the
Brays had planned a trip to the Continent for this
month of June, 1849, and Miss Evans, being left
desolate by the death of her father, accepted their
invitation to join them.” But she did not accompany
them home on their return ; she stayed alone at
Geneva recruiting herself physically and mentally,
delighting herself as much as possible in the society
and Scenery of the place. She spent eight happy,
peaceful, fruitful months in Geneva, with Lake
25
Ieman's clear and placid waters mirroring before her
the varied splendours of hill and sky, and with the
snow-crowned Alps bounding her distant *. “It
was,” says Mr. Cross again, “a peacefullyºhappy
episode in George Eliot's life, and one she was always
fond of recurring to, in our talk, up to the end of her
life.” On her return from Geneva, after a day in
London, Miss Evans went straight to Rosehill, the
residence of her friends, the Brays, going a few days
later to Griff. We are now nearing the date of her
momentous change to London, where she formed those
connections and intimacies that so profoundly shaped
her destiny. In May, 1850, Miss Evans went to
Rosehill in order to be beside Mr. and Mrs. Bray, and
“the congenial intellectual atmosphere surrounding
, them led her to make her home practically at Rosehill
for the next sixteen months.” It was there she met
Mr. Chapman, the editor of the Westminster Review,
who at length succeeded in enlisting her services as
assistant editor. This meeting took place in the
month of October, 1850. But, before leaving Coventry
for good, she wrote an article reviewing Mackay's
Progress of the Intellect, which appeared in the
Westminster for January, 1851, and is instructive as
indicating her intellectual position while yet un-
influenced directly by the leading Westminster
reviewers—as shewing that she did not owe every-
thing to Spencer and Lewes. The following passage
may be taken as a specimen, and is not without
significance in reference to certain elements of her
teaching as a novelist —“It is Mr. Mackay's faith
that divine revelation is not contained exclusively or
pre-eminently in the facts and inspiration of any one
26
age or nation, but is co-extensive with the history of
human development, and is perpetually unfolding
itself to our widened experience and investigation, as
firmament upon firmament becomes visible to us in
proportion to the power and range of our exploring
instruments. The master-key to this revelation is the
recognition of the presence of undeviating law in the
material and moral world—of that invariability of
sequence which is acknowledged to be the basis of
physical science, but which is still perversely ignored
in our social organisation, our ethics, and our religion.
It is the invariability of sequence which can alone
give value to experience, and render education, in the
true sense, possible. The divine yea and nay, the seal
of prohibition and of sanction, are effectually impressed
on human deeds and aspirations, not by means of
Greek and Hebrew, but by that inexorable law of
consequences whose evidence is confirmed instead of
weakened as the ages advance; and human duty is
comprised in the earnest study of this law and patient
obedience to its teaching.” Here we have the
germinal statement of the great moral principle
which, as George Eliot, she afterwards unfolded so
variously in all her novels; here we have thus early
indicated the master-note of George Eliot as a moralist
—the master-key to the moral significance of her
contributions to modern fiction. On this head she had
nothing to learn from Comte, or Spencer, or Lewes;
for the moralities of life and character she had a vision
at once keener and wider than theirs. Her genius was
profoundly moral. “Sympathy,” as says Miss Blind,
“was the key-note of her nature, the source of her
iridescent humour, of her subtle knowledge of cha-
racter, and of her dramatic genius.”
27
In the autumn of 1851, Miss Evans left Coventry
for good, entered on her London life, and began the
last period of her education for the work which was to
plant the name of George Eliot on the heights of fame
—to rank it with the greatest masters of her craft.
“At the end of September,” says Mr. Cross, “Miss
Evans went to stay with the Chapmans at No. 142
Strand, as a boarder, and as assistant editor of the
Westminster Review. A new period now opens in
George Eliot's life, and emphatically the most im-
portant period, for now she is to be thrown in contact
with Mr. Lewes, who is to exercise so paramount an
influence on all her future, with Mr. Herbert Spencer,
and with a number of writers then representing the
most fearless and advanced thought of the day.”
Marian Evans proved herself capable of dealing suc-
cessfully with the science and philosophy of the time,
as well as of delivering effective blows at whatever
seemed to her deserving of condemnation; and, al-
though confined to the use of her left hand, she wrote
on a level with the best of her masculine compeers,
equal to any of them in general culture and force of
style. But her highest capabilities cºuld never have
manifested themselves along the line of periodical
criticism and quarterly reviewing ; for what she was
able to do with her right hand, and her full strength,
did not appear until she was persuaded to take to
writing novels instead of making reviews—until her
as yet undiscovered genius found release and freedom
in original production. In April, 1854, her editorial
connection with the Westminstey Review came to an
end, although she did not then cease to be a contri-
butor to its pages; and in July of the same year her
28
momentous union with Mr. Lewes began, in which
were consummated the educative influences that com-
pleted her character and shaped her career. How-
ever censurable this union may have been in its
beginning from certain points of view, there can be no
doubt of its practical and continuous domestic success.
It supplied both with what each of them needed, and
—what we must never forget in judging of Miss
Evans—it appealed, especially at first, to her power of
/ self-sacrifice for another's good. Lewes found in it
his intellectual and moral salvation, acquired by
| means of it much of the stability which was wanted
' to counter-balance his mercurial temperament ; and
Marian Evans found in it the helpful presence of one
who discerned her higher capabilities more keenly than
she did herself, whose encouragement gave her confi-
dence in her own genius, and whose power of manage-
ment defended her against despondency and worry...?
In the matter of any institution necessary, like mar-
riage, to the fundamental welfare of Society, it is
always a dangerous thing to regard this or that case
as an exception to the general rule, calling for excep-
tional treatment ; for plausible reasons are only too
easy to find in justification of any step that happens
to jump with our private inclinations, and the paths
of sophistical argument are only too facile to the
tread of wilful feet. Miss Evans was not blind to the
social risks of her deviation from the line of salutary
custom ; she accepted them as an inescapable conse-
quence of her decision. It is evident she construed
her duty to Mr. Lewes in the light of an imperative
exception, of which the justification was to be found,
if at all, in the impelling motive and the final issue.
29
“A supreme love,” it is said in Felia, Holt, “a motive
that gives a sublime rhythm to a woman's life, and
exalts habit into partnership with the soul's highest
needs, is not to be had when and how she will: to
know that high initiation, she must often tread where
it is hard to tread, and feel the chill air, and watch
through darkness. It is not true that love makes all
things easy ; it makes us choose what is difficult.” So
it doubtless was in her own experience.
Mr. and Mrs. Lewes—for Miss Evans from the
first assumed the name of wife—made a prolonged
visit to the Continent. On their return, they settled
for a while at East Sheen, London, and afterwards
removed to Richmond, where they remained for more
than three years, with occasional runs to the country
or the sea-side in quest of relaxation and strength.
They both wrote diligently for the Westminster, and
continued to read widely in literature, science, philo-
sophy; and in those days Lewes, among other things,
finished his well-known Life of Goethe. Ilfracombe
and Tenby were visited by them with much enjoy-
ment in the summer of 1856; they revelled in the
ozone, the sea-waves, the glorious breezes and the sun-
light. Under date July 20, 1856, there occurs this
entry in George Eliot's Journal :-“The fortnight
has slipped away without my being able to show much
result for it. I have written a review of the Lover's
Seat, and jotted down some recollections of Ilfra-
combe; besides these trifles, and the introduction to
an article already written, I have done no visible
work. But I have absorbed many ideas and much
bodily strength; indeed, I do not remember ever feel-
ing so strong in mind and body as I feel at this
30
\
moment. . . . I am anxious to begin my
fiction writing.” There are signs now manifest that
she is coming to the consciousness of her genius, and
nearing the accomplishment of her true work. Article-
writing, miscellaneous criticisms, general reviewings,
are to be laid aside, and the original expression of
herself is to begin—the expression of herself in imagi-
native creation. “September, 1856,” she says, “made
a new era in my life, for it was then I began to write
fiction. It had always been a vague dream of mine
that some time or other I might write a novel; and
my shadowy conception of what the novel was to be,
varied, of course, from one epoch of my life to an-
other.” Mr. Lewes continued to urge her to try her
strength, and see what she could really do in novel
writing. “He began to say very positively, ‘You
must try and write a story, and when we were at
Tenby he urged me to begin at once. I deferred it,
however, after my usual fashion with work that does
not present itself as an absolute duty. But one morn-
ing as I was thinking what should be the subject of
my first story, my thoughts merged themselves into a
dreamy dose, and I imagined myself writing a story,
of which the title was The Sad. Fortunes of the
Reveremol Amos Bartom.” Mr. Lewes strongly ap-
proved the title and the subject of the projected
story, which was commenced forthwith on 22nd
September and finished on the 5th November, 1856.
It was then sent to John Blackwood, and began to
appear in Blackwood's Magazine, January, 1857, with
what effect and ultimate success the whole literary
world now knows. The pathetic" tale of Amos and
Milly Barton, the humorous characterisation and
31
dialogue of the scene in the parlour at Cross Farm,
evinced the rise of a new power in English fiction—
a power of the finest quality and destined to attain
the most imposing magnitude. Thus began the short
series of stories known to all readers of good litera-
ture under the name of Scenes of Clerical Life,
making the year 1857 for ever memorable in the
history of George Eliot's literary career; for then was
initiated the period of her original work and great
imaginative creations—the period towards which all
the discipline of her life had tended. The publica-
tion in Blackwood of Scenes of Clerical Life marks
the attainment of her intellectual majority, announces
her definite entrance on the path which led to the
Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch. And so, with
an equipment for her particular creative work such as
has rarely been excelled in the case of either man or
woman—an equipment rich alike in natural gifts and
acquired culture—she at length entered into posses-
sion of her true genius and rose to her true renown.
II.—HIER ART.
The foregoing survey of the main influence that
went to shape George Eliot's character and career,
will aid us all the better to appreciate her merits as a
novelist ; for they determined the salient features of
her artistic method and coloured the quality of her
ethics. It is by means of her great works of fiction
that George Eliot has most deeply influenced the mind
of her time and established her title to fame; and
whatever can throw light on the process of her train-
ing for original production is to be welgomed by all
ſº
)
\L.
who admire her genius and have the interests of noble
literature at heart.
George Eliot, it must never be forgotten, does not
aim at purveying for the brief amusement of idle
readers; she is a thinker herself and taxes the
reflective power as well as the sympathetic emotions.
of all who vield themselve ſº Her art,
whether injured or benefited thereby as art, is always
A

*------ ºr "
fraught with a strenuous phil 2,S_l Il
view a moral aim. The leading canon of the so-called
aesthetic school, art for art's sake, is not applicable to
her works. She agrees with Emerson, that “art-is-
!--the-path of the cre is work,” not the end and
__ aim of the work itself. With her, art is regarded as
subservient to life, as a means whereby the higher
significance and issues of human destiny may be
élicited and shadowed forth. It represents and
embodies the ideal in order to inspire in man nobler
thoughts, to exalt and purge his motives, to raise and
sanctify the general level of conduct. The question,
How far is a work of art affected for the worse by
involving a conscious moral purpose ? in proportion
as it touches the writings of George Eliot, touches also
in much the same way some of the very greatest
literary achievements of all ages. Art for art's sake,
as extolled by the devotees of the modern sensuous
school of poetry, or as used in the cant of a man-
milliner like Oscar Wilde, seems a piece of contemptibly
shallow arrogance in presence of the surviving ex-
amples of the old Greek Drama; seems, in presence
of the superb creations of our own Shakespeare, almost
as mean as an unworthy action perpetrated in the
chancel and under the altar of some grand cathedral
|
i

.
33
consecrated by the devotions of many generations.
The ancient drama of Greece was, in its own way,
pre-eminently moral, and manifested its art in working
out the eternal tragedy of mortal life—in unfolding
the issues of the rivalry between the gods and men,
the conflict between an all-overshadowing fate and
individual freedom whether divine or human, between
the stern necessities of the state and the forms of
private conduct. Were not these supremely moral
questions, touching the fundamental moralities of the
antique classical world 2 And in what respect has the
moral purpose of the dramas of Æschylus, Sophocles,
Euripides, injured them as works of art 2 In no
respect at all; for even on the confession of those who
advocate art for art's sake, they are the masterpieces
of the dramatic art, and supply the canons of artistic
excellence. So that the classical drama of Greece, our
enemies themselves being judges, is a proof that art
involving the most strenuous moral issues, embodying
moral purposes, does not necessarily imply fatal injury
to what may be called its aesthetic value. If injury
there be, it can result only from the crude and clumsy
handling of the subject under treatment.
And similarly in connection with the Shake-
spearian drama, it may be said that the art of
Shakespeare is rather magnified than harmed by the
moral purpose so evidently involved in the best and
grandest of his works—in Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello,
Ring Lear, The Tempest. Shakespeare's art, it is true,
is not of the classical order—that is, does not conform
to the rules which scholars and critics have deduced
from the antique Athenian Drama—but belongs to
the so-called Romantic Drama, a drama more various,
34
flexible, and humane, than the old classical ; neverthe-
less the art of Shakespeare is replete with essentially
the same fundamental significance, teaches the same
great lesson in respect of the binding and unshun-
nable moralities of life, as the art of Æschylus or
of Sophocles. The cuckoo-cry of art for art's sake
is therefore a deep wrong done to true art itself; to
isolate art in this fashion is to wrench it from the
proper conditions of its well-being, to render it
incapable of fulfilling its noblest functions, to convert
it into an evil and a snare. A much worthier and
more acceptable conception is affirmed by Mrs.
Browning in Awrora Leigh :—
“Art’s the witness of what is
Behind this show. If this world’s show were all,
Then imitation would be all in Art ;
There, Jove's hand gripes us !—For we stand here, we,
If genuine artists, witnessing for God's
Complete, consummate, undivided work.
Thus is Art
Self-magnified in magnifying a truth
Which, fully recognised, would change the world
And shift its morals.” X
| The art of George Eliot is of this higher-order,
and bears a fundamentally moral character; And what
has just been said may be accepted as proving that
many of the aesthetic objections urged against it by
the dandies of art-criticism have no reasonable ground
of justification. Hers is no place of decorated art-
furniture, no carpeted world of beautified unreality.
No more than Robert Browning or any other
discerning interpreter of life, is George Eliot to be
35
- \
estimated by the rule of art for art's sake—by a
connoisseur's fastidious taste in the mere niceties and
ornamentations of existence. Her art, like all true
art, gripes the vitals of life, keeps fast by reality, is
too thoroughly penetrated with imagination to swoon N
*~
/
away in a delicious dream of verbal melody. “And I
would not,” says George Eliot herself in Adam Bede,
“even if I had the choice, be the clever novelist who, t
could create a world so much better than this, in . º
which we get up in the morning to do our daily work,
that you would be likely to turn a harder, colder eye;
**ěřtº dusty streets and the common green fields—on
the réal breathing men and women, who can be chilled
by your indifference or injured by your prejudice;
who can be 3. and helped onward by your
fellow-feeling, your forbearance, your outspoken, brave
justice.”
Life itself has a moral character and purpose, and, -
the business of art is to keep true to life as far as t
possible—to elicit its finer meanings and its per-
--—TTY e & • º º -
manent elements from amid obscuring trivialities—to
T---——--—z-T - T T = sº
transfigure the commonest existence by revealing it in
the light of the soul. George Eliot is thus in her art
an ideal realist, if such a phrase may be used to
*
\
J
r
- _: `-tººttºo
N-º-º- e e - e
distinguish her from the most recent realistic school of
fiction. The most modern form of realism is summed
up in a sort of conversational inventory; it busies
itself with reproducing the commonplace gossip of
Society, or with exploring the haunts, the habits, the
vicious sores of rampant rascality. It is a realism
which is either unspeakably wearisome or unspeakably
revolting; ministering to the baser side of humanity
by reporting the scandals and frivolities of Vanity


(35)
/
i /
\v. Q’
Fair, fluctuating between the insipidities of soulless
drawing-rooms and the impurities of the midnight
orgy. But George Eliot's realism is not of this sort,
which is steeped in woreality; it is different alike
from the realism of Mr. W. D. Howalls and of M. Zola;
nor has it anything in common with the romantic
impossibilities of the school of fiction represented by
Mr. Rider Haggard. No, George Eliot, like every
|true artist, gombines in her realism the material form
|and spiritual idea, aiming at the life its hat lies
U/ behind speech and action. Her art deals, more or less
successfully, with authentic facts and forces, the
ſ invisible sources of thought and conduct, which are .
# never adequately expressed by the outward trappings,
vestures, or voices of the r. For example,
| º her treatment of the Dodson family in the “Mill
(W
y”
º
Jón the Floss.” No reasonable reader can complain of
any lack of realism in the characters of Mrs. Glegg,
Mrs. Pullet, or Mrs. Tulliver; the author's presenta-
tion of them is masterly in its kindly mixture of
satire and sympathy, and we seem to know them,
outside and inside alike, as well as if they were among
our most familiar acquaintances. But the treatment
does not consist of a minute cataloguing of the words
and ways of their daily lives; it. is selective and
representative, so as to be an enjoyment instead of a
H.".º.º. Aunt Glegg and Aunt
Pullet would doubtless be unspeakable bores were we
obliged to consort with them on a footing of daily
intimacy, but as ensphered in the sympathetic medium
of George Eliot's art, they afford matter of endless
family, with their petty notions and commonplace
º enjoyment and instruction to the reader. The Dodson





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liness of the means whereby its greatest effects are
produced. The most commonplace materials, the
most unpromising characters, are transfigured by the
magic of her so potent art, and made to disclose their
primal significance. “In natural science,” she re-
marks suggestively in the Mill on the Floss, “I have
understood, there is nothing petty to the mind that
has a large vision of relations, and to which every
single object suggests a vast sum of conditions. It is
surely the same with the observation of human life.”
he always had a large vision of relations, and there-
fore nothing was petty that affected man or his work;
however trivial in appearance anything might be, it
was dignified in her view by its relations to the whole
of which it formed a part. And in respect of this
largeness of view, George Eliot was superior to Jane
Austen, whom she herself held in the highest estima-
tion as an artist. Sir Walter Scott, who still holds
the primacy of romance as securely as Shakespeare
the primacy of the drama, speaking of Miss Austen in
his usually generous way, said—“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.” And George
Eliot, no less enthusiastic than Sir Walter in her
praise, has said—“First and foremost let Jane Austen
be named, the greatest artist that has ever written,
using the term to signify the most perfect mastery
over the means to her end. There are heights and
depths in human nature Miss Austen has never scaled
nor fathomed, there are worlds of passionate existence
into which she has never set foot; but although this
, is obvious to every reader, it is equally obvious that
* * **
* ,
*
, r
she has risked no failures by attempting to delineate
that which she has not seen. Her circle may be re-
stricted, but it is complete. Her world is a perfect orb
and vital.” This is a piece of just criticism as well as
an outburst of enthusiastic praise, supposing the con-
ception of art implied therein to be applicable every-
where; but is it not the case that there are degrees of
dignity in art, varying in value according to the plane
and scope of effort 2 Jane Austen deserves the praise
of such art as signifies “the most perfect mastery over
the means to her end ;” but that of itself hardly
suffices to exalt her to the highest rank as an artist,
not even to the level of one whose ends are greater,
more complex, more vital with thought. If George
Eliot herself shows faults and weaknesses in her art,
from which Miss Austen was free, it would not there-
fore be just to pronounce her inferior to Miss Austen
as an artist, without considering whether the same
canons of criticism apply equally and in the same
sense to both. When all has been said in praise of
the authoress of Pride and Prejwolice, how limited
is her outlook on human life, how circumscribed
, her vision of relations, as compared with the au-
thoress of Middlemarch 3 The art of the one had to
contend with difficulties unknown to the art of the
other; and in estimating the quality or value of any
artistic work, it seems to me necessary to consider,
not the mere mastery of means to ends, but the
*xº~ *-, -
obstacles in the way of obtaining a mastery thereof—
hèTârgeness, the complexity, and weight of the
subject-matter. George Eliot inhabited a different
world altogether from that of Jane Austen; and their
several arts are as different as the worlds they dwelt,
A ,-, *
- \ . *
zºr $
sº ł d
41
.*
in and portrayed. New conditions of thought and
feeling, new problems of science and philosophy, had
developed themselves, with confusing diversity
enough, since Jane Austen ceased to write, whose
works reflect the more uniform experiences of her
well-beloved country-side existence — an existence
with charms of its own, though not of the intensest
quality. But of this new, vaster, more strenuous
world, George Eliot was a born citizen, sensitive on all
sides to its spirit, shaped in character and career by
its dominant influences; and accordingly her intel-
lectual and moral pathway lay across fields of thought
that stretched far from the simpler and serener
sphere of Jane Austen. George Eliot differed from
the writer of Mansfield Park in strength and richness
of personality, making her presence felt throughout
her writings. While Jane Austen rarely obtrudes
herself on the reader's attention either by phrase or
personal comment, George Eliot's personality is all-
pervasive in her bgoks manifesting itself sometimes
chorus-like in explanations of character or plot, some-
sin didactic reflections on Tife, Sömetimes again
plentiful’īāterpretations of motive and conduct;
and consequently her art is mu le e
mirror reflecting things outside itself than a plastic
^–r - i. T^*-es-sº ... •
Thus, the qualities that have gained for George Eliot
her truest glory could become operative only beyond
the restricted sphere within which Jane Austen
won her triumphs; and any deficiency visible here or
there in respect of artistic form in the various novels
of George Eliot receives more than ample compensa-
tion in richness of substance, variety of treatment,
influence moving everywhere like an informing spirit,
*
2”
vº








42
breadth of vision. She is unquestionably the superior
of the two in scope of imagination and strength of
intellectual grasp—in almost all the highest qualities
of a great thinker and a great writer. f
Apart from Mrs. Browning, who certainly has no
feminine equal in English poetry, the only other
serious rival to George Eliot in genius for fiction
among English women is the authoress of Jame Eyre
and Villette. Charlotte Brontë far excels Jane
Austen as a writer of English prose; and in truth, for
certain qualities, such as Swift, graphic, narrative-
power, crisp brilliancy of description, and passionate
intensity, her prose style has never been surpassed;
it combines, to an unusual degree, English vigour and
French point, French vivacity of phrase. Now and
then she rose to heights of imaginative composition
loftier than any ever º by George Eliot; and,
within her own domain, displays an intensity of
emotion and vividness of conception beyond the
power of any English novelist hitherto, whether man
or woman. But her domain was narrow, rock-bound,
with peaks hid in masses of lurid cloud or baring
themselves in stern defiance of thunder and lightning;
and her Titanic vigour failed her whenever she,
strayed beyond the limits of her natural sovereignty
—the realm of passionate autobiography. Here and S
there appear spots, nooks, recesses of exquisite love-
liness, and fountains send forth their waters singing
among ferns and moss, but they are exceptional
things of beauty, and are engirdled by the austere
and fissured presences of elemental crags. Charlotte
Bronté lacked the varied culture, the richly-veined
humanity, the breadth of sympathy, which charac-
43
terised the larger personality of George 'Eliot ; and
her writings are inferior to those of her rival in
renown, in respect of maturity of thought, variety of
culture, and richness of intellectual treatment. When-
ever she spoke straight from the fiery heart of her
own real experience, she struck some of the deeper
tones of autobiographic revelation with a resonant
fulness almost unique in fiction; but George Eliot
had an utterance more various, if less intense—she
could-sweep with sympathetic fingers the chords of
natures as unlike as possible to herself, producing
from them a range of expression beyond the reach of
the hand that wrote Jane Eyre and Villette. And
what a diversified world of human life, of inter-
minoledgled comedy and tragedy, of wit and humour,
of healthy laughter and tender pathos, do we owe to
the creative genius of George Eliot “Though I
trust,” she says, “there is some growth in my ap-
preciation of others and in my self-distrust, there has
been no change in the point of view from which I
regard our life since I wrote my first fiction, the
Scenes of Clerical Life. Any apparent change of
spirit must be due to something of which I am un-
conscious. The principles which are at the root of
my effort to paint Dinah Morris are equally at the
root of my effort to paint Mordecai.” Her all-
:= -
& ; , , y with every kind of human
character and condition certainly never changed from
first to last ; it embraced equally Job Tudge and
Savonarola, Mrs. Holt and Romola. Where, outside
the Shakespearian drama, can be found a gallery of
women—real flesh-and-blood women, not feminine
abstractions—more varied and brilliant than in the

| 44
great series which extends from Milly Barton to
Gwendolen Grandcourt—from Janet Dempster to
Dorothea Brooke—from Hetty Sorrel to Fedalma ž
And when one thinks of such dissimilar specimens
of clerical humanity as the Reverend Amos
Barton and the Rev. Adolphus Irvine, Rufus Lyon
and Augustus Debarry, Edgar Tryan and Edward
Casaubon, one cannot but admire the imaginative
sympathy which could create with almost equal
success such diametrical opposites as these, and find
the common humanity that throbbed under all the
diversity of their official vestments and disguises.
The parson is shown to be a man like others, worthy
of respect in proportion to the actual faithfulness in
him, just as much as Adam Bede or Colet Garth.
And not only so, but George Eliot's wide-ranging
sympathy embraces the canine creation as well as
clerical uniforms, interpreting the mute signs of
canine emotion quite as truly as the infructuous
labours of the would-be author of the Key to all the
Mythologies. Bob Jakin's mongrel cur, Mumps,
which could “smell a thief a good deal stronger nor
the gingerbread,” and knew about his master's “big
thumb,” was included in the fellow-feeling of the
creator of Maggie Tulliver and Romola, Mrs. Poyser
and Dolly Winthrop. And George Eliot has revealed
the genuine goodness of her heart, the reality of her
love for the common lives of men and women, in the
delightful groups of children that brighten up many
pages of her best work. From Milly Barton's little
Dick to Jaéob Cohen in Daniel Deromóla, from Mrs.
(, Poyser's Totty to Job Tudge in Felia, Holt, there is
\presented a gallery of children as bright and lively as
45
can almost anywhere be found. Where has anything
more delicately fine been said of the redeeming agency
of an innocent bright-haired child's strength-in-weak-
ness than in these words which signalise the beginning
of the moral restoration of Silas Marner under the
unconscious influence of little Eppie –” In old days
there were angels who came and took men by the-l
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.”
And here we are reminded of what is one of the
best and most enjoyable qualities of George Eliot's art
as a novelist-tits blended humour and pathos) As av’
Satirist she is often elephantine and ineffective, with-
_out Thackeray's lightness and grace of movement;
but as a humorist she is, in the main, free, effective,
unfailing. When at her best, she commands equally
the springs of laughter and of tears, for both lie side
by side in our human life. Her humour is not of the
boisterous and farcical kind, like much of the humour
of Dickens, but is rather affiliated or akin to that of
Addison and Charles Lamb, which acts on the reader
like a soft, inward, diffusive influence, moving him to
frequent quiet smiles—but not to loudness of merri-
ment—by the insight it gives him into the strange
contrasts of human life and mixed characters of men.
"The account of the Harvest Supper, towards the close
of Adam Bede, affords a good example of George
fºliot's humour or humorousness, as distinguished from
her power of wit and epigram; the supper at which
<--→"
*.*.*.*****
f
l,
46
Z
certain rustic musicians tried to tune their unmelodious
voices, and Mr. Craig aired his political wisdom. “Mr.
Craig was not above talking politics occasionally,
though he piqued himself rather on a wise insight
than on specific information. He saw so far beyond
| the mere facts of a case, that really it was superfluous
to know them.” Mrs. Poyser is, in the main, rather
º witty and epigrammatic than humorous ; in general
she has too much sting and bite for genuine humour.
º But she certainly has the power of bringing whatever
\ humour she possesses to a point—perceptible to the
thickest skin. In her famous encounter with old
Squire Donnithorne, she cannot help scarifying his
dulled susceptibilities. “You may run away from my
words, sir, and you may go spinnin' underhand ways
o' doing us a mischief, for you've got old Harry to
your friend, though nobody else is . . . . An'
| you may be right i' thinking it'll take but little to
y save your soul, for it'll be the smallest savin' y' iver

2 y 3
made, wi' all your scrapin’.” And on one occasion
ſ Adam Bede remarks—“Mrs. Poyser used to say—you
know she would have her word about everything—she
said, Mr. Irvine was like a good meal o' victual, you
were the better for him without thinking on it, and
Mr. Ryde, was like a dose o’ physic, he gripped you
| and worreted you, and after all he left you much the
–––. same.” The scene in the Rainbow Inn, described in
& \ the sixth chapter of Silas Marmer, illustrates at about,
its very best George Eliot's characteristic humour—its
V graphic delineation of individuals, its radiancy ‘of
; I enjoyment in eliciting the quaint oddities of the
bucolic mind, its suggestive interpretation of the
| diverse attitudes and behaviour of the dfferent
\ *.
º
47
members of the company. The humour of the whole
situation is of the purest and most natural kind
possible ; no frosty air mingles with and neutralises
its genial sunshine; no cynicism mars its rich and
gracious humanity. But perhaps Dolly Winthrop
embodies, at their highest, George Eliot's blended
humour and pathos. She is free from every trace of
self-consciousness, and radiates sympathy as roses
radiate fragrance; she is simple-minded as a child,
possessed of a happy temper, a blissful humour of
disposition unquenchable by any mysterious dispensa-
tion of Providence. [The prison scene between the
doomed Hetty Sorrel and Dinah Morris, in keenness
of pathos) excels anything to be found in “Silas
Marner;” but there it is a pathos oppressive in its
painfulness, darkened by the gloom of relentless
Nemesis, without the relief of homely humour such as
tempers the relationship between Dolly and Silas.
Humour of the softest sunniest kind blends with and
exalts the pathos of the poor weaver's forlorn life; it
Smiles and beams through tears, bringing to view the
silver lining of the dark cloud. “And all as we've
got to do is to trusten, Master Marner,” says Dolly,
“to do the right thing as fur as we know, and to
trusten. For if us as knows so little can see a bit o' .
good and rights, we may be sure as there's a good and
a rights bigger nor what we can know—I feel it i' my
own inside as it must be so. And if you could but
haſ gone on trustening, Master Marner, you wouldn't
haſ run away from your fellow-creatures and been so
lone.” “Ah, but that 'ud ha’ been hard,” says Silas,
in an undertone ; “it 'ud haſ been hard to trusten
them.” “And so it would,” said Dolly, almost with
A 48
compunction; “them things are easier said nor done;
and I am partly ashamed o' talking.” “Nay, nay,”
said Silas, “you're i' the right, Mrs. Winthrop—you're
i’ the right. There's good i' this world—I’ve a feeling
o' that now ; and it makes a man feel as there's a good
more nor he can see, i' spite o' the trouble and the
wickedness. That drawing o' the lots is dark; but
the child was sent to me: there's dealings with us–
there's dealings.” Thus the poor Raveloe weaver,
enduring the bitter burden of his grief beside the
trotting of his industrious loom, was disciplined by
Sorrow just like those who cast a much ampler shadow
in the world; and, like Romola and Dorothea and
Gwendolen in their wider orbits, he is made by the
insight and hand of genius to embody anew this
world-old fact of moral experience—
“Half man's truth must hidden lie
If unlit by sorrow's eye.”
In his own way, Silas Marner abides an illustration of
the pure and high philosophy of Wordsworth, the
“teacher of starry wisdom high serene’—
* l
“In the unreasoning progress of the world
A wiser spirit is at work for us,
tº ſº º most prodigal
Of blessings, and most studious of our good,
Even in what seem our most unfruitful hours.”
2^
49
—”
III.—HIER MORAL TEACHING.
\
But George Eliot was much more than a mere |
literary artist of splendid mass and power, able to
create characters as living in their own way as the t
men and women we meet with day by day, true 9
almost as life itself in their mingled strength and
weakness; she assumed more and more the function
of an ethical teacher, utilising her art with increasing
intensity, as she grew older, in the work of inculcat-
ing what she believed to be the truth concerning
character and conduct. And in the main she discerned
with exceptional and almost prophetic penetration,
and embodied in figures and scenes of marvellous
impressiveness, the great fundamental lines and laws
of moral well-being, despite the too frequent one-
sidedness of her philosophical attitude. Her irrep, ºs-
sible moral genius, although many times hampered
and cramped by the rigid bonds of her speculative
theory, evinces its inherent vigour in triumphing over
the limitations of her philosophy, and in keeping her
faithful on the whole to the essential conditions of
moral conduct. The agnosticism wherein she found; ; )
at length intellectual repose deprived her ethicall ſº
teaching of the soul's inspiring faith in the great
Divine implications of man's self-conscious being, and
in the invisible realities of a Divine presence within
and around and beyond this restless human history; f
and not even all the exuberance of her resources of
intellect and imagination, her wealth of sympathetic
emotion and philanthropic passion, can altogether hide
the emptiness which her philosophy leaves at the very
heart and core of life—a void that can alone be ade-
l 50
quately filled with the spirit's noblest faith in the
eternal reality of a Divine Father and Lover of souls.
º Eliot's theoretical morality stops fatally short
N of its rightful consummation in the recognition of the
N |Divine, and fails to give a complete view and inter-
| pretation of man's moral consciousness; but her prac-
|; morality is of the highest and most strenuous
strain, and unsparing in its demands on the daily
fidelity of the individual conscience and will. She did
not lº. moral inspiration along with the spiritual-
hopes of her early faith, and accordingly not a little of
her morality is inspired by much of the true christian
spirit, and by much more of the true christian spirit
than is present in the orthodox moral philosophy of
christendom. Her morality of the cross, of self-sacri-
fice, and self-renunciation, is nearer the teaching of
the Man of Sorrows than the bulk of so-called chris-
tian instruction in matters of daily life and conduct ;
it puts to shame the practice of many who censure her
philosophy. She wanted but the inspirations of a
living faith in God, in the spiritual nature and destiny
of man, to have rendered her novels almost perfect in
relation to the ideal significance of life, and to haye
placed herself by the side of Mrs. Browning as a
witness to the permanent basis and transcendence of
all human life in God the Eternal Goodness.
“And, O beloved voices, upon which
Ours passionately call because erelong
Ye brake off in the middle of that song
We sang together softly, to enrich
The poor world with the sense of love, and witch
The heart out of things evil,—I am strong,
Knowing ye are not lost for aye among
51
The hills, with last year's thrush. God keeps a niche
In heaven to hold our idols ; and albeit
He brake them to our faces and denied
That our close kisses should impair their white,
I know we shall behold them raised, complete,
The dust swept from their beauty,+glorified
New Memnons singing in the great God-light.”
So sings the greatest poetic voice among English
women, giving utterance to the inspired faith of the
heart; but George Eliot's scientific agnosticism de-
prived her of the spiritual joy and buoyance of this
belief, and shut off her vision from a large part of the
best of man.
But still when all has been said by way of ad-
verse criticism of George Eliot's position as a philo-
sopher, as belonging to a certain school of scientific
thought, how much there remains to be gratefully
learned and remembered She has much of enduring
value to teach, much which will really work, and not
give way under the tests of time. Despite all defects,
we may well be thankful for her almost prophetic
passion for duty, for her emphatic insistance on the
supremacy of the moral sentiment. “I remember,”
says F. W. H. Meyers, “how at Cambridge, I walked
with her once in Fellows’ Gardens of Trinity, on an
evening of rainy May; and she, stirred somewhat
beyond her wont, and taking as her text the three
words which have been used so often as the inspiring
trumpet-calls of men, the words God, Immortality,
Duty,+pronounced, with terrible earnestness, how
inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable the
Second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the
third. Never, perhaps, have sterner accents affirmed
/
52
the sovereignty of impersonal and unrecompensing
Law.” Duty became her religion—duty in the form
of uttermost self-renunciation, sympathy with the
lives of real men and women, practical good-doing
wherever possible, and into this exclusively human
interpretation of duty, she put all the passionate fer-
vour of her soul. “Wery slight words and deeds,” it
is said in Felia, Holt, “may have a sacramental effi-
cacy, if we can cast our self-love behind us, in order to
say or do them. And it has been well believed through
many ages that the beginning of compunction is the
beginning of a new life; that the mind which sees
itself blameless may be called dead in trespasses—in
trespasses on the love of others, in trespasses on their
weakness, in trespasses on all those great claims which
are the image of our own need.”
George Eliot, like Carlyle, never wearied in
affirming the dignity and value of true work. No
matter along what line of endeavour a man may
labour, let him always try to do his best, for only
| then will he fulfil his duty. The idle man is worse
than a no-man or vacuum ; he is a blot on the light
of day and a source of moral disaffection. “Adam
Bede,” says George Eliot, “you perceive, was by no
means a marvellous man, nor, properly speaking, a
genius, yet, I will not pretend that his was an
ordinary character among workmen.” . . . “He
was not an average man. Yet, such men as he are
łº, here and there in every generation of our
artisans—with an inheritance of affections
mútured by a simple family life of common need and
common industry, and an inheritance of faculties
trained in skilful courageous labour : they make their

*
¥
53
way upward, rarely as geniuses, most commonly as
painstaking honest men, with the skill and conscience
to do well the tasks that lie before them.” “‘It’s a
fine thing,’ says Caleb Garth, ‘to come to a man when
he's seen into the nature of business; to have the
chance of getting a bit of the country into good fettle
as they say, and putting men into the right way with
their farming, and getting a bit of good contriving
and solid building done—that those who are living
and those who come after will be the better for. I’d
sooner have it than a fortune. I hold it the most
honourable work that is.’ Here Caleb laid down his
letters, thrust his fingers between the buttons of his
waistcoat, and sat upright, but presently proceeded
with some awe in his voice, and moving his head
slowly aside—‘It’s a great gift of God, Susan.’” . A
healthy man has genuine delight in doing useful and
durable work, for therein he wins the joy of moral
freedom, and justifies in the face of the world his
daily existence. And when trouble, perhaps hard to
bear, comes upon him, not unblessed will he really be,
if only he can find relief in the hourly fulfilment of
duty—in tasks nobly and generously done. “There's
nothing,” says Adam Bede, “but what's bearable as
long as a man can work : the natur o' things doesn’t
change, though it seems as if one's own life was nothing
but change. The square o' four is sixteen, and you
must lengthen your lever in proportion to your
weight, is as true when a man's miserable as when
he's happy; and the best o' working is, it gives you a
grip hold o' things outside your own lot.”
Thus effectively does George Eliot teach her
generation the moral dignity of labour, the sacredness
' D
:
54
º
.
of duty faithfully performed—duty which takes on,
when properly understood, the attractiveness of
ºveritable privilege, and is crowned with the per-
suasive sanctions of religion. In her novels she is
;
.*-
*:
never weary of insisting on the need of men and
women everywhere becoming—
“Disciplined by long-indwelling will
To silent labour in the yoke of law.”
And with the preacher of old she is always ready to
say—“Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with
thy might ; for there is no work, nor device, nor
knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou
goest.” The religious conception of George Eliot's
writings, says Professor Edward Dowden, “is that of
a life of mankind over, above, and around the life of
the individual man or woman, and to which the
individual owes his loyalty and devotion, the passion
of his heart, and the utmost labour of his hands.”
Self-renunciation is the primary law of moral felicity,
and the condition of all fruitful good-doing. Moral
life begins with the rise of resistance, on the part of
man or woman, to the sway of merely personal de-
sires, and is developed in the course of the conquering
struggle of the individual with selfish appetite — in
doing something practical to advance the social good.
Self-sacrifice means the death of selfishness and the
birth of a noble altruism ; means the surrender of
“vain expectations and of thoughts that don't agree
with the nature of things,” and devotion to the con-
ditions of general well-being. Except perhaps in the
case of Fedalma, the Spanish Gypsy, who does not
come within the scope of this lecture, George Eliot
has given no grander example of self-renunciation
55
than in the case of Romola, the gem and pride of"
Florence. Romola's pure soul began to rise in indig-
nant protest against her union with the husband to
whom she was bound in the bundle of life; she began
to loathe his cool, crafty, self-indulgent selfishness,
and she resolved to leave his house behind for ever.
She set out . on her journey of self-imposed exile,
robed like a nun in solemn garb, but an arrestive
voice came to her as she sat for a moment under the
cypress tree by the wayside—a voice fraught with
the stern accents of moral obedience. It was the
voice of Savonarola affirming anew the law of duty,
and the need of self-renunciation in presence of an
authority greater than the inclinations or passions of
the hour. “You are seeking your own will, my
daughter,” said the arresting voice to Romola. “You
are seeking some other good than the law you are
bound to obey. But how will you find good It is
not a thing of choice; it is a river that flows from the
foot of the Invisible Throne, and flows by the path of
obedience. I say again, man cannot choose his duties.
You may choose to forsake your duties, and choose
not to have the sorrow they bring. But you will go
forth ; and what will you find, my daughter 2 Sorrow
without duty—bitter herbs, and no bread with them.”
“The higher life begins for us, my daughter,
when we renounce our own will to bow before a
Divine law. That seems hard to you. It is the
portal of wisdom, and freedom, and blessedness. And
the symbol of it hangs before you. That wisdom is
the religion of the cross.”
The same lesson is taught, with whatever varia-
tions of form and setting, in the case of both Gwendolen
5
...---
* r" }
** f .
# 56/
;
- .*
2.
aſ"
and Dorothea. Gwendolen says to Daniel Deronda, in
the course of one of their earnest colloquies—“‘But
you were right—I am selfish. I have never thought
much of any one's feelings, except my mother's.
But what can I do 2 You say I am ignorant.
But what is the good of trying to know more, unless
life were worth more ?’ ‘This good, said Deronda
promptly; . . . ‘life would be worth more to
you ; some real knowledge would give you an interest,
in the world beyond the small drama of personal
desires.’” Marcus Aurelius lays down this pregnant
admonition: “Adapt thyself to the things with which
thy lot has been cast.” This maxim of the renowned
Stoic Emperor condenses a large part of the moral
teaching of Middlemarch, especially in the case of
Dorothea, who, like Gwendolen, needed to be brought
into sympathetic accord with the ordinary life of
, things. The criticism that finds in Dorothea a failure,
and in Middlemarch a production depressing to the
higher moral feelings, seems to me superficial and in-
adequate—blind, in the main, to the deeper qualities
of George Eliot's artistic method. In one sense, I
wn, Dorothea's life seems to end in failure, her early
isions and ambitions to suffer an almost ludicrous
ollapse in her marriage with Will Ladislaw; although
it is not very easy to see wherein, except in respect of
| ready money and social conventionality, the alarming
descent lies from the amateur mythologist to the
amateur artist. The advantage of youth and vivacity,
it must be acknowledged, lay on the side of the
amateur artist and journalist, just as an airy green field
łof spring has the forehand and vantage of a wintry
Wºº. But, be this as it may, the chief interest

l
GD TV
centres in Dorothea herself far more than in either
Casaubon or Ladislaw, revealing itself rather in her
relation to each of them in turn than in their suc-
cessive relations to her. George Eliot, we may be
sure, did not really mean Dorothea to be regarded as
having failed in life—as having been compelled by
overbearing circumstances to accept things just as
they were without further attempts at improvement.
It does not require much acquaintance with George
Eliot's artistic method to be aware of the fact tha
she is always more concerned about the inward mor
drama of her characters than about their outwar
status or condition, and values success of moral dis-
cipline above the ordinary prosperities of exterior
position, magnifying such success even in the midst
apparent failure. Her aim, therefore, in regard to
Dorothea becomes manifest—only when we consider
the inward education of her life—an education in-
tended to be all the more significant because of its
very deficiency in remarkable outward results.
Dorothea had indeed to give up her early enthusi-
astic visions, to renounce her self-conscious self-re-
nunciation in the case of her marriage with Casaubon,
in order to find the most effectual beginning of true
work on the basis of life's common affections and
sympathies—in order not to make a name, but to lose
herself in diffusive good-doing which attains to no
earthly renown. The real failure in Middlemarch is
Lydgate, the ardent and generous-minded young doc-
tor, and not Dorothea who became the wife of the
rather amateurish Will Ladislaw; Lydgate, who was
the subject of noble aspirations, but whose enthusi-
asm in the cause of the scientific alleviation of human
}





58
suffering was chilled to the heart by such a piece of
vº self-calculating obstimacy as Rosamond Wincy.
His position became full of tragic pathos; he had to
renounce reluctantly his professional hopes and ideals,
because he married a certain beautiful woman with
his eyes shut, and against the monitions of his better
judgment. His original error deprived him of his
true resource of work in completeness of domestic
affection and sympathy; and although he afterwards
did his uttermost to repair his mistake, yet Nemesis
was to the last relentless in the shape of his soft-
cheeked and handsome wife who knew not what real
sympathy or affection meant—who knew nothing, or
cared to know nothing, but how to obtain her own
selfish ends. Lydgate had brought himself under in-
fluences beyond his reckoning, but moral consequences
are never in the habit of making a discount in favour
of mere rashness or neglect, any more than in favour
of wilful wrong-doing; and in accordance with the
law of retribution, lydgate had to bear his own
bitter burden; he knew the sorrow—“to love what is
great, and try to reach it, and yet to fail.” He left
Middlemarch, it is true, and acquired what may have
been a lucrative practice in London; he composed a
treatise on gout, made money, and rose in social posi-
tion; but, for all that, the well-paid physician was
the real failure, and not Dorothea, who, in adapting
herself to life's common duties and affections, “lived
faithfully a hidden life.” This was the highest self-
renunciation of all—to renounce the very name and
fame of self-sacrifice, to seek for no visible reward, to
do good as a daily habit of this earthly lot. “Her
full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the
* º
-"
*
59
strength, spent itself in channels which had no great V
name on the earth. But the effect of her being on
those around her was incalculably diffusive.” “‘What
is your religion ?’ said Dorothea to Will Ladislaw.’ ‘I
mean—not what you know about religion, but the
belief that helps you most 2 '” And she was surely
no failure who could claim as her own this belief:
“That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when {
we don't quite know what it is and cannot do what
we would, we are part of the divine power against
evil—widening the skirts of light and making the
struggle with darkness narrower.” Like Felix Holt,
Dorothea could say—“I should sink myself by doing
what I don't recognise as the best.” It is always
necessary to act in the light and under the inspiration
of one's ideal best, even although that ideal best
should afterwards be proved to be inferior to some-
thing better in the course of the world's moral pro-
gress; it can never be advisable to neglect or renounce
one's ideal best at the moment, because one cannot
be sure of its absolute certainty and superiority. For,
oftentimes, a man who would live worthily of his moral
manhood has to act in the faith that the highest will
at length justify itself, albeit he may be able neither
to discern nor conjecture the day and form of its self-
justification. George Eliot, in Felia, Holt, expresses
thus what seems her own private conception of the
matter: “For what we call illusions are often, in
truth, a wider vision of past and present realities—a
willing movement of man's soul with the larger sweep
of the world's forces—a movement towards a more
assured end than the chances of a single life.” And in
one of her poems she says:–
\
/60)
C-
“No great deed is done
By falterers who ask for certainty.
No good is certain, but the steadfast mind,
The undivided will to seek the good :
'Tis that compels the elements, and wrings
A human music from the indifferent air.
The greatest gift the hero leaves his race
Is to have been a hero. Say we fail?—
We feed the high tradition of the world,
And leave our spirit in our children's breasts.”
~ But perhaps the fundamental doctrine of George
Eliot as a moral teacher in her novels is the conception
everywhere present in her writings of the rigorous
impartiality of moral law—the inescapable nature of
moral consequences whenever thought or volition or
| feeling has passed into conduct, and become involved
with the unalterable forces of the moral world.
Nemesis is always with her; retribution forms the
basis of her ethical creed, retribution heavy in its
|. gait and fetching ofttimes a long compass
—roundabout, but sure and inexorable in the end. Her
explanation of the origin of conscience as given in
Damiel Deronda is fairly open to question from the
point of view of a different philosophy from hers.
“Our consciences,” she affirms, “are not all of the same
pattern, an inner deliverance of fixed laws; they are
the voice of sensibilities as various as our memories.”
But however questionable her theoretic explanations
may sometimes be, her impressive affirmations of the
universal validity of the law of consequences, and her
dramatic embodiments of its action in character and
life, carry with them their own incontrovertible evi-
dence of truth. With her, moral safety always lies in

61
resolutely confronting and dealing with the facts of
life, and with law as revealed in those facts; moral
danger lies in heedlessly ignoring or wilfully neglect-
ing them—in failing to walk in the calm light of duty
that shines on every day. It is worth recalling, in this,
connection, the second interview in the wood between; ,
Arthur Donnithorne and Adam Bede, in the course of
which Arthur told Adam that he meant himself to leave
the district and go into the army. “‘What I want
to say to you, Arthur continued, “is this : one of my
reasons for going away is, that no one else may leave;
Hayslope—may leave their home on my account. I.
would do anything, there is no sacrifice I would not
make, to prevent any further injury to others through
my—through what has happened.’ Arthur's words
had precisely the opposite effect to that he had antici-
pated. Adam thought he perceived in them that
notion of compensation for irretrievable wrong, that
Self-soothing attempt to make evil bear the same fruits
as good, which most of all roused his indignation. He
was as strongly impelled to look painful facts in the
face as Arthur was to turn away his eyes from them.
He felt his old severity returning as he said,
– The time's past for that, Sir. A man should make
sacrifices to keep clear of doing a wrong; sacrifices,
won't undo it when it's done. When people's feelings'
have got a deadly wound, they can't be cured with
favours.’” Here is affirmed the irretrievableness of
Wrong-doing, for in the very act the fateful forces of
destiny are set in motion. The thing done is done
irrevocably, and becomes henceforth a potent factor in
the doer's life and character, colouring his present and
shaping his future. Nor is it necessary for the doer
)
62
to be naturally vicious, the victim of malign passions,
in order that the sternest consequences should follow;
the moral law needs only to be broken, and, whether
it be broken through negligence or love of ease or
sheer wilfulness, the breaker is made sooner or later to
suffer. As poor Godfrey Cass found, in Silas Marmer,
—“The yoke a man creates for himself by wrong-
doing will breed hate in the kindliest nature.”
And with what impressiveness has George Eliot
Exemplified all this in the case of Arthur Donnithorne
and of Tito Melema Both had in them the makings
ºf useful and honourable men ; they were naturally
food - humoured and obliging, but were brought to
º
sº
s
bitter grief by selfish indulgence. Neither meant at
first to do wrong, nevertheless both of them by an
#asy process of self-indulgence allowed themselves to
ilrift into the fatal current of evil passion. In the
base of Tito especially, who would not rouse himself
ſo move from Florence in search of his adoptive father,
george Eliot reveals, with most masterly psychological
insight and skill, the almost imperceptible beginnings,
he insidious growth, the doleful consummation of
º worsening. And the pathos of the lesson is
eepened rather than diminished by the evident un-
onsciousness on the part of either Arthur or Tito of
any hidden wrong in themselves. They simply did
not feel any pressing need of immediate resistance to
facile acquiescence in dubious indulgence; nor did
they see any harm in continuing as they were, for
surely things would turn out of themselves all right at
last. “Favourable chance, I fancy,” says George Eliot
in reference to Godfrey Cass, “is the god of all men
who follow their own devices, instead of obeying a law









/ 63
they believe in.” . . . “The evil principle depre-
cated in that religion is the orderly sequence by which
the séed brings forth a crop after its kind.” So Arthur'ſ
i. and Tito Melema comforted º
in a false security, in spite of Occasionally troublesome
thoughts and stings ºf conscience. They both violated
the sacredness of the social bond, and had to eat the
bitter fruit of transgression. Arthur forgot his duty
to his place in society, and acted as if he were above
the law that ruled within a lower social sphere. His
higher-position implied graver responsibility instead of
allowing greater laxity of morals; prescribing to him
all the more carefulness, consideration, honourableness,
towards one in Hetty) Sorrel's condition, because he
was so far above her instation. But, in the luxury of
his own indulgence, he neglected what was due to her,
to the Poysers, and to himself. His selfishness took
the subtle and attractive form of condescending good-
humour: no harm, thought he, could surely come of a
few week's flirtation with a very pretty dairy-maid.
He did not wish to do wrong, his soul would have
shrunk from the mere thought of it in quiet moments
of reflection ; but, all the same, he failed to act as
became a young man in his position, and his natural
excellence of sentiment or disposition did not avail to
prevent his bringing misery and shame into an
honourable family—his own gliding along the dulcet
stream that bore him through a hazy lotos-land of
sentimental delight towards the hard rocks and
hissing rapids of retribution.
--~~~
“The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us.”


64
“It’s plain enough,” as Adam Bede says, “you get
into the wrong road i' this life if you run after this
and that only for the sake o' making things easy and
pleasant to yourself. A pig may poke his nose into
the trough and think o' nothing outside it ; but if
you've got a man's heart and soul in you, you can’t be
easy a-making your own bed an’ leaving the rest to lie
on the stones.” So found out Arthur Donnithorne, to
his life-long remorse; and so likewise did Tito
Melema find out, the handsome, facile, and fluent
young Greek, who forgot amid the ease and luxury of
Florentine society his adoptive father and benefactor.
Tito is delineated and analysed in a much more
imasterly, subtle, and comprehensive fashion than
Arthur Donnithorne, who is a mere sketch beside the
elaborate and minute treatment of the husband of `
Romola. But no more than Arthur is Tito described
as bad at heart; on the contrary, he is good-hearted
and benevolent, ready to help any one within easy
reach of his hands. He is only self-indulgent, loving
present social gaiety and luxury better than the
trouble of fulfilling an irksome duty, fertile in invent-
ing excuses to appease the occasional admonitions of
conscience. “He had once said,” so we read, “that
on a fair assurance of his father's existence and
whereabouts, he would unhesitatingly go after him.
But, after all, why was he bound to go 2 What,
looked at closely, was the end of all life, but to
extract the utmost sum of pleasure ? And was not
his own blooming life a promise of incomparably more
pleasure, not for himself only, but for others, than the
withered wintry life of a man who was past the time
of keen enjoyment, and whose ideas had stiffened into
gº

65
barren rigidity.” Thus subtly worked the poison in
the veins of his moral nature, until he at length
became transformed from what he was, making him
hard, cruel, vicious—until he became a blight and a
curse to everyone connected with him, and the sweet-
mess of his nature turned to the gall of hate.
“But when we in our viciousness grow hard,
O misery on't the wise gods seal our eyes;
In our own filth drop our clear judgments; make us
Adore our errors ; laugh at's, while we strut
To our confusion.”
Tito experienced “that inexorable law of human souls,
that we prepare ourselves for sudden deeds by the
re-iterated choice of good or evil that gradually
determines character.” Like many another, he pre-
pared himself for the day of evil, rendering himself
more and more unworthy of his noble-hearted wife,
till she came to feel his relationship to her eat into
her moral nature like a bitter burning shame.
Romola is made to say to Lillo, Tito's child by
another: “And so, my Lillo, if you mean to act
nobly and seek to know the best things God has put
within reach of men, 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 •
I will tell you something, Lillo . . . . there was
a man to whom I was very near . . . I believe,
,-,-->
, , º,
66
when I first knew him, he never thought of anything
cruel or base. But because he tried to slip away from
everything that was unpleasant, and cared for nothing
else so much as his own Safety, he came at last to
commit some of the basest deeds—such as make men
infamous. He denied his father, and left him to
misery; he betrayed every trust that was reposed in
him, that he might keep himself safe and get rich and
rosperous. Yet calamity overtook him.”
The cases also of Mrs. Transome in Felia Holt
and of Mr. Bulstrode in Middlemarch supply, in this
onnection, abundant food for meditation, and are
fraught with moral instructiveness. Mrs. Transome is
perhaps the most tragically pathetic figure in the
whole range of George Eliot's gallery of characters.
There is something so weird about her, such a sense
of inescapable fate, that the most callous reader must
surely be deeply moved at sight of the terrible tragedy
of this woman's life—at sight of the vulture of me-
mory gnawing ceaselessly in her heart beneath all her
appearance of outward composure and self-control.
Matthew Jermyn, her partner in guilt in the years
long past, with his unremorseful effrontery and shal-
low selfishness, serves but to bring out in more
impressive relief the woman who has the strength of
soul to suffer like some antique queen of tragedy the
plagues of guilty passion. Jermyn has too little con-
science to feel any touch of repentance or remorse;
he is capable of feeling only the fear of exposure as a
fraudulent law-agent. But Mrs. Transome bears in
her keen sensibilities the burning pain of memory,
and in her heart lie the shadows of unsleeping dread.
She has outlived her fateful day of passion, her hair

* \
(7)
~/
has become streaked with grey, but the law of con-
sequences makes her ageing life bitter and desolate.
Harold Transome, her son, in spite of the destiny laid
on him by others, attains a moral deliverance, rises
to a better manhood at the last ; but for his poor
trembling mother, for her ill-dreading Soul, he appears
again from the East as an embodied judgment—as the
Nemesis of her secret crime. Iloveless, forlorn, crush-
ed, she seems, while her dismal tragedy is being
enacted to the bitter end, more like a tortured spirit
than a creature of flesh-and-blood. Harold “ looked
still at his mother,” we read when the moment of dis-
covery had come. “She seemed as if age were striking
her with a sudden wand—as if her trembling face
were getting haggard before him. She was mute.
But her eyes had not fallen; they looked up in help-
less misery at her son. Her son turned away his eyes
from her, and left her. In that moment Harold felt
hard : he could show no pity. All the pride of his
nature rebelled against his sonship.” Still the same
law and the same lesson : indulge selfish passion,
violate the social bond, the binding moralities of life,
and, however slow or long-deferred, retribution will
overtake you stern and sure as Destiny.
“The Fates are just ; they give us but our own ;
Nemesis ripens what our hands have sown.”
Nor will any disguise avail to deceive or bewilder V
the law of consequences, as Mr. Bulstrode, the rich
Middlemarch banker, philanthropist, and champion of
theological orthodoxy, found to his cost. Even his
good-doing present could not destroy his guilty past,
nor avert the doom that follows wrong; his orthodox
(~~ ,
| 68
\_
zeal for purity of doctrine could not propitiate his
moral Nemesis in the shape of Mr. Raffles. The
meeting again of Bulstrode and Raffles, after the lapse
of so many years, is a fine example of George Eliot's
dramatic art, and, for effectiveness of conception
and treatment, is not surpassed in any other part of
her works. Mr. Bulstrode had become master of
Stone Court, the property of Old Peter Featherstone,
and was inwardly congratulating himself on the
security of his social position under providence.
“Few days passed,” we read, “without his riding
thither and looking over some part of the farm with
the bailiff, and the evenings were delicious in that
quiet spot, when the new hay-ricks lately set up were
sending forth odours to mingle with the breath of the
rich old garden. One evening, while the sun was
still above the horizon and burning in golden lamps
among the great walnut boughs, Mr. Bulstrode was
pausing on horseback outside the front gate waiting
for Caleb Garth, who had met him by appointment to
give an opinion on a question of stable drainage, and
was now advising the bailiff in the rick-yard. Mr.
Bulstrode was conscious of being in a good spiritual
frame and more than usually serene, under the
influence of his innocent recreation " • * ,
“At this moment Mr. Bulstrode felt as if the sunshine
were all one with that of far off evenings when he
was a very young man and used to go out preaching
beyond Highbury . . . His brief reverie was
interrupted by the return of Caleb Garth, who was
also on horseback, and was just shaking his bridle
before starting, when he exclaimed—"Bless my heart
what's this fellow in black coming along the lane :
He's like one of those men one sees about after the
races.” Mr. Bulstrode turned his horse and looked
along the lane, but made no reply. The new comer
was our slight acquaintance Mr. Raffles.” . . . . . .
“Mr. Bulstrode's usual paleness had in fact taken an
almost deathly hue. Five minutes before, the
expanse of his life had been submerged in its evening
sunshine which shone backward to its remembered
morning ; sin seemed to be a question of doctrine and
inward penitence, humiliation an exercise of the
closet, the bearing of his deeds a matter of private
vision adjusted solely by spiritual relations and
conceptions of the divine purposes. And now, as if
by some hideous magic, this loud red figure had risen
before him in unmanageable solidity—an incorporate
past which had not entered into his imagination of
chastisements.” So the shades and fears of coming
calamity begin to blight the religious self-complacency
of Mr. Bulstrode. He found—as many another ha
found—that there is no escape from evil deeds by
trying either to think them away or to gloze the
memory of them over with superficial sentiment.
Retribution is sure; the day of judgment is always
involved in the hour and act of wrong-doing. “What-
soever a man sows, that shall he also reap.”
“Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
The fatal shadows that walk by us still.”

But if George Eliot insists, with all the fervouT
derived from her moral insight, on the malign fruitful-|
ness of wrong-doing, no less earnestly does she insist| \Z ~~
on the fruitful beneficence of continuous and faithful
|
good-doing. For it is the same law that applies in
E ,
{
ar
\ 70)
~~
both cases, working out the condemnation of the
wrong and the justification of the right. George
liot, as a moral teacher, is characterised by breadth
of practical view, sympathy with the larger thinking
of the time and the better social movements of the
age. There may be sometimes perversity in her
attitude towards the higher questions of morality and
religion, but there is never any littleness in her
thinking — never any conscious meanness in her
teaching. She affirms the need of greater simplicity
of life, a wiser use of the º of living, and shows
Af
*
f
;
t
the fatal results of selfish indulgencies and creating
v memories of evil. Nowherd is there finer delight
shown in the quiet home-life, its sweet and sacred
associations, than in the brilliant series of her novels,
in which she unweariedly insists on the duty of
deliberate kindness, careful truth, helpful sympathy,
y/ from man to man, and especially from the strong to
the weak. Her love of nature may be called domestic,
for it was in the English midland scenery as glorified
and sanctified by human associations that she found
her greatest delight. This was also the inspiration of
her deep and sensitive feeling for the past, its far-
spreading and binding memories, its various bequeath-
ments to the present. There is, in her view, no breach.
in the continuity of things from first to last, nothing
arbitrary either in origin or influence. Whatever
once has been, exists somehow throughout the long
and troubled course of time, and gives rise to effects
perhaps incalculable which weave their indestructible
threads in the roaring and unhalting loom of life.
This is the one great law of human joy and sorrow—
the law that underlies the world's bane and blessing.
71 /
a /

He who does truly a noble act, yields to an unselfish"
thought, obeys his best impulses, in however nº
or lowly a sphere, helps to raise the moral level of the #
kind and stimulate the remedial forces of goodness.
The years, in the long run, reveal themselves on the |
side of truth, faithfulness, honest dealing; not on the
side of Tito Melema, Mrs. Transome, Mr. Bulstrode,
but on the side of Dinah Morris and Dolly Winthrop,
dam Bede and Caleb Garth.
Like Wordsworth, whom she so much resembled '
in her love of the tender simplicities of the best
aspects of country life, in her sympathetic insight into
the hearts of the rustic poor, George Eliot would ever
Say—
}
*
\
i.
$
“Farewell, farewell, the heart that lives alone,
Housed in a dream, at distance from the kind
Such happiness, wherever it be known,
Is to be pitied ; for ’tis surely blind.
But welcome fortitude, and patient cheer,
And frequent sights of what is to be borne !
Such sights, or worse, as are before me here,
Not without hope we suffer and we mourn.”
Through the cultivation of life's common affections,
through the cheerful but strenuous fulfilment of daily
duty, she herself aspired, and would have all others
aspire, to—
“Join 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 with self,
In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars,
72
And with their mild persistence urge man's search
To waster issues.
So to live is heaven:
To make undying music in the world,
Breathing as beauteous order that controls
With growing sway the growing life of man.
May I 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.
So shall I join the choir invisible
Whose music is the gladness of the world.”
PRINTED BY LESLIE AND RUSSELL, UNION STREET, ABERDEEN.
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