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Title: George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy

Author: George Willis Cooke

Release Date: March 22, 2004  [eBook #11680]

Language: English

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GEORGE ELIOT: A CRITICAL STUDY OF HER LIFE, WRITINGS AND PHILOSOPHY.

BY

GEORGE WILLIS COOKE

AUTHOR OF "RALPH WALDO EMERSON: HIS LIFE, WRITINGS AND PHILOSOPHY."

1884






PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION.


The publication of a new edition of this work permits me to say that the
essay on "The Lady Novelists," quoted in the seventh chapter, was written
by George Henry Lewes. Its opinions, however, are substantially those of
George Eliot, and they will be found in harmony with her own words.
Confessing to the error, I yet venture to let the quotations, and the
comments on them, stand as at first made. The three poems mentioned on page
75, were among the latest of the productions of George Eliot's pen.

It has been suggested to me that I have not done perfect justice to George
Henry Lewes, especially in what I say of his books on the Spanish drama and
the life of Goethe. I have carefully reconsidered what I wrote of him, and
find no occasion for any change of judgment, though two or three words
might properly give place to others of a more appreciative meaning.

My book has met with much greater praise than I could have expected. Its
errors, I have no doubt, are quite numerous enough; and yet I venture to
think the main thought of the book is correct.

MARCH, 1884.




CONTENTS.


PREFACE

    I. EARLY LIFE

   II. TRANSLATOR AND EDITOR

  III. MARRIAGE

   IV. CAREER AS AN AUTHOR

    V. PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS

   VI. LITERARY TRAITS AND TENDENCIES

  VII. THEORY OF THE NOVEL

 VIII. POETIC METHODS

   IX. PHILOSOPHIC ATTITUDE

    X. DISTINCTIVE TEACHINGS

   XI. RELIGIOUS TENDENCIES

  XII. ETHICAL SPIRIT

 XIII. EARLIER NOVELS

  XIV. ROMOLA

   XV. FELIX HOLT AND MIDDLEMARCH

  XVI. DANIEL DERONDA

 XVII. THE SPANISH GYPSY AND OTHER POEMS

XVIII. LATER ESSAYS

  XIX. THE ANALYTIC METHOD

   XX. THE LIMITATIONS OF HER THOUGHT

  XXI. BIBLIOGRAPHY






I.


EARLY LIFE.

The poet and the novelist write largely out of personal experience, and
must give expression to the effects of their own history. What they have
seen and felt, gives shape and tone to what they write; that which is
nearest their own hearts is poured forth in their books. To ignore these
influences is to overlook a better part of what they write, and is often to
lose the explanation of many features of their work. Shakspere is one of
those who are of no time or place, whose words gain no added meaning in
view of what he was and how he lived; but it is not so with a great number
of the best and most inspiring writers. The era in which they lived, the
intellectual surroundings afforded them by their country and generation,
the subtle phases of sentiment and aspiration of their immediate time and
place, are all essential to a true appreciation of their books. It is so of
Goethe, Byron, Shelley, Hugo, Wordsworth, Emerson, and how many more!

As we must know the eighteenth century in its social spirit, literary
tendencies, revolutionary aims, romantic aspirations, philosophy and
science, to know Goethe, so must we know the nineteenth century in its
scientific attainments, agnostic philosophy, realistic spirit and
humanitarian aims, in order to know George Eliot. She is a product of her
time, as Lessing, Goethe, Wordsworth and Byron were of theirs; a voice to
utter its purpose and meaning, as well as a trumpet-call to lead it on. As
Goethe came after Lessing, Herder and Kant, so George Eliot came after
Comte, Mill and Spencer. Her books are to be read in the light of their
speculations, and she embodied in literary forms what they uttered as
science or philosophy.

Not only is a poet's mind affected by the tone of thought about him, but
his personal experiences and surroundings are likely to have a large
influence on what he writes. Scott was deeply affected by the romantic
atmosphere of his native land. Her birthplace and youthful surroundings had
a like effect on George Eliot. The Midland home, the plain village life,
the humble, toiling country folk, shaped for her the scenes and characters
about which she was to write. Some knowledge of her early home and the
influences amidst which her mind was formed, help largely to an
appreciation of her books and the views of life which she presents in them.

The Midland region of England she has pictured with something of that
accuracy with which Scott described the Border. It is a country of historic
memories. Near by her childhood home was the forest of Arden and Astly
Castle, the home of Sir John Grey, whose widow, Elizabeth Woodville, became
the queen of Edward IV. This was also one of the homes of Henry Grey, Duke
of Suffolk, who was found in a hollow tree near by after his rebellion; and
the home, likewise, of his daughter, Lady Jane Grey. In another direction
was Bosworth Field; and within twenty miles was Stratford-upon-Avon. The
ancient city of Coventry was not far distant. It was not these historic
regions which attracted her, however, so much as the pleasant country, the
common people, the quiet villages. With observant eyes she saw the world
about her as it was and she entered into the heart of its life, and has
painted it for us in a most sympathetic, appreciative spirit. The simple,
homely, unromantic life of middle England she has made immortal with her
wit, her satire, her fine description, and her keen love of all that is
human. She herself recognized the importance of her early surroundings. In
one of her letters she used these words:

    It is interesting, I think, to know whether a writer was born in a
    central or border district--a condition which always has a strongly
    determining influence. I was born in Warwickshire, but certain family
    traditions connected with more northerly districts made these districts
    a region of poetry to me in my early childhood. I was brought up in the
    Church of England, and have never joined any other religious society,
    but I have had close acquaintance with many Dissenters of various
    sects, from Calvinistic Anabaptists to Unitarians.

The influence of the surroundings of childhood upon character she has more
than once touched upon in her books. In the second chapter of _Theophrastus
Such_, she says,--

    I cherish my childish loves--the memory of that warm little nest where
    my affections were fledged.

In the same essay she says,--

    Our Midland plains have never lost their familiar expression and
    conservative spirit for me.

In _Daniel Deronda_ she most tenderly expresses the same deep conviction
concerning the soul's need of anchorage in some familiar and inspiring
scene, with which the memories of childhood may be delightfully associated.
Her own fond recollections lent force to whatever philosophical
significance such a theory may have had for her.

    A human life should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where
    it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of the earth, for
    the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it,
    for whatever will give that home a familiar, unmistakable difference
    amidst the future widening of knowledge; a spot where the definiteness
    of early knowledge may be inwrought with affection, and kindly
    acquaintance with all neighbors, even to the dogs and monkeys, may
    spread, not by sentimental effort and reflection, but as a sweet habit
    of the blood.

Mary Ann Evans was born at South Farm, a mile from Griff, in the parish of
Colton, Warwickshire, England, November 22, 1819. In after years she
adopted the abbreviated form of her name, and was known by her friends as
Marian. When she was six months old the family moved to Griff House, which
was situated half-way between Bedworth, a mining village, and the
manufacturing town of Nuneaton. In approaching Griff from Nuneaton, a
little valley, known as Griff Hollows, is passed, much resembling the "Red
Deeps" of _The Mill on the Floss_. On the right, a little beyond, is Griff
House, a comfortable and substantial dwelling surrounded by pleasant
gardens and lawns.

Robert Evans, her father, was born at Ellaston, Staffordshire, of a
substantial family of mechanics and craftsmen. He was of massive build,
tall, wide-shouldered and strong, and his features were of a marked,
emphatic cast. He began life as a master carpenter, then became a forester,
and finally a land agent. He was induced to settle in Warwickshire by Sir
Roger Newdigate, his principal employer, and for the remainder of his life
he had charge of five large estates in the neighborhood. In this employment
he was successful, being respected and trusted to the fullest extent by his
employers, his name becoming a synonym for trustworthiness. Marian many
times sketched the main traits of her father's character, as in the love of
perfect work in "Stradivarius." He had Adam Bede's stalwart figure and
robust manhood. Caleb Garth, in _Middlemarch_, is in many ways a fine
portrait of him as to the nature of his employment, his delight in the
soil, and his honest, rugged character.

Caleb was wont to say that "it's a fine thing to have the chance of getting
a bit of the country into good fettle, 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 honorable work
that is." Robert Evans, like Caleb Garth, "while faithfully serving his
employers enjoyed great popularity among their tenants. He was gentle but
of indomitable firmness; and while stern to the idle and unthrifty, he did
not press heavily on those who might be behindhand with their rent, owing
to ill luck or misfortune, on quarter days."

While still living in Staffordshire, Robert Evans lost his first wife, by
whom he had a son and a daughter. His second wife, the mother of Marian,
was a Miss Pearson, a gentle, loving woman, and a notable housewife. She is
described in the Mrs. Hackit of "Amos Barton," whose industry, sharp
tongue, epigrammatic speech and marked character were taken from life.
Something of Mrs. Poyser also entered into her nature. She had three
children, Christiana, Isaac and Mary Ann. The house at Griff was situated
in a rich landscape, and was a large, commodious farm-house of red brick,
ivy-covered, and of two stories' height. At the back was a large garden,
and a farm-yard with barns and sheds.

In the series of sonnets entitled "Brother and Sister," Marian has given
some account of her early life. She had the attachment there described for
her brother Isaac, and followed him about with the same persistence and
affection. The whole of that poem is autobiographical. The account of the
mother gives a delightful glimpse into Marian's child-life:

  Our mother bade us keep the trodden ways,
    Stroked down my tippet, set my brother's frill,
  Then with the benediction of her gaze
    Clung to us lessening, and pursued us still
  Across the homestead to the rookery elms,
    Whose tall old trunks had each a grassy mound,
  So rich for us, we counted them as realms
    With varied products.

The early life of Marian Evans has, in many features of it, been very fully
described in the story of Maggie Tulliver. How far her own life is that of
Maggie may be seen by comparing the earlier chapters in _The Mill on the
Floss_ with the "Brother and Sister." The incident described in the poem,
of her brother leaving her in charge of the fishing-rod, is repeated in all
its main features in the experiences of Maggie. In the poem she describes
an encounter with a gipsy, which again recalls Maggie's encounter with some
persons of that race. The whole account of her childhood life with her
brother, her trust in him, their delight in the common pleasures of
childhood, and the impression made on her by the beauties of nature,
reappears in striking similarity in the description of the child-life of
Maggie and Tom. These elements of her early experience and observation of
life have been well described by one who knew her personally. This person
says that "Maggie Tulliver's childhood is clearly full of the most accurate
personal recollections."

Marian Evans very early became an enthusiastic reader of the best books. In
an almanac she found a portion of one of the essays of Charles Lamb, and
remembered reading it with great delight. In her seventh year a copy
of _Waverley_ was loaned to her older sister. She became herself intensely
fascinated by it, and when it was returned before she had completed it she
was thrown into much distress. The story so possessed her that she began to
complete it in writing, according to her own conception. When this was
discovered, the book was again secured for her perusal. This incident she
has described in a sonnet, which appears as the motto to the fifty-seventh
chapter of _Middlemarch_.

  They numbered scarce eight summers when a name
    Rose on their souls and stirred such motions there
  As thrill the buds and shape their hidden frame
    At penetration of the quickening air:
  His name who told of loyal Evan Dhu,
    Of quaint Bradwardine, and Vich Ian Vor,
  Making the little world their childhood knew
    Large with a land of mountain, lake and scaur,

  And larger yet with wonder, love, belief,
    Toward Walter Scott, who living far away
  Sent them this wealth of joy and noble grief.
    The book and they must part, but day by day,
      In lines that thwart like portly spiders ran,
      They wrote the tale, from Tully Veolan.

Not only was she a great reader, but she was also a diligent and even a
precocious student, learning easily and rapidly whatever she undertook to
acquire in the way of knowledge.

She was first sent, with her brother Isaac, to a free school in the village
of Griff. Among her mates was William Jacques, the original of Bob Jakins
in _The Mill on the Floss_. When seven years old she went to a girls'
school at Nuneaton. Her schoolmates describe her as being then a "quiet,
reserved girl, with strongly lined, almost masculine features, and a
profusion of light hair worn in curls round her head." The abundance of
her curling hair caused her much trouble, and she once cut it off, as
Maggie Tulliver did, because it would not "lie straight." "One of her
school-fellows," we are told, "recalls that the first time she sat down to
the piano she astonished her companions by the knowledge of music she had
already acquired. She mastered her lessons with an ease which excited
wonder. She read with avidity. She joined very rarely in the sports of her
companions, and her diffidence and shrinking sensibility prevented her from
forming any close friendship among her school-fellows. When she stood up in
the class, her features, heavy in repose, were lighted by eager excitement,
which found further vent in nervous movements of her hands. At this school
Marian was well taught in English, with drawing, music, and some little
French."

Leaving this school at the age of twelve, she went to that of the Misses
Franklin in Coventry, a large town a few miles distant. To the careful
training received there she was much indebted, and in after years often
spoke of it with the heartiest appreciation. One of her friends, Edith
Simcox, has given an account of this school and of Marian's studies
there. "Almost on the outskirts of the old town of Coventry, towards the
railway station, the house may still be seen, itself an old-fashioned
five-windowed, Queen Anne sort of dwelling, with a shell-shaped cornice
over the door, with an old timbered cottage facing it, and near adjoining
a quaint brick and timber building, with an oriel window thrown out upon
oak pillars. Between forty and fifty years ago, Methodist ladies kept the
school, and the name of 'little mamma,' given by her school-fellows, is
a proof that already something was to be seen of the maternal air which
characterized her in later years, and perhaps more especially in
intercourse with her own sex. Prayer meetings were in vogue among the
girls, following the example of their elders; and while taking, no doubt,
a leading part in them, she used to suffer much self-reproach about her
coldness and inability to be carried away with the same enthusiasm as
others. At the same time, nothing was farther from her nature than any
sceptical inclination, and she used to pounce with avidity upon any
approach to argumentative theology within her reach, carrying Paley's
_Evidences_ up to her bedroom, and devouring it as she lay upon the floor
alone."

During the three years Marian attended this school she held aloof from the
other pupils, was grave and womanly in her deportment. She acquired Miss
Rebecca Franklin's slow and precise method of speaking, and to her diligent
training owed her life-long habit of giving a finished completeness to all
her sentences. It seems that her imagination was alive at this time, and
being slowly cultivated. She was in the habit of scribbling verses in her
books and elsewhere.

A fellow-pupil during the time she was a member of this boarding-school has
given these reminiscences of Marian's life there: "She learned everything
with ease," says this person, "but was passionately devoted to music, and
became thoroughly accomplished as a pianist. Her masters always brought the
most difficult solos for her to play in public, and everywhere said she
might make a performer equal to any then upon the concert stage. She was
keenly susceptible to what she thought her lack of personal beauty,
frequently saying that she was not pleased with a single feature of her
face or figure. She was not especially noted as a writer, but so uncommon
was her intellectual power that we all thought her capable of any effort;
and so great was the charm of her conversation, that there was continual
strife among the girls as to which of them should walk with her. The
teachers had to settle it by making it depend upon alphabetical
succession."

Leaving the school in Coventry at the age of fifteen, Marian continued her
studies at home. The year following, her mother died; and this event, as
she afterwards said, first made her acquainted with "the unspeakable grief
of a last parting." Soon after, her older sister and her brother were
married and left home. She alone remained with her father, and was for
several years his housekeeper. "He offered to get a housekeeper," says Miss
Blind, "as not the house only, but farm matters had to be looked after, and
he was always tenderly considerate of 'the little wench,' as he called her.
But his daughter preferred taking the whole management of the place into
her own hands, and she was as conscientious and diligent in the discharge
of her domestic duties as in the prosecution of the studies she carried on
at the same time." Her experiences at this period have been made use of in
more than one of her characters. The dairy scenes in _Adam Bede_ are so
perfectly realistic because she was familiar with all the processes of
butter and cheese making.

In 1841 her father gave up his business to his son and moved to Foleshill,
one mile from Coventry. A pleasant house and surroundings made the new
home, and her habits of thought and life became more exact and fastidious.
The frequent absence of her father gave her much time for reading, which
she eagerly improved. Books were more accessible, though her own library
was a good one.

She zealously began and carried on a systematic course of studies, such as
gave her the most thorough results of culture. She took up Latin and Greek
with the head master of the Coventry grammar-school, and became familiar
with the classic literatures. French, German and Italian were read in all
the master-pieces of those languages. The Old Testament was also studied
in the original; at the same time she became a proficient player on the
piano, and obtained a thorough knowledge of music. During several years of
quiet and continuous study she laid the foundations of that accurate and
wide-reaching knowledge which was so notable a feature of her life and
work. It was a careful, systematic knowledge she acquired, such as entitled
her to rank as an educated person in the fullest sense. Her painstaking
thoroughness, and her energetic application, were as remarkable at this
time as in later years. Her knowledge was mainly self-acquired, but it was
in no sense superficial. It is difficult to see in what way it could have
been improved, even if the universities had been open to her.

Her life and her studies at Coventry have been well described by one who
knew her. We are told that "in this somewhat more populous neighborhood she
soon became known as a person of more than common interest, and, moreover,
as a most devoted daughter and the excellent manager of her father's
household. There was perhaps little at first sight which betokened genius
in that quiet gentle-mannered girl, with pale grave face, naturally pensive
in expression: and ordinary acquaintances regarded her chiefly for the
kindness and sympathy that were never wanting to any. But to those with
whom, by some unspoken affinity, her soul could expand, her expressive gray
eyes would light up with intense meaning and humor, and the low, sweet
voice, with its peculiar mannerism of speaking--which by the way wore off
in after years--would give utterance to thoughts so rich and singular that
converse with Miss Evans, even in those days, made speech with other people
seem flat and common. Miss Evans was an exemplification of the fact that a
great genius is not an exceptional, capricious product of nature, but a
thing of slow, laborious growth, the fruit of industry and the general
culture of the faculties. At Foleshill, with ample means and leisure, her
real education began. She acquired French, German and Italian from Signor
Brezzi. An acquaintance with Hebrew was the result of her own unaided
efforts. From Mr. Simms, the veteran organist of St. Michaels, Coventry,
she received lessons in music, although it was her own fine musical sense
which made her in after years an admirable pianoforte player. Nothing once
learned escaped her marvellous memory; and her keen sympathy with all human
feelings, in which lay the secret of her power of discriminating character,
caused a constant fund of knowledge to flow into her treasure-house from
the social world about her."

Marian Evans early showed an unusual interest in religious subjects. Her
parents belonged to the Established Church, while other members of the
family were zealous Methodists. Religion was a subject which occupied much
of their attention, and several of them were engaged in one way and another
in its inculcation. Marian was an attentive listener to the sermons
preached in the parish church, and at the age of twelve was teaching in a
Sunday school held in a cottage near her father's house. Up to the age of
eighteen she was a most devoted believer in Christianity, and her zeal was
so great that Evangelicalism came to represent her mode of thought and
feeling. She was a somewhat rigid Calvinist and full of pious enthusiasm.
After her removal to Coventry, where her reading was of a wider range and
her circle of friends increased, doubts gradually sprang up in her mind. In
a letter written to Miss Sara Hennell she gave a brief account of her
religious experiences at this period. In it she described an aunt, Mrs.
Elizabeth Evans, who was a Methodist preacher, and the original of Dinah
Morris in _Adam Bede_.

    There was hardly any intercourse between my father's family, resident
    in Derbyshire and Staffordshire, and our family--few and far-between
    visits of (to my childish feeling) strange uncles and aunts and cousins
    from my father's far-off native country, and once a journey of my own,
    as a little child, with my father and mother, to see my uncle William
    (a rich builder) in Staffordshire--but _not_ my uncle and aunt Samuel,
    so far as I can recall the dim outline of things--are what I remember
    of northerly relatives in my childhood.

    But when I was seventeen or more--after my sister was married and I was
    mistress of the house--my father took a journey into Derbyshire, in
    which, visiting my uncle and aunt Samuel, who were very poor, and lived
    in a humble cottage at Wirksworth, he found my aunt in a very delicate
    state of health after a serious illness, and, to do her bodily good, he
    persuaded her to return with him, telling her that _I_ should be very,
    very happy to have her with me for a few weeks. I was then strongly
    under the influence of Evangelical belief, and earnestly endeavoring to
    shape this anomalous English-Christian life of ours into some
    consistency with the spirit and simple verbal tenor of the New
    Testament. I _was_ delighted to see my aunt. Although I had only heard
    her spoken of as a strange person, given to a fanatical vehemence of
    exhortation in private as well as public, I believed that I should find
    sympathy between us. She was then an old woman--about sixty--and, I
    believe, had for a good many years given up preaching. A tiny little
    woman, with bright, small, dark eyes, and hair that had been black, I
    imagine, but was now gray--a pretty woman in her youth, but of a
    totally different physical type from Dinah. The difference--as you will
    believe--was not _simply_ physical; no difference is. She was a woman
    of strong natural excitability, which I know, from the description I
    have heard my father and half-sister give, prevented her from the
    exercise of discretion under the promptings of her zeal. But this
    vehemence was now subdued by age and sickness; she was very gentle and
    quiet in her manners--very loving--and (what she must have been from
    the very first) a truly religious soul, in whom the love of God and the
    love of man were fused together. There was nothing highly distinctive
    in her religious conversation. I had had much intercourse with pious
    Dissenters before; the only freshness I found, in our talk, came from
    the fact that she had been the greater part of her life a Wesleyan, and
    though _she left the society when women were no longer allowed to
    preach_, and joined the New Wesleyans, she retained the character of
    thought that belongs to the genuine old Wesleyan. I had never talked
    with a Wesleyan before, and we used to have little debates about
    predestination, for I was then a strong Calvinist. Here her superiority
    came out, and I remember now, with loving admiration, one thing which
    at the time I disapproved; it was not strictly a consequence of her
    Arminian belief, and at first sight might seem opposed to it, yet it
    came from the spirit of love which clings to the bad logic of
    Arminianism. When my uncle came to fetch her, after she had been with
    us a fortnight or three weeks, he was speaking of a deceased minister,
    once greatly respected, who from the action of trouble upon him had
    taken to small tippling, though otherwise not culpable. "But I hope the
    good man's in heaven, for all that," said my uncle. "Oh, yes," said my
    aunt, with a deep inward groan of joyful conviction, "Mr. A's in
    heaven--that's sure." This was at the time an offence to my stern,
    ascetic, hard views--how beautiful it is to me now!

One who has been permitted to read the letters of Marian Evans written to
this aunt, has given the following account of them, which throws much light
on her religious attitude at this period: "Most of the epistles are
addressed to my 'dear uncle and aunt,' and all reveal George Eliot's great
talents. The style is elegant and graceful, and the letters abound in
beautiful metaphor; but their most striking characteristic is the religious
tinge that pervades them all. Nearly every line denotes that George Eliot
was an earnest biblical student, and that she was, especially in the years
1839 and 1840, very anxious about her spiritual condition. In one of these
letters, written from Griff to Elizabeth Evans, in 1839, she says she is
living in a dry and thirsty land, and that she is looking forward with
pleasure to a visit to Wirksworth, and likens her aunt's companionship and
counsel to a spring of pure water, acceptable to her as is the well dug for
the traveller in the desert. That the most affectionate and loving
relationship existed between the eminent author and Mrs. Elizabeth Evans,
is apparent from this correspondence. The inmost secrets of George Eliot's
heart are laid bare in these letters to the famous Methodist preacher, who
was at that time her dearest friend. She is ever asking for advice and
spiritual guidance, and confesses her faults with a candor that is rendered
additionally attractive by reason of the polished language in which it is
clothed. When quite a girl, George Eliot was known as pious and clever; and
in the letters she wrote in 1839, when she was twenty years old, the
cleverness has grown and expanded, although she is not so sure about her
piety. She says that 'unstable as water thou shalt not excel,' seems to be
a description of her character, instead of the progress from strength to
strength that should be experienced by those who wish to stand in the
presence of God. In another letter she admits that she cannot give a good
account of her spiritual state, says that she has been surrounded by
worldly persons, and that love of human praise is one of her great
stumbling-blocks. But in a letter written in 1840 the uncertainty has gone
from her mind, and she writes that she has resolved in the strength of the
Lord to serve him evermore. In a later communication, however, she does not
appear so confident, and admits that she is obliged to strive against the
ambition that fills her heart, and that her fondness of worldly praise is a
great bar and hindrance to spiritual advancement. Still she thinks it is no
use sitting inactive with folded hands; and believing that the love of God
is the only thing to give real satisfaction to human beings, she hopes,
with his help, to obtain it. One of the letters is chiefly devoted to the
concern felt by Marian Evans at Elizabeth Evans' illness; and another,
written at Foleshill, betrays some humor amid the trouble that afflicts her
about her own future. Their outward circumstances, she writes, are all she
can desire; but she is not so certain about her spiritual state, although
she feels that it is the grace of God alone that can give the greatest
satisfaction. Then she goes on to speak of the preacher at Foleshill, with
whom she is not greatly pleased: 'We get the truth, but it is not
recommended by the mode of its delivery,' is how she writes of this divine;
yet she is charitable withal, and removes the sting by adding that more
good may sometimes be obtained from humble instruments than from the
highest privileges, and that she must examine her own heart rather than
speak unkindly of the preacher. Up to this period it is evident that Marian
Evans' views upon religion were orthodox, and that her life was passed in
ceaseless striving for the 'peace that passeth understanding;' but in 1843
a letter was written to Elizabeth Evans by a relative in Griff, in which
Marian Evans is spoken of, and the change in her religious opinions
indicated. She writes that they are in great pain about Mary Ann; but the
last portion of the letter, dealing more fully with the subject, has
unfortunately got lost or destroyed. The close association of George Eliot
with Derbyshire, as well as her love for the quaint village of Wirksworth,
and its upright, honest, God-fearing people, breaks forth in more than one
of these communications."

Partly as the result of her studies and partly as the result of contact
with other minds, Marian began to grow sceptical about the religious
beliefs she had entertained. This took place probably during her
twenty-third year, but the growth of the new ideas was slow at first. As
one of her friends has suggested, it was her eagerness for positive
knowledge which made her an unbeliever. She had no love of mere doubt, no
desire to disagree with accepted doctrines, but she was not content unless
she could get at the facts and reach what was just and reasonable. "It is
seldom," says this person, "that a mind of so much power is so free from
the impulse to dissent, and that not from too ready credulousness, but
rather because the consideration of doubtful points was habitually crowded
out, one may say, by the more ready and delighted acceptance of whatever
accredited facts and doctrines might be received unquestioningly. We can
imagine George Eliot in youth, burning to master all the wisdom and
learning of the world; we cannot imagine her failing to acquire any kind of
knowledge on the pretext that her teacher was in error about something else
than the matter in hand; and it is undoubtedly to this natural preference
for the positive side of things that we are indebted for the singular
breadth and completeness of her knowledge and culture. A mind like hers
must have preyed disastrously upon itself during the years of comparative
solitude in which she lived at Foleshill, had it not been for that
inexhaustible source of delight in every kind of intellectual acquisition.
Languages, music, literature, science and philosophy interested her alike;
it was early in this period that in the course of a walk with a friend she
paused and clasped her hands with a wild aspiration that she might live 'to
reconcile the philosophy of Locke and Kant!' Years afterward she remembered
the very turn of the road where she had spoken it."

The spiritual struggles of Maggie Tulliver give a good picture of Marian
Evans' mental and spiritual experiences at this time. Her friends and
relatives were scandalized by her scepticism. Her father could not at all
sympathize with her changed religious attitude, and treated her harshly.
She refused to attend church, and this made the separation so wide that it
was proposed to break up the home. By the advice of friends she at last
consented to outwardly conform to her father's wishes, and a partial
reconciliation was effected. This alienation, however, had a profound
effect upon her mind. She slowly grew away from the intellectual basis
of her old beliefs, but, with Maggie, she found peace and strength in
self-renunciation, and in the cultivation of that inward trust which makes
the chief anchorage of strong natures. She bore this experience patiently,
and without any diminution of her affection; but she also found various
friends among the more cultivated people of Coventry, who could sympathize
with her in her studies and with her radical views in religion. These
persons gave her the encouragement she needed, the contact with other and
more matured minds which was so necessary to her mental development, and
that social contact with life which was so conducive to her health of mind.
In one family especially, that of Mr. Charles Bray, did she find the true,
and cordial, and appreciative friendship she desired. These friends
softened the growing discord with her own family, and gave her that devoted
regard and aid that would be of most service to her. "In Mr. Bray's
family," we are told by one who has written of this trying period of her
career, "she found sympathy with her ardent love of knowledge and with the
more enlightened views that had begun to supplant those under which (as she
described it) her spirit had been grievously burdened. Emerson, Froude,
George Combe, Robert Mackay, and many other men of mark, were at various
times guests at Mr. Bray's house at Rosehill while Miss Evans was there
either as inmate or occasional visitor; and many a time might have been
seen, pacing up and down the lawn or grouped under an old acacia, men of
thought and research, discussing all things in heaven and earth, and
listening with marked attention when one gentle woman's voice was heard to
utter what they were quite sure had been well matured before the lips
opened. Few, if any, could feel themselves her superior in general
intelligence; and it was amusing one day to see the amazement of a certain
doctor, who, venturing on a quotation from Epictetus to an unassuming young
lady, was, with modest politeness, corrected in his Greek by his feminine
auditor. One rare characteristic belonged to her which gave a peculiar
charm to her conversation. She had no petty egotism, no spirit of
contradiction; she never talked for effect. A happy thought well expressed
filled her with delight; in a moment she would seize the thought and
improve upon it--so that common people began to feel themselves wise in her
presence; and perhaps years after she would remind them, to their pride and
surprise, of the good things they had said."

She was an ardent reader of Emerson and other thinkers of his cast of
thought, and some traces of this early sympathy are to be seen in her
books. On his second visit to England Emerson spent a day or two at the
house of Charles Bray, with whose writings he had previously become
acquainted. Emerson was much impressed with the personality of Marian
Evans, and more than once said to Bray, "That young lady has a calm,
serious soul." When Emerson asked her somewhat suddenly, "What one book do
you like best?" she at once replied, "Rousseau's _Confessions_." She
cherished this acquaintance with Emerson, and held him in grateful
remembrance through life.

The painful experiences of this period are undoubtedly reflected in another
of her autobiographic poems, that entitled "Self and Life." She speaks of
the profound influence the past had over her mind, and that her hands and
feet were still tiny when she began to know the historic thrill of contact
with other ages. She also makes Life say to Self, in regard to her pain and
sorrow:

  But all thy anguish and thy discontent
    Was growth of mine, the elemental strife
  Towards feeling manifold with vision blent
    To wider thought: I was no vulgar life
  That like the water-mirrored ape,
    Not discerns the thing it sees,
  Nor knows its own in others' shape,
    Railing, scorning, at its ease.
  Half man's truth must hidden lie
  If unlit by sorrow's eye.
  I by sorrow wrought in thee
  Willing pain of ministry.

The intellectual surroundings of Marian Evans at this time gave shape to
her whole after-life. There were now laid the foundations of her mode of
thinking, and her philosophic theories began to be formed. It was in the
home of one of her friends she learned to think for herself, and it was
there her positivist doctrines first appeared. Charles Bray was affected by
the transcendental movement, and was an ardent admirer of Newman, Emerson
and others among its leaders. This interest prepared him, as it has so many
other minds, for the acceptance of those speculative views which were built
up on the foundation of science when the transcendental movement began to
wane. The transcendental doctrines of unity, the oneness of mind and
matter, the evolution of all forms of life and being from the lowest, the
universal dominion of law and necessity, and the profound significance of
nature in its influence on man, as they were developed by Goethe,
Schelling, Carlyle and Emerson, gave direction to a new order of
speculation, which had its foundations in modern science.

Bray was an ardent phrenologist, and in 1832 published a work on _The
Education of the Feelings_, based on phrenological principles. In 1841
appeared his main work, _The Philosophy of Necessity_; this was followed
several years later by a somewhat similar work, _On Force, its Mental and
Moral Correlates_. His philosophy was summarized in a volume published in
1871, which was entitled _A Manual of Anthropology_. He also wrote
pamphlets on "Illusion and Delusion," "The Reign of Law," "Toleration," and
"Christianity." In his work on necessity he promulgated very many of those
ideas which have formed so prominent a part of the philosophy of George
Eliot. The dominion of law, the reign of necessity, experience as the
foundation of knowledge, humanity as an organism that develops a larger
life for man by the aid of experience and tradition,--these are among the
doctrines of the book. There is every reason for believing that in the
teachings of Charles Bray, Marian Evans found many of the main elements of
her philosophy, and with his aid her opinions were largely shaped.

Mrs. Bray was also a woman of large intelligence, and of a mind freely
open to new theories. She wrote a _Physiology for Schools_ and a
school-book on _Duties to Animals_, which have been well received by the
public and used as text books in the schools of the Midland counties. In
1882 she published a little book on the _Elements of Morality_, consisting
of a series of easy lessons for Unitarian Sunday schools and for home
teaching. To the Brays, Marian Evans owed much in the way of sympathy,
culture and direct influence. Perhaps more than any other persons they gave
tone and direction to her mind. One who knew them has said, "Besides being
a practical as well as theoretical philanthropist, Mr. Bray was also a
courageous impugner of the dogmas which form the basis of the popular
theology. Mrs. Bray shared in this general largeness of thought, while
perhaps more in sympathy with the fairer aspects of Christianity."

A brother and a sister of Mrs. Bray's, Charles C. Hennell and Sara S.
Hennell, also had a large influence on Marian Evans during this period. It
was Charles Hennell who induced her to translate Strauss, and it was Sara
Hennell to whom she wrote about her aunt after the publication of _Adam
Bede_. Hennell's _Inquiry concerning the origin of Christianity_ was
published in 1838, and appeared in a second edition in 1841. In the latter
year the book was read by Marian Evans, after a faithful perusal of the
Bible as a preparation for it, and quickly re-read, and with great interest
and delight. She then pronounced it "the most interesting book she had ever
read," dating from it a new birth to her mind. The book was translated into
German, Strauss writing a preface for it, and that interpreter of
Christianity praised it highly. Hennell rejected all supernaturalism and
the miraculous, regarding Christianity as a slow and natural development
out of Judaism, aided by Platonism and other outside influences. He finds
the sources of Jesus' teachings in the Jewish tendencies of the time, while
the cause of the supremacy of the man Jesus was laid in a long course of
events which had swelled to a crisis at the time of his appearance, and
bore him aloft to a height whence his personal qualities told with a power
derived from the accumulated force of many generations. Jesus was an
enthusiast who believed himself the predicted king of the Jews, and he was
a revolutionist expecting to establish an earthly kingdom for the supremacy
of Judaism. Jesus was largely influenced by the Essenes, but he rejected
their austerity. Hennell found a mixture of truth and error in the Gospels,
and believed that many mythical elements entered into the accounts given of
Jesus. A thorough rationalist, he claimed to accept the spiritual essence
of Christianity, and to value highly the moral teachings of Jesus. In a
later work on _Christian Theism_ he finds an argument for belief in God
mainly in nature. In his conclusions he is not far from F.W. Newman and
Theodore Parker; but he does not give the credit to intuition and the
religious faculty they do, though he is an earnest believer in God, and
inclined to accept Christianity as the highest expression of religion.

Sara S. Hennell early published _An Essay on the Skeptical Tendency of
Butler's Analogy_, and a Baillie prize essay on _Christianity and
Infidelity: An Exposition of the Arguments on Both Sides_. A work of much
merit and thought appeared from her pen in 1860, under the title of
_Thoughts in Aid of Faith_. In this work she follows her brother, Strauss,
Feuerbach and Spencer in an interpretation of religion, which constantly
recalls the theories of George Eliot. In a series of more recent books she
has continued the same line of thought. The early and intimate friendship
of Marian Evans and Miss Hennell may explain this similarity of opinion,
and the beliefs they held in common were doubtless developed to a greater
or less extent even when the former lived in Coventry.

Another friend of this period was a German scholar by the name of Brabant,
resident in England, a friend of Strauss, Paulus, Coleridge and Grote.
Grote described him as "a vigorous self-thinking intellect." A daughter of
Dr. Brabant first undertook the translation of Strauss, and she it was who
married Charles Hennell. After this marriage Miss Evans offered to take to
Dr. Brabant the place of his daughter, and did act as his housekeeper for
some months.

Marian Evans was surrounded at the most impressible period of her life by
this group of intellectual, free-thinking people, who seem to have fully
indoctrinated her with their own opinions. None of them had rejected
Christianity or theism, but they were rationalists in spirit, and eager
students of philosophy and science. Here were laid the foundations of the
doctrines she afterwards held so strongly, and even during this period very
many of the theories presented in her books were fully developed. Here her
mind was thoroughly prepared for the teachings of Comte, Spencer and Lewes;
and her early instructors had gone so far in their lessons that the later
teachers had little to do more than to give system to her thoughts.

It was essential to George Eliot's novel-writing that she was educated
amidst religious influences, and that she earnestly accepted the religious
teaching of her childhood. Not less important was her humble home and her
association with the common life of the people. Through all her work these
influences appear, coloring her thought, shaping her views of life, and
increasing her sympathies and affections. Her tender, enthusiastic love of
humble life never lost any of its quickening power. The faith of childhood
was lost, but its memory was left in a warm appreciation of all phases of
religious life and a heartfelt sympathy with all the sorrows and
aspirations of men.

Her father's health becoming very poor, Marian spent the next two or three
years in the care of him. She read to him most of Scott's novels, devoting
several hours each day to this task. During this period she made a visit to
the Isle of Wight, and there read the novels of Richardson. Her father died
in 1849, and she was very much affected by this event. She grieved for him
overmuch, and could find no consolation. Her friends, the Brays, to divert
and relieve her mind, invited her to take a continental tour with them.
They travelled extensively in Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and Italy. Her
grief, however, was so excessive as to receive little relief, and her
friends began to fear the results. On their return to England they left her
at Geneva, where she remained for nearly a year. After some months in a
boarding-house near Geneva she became an inmate of the family of M.
d'Albert Durade, a Swiss water-color painter of some reputation, who
afterwards became the translator of her works into French. She devoted the
winter of 1849-50 to the study of French and its literature, to mathematics
and to reading. Her teacher in mathematics soon told her that she was able
to proceed without his aid. She read Rousseau and studied the French
socialists. M. Durade painted her portrait, making a remarkable picture.
The softness of the clear blue eyes, in which is expressed a profound depth
of thought, is one of its characteristics. M. Durade accompanied her to
England in the spring of 1850, and she went to live with her brother, where
she remained for a few months. The old family differences about religion
had alienated the brother and sister so far intellectually that she
accepted an invitation from the Brays to find a home with them. Her sadness
and grief continued, and her health was not good. Her fits of nervousness
and of tears were frequent, but her studies continued to occupy her mind.
She delighted to converse with Mr. Bray, and other persons of earnest
thought had their influence on her mind. Among these was George Dawson, the
famous preacher who cut himself loose from all denominations.




II.


TRANSLATOR AND EDITOR.

It was while living at Foleshill, and amidst the intellectual influences of
awakening radicalism, that Marian Evans undertook her first literary labor.
This was the translation of the _Leben Jesu_ of David Strauss. A book so
daring in its interpretations of the origin of Christianity excited much
attention, and especially among those who had broken away from the old
religious beliefs. The work of translation was at first undertaken by Miss
Brabant, who soon married Charles Hennell. Then the task was taken up by
Marian Evans, who gave three years to it, renewing her Hebrew studies for
the purpose, and the book was published in 1846. The work was thoroughly
done, so much so that Strauss complimented the translator on its accuracy
and correctness of spirit. Concerning the translation the _Westminster
Review_ had this word of praise to offer: "We can testify that the
translator has achieved a very tough work with remarkable spirit and
fidelity. The author, though indeed a good writer, could hardly have spoken
better had his country and language been English. The work has evidently
fallen into the hands of one who has not only effective command of both
languages, but a familiarity with the subject-matter of theological
criticism, and an initiation into its technical phraseology." Another
critic said that "whoever reads these volumes without any reference to the
German, must be pleased with the easy, perspicuous, idiomatic force of the
English style. But he will be still more satisfied when, on turning to the
original, he finds that the rendering is word for word, thought for thought
and sentence for sentence. In preparing so beautiful a rendering as the
present, the difficulties can have been neither few nor small in the way of
preserving, in various parts of the work, the exactness of the translation,
combined with that uniform harmony and clearness of style which impart to
the volumes before us the air and the spirit of an original. A modest and
kindly care for his reader's convenience has induced the translator often
to supply the rendering into English of a Greek quotation when there was no
corresponding rendering into German in the original. Indeed, Strauss may
well say, as he does in the notice which he writes for this English
edition, that, as far as he has examined it, the translation is _et
accurata et perspicua_."

The book had a successful sale, but Marian Evans received only twenty
pounds, and twenty-five copies of the book, for her share of the
translation. A little later she translated Feuerbach's _Essence of
Christianity_, receiving fifty pounds for this labor. It was published in
1854, but the sale was small, and it proved a heavy loss to the publisher.
While translating Strauss she aided a friend interested in philosophical
studies (probably Charles Bray) by the translation, for his reading, of the
_De Deo_ of Spinoza. Some years later she completed a translation of the
more famous _Ethica_ of the same thinker. It was not published, probably
because there was at that time so little interest in Spinoza.

The execution of such work as this, and all of it done in the most
creditable and accurate manner, indicates the thoroughness of Marian Evans'
scholarship. Though she doubtless was somewhat inclined to accept the
opinions she thus helped to diffuse, yet Miss Simcox tells us that "the
translation of Strauss and the translation of Spinoza were undertaken, not
by her own choice but at the call of friendship; in the first place to
complete what some one else was unable to continue, and in the second to
make the philosopher she admired accessible to a friendly phrenologist
who did not read Latin. At all times she regarded translation as a work
that should be undertaken as a duty, to make accessible any book that
required to be read; and though undoubtedly she was satisfied that the
_Leben Jesu_ required to be read in England, it would be difficult to
imagine a temper more naturally antipathetic to her than that of its
author; and critics who talk about the 'Strauss and Feuerbach period'
should be careful to explain that the phrase covers no implication that
she was at anytime an admirer or a disciple of Strauss. There are extremes
not only too remote but too disparate to be included in the same life."

Marian Evans did not become an admirer or disciple of Strauss, probably
because she preferred Charles Hennell's interpretation of Christianity, It
is certain, however, that she was greatly affected by Feuerbach, and that
his influence was ever after strongly marked in her thinking. The teachings
of Charles Bray and Charles Hennell had prepared her for the reception of
those of Feuerbach, and he in turn made her mind responsive to the more
systematic philosophy of Comte. Bray had taught her, along with Kant, to
regard all knowledge as subjective, while Hennell and her other friends had
shown her the objective falsity of Christianity. Thus her mind was made
ready for Feuerbach's leading principle, that all religion is a product of
the mind and has no outward reality corresponding to its doctrines.
According to Feuerbach, the mind creates for itself objective images
corresponding to its subjective states, reproduces its feelings in the
outward world. In reality there is no objective fact corresponding to these
subjective ideas, but what the mind conceives to exist is a necessary
product of its own activity. The mind necessarily believes in God, which is
man's way of conceiving his species and realizing to himself the perfect
type of his own nature. God does not exist, and yet he is a true picture of
man's soul, a necessary product of his feeling and consciousness. All
religious ideas are true subjectively, and Christianity especially
corresponds to the inward wants and aspirations of the soul. To Feuerbach
it is true as a poetic interpretation of feeling and sentiment, and to him
it gives the noblest and truest conception of what the soul needs for its
inward satisfaction.

The influence of Feuerbach is to be seen in the profound interest which
Marian Evans ever took in the subject of religion. That influence alone
explains how it was possible for one who did not accept any religious
doctrines as true, who did not believe in God or immortality, and who
rejected Christianity as a historic or dogmatic faith, to accept so much as
she did of the better spirit of religion and to be so keenly in sympathy
with it. It was from the general scepticism and rationalism of the times
she learned to reject all religion as false to truth and as not giving a
just interpretation of life and its facts. It was from Feuerbach she
learned how great is the influence of religion, how necessary it is to
man's welfare, and how profoundly it answers to the wants of the soul. Like
so many keen minds of the century, she rejected, with a sweeping
scepticism, all on which a spiritual religion rests, all its facts,
arguments and reasons. She knew only nature and man; inspiration,
revelation, a spiritual world, had no existence for her. Yet she believed
most thoroughly in religion, accepted its phenomena, was deeply moved by
its spiritual aims, yearned after its perfect self-renunciation. Religion
was to her, however, a purely subjective experience; it gave her a larger
realization of the wants of humanity, it revealed to her the true nature of
feeling. To Feuerbach she owed this capacity to appreciate Christianity, to
rejoice in its spiritual aims, and even to accept it as a true
interpretation of the soul's wants, at the same time that she totally
rejected it as fact and dogma.

In the spring of 1851 she was invited to London by John Chapman, to assist
him in the editorship of the _Westminster Review_, Chapman had been the
publisher of her translations, and she had met him in London when on the
way to the continent the year before. He was the publisher of a large
number of idealistic and positivist works, representing the outspoken and
radical sentiment of the time. The names of Fichte, Emerson, Parker,
Francis Newnian, Cousin, Ewald, H. Martineau, and others of equal note,
appeared on his list. The _Westminster Review_ was devoted to scientific
and positivist views, and was the organ of such writers as Mill, Spencer,
Lewes and Miss Martineau. It was carefully edited, had an able list of
contributors, but its advanced philosophical position did not give it a
wide circle of readers. It gave careful reviews of books, and had able
departments devoted to the literature of each of the leading countries.
Marian Evans did much of the labor in preparing these departments and in
writing special book reviews. Her work was thoroughly done, and shows wide
reading and patient effort. Her position brought her the acquaintance of
a distinguished and brilliant company of men and women. Under this
influence her powers widened, and she quickly showed herself the peer of
the ablest among them. Herbert Spencer has said that at this time she was
"distinguished by that breadth of culture and universality of power which
have since made her known to all the world." We are told by another that
"her strength of intellect, her scholarship and varied accomplishments, and
the personal charm of her manner and conversation, made a deep impression
on all who wore thrown into her society."

Dr. Chapman then lived in the Strand, and Marian Evans became a member of
his family, sharing in its interests as well as in its labors. She was
extremely simple in her habits, went but very little into society, and gave
herself almost exclusively to her duties and to metaphysical studies. A
fortnightly gathering of the contributors to the _Review_ was held in Mr.
Chapman's house, and on these occasions she came to know most of the
scientific and positivist thinkers of England at that time. Harriet
Martineau invited her to Ambleside, and she was a frequent guest at the
London residence of Sir James and Lady Clarke. She visited George Combe and
his wife at Edinburgh in October, 1852, going to Ambleside on her return.

While assisting Mr. Chapman, Marian Evans contributed only one article,
beyond her editorial work, to the pages of the _Westminster Review_. The
work she did, almost wholly that of digesting and reviewing new books,
could have been little to her taste. It must have been a drudgery, except
in so far as it aided her in the pursuit of her studies. Occasionally,
however, she must have found a task to her mind, as when, in the summary of
current English literature for January, 1852. she had Carlyle's _Life of
Sterling_ in hand. Her notice of the book is highly appreciative of
Carlyle's genius, and full of cordial praise. This passage gives her idea
of a true biography:

    We have often wished that genius would incline itself more frequently
    to the task of the biographer,--that when some great or good personage
    dies, instead of the dreary three or five volumed compilations of
    letter, and diary, and detail, little to the purpose, which two-thirds
    of the reading public have not the chance, nor the other third the
    inclination, to read, we could have a real "Life," setting forth
    briefly and vividly the man's inward and outward struggles, aims and
    achievements, so as to make clear the meaning which his experience has
    for his fellows. A few such lives (chiefly, indeed, autobiographies)
    the world possesses, and they have, perhaps, been more influential on
    the formation of character than any other kind of reading. But the
    conditions required for the perfection of life writing,--personal
    intimacy, a loving and poetic nature which sees the beauty and the
    depth of familiar things, and the artistic power which seizes
    characteristic points and renders them with life-like effect,--are
    seldom found in combination. _The Life of Sterling_ is an instance of
    this rare conjunction. Its comparatively tame scenes and incidents
    gather picturesqueness and interest under the rich lights of Carlyle's
    mind. We are told neither too little nor too much; the facts noted, the
    letters selected, are all such as serve to give the liveliest
    conception of what Sterling was and what he did; and though the book
    speaks much of other persons, this collateral matter is all a kind of
    scene-painting, and is accessory to the main purpose.

The earliest of the regular articles, and the only one printed while she
was the associate editor of the _Review_, is on "The Lady Novelists." It
appeared in the number for July, 1852, and contained a striking discussion
of woman's place in literature, a defence of woman's right to occupy that
field she can best cultivate, with a clear and just criticism of several of
the most prominent among lady novelists. She was quite full in her
treatment of Jane Austen and George Sand, praising as well as criticising
with insight and fine discrimination. At the outset she defines literature
as an expression of the emotions, and gives a remarkably clear and original
description of its functions.

Her editorial connection with the _Westminster Review_ continued for about
two years, until the end of 1853. For the next three years she was a
contributor to its pages, where there appeared "Woman in France: Madame de
Sablé," in October, 1854; "Evangelical Teaching: Dr. Cumming," October,
1855; "German Wit: Heinrich Heine," January, 1856; "The Natural History of
German Life," July, 1856; "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists," October, 1856;
and "Worldliness and other-Worldliness: the Poet Young," January, 1857. Two
other articles have been attributed to her pen, but they are of little
value. These are "George Forster," October, 1856, and "Weimar and its
Celebrities," April, 1859. The interest and value of nearly all these
articles are still as great as when they were first published. This will
justify the publication here of numerous extracts from their most salient
and important paragraphs. As indicating her literary judgment, and her
capacity for incisive characterization and clear, trenchant criticism,
reference may be made to the essay on Heine, which is one of the finest
pieces of critical writing the century has produced.

    Heine is one of the most remarkable men of this age; no echo, but a
    real voice, and therefore, like all genuine things in this world, worth
    studying; a surpassing lyric poet, who has uttered our feelings for us
    in delicious song; a humorist, who touches leaden folly with the magic
    wand of his fancy, and transmutes it into the fine gold of art--who
    sheds his sunny smile on human tears, and makes them a beauteous
    rainbow on the cloudy background of life; a wit, who holds in his
    mighty hand the most scorching lightnings of satire; an artist in prose
    literature, who has shown even more completely than Goethe the
    possibilities of German prose; and--in spite of all charges against
    him, true as well as false--a lover of freedom, who has spoken wise and
    brave words on behalf of his fellow-men. He is, moreover, a suffering
    man, who, with all the highly wrought sensibility of genius, has to
    endure terrible physical ills; and as such he calls forth more than an
    intellectual interest. It is true, alas! that there is a heavy weight
    in the other scale--that Heine's magnificent powers have often served
    only to give electric force to the expression of debased feeling, so
    that his works are no Phidian statue of gold, and ivory, and gems, but
    have not a little brass, and iron, and miry clay mingled with the
    precious metal. The audacity of his occasional coarseness and
    personality is unparalleled in contemporary literature, and has hardly
    been exceeded by the license of former days. Yet, when all coarseness,
    all scurrility, all Mephistophelean contempt for the reverent feelings
    of other men, is removed, there will be a plenteous remainder of
    exquisite poetry, of wit, humor and just thought. It is apparently too
    often a congenial task to write severe words about the transgressions
    committed by men of genius, especially when the censor has the
    advantage of being himself a man of _no_ genius, so that those
    transgressions seem to him quite gratuitous; _he_, forsooth, never
    lacerated any one by his wit, or gave irresistible piquancy to a coarse
    allusion, and his indignation is not mitigated by any knowledge of the
    temptation that lies in transcendent power....

    In Heine's hands German prose, usually so heavy, so clumsy, so dull,
    becomes, like clay in the hands of the chemist, compact, metallic,
    brilliant; it is German in an _allotropic_ condition. No dreary,
    labyrinthine sentences in which you find "no end in wandering mazes
    lost;" no chains of adjectives in linked harshness long drawn out; no
    digressions thrown in as parentheses; but crystalline definiteness and
    clearness, fine and varied rhythm, and all that delicate precision,
    all those felicities of word and cadence, which belong to the highest
    order of prose. And Heine has proved that it is possible to be witty
    in German; indeed, in reading him, you might imagine that German was
    pre-eminently the language of wit, so flexible, so subtle, so piquant
    does it become under his management. He is far more an artist in
    prose than Goethe. He has not the breadth and repose, and the calm
    development which belongs to Goethe's style, for they are foreign
    to his mental character; but he excels Goethe in susceptibility to
    the manifold qualities of prose, and in mastery over its effects.
    Heine is full of variety, of light and shadow: he alternates
    between epigrammatic pith, imaginative grace, sly allusion, and
    daring piquancy; and athwart all those there runs a vein of sadness,
    tenderness and grandeur which reveals the poet.

The introduction to this article contains a wise comparison of wit and
humor, and makes a subtle discrimination between them. German wit she finds
is heavy and lacking in nicety of perception; and the German is the only
nation that "had contributed nothing classic to the common stock of
European wit and humor" previous to the present century. In Heine she found
both in a marked degree, so that he is unlike the other writers of Germany,
having a flavor and a spirit quite his own.

Her essays on Dr. Cumming and the poet Young were largely of a theological
character. They are keen in their thrusts at dogmatic religion, sparkling
with witty hits at a make-believe piety, and full of biting sarcasm. Her
entire want of sympathy with the men she dissects, makes her sometimes
unjust to them, and she makes them worse than they really were. The
terrible vigor of her criticism may be seen in her description of Dr.
Cumming and his teaching. She brings three charges against him, and defends
each with ample quotation, wit, sarcasm, argument and eloquence. She finds
in his books unscrupulosity of statement, absence of genuine charity, and a
perverted moral judgment. These essays much resemble Thackeray's dissection
of Swift for their terrible sarcasm, their unmerciful criticism, and their
minute unveiling of human weakness and hypocrisy. It is possible that
Thackeray was her model, as his lecture was first delivered in 1851 or
1852; but, at least, she is not at all his inferior in power to lay bare
the character and tendencies of the men she selected for analysis. Her keen
psychological insight was shown here in a manner as brilliant and as
accurate as in any of her novels. She may have done injustice to the
circumstances under which these men were placed, their religious education,
the social conditions which aided them in the pursuit of the lives they
lived; and she may not have been quite ready enough to deal charitably with
those who were blinded, as these men were, by all their surroundings and by
whatever of culture they received; but she did see into the secret places
of their lives, and laid bare the inner motives of their conduct. It was
because these men came before the world as its teachers, holding up before
it a special ideal and motive for its guidance, that she criticised them.
In reality they were selfish, narrow, worldly; their teaching came from no
deep convictions, nor from a high moral purpose; and hence her criticism.
She laid bare the shallowness of their thoughts, the selfishness of their
purposes, and the spiritual unfruitfulness of their teachings. Criticism so
unsparing and so just, because based on the most searching insight into
character and conduct, it would be difficult to find elsewhere.

    Dr. Cumming's mind is evidently not of the pietistic order. There is
    not the slightest leaning towards mysticism in his Christianity--no
    indication of religious raptures, of delight in God, of spiritual
    communion with the Father. He is most at home in the forensic view of
    justification, and dwells on salvation as a scheme rather than as an
    experience. He insists on good works as the sign of justifying faith,
    as labors to be achieved to the glory of God, but he rarely represents
    them as the spontaneous, necessary outflow of a soul filled with divine
    love. He is at home in the external, the polemical, the historical, the
    circumstantial, and is only episodically devout and practical. The
    great majority of his published sermons are occupied with argument or
    philippic against Romanists and unbelievers, with vindications of the
    Bible, with the political interpretation of prophecy, or the criticism
    of public events; and the devout aspiration, or the spiritual and
    practical exhortation, is tacked to them as a sort of fringe in a
    hurried sentence or two at the end. He revels in the demonstration that
    the Pope is the Man of Sin; he is copious on the downfall of the
    Ottoman empire; he appears to glow with satisfaction in turning a story
    which tends to show how he abashed an "infidel;" it is a favorite
    exercise with him to form conjectures of the process by which the earth
    is to be burned up, and to picture Dr. Chalmers and Mr. Wilberforce
    being caught up to meet Christ in the air, while Romanists, Puseyites
    and infidels are given over to gnashing of teeth. But of really
    spiritual joys and sorrows, of the life and death of Christ as a
    manifestation of love that constrains the soul, of sympathy with that
    yearning over the lost and erring which made Jesus weep over Jerusalem,
    and prompted the sublime prayer, "Father, forgive them," of the gentler
    fruits of the Spirit, and the peace of God which passeth
    understanding--of all this, we find little trace in Dr. Cumming's
    discourses.

Even more severe is her account of the poet Young. She speaks of him as "a
remarkable individual of the species _divine_." This is her account of his
life:

    He is on the verge of fifty, and has recently undergone his
    metamorphosis into the clerical form. Rather a paradoxical specimen, if
    you observe him narrowly: a sort of cross between a sycophant and a
    psalmist, a poet whose imagination is alternately fired by the "Last
    Day" and by a creation of peers, who fluctuate between rhapsodic
    applause of King George and rhapsodic applause of Jehovah. After
    spending "a foolish youth, the sport of peers and poets," after being a
    hanger-on of the profligate Duke of Wharton, after aiming in vain at a
    parliamentary career, and angling for pensions and preferment with
    fulsome dedications and fustian odes, he is a little disgusted with his
    imperfect success, and has determined to retire from the general
    mendicancy business to a particular branch; in other words, he has
    determined on that renunciation of the world implied in "taking
    orders," with the prospect of a good living and an advantageous
    matrimonial connection. And no man can be better fitted for an
    Established Church. He personifies completely her nice balance of
    temporalities and spiritualities. He is equally impressed with the
    momentousness of death and of burial fees; he languishes at once for
    immortal life and for "livings;" he has a vivid attachment to patrons
    in general, but on the whole prefers the Almighty. He will teach, with
    something more than official conviction, the nothingness of earthly
    things; and he will feel something more than private disgust if his
    meritorious efforts in directing man's attention to another world are
    not rewarded by substantial preferment in this. His secular man
    believes in cambric bands and silk stockings as characteristic attire
    for "an ornament of religion and virtue;" hopes courtiers will never
    forgot to copy Sir Robert Walpole; and writes begging letters to the
    King's mistress. His spiritual man recognizes no motives more familiar
    than Golgotha and the skies; it walks in graveyards, or it soars among
    the stars. His religion exhausts itself in ejaculations and rebukes,
    and knows no medium between the ecstatic and the sententious. If it
    were not for the prospect of immortality, he considers it would be wise
    and agreeable to be indecent or to murder one's father; and, heaven
    apart, it would be extremely irrational in any man not to be a knave.
    Man, he thinks, is a compound of the angel and the brute; the brute is
    to be humbled by being reminded of its "relation to the stalls," and
    frightened into moderation by the contemplation of death-beds and
    skulls; the angel is to be developed by vituperating this world and
    exalting the next; and by this double process you get the
    Christian--"the highest style of man." With all this, our new-made
    divine is an unmistakable poet. To a clay compounded chiefly of the
    worldling and the rhetorician, there is added a real spark of
    Promethean fire. He will one day clothe his apostrophes and
    objurgations, his astronomical religion and his charnel-house morality,
    in lasting verse, which will stand, like a Juggernaut made of gold and
    jewels, at once magnificent and repulsive; for this divine is Edward
    Young, the future author of _Night Thoughts_.

She says, "One of the most striking characteristics of Young is his
_radical insincerity as a poetic artist_."

    Indeed, we remember no mind in poetic literature that seems to have
    absorbed less of the beauty and the healthy breath of the common
    landscape than Young's. His images, often grand and finely presented,
    lie almost entirely within that circle of observation which would be
    familiar to a man who lived in town, hung about the theatres, read the
    newspaper, and went home often by moon and star light. There is no
    natural object nearer than the moon that seems to have any strong
    attraction for him, and even to the moon he chiefly appeals for
    patronage, and "pays his court" to her.... He describes nothing so well
    as a comet, and is tempted to linger with fond detail over nothing more
    familiar than the day of judgment and an imaginary journey among the
    stars.... The adherence to abstractions, or to the personification of
    abstractions, is closely allied in Young to the _want of genuine
    emotion_. He sees Virtue sitting on a mount serene, far above the mists
    and storms of earth: he sees Religion coming down from the skies, with
    this world in her left hand and the other world in her right; but we
    never find him dwelling on virtue or religion as it really exists--in
    the emotions of a man dressed in an ordinary coat, and seated by his
    fireside of an evening, with his hand resting on the head of his little
    daughter, in courageous effort for unselfish ends, in the internal
    triumph of justice and pity over personal resentment, in all the
    sublime self-renunciation and sweet charities which are found in the
    details of ordinary life.

In these essays there are various indications of her religious opinions,
and those of a decided character. In that on Dr. Cumming, she has this word
to say of the rationalistic conception of the Bible:

    He seems to be ignorant, or he chooses to ignore the fact, that there
    is a large body of eminently instructed and earnest men who regard the
    Hebrew and Christian scriptures as a series of historical documents, to
    be dealt with according to the rules of historical criticism, and that
    an equally large number of men, who are not historical critics, find
    the dogmatic scheme built on the letter of the scriptures, opposed to
    their profoundest moral convictions.

This statement is suggestive of her position on religious subjects:

    The best minds that accept Christianity as a divinely inspired system,
    believe that the great end of the Gospel is not merely the saving but
    the educating of men's souls, the creating within them of holy
    dispositions, the subduing of egoistical pretensions, and the perpetual
    enhancing of the desire that the will of God--a will synonymous with
    goodness and truth--may be done on earth. But what relation to all this
    has a system of interpretation which keeps the mind of the Christian in
    the position of a spectator at a gladiatorial show, of which Satan is
    the wild beast in the shape of a great red dragon, and two thirds of
    mankind the victims--the whole provided and got up by God for the
    edification of the saints?

She calls Dr. Cumming's teachings "the natural crop of a human mind where
the soil is chiefly made up of egoistic passions and dogmatic beliefs."
Then she deals with that belief in this trenchant fashion:

    Happily, the constitution of human nature forbids the complete
    prevalence of such a theory. Fatally powerful as religious systems have
    been, human nature is stronger and wider than religious systems, and
    though dogmas may hamper, they cannot absolutely repress its growth:
    build walls around the living tree as you will, the bricks and mortar
    have by and by to give way before the slow and sure operation of the
    sap. But next to the hatred of the enemies of God which is the
    principle of persecution, there perhaps has been no perversion more
    obstructive of true moral development than this substitution of a
    reference to the glory of God for the direct promptings of the
    sympathetic feelings. Benevolence and justice are strong only in
    proportion as they are directly and inevitably called into activity by
    their proper objects; pity is strong only because we are strongly
    impressed by suffering; and only in proportion as it is compassion that
    speaks through the eyes when we soothe, and moves the arm when we
    succor, is a deed strictly benevolent. If the soothing or the succor be
    given because another being wishes or approves it, the deed ceases to
    be one of benevolence, and becomes one of deference, of obedience, of
    self-interest, or vanity. Accessory motives may aid in producing an
    action, but they presuppose the weakness of the direct motive; and
    conversely, when the direct motive is strong, the actions of accessory
    motives will be excluded.

In writing of Young she says,--

    The God of the _Night Thoughts_ is simply Young himself "writ large"--a
    didactic poet, who "lectures" mankind in the antithetic hyperbole of
    mortal and immortal joys, earth and the stars, hell and heaven, and
    expects the tribute of inexhaustible applause. Young has no conception
    of religion as anything else than egoism turned heavenward; and he does
    not merely imply this, he insists on it.

She contrasts Young with Cowper, preferring the latter because he dwells
more on the things of a common and simple life.

    In Young we have the type of that deficient human sympathy, that
    impiety toward the present and the visible, which flies for its
    motives, its sanctities, and its religion, to the remote, the vague and
    unknown: in Cowper we have the type of that genuine love which
    cherishes things in proportion to their nearness, and feels its
    reverence grow in proportion to the intimacy of its knowledge.

This warm human sympathy is all she cares for in religion.

    See how a lovely, sympathetic nature manifests itself in spite of creed
    and circumstance! Where is the poem that surpasses the _Task_ in the
    genuine love it breathes, at once toward inanimate and animate
    existence--in truthfulness of perception and sincerity of
    presentation--in the calm gladness that springs from a delight in
    objects for their own sake, without self-reference--in divine sympathy
    with the lowliest pleasures, with the most shortlived capacity for
    pain? Here is no railing at the earth's "melancholy map," but the
    happiest lingering over her simplest scenes with all the fond
    minuteness that belongs to love; no pompous rhetoric about the
    inferiority of the brutes, but a warm plea on their behalf against
    man's inconsiderateness and cruelty, and a sense of enlarged happiness
    from their companionship in enjoyment; no vague rant about human misery
    and human virtue, but that close and vivid presentation of particular
    deeds and misdeeds, which is the direct road to the emotions. How
    Cowper's exquisite mind falls with the mild warmth of morning sunlight
    on the commonest objects, at once disclosing every detail and investing
    every detail with beauty! No object is too small to prompt his song--
    not the sooty film on the bars, or the spoutless teapot holding a bit
    of mignonette that serves to cheer the dingy town lodging with a "hint
    that nature lives;" and yet his song is never trivial, for he is alive
    to small objects, not because his mind is narrow, but because his
    glance is clear and his heart is large.

Her contributions to the _Westminster Review_ indicate that Marian Evans
had read much and well, and that she was possessed of a thoroughly
cultivated mind and much learning. To their preparation she gave herself
diligently, writing slowly, after a careful study of her subject and much
thought devoted to a faithful thinking out of all its parts. It has been
many times suggested that these articles gave indication only of learning
and studious effort. They certainly give strong hint of these, but also of
much more. That on human life shows how much she had thought, and how
thoroughly and philosophically, on one of the largest problems; while the
one on Heine indicates her penetrating literary judgment and her capacity
for analysis and interpretation. These essays are not mere compilations,
mere digests of learned information; they are studies of large subjects
done in a large and inspiring manner. Her essays on the poet Young and Dr.
Cumming, and the two on lady novelists, as well as that on Heine, show many
indications of that subtle power and that true genius which were displayed
in her later work. There was genius displayed in these articles, without
doubt, and genius of a high order. It was genius not as yet aware of
itself, and not yet at the height of its power and capable of its truest
expression, but genius nevertheless. Many of the most striking
characteristics of her novel-writing were shown in these essays. Here was
the same love of common human life; the same interest in its humbler forms
and expressions; the like penetrating analysis and subtle portrayal of
character; a psychological method of the same probing and comprehensive
nature. Her main philosophical ideas were indicated here, though not given
that clear and incisive expression they afterwards received. When she wrote
of the natural history of German life she indicated in the very title of
her essay one of her main theories, and her conception of man as a social
being was brought out in it. These essays fully indicate that her opinions
were already formed, that the leading ideas she was to give expression to
in her novels had been arrived at by diligent study and thought, and that
she had equipped herself with ample reasons for the acceptance of the
opinions she held. Their chief defect is in their occasional arrogance of
expression, as if the writer had not yet wholly escaped the superior airs
of the young woman elated with the greatness of her knowledge, and a
certain rudeness and vehemence of statement not seen later. It is a defect
that is not very prominent, but one that is apparent enough to mar some of
the best of these pages. It was one she never wholly outgrew, though in her
novels her large information was usually so managed and subordinated as to
give little annoyance to the intelligent reader.

It must be quite evident to any reader of her _Westminster Review_
contributions, that Marian Evans would never have attained to any such high
literary eminence as an essayist as that which she has secured as a
novelist. Readable as are her essays,--and the five just named are
certainly worthy of a place in her complete works,--yet they are not of the
highest order. She could attain the highest range of her power only when
something far more subtile and intrinsic was concerned. That this is true
may be seen in these essays; for even here she writes the best only when
she has human motives, feelings and aspirations to weigh and explain. That
she could dissect and explain the inner man they made apparent enough; but
her genius demanded also the opportunity to create, to build up a life of
high beauty and purpose from materials of its own construction. Her
_Review_ articles gave her a high place in the eyes of her friends, and
their chief value seems to have been, that they caused these friends to see
that she could do other and better work, and led them to induce her to
apply her genius in a direction more congenial to its capacity.




III.


MARRIAGE.

In 1853 Marian Evans became the wife of George Henry Lewes. He had married
at an early ago a woman possessed of many charms of person. They went to
live in a large house at Kensington with five other young couples, keeping
house on a co-operative arrangement, with many attractions of social
entertainment therewith. One result was the desertion of her home by Mrs.
Lewes in connection with one of the men into whose company she was
constantly thrown by this manner of life. She soon repented, and Lewes
forgave her, receiving her back to his home. A second time, however, she
left him. His having condoned her fault made it impossible for him to
secure a divorce according to the laws of England at that time. He seems to
have done what he could to retain her faithful devotion to her marriage
relations, so long as that seemed possible.

When Lewes and Marian Evans met, on her going to live in London, and after
his wife had deserted him, there sprang up a strong attachment between
them, As they could not be legally married, she agreed to live with him
without that formality.

It is to be said of this affair that George Eliot was very far from looking
at such a problem as Goethe or, George Sand would have looked at it, from
the position of personal inclination. Yet we are told by Miss Blind that
she early entertained liberal views in regard to divorce, believing that
greater freedom in this respect is desirable. There could have been no
passionate individualistic defiance of law in her case, however. No one has
insisted more strongly than she on the importance and the sanctity of the
social regulations in regard to the union of the sexes. That her marriage
was a true one in all but the legal form, that she was faithful to its
every social obligation, has been abundantly shown. She was a most faithful
wife to Lewes, and the devoted mother of his three children by the previous
marriage, while she found in him that strong, self-reliant helpmate she
needed.

Her marriage under these circumstances required no little individualism of
purpose, and some defiance of social obligations. Her intimate friends were
unable to comprehend her conduct, and she was alienated from most of them.
Especially her friends in Coventry were annoyed at such a marriage, and
were not reconciled with her for a long time, and not until they saw that
she had acted with a conscientious purpose. She was excluded from society
by this act, and her marriage was interpreted as a gross violation of
social morality. To a sensitive nature, as hers assuredly was, and to one
who so much valued the confidence of her friends as she did, such exclusion
must have been a serious cross. She freely elected her own course in life,
however, and she never seems to have complained at the results it brought
her. That it saddened her mind seems probable, but there is no outward
evidence that she accepted her lot in a bitter or complaining spirit. No
one could have written of love and marriage in so high and pure a spirit as
everywhere appears in her books with whom passion was in any degree a
controlling influence. In _Adam Bede_ her own conception of wedded love is
expressed out of the innermost convictions and impulses of her own heart,
when she exclaims,--

    What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they
    are joined for life--to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on
    each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be
    one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the
    last parting.

In _Felix Holt_ there is a passage on this subject which must have come
directly from her own experience, and it gives us a true insight into the
spirit in which she accepted the distrust of friends and the coldness of
the world which her marriage brought her.

    A supreme love, 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.

Throughout her novels she exalts marriage, never casts any slur upon it,
treats it as one of the most sacred of all human relations. She makes it
appear as a sacrament, not of the Church, but of the sublime fellowship of
humanity. It is pure, holy, a binding tie, a sacred obligation, as it
appears in her books. When Romola is leaving Florence and her husband, her
love dead and all that made her life seem worthy gone with it, she meets
Savonarola, who bids her return to her home and its duties. What the great
prophet-priest says on this occasion we have every reason to believe
expressed the true sentiments of George Eliot herself. He proclaims, what
she doubtless thoroughly believed, that marriage is something far more than
mere affection, more than love; that its obligation holds when all love is
gone; that its obligation is so sacred and binding as to call for the
fullest measure of renunciation and personal humiliation. As throwing light
on George Eliot's manner of looking at this subject, the whole chapter
which describes the meeting of Romola and Savonarola deserves to be read.
That portion of it in which Savonarola gives his views of marriage may here
be reproduced, not as giving the doctrine of the Church, but as presenting
the positivist conception of marriage as interpreted by George Eliot.

    His arresting voice had brought a new condition into her life, which
    made it seem impossible toiler that she could go on her way as if she
    had not heard it; yet she shrank as one who sees the path she must
    take, but sees, too, that the hot lava lies there. And the instinctive
    shrinking from a return to her husband brought doubts. She turned away
    her eyes from Fra Girolamo, and stood for a minute or two with her
    hands hanging clasped before her, like a statue. At last she spoke, as
    if the words were being wrung from her, still looking on the ground.

    "My husband--he is not--my love is gone!"

    "My daughter, there is the bond of a higher love. Marriage is not
    carnal only, made for selfish delight. See what that thought leads you
    to! It leads you to wander away in a false garb from all the
    obligations of your place and name. That would not have been if you had
    learned that it is a sacramental vow, from which none but God can
    release you. My daughter, your life is not as a grain of sand, to be
    blown by the winds; it is as flesh and blood, that dies if it be
    sundered. Your husband is not a malefactor?"

    Romola flushed and started. "Heaven forbid! No; I accuse him of
    nothing."

    "I did not suppose he was a malefactor. I meant that if he were a
    malefactor your place would be in the prison beside him. My daughter,
    if the cross comes to you as a wife, you must carry it as a wife. You
    may say, 'I will forsake my husband,' but you cannot cease to be a
    wife."

    "Yet if--oh, how could I bear--" Romola had involuntarily begun to say
    something which she sought to banish from her mind again.

    "Make your marriage sorrows an offering, too, my daughter: an offering
    to the great work by which sin and sorrow are being made to cease.
    The end is sure, and is already beginning. Here in Florence it is
    beginning, and the eyes of faith behold it. And it may be our
    blessedness to die for it: to die daily by the crucifixion of our
    selfish will--to die at last by laying our bodies on the altar. My
    daughter, you are a child of Florence; fulfil the duties of that great
    inheritance. Live for Florence--for your own people, whom God is
    preparing to bless the earth. Bear the anguish and the smart. The iron
    is sharp--I know, I know--it rends the tender flesh. The draught is
    bitterness on the lips. But there is rapture in the cup--there is the
    vision which makes all life below it dross forever. Come, my daughter,
    come back to your place!" [Footnote: Chapter XL.]

Again, when Dorothea goes to see Rosamond to intercede in Dr. Lydgate's
behalf with his wife, we have an expression of the sacredness of marriage,
and the renunciation it demands of all that is opposed to its trust and
helpfulness. Dorothea says,--

    "Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful
    in the nearness it brings. Even if we loved some one else better
    than--than those we were married to, it would be of no use"--poor
    Dorothea, in her palpitating anxiety, could only seize her language
    brokenly--"I mean, marriage drinks up all our power of giving or
    getting any blessedness in that sort of love. I know it may be very
    dear--but it murders our marriage--and then the marriage stays with us
    like a murder--and everything else is gone. And then our husband--if he
    loved and trusted us, and we have not helped him, but made a curse in
    his life--"

If Marian Evans rejected the sanctions which society has imposed on the
love of man and woman in the legal forms of marriage, it was not in a
wilful and passionate spirit. There are reasons for believing that she was
somewhat touched in her youth with the individualistic theories of the
time, which made so many men and women of genius reject the restraints
imposed by society, as in the case of Goethe, Heine, George Sand, Shelley
and many another; yet she does not appear to have been to more than a very
limited extent influenced by such considerations in regard to her own
marriage. The matter for surprise is, that one who regarded all human
traditions, ceremonies and social obligations as sacred, should have
consented to act in so individualistic a manner. She makes Rufus Lyon
say--and it is her own opinion--that "the right to rebellion is the right
to seek a higher rule, and not to wander in mere lawlessness." Her
marriage, after the initial act, had in it nothing whatever of lawlessness.
She believed there exists a higher rule than that of Parliament, and to
this higher law she submitted. To her this was not a law of self-will and
personal inclination, but the law of nature and social obligation. That she
was not overcome by the German individualistic and social tendencies may be
seen in the article on "Weimar and its Celebrities," in the _Westminster
Review_, where, in writing of Wieland as an educator, she says that the
tone of his books was not "immaculate," and that it was "strangely at
variance, with that sound and lofty morality which ought to form the basis
of every education." She also speaks of the philosophy of that day as "the
delusive though plausible theory that no license of tone, or warmth of
coloring, could injure any really healthy and high-toned mind." In the
article on "Woman in France," she touches on similar theories. As this
article was written just at the time of her marriage, one passage in it may
have a personal interest, and shows her conception of a marriage such as
her own, based on intellectual interest rather than on passionate love. She
is speaking of

    the laxity of opinion and practice with regard to the marriage tie.
    Heaven forbid [she adds] that we should enter on a defence of French
    morals, most of all in relation to marriage! But it is undeniable that
    unions formed in the maturity of thought and feeling, grounded only on
    inherent fitness and mutual attraction, tended to bring women into more
    intelligent sympathy with men, and to heighten and complicate their
    share in the political drama. The quiescence and security of the
    conjugal relation are, doubtless, favorable to the manifestation of the
    highest qualities by persons who have already attained a high standard
    of culture, but rarely foster a passion sufficient to rouse all the
    faculties to aid in winning or retaining its beloved object--to convert
    indolence into activity, indifference into ardent partisanship, dulness
    into perspicuity.

Her conception of marriage may have been affected by that presented by
Feuerbach in his _Essence of Christianity_. In words translated into
English by herself, Feuerbach says, "that alone is a religious marriage
which is a true marriage, which corresponds to the essence of
marriage--love." Again, he says that marriage is only sacred when it is an
inward attraction confirmed by social and personal obligations; "for a
marriage the bond of which is merely an external restriction, not the
voluntary, contented self-restriction of love--in short, a marriage which
is not spontaneously concluded, spontaneously willed, self-sufficing--is
not a true marriage, and therefore not a truly moral marriage." As a moral
and social obligation, marriage is to be held sacred; its sacredness grows
out of its profound human elements of helpfulness, nurture and emotional
satisfaction, while its obligation rises from its primary social
functions. It does not consist in any legal form, but in compliance with
deep moral and social responsibilities. Some such conception of marriage
as this she seems to have accepted, which found its obligation in the
satisfaction it gives to the inner nature, and in the fulfilment of social
responsibilities. The influence of Compte may also have been felt in the
case of both Lewes and Marian Evans; they saw in the marriage form a
fulfilment of human, not of legal, requirements.

While there is no doubt they would both gladly have accepted the legal
form had that been possible, yet they were sufficiently out of sympathy
with the conventionalities of society to cause them to disregard that form
when it could not be complied with. They regarded themselves, however, as
married, and bound by all the ties and requirements which marriage
imposes. They proclaimed themselves to their friends as husband and wife,
and they were so accepted by those who knew them. In her letters to
literary correspondents she always mentioned Lewes as "my husband." The
laws of most civilized nations recognize these very conditions, and
regard the acceptance of the marriage relation before the world as a
sufficient form.

Those who have written of this marriage, bear testimony to its devotion
and beauty. The author of the account of her life and writings in the
_Westminster Review_, an early and intimate friend, says the "union was
from the first regarded by themselves as a true marriage, as an alliance
of a sacred kind, having a binding and permanent character. When the fact
of the union was first made known to a few intimate friends, it was
accompanied with the assurance that its permanence was already irrevocably
decreed. The marriage of true hearts for a quarter of a century has
demonstrated the sincerity of the intention. 'The social sanction,' said
Mr. Lewes once in our hearing, 'is always desirable.' There are cases in
which it is not always to be had. Such a ratification of the sacrament of
affection was regarded as a sufficient warrant, under the circumstances of
the case, for entrance on the most sacred engagement of life. There was
with her no misgiving, no hesitation, no looking back, no regret; but
always the unostentatious assertion of quiet, matronly dignity, the most
queenly expression and unconscious affirmation of the 'divine right' of
the wedded wife. We have heard her own oral testimony to the enduring
happiness of this union, and can, as privileged witnesses, corroborate it.
As a necessary element in this happiness she practically included the
enjoyment inseparable from the spontaneous reciprocation of home
affection, meeting with an almost maternal love the filial devotion of Mr.
Lewes's sons, proffering all tender service in illness, giving and
receiving all friendly confidence in her own hour of sorrowful
bereavement, and crowning with a final act of generous love and
forethought the acceptance of parental responsibilities in the
affectionate distribution of property, the visible result of years of the
intellectual toil whose invisible issues are endless."

Their marriage helped both to a more perfect work and to a truer life. She
gave poise and purpose to the "versatile, high-strung, somewhat wayward
nature" of her husband, and she "restrained, raised, ennobled, and
purified" his life and thought. He stimulated and directed her genius life
into its true channel, cared for her business interests with untiring
faithfulness, made it possible for her to pursue her work without burdens
and distractions, and gave her the inspiration of a noble affection and a
cheerful home. Miss Edith Simcox speaks of "the perfect union between
these two," which, she says, "lent half its charm to all the worship paid
at the shrine of George Eliot." She herself, Miss Simcox proceeds to say,
"has spoken somewhere of the element of almost natural tenderness in a
man's protecting love: this patient, unwearying care for which no trifles
are too small, watched over her own life; he stood between her and the
world, her relieved her from all those minor cares which chafe and fret
the artist's soul; he wrote her letters; in a word, he so smoothed the
course of her outer life as to leave all her powers free to do what she
alone could do for the world and for the many who looked to her for help
and guidance. No doubt this devotion brought its own reward; but we are
exacting for our idols and do not care to have even a generous error to
condone, and therefore we are glad to know that, great as his reward was,
it was no greater than was merited by the most perfect love that ever
crowned a woman's life." Mr. Kegan Paul also writes of the mutual
helpfulness and harmony of purpose which grew out of this marriage. "Mr.
Lewes's character attained a stability and pose in which it had been
somewhat lacking, and the quiet of an orderly and beautiful home enabled
him to concentrate himself more and more on works demanding sustained
intellectual effort, while Mrs. Lewes's intensely feminine nature found
the strong man on whom to lean in the daily business of life, for which
she was physically and intellectually unfitted. Her own somewhat sombre
cast of thought was cheered, enlivened and diversified by the vivacity and
versatility which characterized Mr. Lewes, and made him seem less like an
Englishman than a very agreeable foreigner."

This marriage presents one of the curious ethical problems of literature.
In this case approval and condemnation are alike difficult. Her own
teaching condemns it; her own life approves it. We could wish it had not
been, for the sake of what is purest and best; and yet it is not difficult
to see that its effects were in many ways beneficial to her. That it was
ethically wrong there is no doubt. That it was condemned by her own
teaching is so plain as to cause doubt about how she could herself approve
it.

Lewes had a brilliant and versatile mind. He was not a profound thinker,
but he had keen literary tastes, a vigorous interest in science, and a
remarkable alertness of intellect. His gifts were varied rather than deep;
literary rather than philosophical. As a companion, he had a wonderful
charm and magnetism; he was a graceful talker, a marvellous story-teller,
and a wit seldom rivalled. His intimate friend, Anthony Trollope, says,
"There was never a man so pleasant as he with whom to sit and talk vague
literary gossip over a cup of coffee and a cigar." By the same friend we
are told that no man related a story as he did. "No one could say that he
was handsome. The long bushy hair, and the thin cheeks, and the heavy
mustache, joined as they were, alas! almost always to a look of sickness,
were not attributes of beauty. But there was a brilliance in his eye which
was not to be tamed by any sickness, by any suffering, which overcame all
other feeling on looking at him."

George Henry Lewes was born in London, April 18, 1817. His grandfather was
a well-known comedian. His education was received in a very desultory
manner. He was at school for a time in Jersey, and also in Brittany, where
he acquired a thorough command of French. Later he attended a famous school
in Greenwich, kept by a Dr. Burney. After leaving school he went into a
notary's office, and then he became a clerk to a Russia merchant. His mind
was, however, attracted to scientific and philosophic studies, and he
betrayed little interest either in the law or in commercial pursuits. Then
he took up the study of medicine, giving thorough attention to anatomy and
physiology. It is said that his horror of the dissecting-room was so great
as to cause him to abandon the purpose to become a physician. All this time
his mind was steadily drawn to philosophy, and he gave as much time to it
as he could. The bent, of his mind was early developed, and in 1836, when
only nineteen, he had projected a treatise on the philosophy of mind, in
which he proposed to give a physiological interpretation to the doctrines
of Reid, Stewart and Brown. At the age of twenty he gave a course of
lectures on this subject; and to this line of thought he held ever after.
One of the influences which led to his departure from a strict
interpretation of the Scotch metaphysicians was the influence of Spinoza.
As indicating the eagerness with which he pursued his studies in all
directions, and the earnestness of his purpose at so early an age, his own
account of a club he attended at this time [Footnote: Fortnightly Review,
April 1,1866, introductory to the article on Spinoza.] may be mentioned. In
this account he describes a Jew by the name of Cohen, who first introduced
him to the study of Spinoza, and who has mistakenly been supposed to be the
original of Mordecai in _Daniel Deronda_.

The sixth member of this club, who "studied anatomy and many other things,
with vast aspirations, and no very definite career before him," was Lewes
himself, in all probability. His eager desire for knowledge took him to
Germany in 1838, where he remained for two years in the same desultory
study of many subjects. He became thoroughly acquainted with the German
language and life, and gave much attention to German literature and
philosophy. On his return to England, Lewes entered upon his literary
career, which was remarkable for its versatility and productiveness. In
1841 he wrote "The Noble Heart," a three-act tragedy, published in 1852.
His studies of Spinoza found expression in one of the first essays on the
subject published in England. In 1843, he published in the _Westminster
Review_ his conclusions on that thinker. His essay was reprinted in a
separate form, attracting much attention, and in 1846 was incorporated into
a larger work, the result of his studies in Germany and of his interest in
philosophy. In 1845, at the age of twenty-nine, he published a history of
philosophy, in which he undertook to criticise all metaphysical systems
from the inductive and scientific point of view. This work was his
_Biographical History of Philosophy_. It appeared in four small volumes in
Knight's weekly series of popular books devoted to the diffusion of
knowledge among the people. Lewes touched a popular demand in this book,
reaching the wants of many readers. He continued through many years to
elaborate his studies on these subjects and to re-work his materials. New
and enlarged editions, each time making the book substantially a new one,
were published in 1857, in 1867 and in 1871. No solid book of the century
has sold better; and it has been translated into several continental
languages.

Lewes did not confine himself to philosophy. Other and very different
subjects also attracted his attention. His mind ranged in many directions,
and his flexible genius found subjects of interest on all sides. In 1846 he
published a little book on _The Spanish Drama: Lope de Vega and Calderon_,
a slight affair, full of his peculiar prejudices, and devoted mainly to an
unsympathetic criticism. The following year he gave to the world an
ambitious novel, _Ranthorpe_. It seems to have been well read in its day,
was translated into German and reprinted on the continent by Tauchnitz. The
plot is well conceived, but the story is rapidly told, full of incident and
tragedy, and there is a subtle air of unreality about it. The experiences
of a poet are unfolded in a romantic form, and the attempt is made to show
what is the true purpose and spirit in which literature can be successfully
pursued. To this end there is a discussion running through the book on the
various phases of the literary life, much in the manner of Fielding.
_Ranthorpe_ would now be regarded as a very dull novel, and it is crude,
full of the sensational, with little analysis of character and much action.

It was read, however, by Charlotte Brontë with great interest, and she
wrote of it to the author in these words: "In reading _Ranthorpe_ I have
read a new book--not a reprint--not a reflection of any other book, but _a
new book_. I did not know such books were written now. It is very different
to any of the popular works of fiction; it fills the mind with fresh
knowledge. Your experience and your convictions are made the reader's; and
to an author, at least, they have a value and an interest quite unusual."
In 1848, Lewes published another novel of a very different kind--_Rose,
Blanche and Violet_. This was a society novel, intended to reach the minds
of the ordinary novel-readers, but was not so successful as the first. It
has little plot or incident, but has much freshness of thought and
originality of style.

The same year appeared his _Life of Robespierre_, the result of original
investigations, and based largely on unpublished correspondence. Without
any sympathy of opinion with Robespierre, and without any purpose of
vindicating his character, Lewes told the true story of his life, and
showed wherein he had been grossly misrepresented. The book was one of
much interest, though it lacked in true historic insight and was clumsily
written. While these works were appearing, Lewes was a voluminous
contributor to the periodical literature of the day. He wrote, at this
time and later, for the _Edinburgh Review_, the _Foreign Quarterly_,
_British Quarterly_, _Westminster Review_, _Fraser's Magazine_,
_Blackwood's Magazine_, _Cornhill Monthly_, _Saturday Review_, in the
_Classical Museum_, the _Morning Chronicle_, the _Atlas_ and various other
periodicals, and on a great variety of subjects. His work of this kind was
increased when in 1849 he became the literary editor of _The Leader_
newspaper, a weekly journal of radical thought and politics. His
versatility, freshness of thought and vigor of expression made this
department of _The Leader_ of great interest. His reviews of books were
always good, and his literary articles piquant and forcible. In the first
volume he published a story called _The Apprenticeship of Life_. In April,
1852, he began in its columns a series of eighteen articles on Comte's
Positive Philosophy. In connection with the second article of this series
he asked for subscriptions in aid of Comte, and in the third reported that
three workingmen had sent in money. These subscriptions were continued
while the articles were in progress, and amounted to a considerable sum. In
1854 these essays were republished in Bohn's _Scientific Library_ under the
title of _Comte's Philosophy of the Sciences_. The _Leader_ was ably
conducted, but it was radical and outspoken, and did not receive the
support it deserved. In 1854 his connection with it came to an end.

While connected with _The Leader_, Lewes had turned his attention to
Goethe, and made a thorough study of his life and opinions. After spending
many months in Weimar, and as a result of his studies in Germany, he
published in 1855 his _Life and Works of Goethe_. It was carefully
re-written in 1873, and the substance of it was given in an abbreviated
and more popular form a few years later. This has usually been accepted
as the best book about Goethe written in English. Mr. Anthony Trollope
expresses the usual opinion when he says, "As a critical biography of
one of the great heroes of literature it is almost perfect. It is short,
easily understood by common readers, singularly graphic, exhaustive, and
altogether devoted to the subject." On the other hand, Bayard Taylor
said that "Lewes's entertaining apology hardly deserves the name of a
biography." It is an opinionated book, controversial, egotistic, and
unnecessarily critical. It was written less with the purpose of
interpreting Goethe to the English reader than of giving expression
to Lewes's own views on many subjects. His chapters on Goethe's science
and on his realism are marked by an extreme dogmatism. The poetic and
religious side of Goethe's nature he was incapable of understanding, and
always misrepresents, as he did that side of his nature which allied Goethe
with Schiller and the other idealists. Lewes was always polemical, had some
theory to champion, some battle to fight. He did not write for the sake of
the subject, but because the subject afforded an arena of battle for the
theories to the advocacy of which he gave his life.

With the completion of his _Life of Goethe_, Lewes turned his attention
more than ever to physiological studies, though he had continued to give
them much attention in the midst of his other pursuits. In 1858 appeared
his _Seaside Studies_, in which he recorded the results of his original
investigations at Ilfracombe, Tenby, Scilly Isles and Jersey. This volume
is written in a plain descriptive style, containing many interesting
accounts of scenery and adventure, explanations of the methods of study of
animal life at the seashore, how experiments are carried on, the results of
these special studies, and much of controversy with other observers. It
combines science and description in a happy manner. Another result of his
physiological studies was a paper "On the Spinal Cord as a Centre of
Sensation and Volition," read before the British Association for the
Advancement of Science, in 1858. This was followed the next year by three
published addresses on "The Nervous System," in which he presented those
theories which were more carefully developed in his latest work, where he
gave a systematic account of his philosophy. From this time on to his death
the greater part of his energies were given to these studies, and to the
building up of a philosophy based on physiology. A popular work, in which
many of his theories are unfolded, and marked throughout by his peculiar
ideas in regard to the relations of body and mind, was published in 1858.
This was his _Physiology of Common Life_, a work of great value, and
written in a simple, comprehensive style, suited to the wants of the
general reader. In the first volume he wrote of hunger and thirst, food and
drink, digestion, structure and uses of the blood, circulation of the
blood, respiration and suffocation, and why we are warm and how we keep so.
The second treats of feeling and thinking, the mind and the brain, our
senses and sensations, sleep and dreams, the qualities we inherit from our
parents, and life and death. In 1860 he printed in _The Cornhill Magazine_
a series of six papers on animal life. They were reprinted in book form in
1861, under the title of _Studies in Animal Life_. More strictly scientific
than his _Seaside Studies_, they were even more popular in style, and
intended for the general reader. While these books were being published he
was at work on a more strictly scientific task, and one intended for the
thoughtful and philosophic reader. This was his _Aristotle: a Chapter from
the History of Science, including Analyses of Aristotle's Scientific
Writings_, which was completed early in 1862, but not published until 1864.
As in his previous works, Lewes is here mainly concerned with an exposition
of his theories of the inductive method, and he judges Aristotle from this
somewhat narrow position. He refuses Aristotle a place among scientific
observers, but says he gave a great impulse towards scientific study, while
in intellectual force he was a giant. The book contains no recognition of
Aristotle's value as a philosopher; indeed his metaphysics are treated with
entire distrust or indifference. His fame is pronounced to be justifiably
colossal, but it is said he did not lay the basis of any physical science.
It is a work of controversy rather than of unbiassed exposition, and its
method is dry and difficult.

Early in the year 1865, a few literary men in London conceived the project
of a new review, which should avoid what they conceived to be the errors of
the old ones. It was to be eclectic in its doctrinal position, contain only
the best literature, all articles were to be signed by the author's name,
and it was to be published by a joint-stock company. Lewes was invited to
become the editor of this new periodical, and after much urging he
consented. The first number of _The Fortnightly Review_ was published May
15,1865, It proved a financial failure, and was soon sold to a publishing
firm. The eclectic theory was abandoned, and the _Review_ became an
agnostic and radical organ under the management of its second editor, John
Morley. Lewes edited six volumes, when, in 1867, he was obliged, on account
of his health, to resign his position. He made the _Review_ an independent
and able exponent of current thought, and he kept it up to a very high
standard of literary excellence. His own contributions were among the best
things it contained, and give a good indication of the wide range of his
talent. In the first volume he published papers on "The Heart and the
Brain," and on the poetry of Robert Buchanan, as well as a series of four
very able and valuable papers on "The Principles of Success in Literature."
In the second volume he wrote about "Mr. Grote's Plato." In the third he
dealt with "Victor Hugo's Latest Poems," "Criticism in relation to Novels,"
and "Auguste Comte." In this volume he began a series of essays entitled
"Causeries," in which he treated, in a light vein, of the passing topics of
the day. He wrote of Spinoza in the fourth volume, and of "Comte and Mill"
in the sixth, contributing nothing to the fifth. After Morley became the
editor, in the ninth and tenth volumes, he published three papers on
Darwin's hypothesis, and in 1878 there was a paper of his on the "Dread and
Dislike of Science." He also had a criticism of Dickens in the July number
of 1872, full of his subtle power of analysis and literary insight.

Lewes in early life had a strong inclination to become an actor, and he did
go on the stage for a short time. He wrote and translated several plays,
one of his adaptations becoming very popular. He wrote dramatic criticisms
for the _Pall Mall Gazette_ and other journals, during many years. In 1875,
a volume of these papers was published with the title, _On Actors and the
Art of Acting_. It treated in a pleasant way, and with keen insight, of
Edmund Kean, Charles Kean, Rachel, Macready, Fan-en, Charles Matthews,
Frédéric Lemaitre, the two Keeleys, Shakspere as actor and critic, natural
acting, foreign actors on our stage, the drama of Paris in 1865, Germany in
1867, and Spain in 1867, and of his first impressions of Salvini. Another
piece of work done by him was the furnishing, in 1867, of an explanatory
text to accompany Kaulbach's _Female Characters of Goethe_.

The last years of Lewes's life were devoted to the preparation of a
systematic exposition of his physiological philosophy. As early as the year
1858, he was at work on the nervous system, and, soon after, his studies
took a systematic shape. In his series of volumes on the _Problems of Life
and Mind_ he gave to the world a new theory of the mind and of knowledge.
In the first two volumes, published in 1874, and entitled _The Foundations
of a Creed_, he developed his views on the methods of philosophic research.
These were followed in 1877 by a third volume, on _The Physical Basis of
Life_. After his death his wife edited two small volumes on Psychology,
which included all the writing he left in a form ready for publication. His
work was left incomplete, but its publication had gone far enough to show
the methods to be followed and the main conclusions to be reached.

Concerning the work done by Lewes in philosophy, there will be much
difference of opinion. He did much through his various expositions to make
the public familiar with the inductive methods of inquiry and with the
conclusions of positive thought. He made his books readable, and even
popular, giving philosophy an exposition suited to the wants of the general
reader. At the same time, he was polemical and dogmatic, and more concerned
to be clever than to be exact in his interpretation. Into the meanings of
some of the greatest thinkers he had little clear insight, and he is seldom
to be implicitly trusted as an expositor of those whose systems were in any
way opposed to his own. His limitations have been well defined by Ribot, in
his _Contemporary English Psychology_.

"Mr. Lewes lacks the vocation of the scholar, which, indeed, is generally
wanting in original minds. His history resembles rather that of Hegel than
that of Ritter. His review of the labors of philosophers is rather occupied
with that which they have thought, than with their comparative importance.
He judges rather than expounds; his history is fastidious and critical. It
is the work of a clear, precise and elegant mind, always that of a writer,
often witty, measured, possessing no taste for declamation, avoiding
exclusive solutions, and making its interest profitable to the reader whom
he forces to think." Ribot speaks of the work again as being original but
dogmatic and critical. He says it belongs to that class of books which make
history a pretext for conflict. "The author is less occupied with the
exposition of facts than he is with his method of warfare; he thinks less
of being exact than of being clever.... He has evidently no taste, or, if
we prefer so to put it, he has not the virtue necessary to face these
formidable folios, these undigested texts of scholastic learning, which the
historian of philosophy ought to penetrate, however repulsive to his
positive and lucid mind."

On the other hand, Mr. Frederic Harrison has described the great success of
the _Biographical History of Philosophy_, and made it apparent what are its
chief merits. "This astonishing work was designed to be popular, to be
readable, to be intelligible. It was all of these in a singular degree. It
has proved to be the most popular account of philosophy of our time; it has
been republished, enlarged, and almost re-written, and each re-issue has
found new readers. It did what hardly any previous book on philosophy ever
did--it made philosophy readable, reasonable, lively, almost as exciting as
a good novel. Learners who had been tortured over dismal homilies on the
pantheism of Spinoza, and yet more dismal expositions of the pan-nihilism
of Hegel, seized with eagerness upon a little book which gave an intense
reality to Spinoza and his thoughts, which threw Hegel's contradictories
into epigrams, and made the course of philosophic thought unfold itself
naturally with all the life and coherence of a well-considered plot....
There can be no possible doubt as to the success of this method. Men to
whom philosophy has been a wearisome swaying backward and forward of
meaningless phrases, found something which they could remember and
understand.... For a generation this 'entirely popular' book saturated the
minds of the younger readers. It has done as much as any book, perhaps-more
than any, to give the key to the prevalent thought of our time about the
metaphysical problems.... That such a book should have had such a triumph
was a singular literary fact. The opinions frankly expressed as to
theology, metaphysics, and many established orthodoxies; its conclusion,
glowing in every page, that metaphysics, as Danton said of the Revolution,
was devouring its own children, and led to self-annihilation; its
proclamation of Comte as the legitimate issue of all previous philosophy
and positive philosophy as its ultimate _irenicon_--all this, one might
think, would have condemned such a book from its birth. The orthodoxies
frowned; the professors sneered; the owls of metaphysic hooted from the
gloom of their various jungles; but the public read, the younger students
adopted it, the world learned from it the positive method; it held its
ground because it made clear what no one else had made clear--what
philosophy meant, and why philosophers differed so violently."

This extravagant praise becomes even absurd when the writer gravely says
that this book "had simply killed metaphysic." A popular style and method
gave the book success, along with the fact that the temper of the time made
such a statement acceptable. It cleverly indicated the weak places in the
metaphysical methods, and it presented the advantages of the inductive
method with great eloquence and ingenuity. Its satire, and its contempt for
the more spiritualistic systems, also helped to make it readable.

His later work, in which he develops his own positive conclusions, has the
merit of being one of the best expositions yet made of the philosophy of
evolution. In view, however, of his unqualified condemnation of the
theories of metaphysicians, his system is one of singular audacity of
speculation. Not even Schelling or Hegel has gone beyond him in theorizing,
or exceeded him in the ground traversed beyond the limits of demonstration.
He who had held up all speculative systems to scorn, distanced those he had
condemned, and showed how easy it is to take theory for fact. Metaphysic
has not had in its whole history a greater illustration of the daring of
speculation than in the case of Lewes's theory of the relations of the
subjective and objective. He interprets matter and mind, motion and
feeling, objective and subjective, as simply the outer and inner, the
concave and convex, sides of one and the same reality. Mind is the same as
matter, except that it is viewed from a different aspect. In this opinion
he resembles Schelling more than any other thinker, as he does in some
other of his speculations. As a monist, his conclusions are similar to
those of the leading German transcendentalists. Indeed, the evolution
philosophy he expounds is, in some of its aspects, but a development of the
identity philosophy of Schelling. In its monism, its theory of the
development of mind out of matter, and its conception of law, they are one
and the same. The evolution differs from the identity philosophy mainly in
its more scientific interpretation of the influence of heredity and the
social environment. The one is undoubtedly an outgrowth from the other,
while the audacious nights of speculation indulged in by Lewes rival
anything attempted even by Schelling.

Lewes was one of the earliest English disciples of Auguste Comte, and he
probably did more than any other person to introduce the opinions of that
thinker to English students. He was a zealous and yet not a blind disciple,
rejecting for the most part the later speculations of Comte. Comte's
theories of social and religious construction were repugnant to Lewes's
mind, but his positive methods and his entire rejection of theology were
acceptable. Comte's positivism was the foundation of his own philosophy,
and he did little more than to expand and more carefully work out the
system of his predecessor. In psychology he went beyond Comte, through his
physiological studies, and by the adoption of the methods and results of
evolution. His discovery of the sociological factors of mind was a real
advance on his master.

George Eliot's connection with Lewes had much to do with the
after-development of her mind. An affinity of intellectual purpose
and conviction drew them together. She found her philosophical theories
confirmed by his, and both together labored for the propagation of
that positivism in which they so heartily believed. Their lives and
influence are inseparably united. There was an almost entire unanimity of
intellectual conviction between them, and his books are in many ways the
best interpreters of the ethical and philosophical meanings of her novels.
Her thorough interest in his studies, and her comprehension of them, is
manifest on many of her pages. Her enthusiastic acceptance of positivism in
that spirit in which it is presented by Lewes, is apparent throughout all
her work. Their marriage was a companionship and a friendship. They lived
in each other, were mutual helpers, and each depended much on--the advice
and counsel of the other. Miss Mathilde Blind has pointed out how
thoroughly identical are their views of realism in art, and on many other
subjects they were as harmonious. They did not echo each other, but there
was an intimate affinity of intellectual apprehension and purpose.

Immediately after their marriage, Lewes and his wife went to Germany, and
they spent a quiet year of study in Berlin, Munich and Weimar. Here he
re-wrote and completed his _Life of Goethe_. On their return to England
they took a house in Blandford Square, and began then to make that home
which was soon destined to have so much interest and attraction. A good
part of the year 1858 was also spent on the continent in study and travel.
Three months were passed in Munich, six weeks in Dresden, while Salzburg,
Vienna and Prague were also visited. The continent was again visited in the
summer of 1865, and a trip was taken through Normandy, Brittany and
Touraine. Other visits preceded and followed, including a study of Florence
in preparation for the writing of _Romola_, and a tour in Spain in 1867 to
secure local coloring for _The Spanish Gypsy_. In 1865, the house in
Blandford Square was abandoned for "The Priory," a commodious and pleasant
house on the North Bank, St. John's Wood. It was here Mr. and Mrs. Lewes
lived until his death.




IV.


CAREER AS AN AUTHOR.

Until she was thirty-six years old Mrs. Lewes had given no hint that she
was likely to become a great novelist. She had shown evidence of large
learning and critical ability, but not of decided capacity for imaginative
or poetic creation. The critic and the creator are seldom combined in one
person; and while she might have been expected to become a philosophical
writer of large reputation, there was little promise that she would become
a great novelist. Before she began the _Scenes of Clerical Life_, she had
written but very little of an original character. She was not drawn
irresistibly to the career for which she was best fitted, and others had to
discover her gift and urge her to its use. Mr. Lewes saw that the person
who could write so admirably of what a novel ought to be, and who could so
skilfully point out the defects in the lady novelists of the day, was
herself capable of writing much better ones than those she criticised. It
was at his suggestion, and through his encouragement, she made her first
attempt at novel-writing. Her love of learning, her relish for literary and
philosophical studies, led her to believe that she could accomplish the
largest results in the line of the work she had already begun. Yet Lewes
had learned from her conversational powers, from her keen appreciation of
the dramatic elements of daily life, and from her fine humor and sarcasm,
that other work was within the range of her powers. Reluctantly she
consented to turn aside from the results of scholarship she had hoped to
accomplish, and with many doubts concerning her ability to become a writer
of fiction. The history of the publication of her first work, _Scenes
of Clerical Life_, has been fully told, and is helpful towards an
understanding of her career as an author.

In the autumn of 1856, William Blackwood received from Lewes a short story
bearing--the title of "The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton," which he
sent as the work of an anonymous friend. His nephew has described the
results that followed on the reception of this novel by Blackwood, and its
publication in _Blackwood's Magazine_. "The story was offered as the first
instalment of a series; and though the editor pronounced that 'Amos' would
'do,' he wished to satisfy himself that it was no chance hit, and requested
a sight of the other tales before coming to a decision. Criticisms on the
plot and studies of character in 'Amos Barton' were frankly put forward,
and the editor wound up his letter by saying,' If the author is a new
writer, I beg to congratulate him on being worthy of the honors of print
and pay. I shall be very glad to hear from him or you soon.' At this time
the remaining _Scenes of Clerical Life_ were unwritten, and the criticisms
upon 'Amos' had rather a disheartening effect upon the author, which the
editor hastened to remove as soon as he became sensible of them, by
offering to accept the tale. He wrote to Mr. Lewes, 'If you think it would
stimulate the author to go on with the other tales, I shall publish 'Amos'
at once;' expressing also his 'sanguineness' that he would be able to
approve of the contributions to follow, as 'Amos' gave indications of
great freshness of style. Some natural curiosity had been expressed as
to the unknown writer, and a hint had been thrown out that he was 'a
clergyman,'--a device which, since it has the great sanction of Sir Walter
Scott, we must regard as perfectly consistent with the ethics of anonymous
literature.

"'Amos Barton' occupied the first place in the magazine for January, 1857,
and was completed in the following number. By that time 'Mr. Gilfil's Love
Story' was ready, and the _Scenes of Clerical Life_ appeared month by
month, until they ended with 'Janet's Repentance' in November of that year.
As fresh instalments of the manuscript were received, the editor's
conviction of the power, and even genius, of his new contributor steadily
increased. In his first letter to the author after the appearance of 'Amos
Barton,' he wrote, 'It is a long time since I have read anything so fresh,
so humorous and so touching. The style is capital, conveying so much in so
few words.' In another letter, addressed 'My dear Amos,' for lack of any
more distinct appellation, the editor remarks, 'I forgot whether I told you
or Lewes that I had shown part of the MS. to Thackeray. He was staying with
me, and having been out at dinner, came in about eleven o'clock, when I had
just finished reading it. I said to him, 'Do you know that I think I have
lighted upon a new author who is uncommonly like a first-class passenger?'
I showed him a page or two--I think the passage where the curate returns
home and Milly is first introduced. He would not pronounce whether it came
up to my ideas, but remarked afterwards that he would have liked to have
read more, which I thought a good sign.'

"From the first the _Scenes of Clerical Life_ arrested public attention.
Critics were, however, by no means unanimous as to their merits. They
had so much individuality--stood so far apart from the standards of
contemporary fiction--that there was considerable difficulty in applying
the usual tests in their case. The terse, condensed style, the exactitude
of expression, and the constant use of illustration, naturally suggested to
some the notion that the new writer must be a man of science relaxing
himself in the walks of fiction. The editor's own suspicions had once been
directed towards Professor Owen by a similarity of handwriting. Guesses
were freely hazarded as to the author's personality, and among other
conjectures was one that Lord Lyttoll, whose 'Caxton' novels were about
the same period delighting the readers of this magazine, had again struck
a new vein of fiction. Probably Dickens was among the first to divine that
the author must be a woman; but the reasons upon which he based this
opinion might readily have been met by equally cogent deductions from the
_Scenes_ that the writer must be of the male sex. Dickens, on the
conclusion of the _Scenes_, wrote a letter of most generous appreciation,
which, when sent through the editor, afforded the unknown author very
hearty gratification.

"While 'Mr. Gilfil's Love Story' was passing through the magazine, the
editor was informed that he was to know the author as 'George Eliot.' It
was at this time, then, that a name so famous in our literature was
invented. We have no reason to suppose that it had been thought of when the
series was commenced. It was probably assumed from the impossibility of a
nameless shadow maintaining frequent communication with the editor of a
magazine; possibly the recollection of George Sand entered into the idea;
but the designation was euphonious and impressive.

"Before the conclusion of the _Scenes_, Mr. Blackwood felt satisfied that
he had to do with a master mind, and that a great career as a novelist lay
open to George Eliot; and his frequent communications urged her warmly to
persevere in her efforts. When 'Janet's Repentance' was drawing to a close,
and arrangements were being made for re-issuing the sketches as a separate
publication, he wrote to Mr. Lewes, 'George Eliot is too diffident of his
own powers and prospects of success. Very few men, indeed, have more reason
to be satisfied as far as the experiment has gone. The following should be
a practical cheerer,'--and then he proceeded to say how the Messrs,
Blackwood had seen reason to make a large increase in the forthcoming
reprint of the _Scenes_. The volumes did not appear until after the New
Year of 1858; and their success was such that the editor was able, before
the end of the month, to write as follows to Lewes: 'George Eliot has
fairly achieved a literary reputation among judges, and the public must
follow, although it may take time. Dickens's letter was very handsome, and
truly kind. I sent him an extract from George Eliot's letter to me, and I
have a note from him, saying that 'he has been much interested by it,' and
that 'it has given him the greatest pleasure.' Dickens adheres to his
theory that the writer must be a woman.' To George Eliot herself he wrote
in February, 1858, 'You will recollect, when we proposed to reprint, my
impression was that the series had not lasted long enough in the magazine
to give you a hold on the general public, although long enough to make your
literary reputation. Unless in exceptional cases, a very long time often
elapses between the two stages of reputation, the literary and the public.
Your progress will be _sure_, if not so quick as we could wish.'"

The success of the _Clerical Scenes_ determined the literary career of Mrs.
Lewes. She began at once an elaborate novel, which was largely written in
Germany. It was sent to Blackwood for publication, and his nephew has given
a full account of the reception of the manuscript and the details of giving
the work to the public.

"_Adam Bede_ was begun almost as soon as the _Scenes_ were finished, and
had already made considerable progress before their appearance in the
reprint. In February, 1858, the editor, writing to Mr. Lewes, says, 'I am
delighted to hear from George Eliot that I might soon hope to see something
like a volume of the new tale. I am very sanguine.' In a few weeks after,
the manuscript of the opening chapters of _Adam Bede_ was put into his
hands, and he writes thus to Lewes after the first perusal: 'Tell George
Eliot that I think _Adam Bede_ all right--most lifelike and real. I shall
read the MS. quietly over again before writing in detail about it.... For
the first reading it did not signify how many things I had to think of; I
would have hurried through it with eager pleasure. I write this note to
allay all anxiety on the part of George Eliot as to my appreciation of the
merits of this most promising opening of a picture of life. In spite of all
injunctions, I began _Adam Bede_ in the railway, and felt very savage when
the waning light stopped me as we neared the Scottish border.' A few weeks
later, when he had received further chapters, and had reperused the
manuscript from the beginning, Mr. Blackwood wrote to George Eliot, 'The
story is altogether very novel, and I cannot recollect anything at all like
it. I find myself constantly thinking of the characters as real personages,
which is a capital sign.' After he had read yet a little further he
remarks, 'There is an atmosphere of genuine religion and purity that fears
no evil, about the whole opening of the story.' George Eliot made an
expedition to Germany in the spring of 1858, and the bulk of the second
volume was sent home from Munich. Acknowledging the receipt of the
manuscript, the editor wrote to Lewes, 'There can be no mistake about the
merits, and I am not sure whether I expressed myself sufficiently warmly.
But you know that I am not equal to the _abandon_ of expression which
distinguishes the large-hearted school of critics.' Adam Bede was completed
in the end of October, 1858, and Mr. Blackwood read the conclusion at once,
and sent his opinions. He says, 'I am happy to tell you that I think it is
capital.--I never saw such wonderful efforts worked out by such a
succession of simple and yet delicate and minute touches. Hetty's night in
the fields is marvellous. I positively shuddered for her, poor creature;
and I do not think the most thoughtless lad could read that terrible
picture of her feelings and hopeless misery without being deeply moved.
Adam going to support her at the trial is a noble touch. You really make
him a gentleman by that act. It is like giving him his spurs. The way poor
Hetty leans upon and clings to Dinah is beautiful. Mr. Irwine is always
good; so are the Poysers, lifelike as possible. Dinah is a very striking
and original character, always perfectly supported, and never obtrusive in
her piety. Very early in the book I took it into my head that it would be
'borne in upon her' to fall in love with Adam. Arthur is the least
satisfactory character, but he is true too. The picture of his happy,
complacent feelings before the bombshell bursts upon him is very good.'

"_Adam Bede_ was published in the last week of January, 1859. The author
was desirous on this occasion to test her strength by appealing directly to
the public; and the editor, though quite prepared to accept _Adam Bede_ for
the magazine, willingly gratified her. Sending George Eliot an early copy,
before _Adam Bede_ had reached the public, he says, 'Whatever the
subscription may be, I am confident of success--great success. The book is
so novel and so true, that the whole story remains in my mind like a
succession of incidents in the lives of people I know. _Adam Bede_ can
certainly never come under the class of popular agreeable stories; but
those who love power, real humor, and true natural description, will stand
by the sturdy carpenter and the living groups you have painted in and about
Hayslope.'

"_Adam Bede_ did not immediately command that signal success which, looking
back to it now, we might have expected for it. As the editor had warned the
author, the Scenes had secured for her a reputation with the higher order
of readers and with men of letters, but had not established her popularity
with the public in general. The reviewers, too, were somewhat divided. Many
of them recognized the merits of the work, but more committed the blunder
of endeavoring to fix the position of the book by contrasting the author
with the popular novelists of the time, and by endeavoring to determine
from which of them she had drawn her inspiration. In 1859 a review of _Adam
Bede_ from the pen of one of the oldest and ablest of our contributors was
published in this magazine, and on its appearance George Eliot wrote the
editor, 'I should like you to convey my gratitude to your reviewer. I see
well he is a man whose experience and study enabled him to relish parts of
my book which I should despair of seeing recognized by critics in London
back drawing-rooms. He has gratified me keenly by laying his fingers on
passages which I wrote either from strong feeling or from intimate
knowledge, but which I had prepared myself to find passed over by
reviewers.' Soon after, _The Times_ followed with an appreciative notice of
the book which sounded its real merits, and did justice to the author's
originality of genius; and by the month of April the book was steadily
running through a second edition. Readers were beginning to realize that
the _Scenes of Clerical Life_ was not a mere chance success, but the work
of a writer capable of greater and better things."

It was Mrs. Lewes's desire not to be known to the public in her own
personality, hence her adoption of a _nom de plume_. She shrank from the
consequences of a literary fame, had none of George Sand's love of
notoriety or desire to impress herself upon the world. It was her hope that
George Eliot and Mrs. Lewes would lead distinct lives so far as either was
known outside her own household; that the two should not be joined together
even in the minds of her most intimate friends. When her friend, the editor
of the _Westminster Review_, detected the authorship of _Adam Bede_, and
wrote to her in its praise, congratulating her on the success she had
attained, Lewes wrote to him denying positively that Mrs. Lewes was the
author. Charles Dickens also saw through the disguise, and wrote to the
publisher declaring his opinion that _Adam Bede_ was written by a woman.
When this was denied, he still persisted in his conviction, detecting the
womanly insight into character, her failure adequately to portray men,
while of women "she seemed to know their very hearts."

The vividness with which scenes and persons about her childhood home were
depicted, speedily led to the breaking of this disguise. One of her
school-fellows, as soon as she had read _Adam Bede_, said, "George Eliot
is Marian Evans;" but others were only confident that the author must be
some Nuncaton resident, and began to look about them for the author. Some
portions of the _Scenes of Clerical Life_ had already been discovered to
have a very strong local coloring, and now there was much curiosity as to
the personality of the writer. A dilapidated gentleman of the neighborhood,
who had run through with a fortune at Cambridge, was selected for the
honor. While the _Scenes_ were being published, an Isle of Man newspaper
attributed the authorship to this man, whose name was Liggins, but he at
once repudiated it. On the appearance of _Adam Bede_ this claim was again
put forward, and a local clergyman became the medium of its announcement
to the public. The London _Times_ printed the following letter in its issue
of April 15, 1859: "Sir,--The author of _Scenes of Clerical Life_ and _Adam
Bede_ is Mr. Joseph Liggins, of Nuncaton, Warwickshire. You may easily
satisfy yourself of my correctness by inquiring of any one in that
neighborhood. Mr. Liggins himself and the characters whom he paints are
as familiar there as the twin spires of Coventry.--Yours obediently,
H. ANDERS, Rector of Kirkby."

The next day the following was printed by the same paper:--

    Sir,--The Rev. H. Anders has with questionable delicacy and
    unquestionable inaccuracy assured the world through your columns that
    the author of _Scenes of Clerical Life_ and _Adam Bede_ is Mr. Joseph
    Liggins, of Nuncaton. I beg distinctly to deny that statement. I
    declare on my honor that that gentleman never saw a line of those works
    until they were printed, nor had he any knowledge of them whatever.
    Allow me to ask whether the act of publishing a book deprives a man of
    all claim to the courtesies usual among gentlemen? If not, the attempt
    to pry into what is obviously meant to be withheld--my name--and to
    publish the rumors which such prying may give rise to, seems to me
    quite indefensible, still more so to state these rumors as ascertained
    facts. I am, sir. Yours, &c., GEORGE ELIOT.

Liggins found his ardent supporters, and he explained the letter
repudiating the authorship of the _Scenes of Clerical Life_ as being
written to further his own interests. He obtained money on the plea that he
was being deprived of his rights, by showing portions of a manuscript which
he had copied from the printed book. Neighboring clergymen zealously
espoused his cause, and a warm controversy raged for a little time
concerning his claim. Very curiously, it became a question of high and low
church, his own fellow-believers defending Liggins with zeal, while the
other party easily detected his imposition. Finally, Blackwood published a
letter in _The Times_ denying his claims, accompanied by one from George
Eliot expressing entire satisfaction with her publisher. A consequence of
this discussion was, that the real name of the author was soon known to the
public.

The curiosity excited about the authorship of _Adam Bede_, the Liggins
controversy, and the fresh, original character of the book itself, soon
drew attention to its merits. It was referred to in a Parliamentary debate,
and it became the general topic of literary conversation. Its success was
soon assured, and it was not long before it was recognized that a new
novelist of the first order had appeared.

It is as amusing as interesting now to look back upon the reception given
to _Adam Bede_ by the critics. It is not every critic who can detect a
great writer in his first unheralded book, and some very stupid blunders
were made in regard to this one. It was reviewed in _The Spectator_ for
February 12, 1859, in this unappreciative manner: "George Eliot's
three-volume novel of _Adam Bede_ is a story of humble life, where
religious conscientiousness is the main characteristic of the hero and
heroine, as well as of some of the other persons. Its literary feature
partakes, we fear, too much of that Northern trait which, by minutely
describing things and delineating individuals as matters of substantive
importance in themselves, rather than as subordinate to general interest,
has a tendency to induce a feeling of sluggishness in the reader."

Not all the critics were so blundering as this one, however, and in the
middle of April, _The Times_ said there was no mistake about the character
of _Adam Bede_, that it was a first-rate novel, and that its author would
take rank at once among the masters of the craft. In April, also,
_Blackwood's Magazine_ gave the book a hearty welcome. The natural, genuine
descriptions of village life were commended, and the boot was praised for
its "hearty, manly sympathy with weakness, not inconsistent with hatred of
vice." Throughout this notice the author is spoken of as "Mr. Eliot." The
critic of the _Westminster Review_, in an appreciative and favorable
notice, expressed a doubt if the author could be a man. He cited Hetty as
proof that only a woman could have written the book, and said this
character could "only be delineated as it is by an author combining the
intense feelings and sympathies of a woman with the conceptive power of
artistic genius." The woman theory was pronounced to be beset with serious
difficulties, however, and the notice concluded with these words: "But
while pronouncing no decisive opinion on this point, we may remark that the
union of the best qualities of the masculine and feminine intellect is as
rare as it is admirable; that it is a distinguishing characteristic of the
most gifted artists and poets, and that to ascribe it to the author of
_Adam Bede_ is to accord the highest praise we can bestow."

With the writing of _Adam Bede_, George Eliot accepted her career as a
novelist, and henceforth her life was devoted to literary creation. Even
before _Adam Bede_ was completed, her attention was directed to Savonarola
as the subject for a novel. Though this subject was in her mind, yet it was
not made use of until later. As soon as _Adam Bede_ was completed, she at
once began another novel of English life, and drawn even more fully than
its predecessors from her own experience. Of this new work a greater
portion of the manuscript was in the hands of the publishers with the
beginning of 1860. She called it _Sister Maggie_, from the name of the
leading character. This title did not please the publisher, and on the 6th
of January, Blackwood wrote to her suggesting that it be called _The Mill
on the Floss_. This title was accepted by George Eliot, and the new work
appeared in three volumes at the beginning of April, 1860.

In July, 1859, there appeared in _Blackwood's Magazine_ a short story from
George Eliot bearing the title of "The Lifted Veil." This was followed by
another, in 1864, called "Brother Jacob." Both were printed anonymously and
are the only short stories she wrote after the _Clerical Scenes_. They
attracted attention, but were not reprinted until 1880, when they appeared
in the volume with _Silas Marner_, in Blackwood's "cabinet edition" of her
works. In March, 1861, _Silas Marner, the Weaver of Raveloe_, her only
one-volume novel, was given to the public by Blackwood.

Having carefully studied the life and surroundings of Savonarola, she now
took up this subject, and embodied it in her _Romola_. This novel appeared
in the _Cornhill Magazine_ from July, 1862, to July, 1863. It has been
reported that it was offered to Blackwood for publication, who rejected it
because it was not likely to be popular with the public. The probable
reason of its publication in the _Cornhill Magazine_ was that a large sum
was paid for its first appearance in that periodical. In a letter written
July 5, 1862, Lewes gave the true explanation. "My main object in
persuading her to consent to serial publication was not the unheard-of
magnificence of the offer, but the advantage to such a work of being read
slowly and deliberately, instead of being galloped through in three
volumes. I think it quite unique, and so will the public when it gets over
the first feeling of surprise and disappointment at the book not being
English and like its predecessor." The success it met with while under way
in the pages of the magazine may be seen from a letter written by Lewes on
December 18. "Marian lives entirely in the fifteenth century, and is much
cheered every now and then by hearing indirectly how her book is
appreciated by the higher class of minds, and some of the highest, though
it is not, and cannot be, popular. In Florence we hear they are wild with
delight and surprise at such a work being executed by a foreigner, as if an
Italian had ever done anything of the kind." _Romola_ was illustrated in
the _Cornhill Magazine_, and on its completion was reprinted by Smith,
Elder & Co., the publishers of that periodical.

The success of _Romola_ was such as to lead George Eliot to begin on
another historical subject, though she was probably induced to do this much
more by its fitness to her purposes than by the public reception of the
novel. This time she gave her work a poetical and dramatic form. _The
Spanish Gypsy_ was written in the winter of 1864-5, but was laid aside for
more thorough study of the subject and for careful revision. She had
previously, in 1863, written a short story in verse, founded on the pages
of Bocaccio, entitled "How Lisa Loved the King." Probably other poems had
also been written, but poetry had not occupied much of her attention. As a
school-girl, and even after she had gone to London, she had written verses.
Among these earlier attempts, it may not be unsafe to conjecture, may have
been the undated poems which she has published in connection with _The
Legend of Jubal_. These are "Self and Life," "Sweet Evenings come and go,
Love," and "The Death of Moses."

After laying aside _The Spanish Gypsy_ she began on another novel of
English life, and _Felix Holt: the Radical_ was printed in three volumes by
Blackwood, in June, 1866. Shortly after, she printed in _Blackwood's
Magazine_--an "Address to workmen, by Felix Holt," in which she gave some
wholesome and admirable advice to the operative classes who had been
enfranchised by the Reform Bill. In the same magazine, "How Lisa Loved the
King" was printed in May, 1869. This was the last of her contributions to
its pages. Its publisher gave her many encouragements in her literary
career, and was devoted to her interests. After his death she gave
expression to her appreciation of his valuable aid in reaching the public,
through a letter addressed to his successor.

    I feel that his death was an irreparable loss to my mental life for
    nowhere else is it possible that I can find the same long-tried
    genuineness of sympathy and unmixed impartial gladness in anything I
    might happen to do well. To have had a publisher who was in the fullest
    sense of the word a gentleman, and at the same time a man of excellent
    moral judgment, has been an invaluable stimulus and comfort to me. Your
    uncle had retained that fruit of experience which makes a man of the
    world, as opposed to the narrow man of literature. He judged well of
    writing, because he had learned to judge well of men and things, not
    merely through quickness of observation and insight, but with the
    illumination of a heart in the right place--a thorough integrity and
    rare tenderness of feeling.

After a visit to Spain in the summer of 1867, _The Spanish Gypsy_ was
re-written and published by Blackwood, in June, 1868. During several years,
at this period of her life, her pen was busy with poetical subjects. "A
Minor Prophet" was written in 1865, "Two Lovers" in 1866, and "Oh may I
join the Choir Invisible" in 1867. "Agatha" was written in 1868, and was
published in the _Atlantic Monthly_ for August, 1869. _The Legend of Jubal_
was written in 1869 and was printed in _Macmillan's Magazine_ for May,
1870. In 1869 were also written the series of sonnets entitled "Brother and
Sister." "Armgart" was written in 1870, and appeared in _Macmillan's
Magazine_ in July, 1871. "Arion" and "Stradivarius" were written in 1873.
"A College Breakfast Party" was written in April, 1874, and was printed in
_Macmillan's Magazine_ for July, 1878. _The Legend of Jubal and other
Poems_ was published by Blackwood in 1874, and contained all the poems just
named, except the last. A new edition was published in 1879 as _The Legend
of Jubal and other Poems, Old and New_. The "new" poems in this edition are
"The College Breakfast Party," "Self and Life," "Sweet Evenings come and
go, Love," and "The Death of Moses."

To the longer of these poetical studies succeeded another novel of English
Life. _Middlemarch: a Study of Provincial Life_ was printed in twelve
monthly parts by Blackwood, beginning in December, 1871. Five years later,
_Daniel Deronda_ was printed in eight monthly parts by the same publisher,
beginning with February, 1876. This method of publication was probably
adopted for the same reason assigned by Lewes for the serial appearance of
_Romola_. Both novels attracted much attention, and were eagerly devoured
and discussed as the successive numbers appeared, the first because of its
remarkable character as a study of English life, the other because of its
peculiar ideas, and its defence of the Jewish race. Her last book,
_Impressions of Theophrastus Such_, a series of essays on moral and
literary subjects, written the year before, was published by Blackwood in
June, 1879. Its reception by the public was somewhat unfavorable, and it
added nothing of immediate enlargement to her reputation.

Of miscellaneous writing George Eliot did but very little. While Mr. Lewes
was the editor of _The Leader_ newspaper, from 1849 to 1854, she was an
occasional contributor of anonymous articles to its columns. When he
founded _The Fortnightly Review_ she contributed to its first number,
published in May, 1865, an article on "The Influence of Rationalism," in
which she reviewed Lecky's _Rationalism in Europe_. These occasional
efforts of her pen, together with the two short stories and the poems
already mentioned, constituted all her work outside her series of great
novels. She concentrated her efforts as few authors have done; and having
found, albeit slowly and reluctantly, what she could best accomplish, she
seldom strayed aside. When her pen had found its proper place it was not
often idle; and though she did not write rapidly, yet she continued
steadily at her work and accomplished much. Within twenty years she wrote
eight great works of fiction, including _The Spanish Gypsy_; works that are
destined to an immortality of fame. From almost entire obscurity her name
appeared, with the publication of the _Scenes of Clerical Life_, to attract
attention among a few most appreciative readers, and it was destined then
to rise suddenly to the highest place of literary reputation with the
publication of _Adam Bede_. Her genius blazed clearly out upon the world in
the fulness of its powers, and each new work added to her fame, and
revealed some new capacity in the delineation of character. Her literary
career shows throughout the steady triumph of genius and of persistent
labor.




V.


PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS.

The home of Mrs. Lewes during the later years of her life was in one of the
London suburbs, near Regent's Park, in what is known as St. John's Wood, at
number 21, North Bank Street. This locality was not too far from the city
for the enjoyment and the use of its advantages, while it was out of the
noise and the smoke. The houses stand far apart, are surrounded with trees
and lawns, while all is quiet and beautiful. The square, unpretentious
house in which the Leweses lived was surrounded by a fine garden and green
turf, while flowers were abundant. A high wall shut it out from the street.
Within, all was refinement and good taste; there were flowers in the
windows, the furniture was plain and substantial, while quiet simplicity
reigned supreme. The house had two stories and a basement. On the first
floor were two drawing-rooms, a small reception room, a dining-room and Mr.
Lewes's study. These rooms were decorated by Owen Jones, their artist
friend. The second floor contained the study of George Eliot, which was a
plain room, not large. Its two front windows looked into the garden, and
there were book-cases around the walls, and a neat writing-desk. All things
about the house indicated simple tastes, moderate needs, and a plain method
of life.

Mrs. Lewes usually went into her study at eight o'clock in the morning, and
remained there at work until one. If the weather was fine, she rode out in
the afternoon, or she walked in Regent's Park with Mr. Lewes. In case the
weather did not permit her going out, she returned again to her study in
the afternoon. The affairs of her household were so arranged that she could
give herself uninterruptedly to her work. The kitchen was in the basement,
a housekeeper had entire charge of the management of the house, and Mrs.
Lewes was carefully guarded from all outside interruptions. She very seldom
went into society, and she received but few visitors, except on Sunday
afternoons. Her letters were written by Mr. Lewes, with the exception of
those to personal friends or an occasional outside correspondent; and all
the details of the publication of her books and the management of her
business affairs were in his hands. The immediate success of her novels
made them profitable to the publisher, and she was paid comparatively large
sums for them.

Her evenings were spent by Mrs. Lewes at home, in reading and singing,
unless she went to the theatre, as she often did. She walked much, often
visiting the zoological gardens, and she had a great liking for all kinds
of small animals. She greatly enjoyed travelling. Music was her passion,
and art her delight. She preferred the realistic painters, and she never
tired of the collections she often visited in London.

The health of Mrs. Lewes was never good. She was a constant sufferer, was
nervous, excitable and low-spirited. Only by the utmost care and husbanding
of her powers was she enabled to accomplish her work. In a note to one of
her correspondents she has given some hint of the almost chronic languor
and bodily weakness from which she suffered.

    The weather, our ailments, and various other causes, have made us put
    off our flight from one week to another, but now we are really
    fluttering our wings and making a dust about us. I wish we had seen you
    oftener. I was placidly looking forward to your staying in England
    another year or more, and gave way to my general languor about seeing
    friends in these last months, which have been too full of small bodily
    miseries for me to feel that I had much space to give to pleasanter
    occupation.

Only those who knew her long and well can fitly describe such a woman as
Mrs. Lewes. Personal intimacy gives a color to the words used, and a
meaning to the delicate shades of expression, that can be had in no other
way. One of her friends has described her as being of "the middle height,
the head large, the brow ample, the lower face massive; the eyes gray,
lighting up from time to time with a sympathetic glow; the countenance
sensitive, spiritual, with 'mind and music breathing' from it; the general
demeanor composed and gracious; her utterance fluent and finished, but
somewhat measured; her voice clear and melodious, moving evenly, as it were
in a monotone, though now and then rising, with a sort of quiet eagerness,
into a higher note." The same writer speaks of the close-fitting flow of
her robe, and the luxuriant mass of light-brown hair hanging low on both
sides of her head, as marked characteristics of her costume. Her features
were very plain and large, too large for anything like beauty, but strongly
impressive by their very massiveness. More than one of her friends has
spoken of her resemblance to Savonarola, perhaps suggested by her
description of that monk-prophet in _Romola_. Mr. Kegan Paul finds that she
also resembled Dante and Cardinal Newman, and that these four were of the
same spiritual family, with a curious interdependence of likeness. All
these persons have "the same straight wall of brow; the droop of the
powerful nose; mobile lips, touched with strong passion kept resolutely
under control; a square jaw, which would make the face stern were it not
counteracted by the sweet smile of lips and eye." Her friends say that no
portrait does her justice, that her massive we features could not be
portrayed. "The mere shape of the head," says Kegan Paul, "would be the
despair of any painter. It was so grand and massive that it would scarcely
be possible to represent it without giving the idea of disproportion to the
frame, of which no one ever thought for a moment when they saw her,
although it was a surprise, when she stood up, to see that, after all, she
was but a little fragile woman who bore this weight of brow and brain."

An account of her personal traits has been given by Mrs. Lippincott. "She
impressed me," says this writer, "at first as exceedingly plain, with the
massive character of her features, her aggressive jaw and evasive blue
eyes. But as she grew interested and earnest in conversation, a great light
flashed over or out of her face, till it seemed transfigured, while the
sweetness of her rare smile was something quite indescribable. But she
seemed to me to the last lofty and cold. I felt that her head was among the
stars--the stars of a wintry night." Another American, Miss Kate Field, in
writing of the English authors to be seen in Florence half a dozen years
after George Eliot began her career, was the first to give an account of
this new literary star. "She is a woman of large frame and fair Saxon
coloring. In heaviness of jaw and height of cheek-bone she greatly
resembles a German; nor are her features unlike those of Wordsworth,
judging from his pictures. The expression of her face is gentle and
amiable, while her manner is particularly timid and retiring. In
conversation Mrs. Lewes is most entertaining, and her interest in young
writers is a trait which immediately takes captive all persons of this
class. We shall not forget with what kindness and earnestness she addressed
a young girl who had just begun to handle a pen, how frankly she related
her own literary experience, and how gently she _suggested_ advice. True
genius is always allied to humility; and in seeing Mrs. Lewes do the work
of a good Samaritan so unobtrusively, we learned to respect the woman as
much as we had ever admired the writer. 'For years,' said she to us, 'I
wrote reviews because I knew too little of humanity.'"

These sketches by persons who only met her casually have an interest in the
illustration of her character; and they may be added to by still another
account, written by Mrs. Annie Downs, also an American, in 1879, and
describing a visit to George Eliot two years before her death. "Tall,
slender, with a grace most un-English, her face, instead of beauty,
possessed a sweet benignity, and at times flashed into absolute brilliancy.
She was older than I had imagined, for her hair, once fair, was gray, and
unmistakable lines of care and thought were on the low, broad brow. But
although a pang pierced my heart as I recognized that most of her life was
behind her, so intensely did I feel her personality that in a moment I lost
sight of her age; it was like standing soul to soul, and beyond the reach
of time. Dressed in black velvet, with point lace on her hair, and repeated
at throat and wrists, she made me think at once of Romola and Dorothea
Brooke. She talked of Agassiz, of his museum at Cambridge, of the great
natural-history collections at Naples, of Sir Edwin Landseer's pictures,
and with enthusiasm of Mr. Furnival's Shakspere and Chaucer classes at the
Working Men's College... She had quaint etchings of some of the monkeys at
the zoological gardens, and told me she was more interested in them than
any of the other animals, they exhibit traits so distinctly human. She
declared, while her husband and friends laughingly teased her for the
assertion, that she had seen a sick monkey, parched with fever, absolutely
refuse the water he longed for, until the keeper had handed it to a friend
who was suffering more than he. As an illustration of their quickness, she
told me, in a very dramatic manner, of a nurse who shook two of her little
charges for some childish misdemeanor while in the monkey house. No one
noticed the monkeys looking at her, but pretty soon every old monkey in the
house began shaking her children, and kept up the process until the little
monkeys had to be removed for fear their heads would be shaken off. I felt
no incongruity between her conversation and her books. She talked as she
wrote; in descriptive passages, with the same sort of humor, and the same
manner of linking events by analogy and inference. The walls were covered
with pictures. I remember Guido's Aurora, Michael Angelo's prophets,
Raphael's sibyls, while all about were sketches, landscapes and crayon
drawings, gifts from the most famous living painters, many of whom are
friends of the house. A grand piano, opened and covered with music,
indicated recent and continual use."

One of her intimate friends says that "in every line of her face there was
powder, and about her jaw and mouth a prodigious massiveness, which might
well have inspired awe had it not been tempered by the most gracious smile
which ever lighted up human features, and was ever ready to convert what
otherwise might have been terror into fascination!" We are told that "an
extraordinary delicacy pervaded her whole being. She seemed to live upon
air, and the rest of her body was as light and fragile as her countenance
and intellect were massive." One of the results of this large brain and
fragile body was, that she was never vigorous in health. Only her quiet,
simple life, and avoidance of all excitement in regular work, enabled her
to accomplish so much as she did. Her conversation was rich and attractive.
She talked much as she wrote, was a good listener, never obtruded her
opinions, and always had a noble moral purpose in her words.

An American lady has given an interesting account of her home and of her
conversation. "No one," says Mrs. Field, "who had ever seen her could
mistake the large head (her brain must be heavier than most men's) covered
with a mass of rich auburn hair. At first I thought her tall; for one could
not think that such a head could rest on an ordinary woman's shoulders.
But, as she rose up, her figure appeared of but medium height. She received
us very kindly. In seeing, for the first time, one to whom we owed so many
happy hours, it was impossible to feel towards her as a stranger. All
distance was removed by her courtesy. Her manners are very sweet, because
very simple and free from affectation. To me her welcome was the more
grateful as that of one woman to another. There is a sort of free-masonry
among women, by which they understand at once those with whom they have any
intellectual sympathy. A few words, and all reserve was gone. 'Come, sit by
me on this sofa,' she said; and instantly, seated side by side, we were
deep in conversation. It is in such intimacy one feels the magnetism of a
large mind informed by a true woman's heart; then, as the soul shines
through the face, one perceives its intellectual beauty. No portrait can
give the full expression of the eye any more than of the voice. Looking
into that clear, calm eye, one sees a transparent nature, a soul of
goodness and truth, an impression which is deepened as you listen to her
soft and gentle tones. A low voice is said to be an excellent thing in a
woman. It is a special charm of the most finely cultured English ladies.
But never did a sweeter voice fascinate a listener,--so soft and low that
one must almost bend to hear. You can imagine what it was thus to sit for
an hour beside this gifted woman and hear talk of questions interesting to
the women of England and America. But I should do her great injustice if I
gave the impression that there was in her conversation any attempt at
display. There is no wish to shine. She is above that affectation of
brilliancy which is often mere flippancy. Nor does she seek to attract
homage and admiration. On the contrary, she is very averse to speak of
herself, or even to hear the heartfelt praise of others. She does not
engross the conversation, but is more eager to listen than to talk. She has
that delicate tact--which is one of the fine arts among women--to make
others talk, suggesting topics the most rich and fruitful, and by a word
drawing the conversation into a channel where it may flow with broad, free
current. Thus she makes you forget the celebrated author, and think only of
the refined and highly cultivated woman. You do not feel awed by her
genius, but only quickened by it, as something that calls out all that is
better and truer. While there is no attempt to impress you with her
intellectual superiority, you naturally feel elevated into a higher sphere.
The conversation of itself floats upward into a region above the
commonplace. The small-talk of ordinary society would seem an impertinence.
There is a singular earnestness about her, as if those mild eyes looked
deep into the great, sad, awful truths of existence. To her, life is a
serious reality, and the gift of genius a grave responsibility."

Mrs. Lewes was in the habit for many years of receiving her friends on
Sunday afternoons from two to six o'clock. These gatherings came to be
among the most memorable features of London literary life. A large number
of persons, both men and women, attended her receptions, and among them
many who were well known to the scientific or literary world. Especially
were young men of aspiring minds drawn hither and given a larger
comprehension of life. She had no political or fashionable connections,
says Mr. F.W.H. Myers, "but nearly all who were most eminent in art,
science, literature, philanthropy, might be met from time to time at her
Sunday-afternoon receptions. There were many women, too, drawn often from
among very different traditions of thought and belief, by the unfeigned
goodness which they recognized in Mrs. Lewes's look and speech, and
sometimes illumining with some fair young face a _salon_ whose grave talk
needed the grace which they could bestow. And there was sure to be a
considerable admixture of men not as yet famous,--probably never to be
so,--but whom some indication of studies earnestly pursued, of sincere
effort for the good of their fellow-men, had recommended to 'that
hopeful interest which'--to quote a letter of her own--'the elder mind,
dissatisfied with itself, delights to entertain with regard to those
younger, whose years and powers hold a larger measure of unspoiled life.'
It was Mr. Lewes who on these occasions contributed the cheerful
_bonhomie_, the observant readiness, which are necessary for the facing of
any social group. Mrs. Lewes's manner had a grave simplicity, which rose in
closer converse into an almost pathetic anxiety to give of her best--to
establish a genuine human relation between herself and her interlocutor--to
utter words which should remain as an active influence for good in the
hearts of those who heard them. To some of her literary admirers, this
serious tone was distasteful; they were inclined to resent the prominence
given to moral ideas in a quarter from which they preferred to look merely
for intellectual refreshment. Mrs. Lewes's humor, though fed from a deep
perception of the incongruities of human fates, had not, except in intimate
moments, any buoyant or contagious quality, and in all her talk--full of
matter and wisdom, and exquisitely worded as it was--there was the same
pervading air of strenuous seriousness which was more welcome to those
whose object was distinctively to _learn_ from her, than to those who
merely wished to pass an idle and brilliant hour. To her, these mixed
receptions were a great effort. Her mind did not move easily from one
individuality to another, and when she afterward thought that she had
failed to understand some difficulty which had been laid before her,--had
spoken the wrong word to some expectant heart,--she would suffer from
almost morbid accesses of self-reproach." A further idea of these
conversations may be gathered from Mr. Kegan Paul's account. "When London
was full," he says, "the little drawing-room in St. John's Wood was now and
then crowded to overflowing with those who were glad to give their best of
conversation, of information, and sometimes of music, always to listen with
eager attention to whatever their hostess might say, when all that she said
was worth hearing. Without a trace of pedantry, she led the conversation to
some great and lofty strain. Of herself and her works she never spoke; of
the works and thoughts of others she spoke with reverence, and sometimes
even too great tolerance. But these afternoons had the highest pleasure
when London was empty, or the day was wet, and only a few friends were
present, so that her conversation assumed a more sustained tone than was
possible when the rooms were full of shifting groups. It was then that,
without any premeditation, her sentences fell as fully formed, as wise, as
weighty, as epigrammatic, as any to be found in her books. Always ready,
but never rapid, her talk was not only good in itself, but it encouraged
the same in others, since she was an excellent listener, and eager to
hear."

At these gatherings the most noted of the English disciples of Comte were
to be found, and among them Frederic Harrison, Prof. E.S. Beesley, Dr.
Congrove, the director of the London Church of Humanity, and Prof. W.K.
Clifford. The English positivists were represented by Herbert Spencer,
Prof. T.H. Huxley and Moncure D. Conway. The realistic school of poets and
artists came in the persons of its most representative men. Dante Rosetti
and Millais, Tourguénief and Burne Jones, DuMaurier and Dr. Hueffner
illustrated most of its phases. The great world of general literature sent
Sir Arthur Helps, Sir Theodore Martin, Anthony Trollope, C.G. Leland,
Justin McCarthy, Frederic Myers, Prof. Mark Pattison and many another. The
rarer guests included Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning. It was no
inconsiderable influence which could draw together such a company and hold
it together for many years. Of the part played in these gatherings by the
hosts, Miss Mathilde Blind has given an account. Lewes acted "as a social
cement. His vivacity, his ready tact, the fascination of his manners,
diffused that general sense of ease and _abandon_ so requisite to foster an
harmonious flow of conversation. He was inimitable as a _raconteur_, and
Thackeray, Trollope and Arthur Helps were fond of quoting some of the
stories which he would dramatize in the telling. One of the images which,
on these occasions, recurs oftenest to George Eliot's friends is that of
the frail-looking woman who would sit with her chair drawn close to the
fire, and whose winning womanliness of bearing and manners struck every one
who had the privilege of an introduction to her. Her long, pale face, with
its strongly marked features, was less rugged in the mature prime of life
than in youth, the inner meanings of her nature having worked themselves
more and more to the surface, the mouth, with its benignant suavity of
expression, especially softening the too prominent under lip and massive
jaw. Her abundant hair, untinged with gray, whose smooth bands made a kind
of frame to the face, was covered by a lace or muslin cap, with lappets of
rich point or Valenciennes lace fastened under her chin. Her gray-blue
eyes, under noticeable eyelashes, expressed the same acute sensitiveness as
her long, thin, beautifully shaped hands. She had a pleasant laugh and
smile, her voice being low, distinct, and intensely sympathetic in quality;
it was contralto in singing, but she seldom sang or played before more than
one or two friends. Though her conversation was perfectly easy, each
sentence was as finished, as perfectly formed, as the style of her
published works."

Among the persons who gathered at The Priory on Sunday afternoons there
came to be a considerable number of those who were Mrs. Lewes's devoted
disciples. They hung upon her words, they accepted her views of life, her
philosophy became theirs. That she would have admitted such discipleship
existed there is no reason to believe, and it is certain she did not
attempt to bring it about or even desire it. So great, however, was her
power of intellect, so noble her personal influence, it was impossible that
ardent young natures could refrain from devotion to such genius and speedy
acceptance of its teachings. The richness of her moral and intellectual
nature aided largely in this heroine worship, but she impressed herself on
other minds because she was so much an individual, because her personality
was of a kind to command reverence and devotion. It was not merely young
and impulsive natures who were thus attracted and inspired, for Edith
Simcox says that "men and women, old friends and new, persons of her own
age and of another generation, the married and the single, impulsive
lovers and hard-headed philosophers, nay, even some who elsewhere might
have passed for cynics, all classes alike yielded to the attractive force
of this rare character, in which tenderness and strength were blended
together, and as it were transfused with something that was all her
own--the genius of sweet goodness." Perhaps her influence was so great on
those it reached because it demanded high and noble life and thought of her
disciples. Her moral ideal was a high one, and she had literary and
artistic standards that demanded all the effort of both genius and talent,
while her culture was such as to be exacting in its requirements. So we
find Miss Simcox saying that Mrs. Lewes, in her friendships, "had the
unconscious exactingness of a full nature. She was intolerant of a vacuum
in the mind or character, and she was indifferent to admiration that did
not seem to have its root in fundamental agreement with those principles
she held to be most 'necessary to salvation.' Where this sympathy existed,
her generous affection was given to a fellow-believer, a fellow-laborer,
with singularly little reference to the fact that such full sympathy was
never unattended with profound love and reverence for herself as a living
witness to the truth and power of the principles thus shared. To love her
was a strenuous pleasure; for in spite of the tenderness for all human
weakness that was natural to her, and the scrupulous charity of her overt
judgments, the fact remained that her natural standard was ruthlessly out
of reach, and it was a painful discipline for her friends to feel that she
was compelled to lower it to suit their infirmities. The intense humility
of her self-appreciation, and the unfeigned readiness with which she would
even herself with any sinner who sought her counsel, had the same effect
upon those who would compare what she condemned in herself with what she
tolerated in them. And at the same time, no doubt, this total absence of
self-sufficiency had something to do with the passionate tenderness with
which commonplace people dared to cherish their immortal friend."

As has already been suggested, her womanliness is a more prominent
characteristic of Mrs. Lewes's mind than its great intellectual power. Her
sympathy was keen and most sensitive, her modesty and humility were almost
excessive, and her tenderness of nature was a woman's own. She gave her
sympathy readily and freely to the humble and unfavored. She had no taint
of intellectual aristocracy, says one of her friends. Faithful, devoted
love; the sacredness of simple duties and plain work; earnest help of other
souls,--these were among the daily lessons of her life and teaching. "How
strong was the current of her sympathy in the direction of all humble
effort," exclaims one of her friends, "how reluctantly she checked
presumption! The most ordinary and uninteresting of her friends must feel
that had they known nothing of her but her rapid insight into and quick
response to their inmost feelings she would still have been a memorable
personality to them. This sympathy was extended to the sorrows most unlike
anything she could ever by any possibility have known--the failures of life
obtained as large a share of her compassion as its sorrows. The wish to
console and cheer was indeed rooted in the most vital part of her nature."
Another of her friends has said that "she possessed to a marvellous degree
the divine gifts of charity, and of attracting moral outcasts to herself,
whose devils she cast out, if I may be permitted the expression, by
shutting her eyes to their existence. In her presence you felt wrapped
round by an all-embracing atmosphere of sympathy and readiness to make the
least of all your short comings, and the most of any good which might be in
you. But great as was her personality, she shrank with horror from
intruding it upon you, and, in general society, her exquisitely melodious
voice was, unhappily for the outside circles, too seldom raised beyond the
pitch of something not much above a whisper. Of the rich vein of humor
which runs through George Eliot's works there was comparatively little
trace in her conversation, which seldom descended from the grave to the
gay. But although she rarely indulged in conversational levity herself, she
was most tolerant of it, and even encouraged its ebullition, in others,
joining heartily in any mirth which might be going on."

She made her younger admirers feel the deeper influence of her great
personality by inspiring them with the largest moral purposes. To awaken
and to arouse the moral nature seems always to have been her purpose, and
to lead it to the highest attainable results. Earnest young minds never
"failed to feel in her presence that they were for the time, at all events,
raised into a higher moral level, and none ever left her without feeling
inspired with a stronger sense of duty, and positively under the obligation
of striving to live up to a higher standard of life." Hence her personal
influence was considerable, though she led the close life of a student, and
did not go into general society at all. This high moral earnestness made
her a prophet to her friends, as in her books it made her a great moral
teacher to the world at large. Those who had the privilege of an intimate
acquaintance with Mrs. Lewes have pronounced the woman greater than her
books. She was not only a great writer but a great woman. Human nature in
its largest capacities was represented in her, for she rose above the
limitations of sex; and she is thought of less as a great woman than as a
large human personality. Hers was a massive nature, emphatic, individual,
many-sided. Genius of a very high order, though not the highest, was hers,
while she was possessed of a broad culture and great learning. Seldom does
genius carry with it talents so varied and well-trained or a culture so
full and thorough. And her culture was of that kind which entered into
every fibre of her nature and became a part of her own personality. It was
thoroughly digested and absorbed into good healthy red blood, and became a
quickened, sustained motive to the largest efforts. How vital this love of
culture was, may be seen when we are told that "she possessed in an eminent
degree that power which has led to success in so many directions, of
keeping her mind unceasingly at the stretch without conscious fatigue. She
would cease to ponder or to read when other duties called her, but never
because she herself felt tired. Even in so complex an effort as a visit to
a picture gallery implies, she could continue for hours at the same pitch
of earnest interest, and outweary strong men. Nor was this a mere habit of
passive reception. In the intervals between her successive compositions her
mind was always fusing and combining its fresh stores."

She had culture, moral power and earnestness in a high degree, warmth of
sympathy and sensitiveness to all beauty, but she had no saintliness.
Profound as was her reverence for moral purity, and lofty as was her moral
purpose, she was not a saint, and holiness was not a characteristic of her
nature. This clear and high sense of moral truth everywhere appears in her
life and thought. "For the lessons most imperatively needed by the mass of
men, the lessons of deliberate kindness, of careful truth, of unwavering
endeavor,--for these plain themes one could not ask a more convincing
teacher than she. Everything in her aspect and presence was in keeping with
the bent of her soul. The deeply lined face, the too marked and massive
features, were united with an air of delicate refinement, which in one way
was the more impressive because it seemed to proceed entirely from within.
Nay, the inward beauty would sometimes quite transform the external
harshness; there would be moments when the thin hands that entwined
themselves in their eagerness, the earnest figure that bowed forward to
speak and hear, the deep gaze moving from one face to another with a grave
appeal,--all these seemed the transparent symbols that showed the presence
of a wise, benignant soul. But it was the voice which best revealed her, a
voice whose subdued intensity and tremulous richness seemed to environ her
uttered words with the mystery of a world that must remain untold. And then
again, when in moments of more intimate converse some current of emotion
would set strongly through her soul, when she would raise her head in
unconscious absorption and look out into the unseen, her expression was not
one to be soon forgotten. It has not, indeed, the serene felicity of souls
to whose childlike confidence all heaven and earth are fair. Rather it was
the look of a strenuous Demiurge, of a soul on which high tasks are laid,
and which finds in their accomplishment its only imagination of joy."

Another side of her influence on persons is expressed by the representative
of that publishing house which gave her books to the world. "In addition to
the spell which bound the world to her by her genius, she had a personal
power of drawing to herself, in ties of sympathy and kindly feeling, all
who came under her influence. She never oppressed any one by her talents;
she never allowed any one to be sensible of the depth and variety of her
scholarship; she knew, as few know, how to draw forth the views and
feelings of her visitors, and to make their sympathies her own. There was a
charm in her personal character which of itself was sufficient to
conciliate deep and lasting regard. Every one who entered her society left
it impressed with the conviction that they had been under the influence of
a sympathy and tenderness not less remarkable than the force of her mental
power.... Her deep and catholic love for humanity in its broadest and best
sense, which was in itself the strongest quickening motive of her genius,
will maintain her influence in the future as in the present."

Hers was a somewhat sensitive, shrinking nature, with no self-assumption,
and without the taint of egotism. She had a modest estimate of her own
great literary creations, and shrank from all mention of them and from the
homage paid to her as an author. After the publication of _Romola_ she was
one day reading French to a girl companion in the garden of a Swiss hotel,
when a lady drew near to listen to the silvery tones of her voice. Noticing
this, she said, "Do you understand?" The lady answered, "I do not care for
the matter; I only came to listen to your voice." "Do you like it?" was
then inquired. When the lady expressed the pleasure it gave her, Mrs. Lewes
took her hand and warmly said, "I thank you. I would rather you would
compliment my voice than my _Romola_." [Footnote: This story is not
authenticated; it may be taken for what it is worth, though it appears to
be characteristic.]

It has been truly said of her that above all novelists, with the exception
of Goethe, she was supreme in culture. She had a passion for knowledge, and
zeal in the pursuit of learning. She was a lover of books, but not a
scholar in the technical and exact sense. Delighting in literature, art,
music, and all that appeals to the imagination, rather than in mere
information, yet she was a thinker of original powers, with a keen
appreciation of philosophy, and ability to tread its most difficult paths
with firm step. She had an intimate acquaintance with the literatures of
Germany, France, Italy and Spain, and she was well read in the classics of
Greece and Rome. She was "competently acquainted" with the different
systems of philosophy, and she had mastered their problems while thinking
out her own conclusions. Having no professional knowledge of the sciences,
she was a diligent reader of scientific books, and was familiar with all
the bearings of science on philosophy and religion. Her books show an
intimate knowledge of modern thought in many of its phases, as it bears
upon physical, economic, historical and intellectual science. With all her
learning, however, she retained a woman's sympathy with life, beauty and
poetry. Her knowledge was never dry and technical, but warm and imaginative
with genius and poetry. [Footnote: Her scholarly habits, and her realistic
tendencies, usually made George Eliot very painstaking and accurate, but an
occasional slip of pen or memory is to be noted in her books. In
Theophrastus Such she credited to the Apologia of Plato what is really
contained in the Phaedo. The motto to chapter seventeen of Daniel Deronda
was quoted, in the first edition, as from In Memoriam instead of Locksley
Hall. In an early chapter of Felix Holt she made the parson preach from the
words, "Break up the fallow ground of your hearts." The words of scripture
are, "Break up your fallow ground." In Adam Bede a clergyman is made to
take the words of the Prayer Book, "In the midst of life we are in death,"
for his text.]

Her culture may be compared with Mrs. Browning's, who was also an extensive
reader and widely informed. The poet as well as the novelist acquired her
learning because of her thirst for knowledge, and mainly by her own
efforts; but she preferred the classics to science, and literature to
philosophy. Mrs. Browning was the wiser, George Eliot the more learned. The
writings of Mrs. Browning are less affected by her information than George
Eliot's; and this is true because she was of a more poetical temperament,
because her imagination was more brilliant and creative.

Mrs. Lewes was an enthusiastic lover of art, and especially of music. She
never tired in her interest in beholding fine paintings, and music was the
continual delight of her life. She was a tireless frequenter of picture
galleries, and every fine musical entertainment in London was sure to find
her, in company with Mr. Lewes, an enthusiastic listener. Good acting also
claimed not a little of her interest, and she carefully studied even the
details of the dramatic art, so that she was able to give a critical
appreciation to the acting she enjoyed. Indeed, she had given to her mind
that rounded fulness of attainment, and developed all her faculties
with that due proportion, which Fichte so earnestly preached as the
characteristic of true culture. "Her character," says Edith Simcox, "seemed
to include every possibility of action and emotion; no human passion was
wanting in her nature, there were no blanks or negations; and the
marvellous thing was to see how, in this wealth of impulses and desires,
there was no crash of internal discord, no painful collisions with other
human interests outside; how, in all her life, passions of volcanic
strength were harnessed in the service of those nearest her, and so
inspired by the permanent instinct of devotion to her kind, that it seemed
as if it were by her own choice they spent themselves there only where
their force was welcome. Her very being was a protest against the opposing
and yet cognate heresies that half the normal human passions must be
strangled in the quest of virtue, and that the attainment of virtue is a
dull and undesirable end, seeing that it implies the sacrifice of most that
makes life interesting." She had her own temptations and her imperfections.
With these she struggled bravely, and set herself to the hard task of
correction and discipline. Her culture was not merely one of books, but it
was also one of moral discipline and of strenuous spiritual subjection. It
was one of stern moral requirements and duties, as well as one of large
sympathy with all that is natural and beautiful.

It was a quiet life of continuous study and authorship which Mrs. Lewes led
in The Priory, and it was varied from year to year only by her visits to
the continent and by her summer residence in Surrey. One of her summer
retreats, at the village of Shotter Mill, has been described, as well as
her life there. The most picturesque house in the place is known as
Brookbank, and here she spent a summer, that of 1871. It is described as
"an old two-storied cottage, the front of the house being half-covered with
trailing rose-trees. The rooms are low but pleasant, and furnished in a
simple, comfortable manner. We have often endeavored," says the writer of
this account, "to glean some information regarding George Eliot's life at
Shotter Mill, but she and Mr. Lewes lived in such seclusion that there was
very little to be told. They seldom crossed their threshold during the day,
but wandered over the commons and hills after sundown. They were very
anxious to lodge at the picturesque old farm, ten minutes' walk beyond
Brookbank, but all available room was then occupied. However, George Eliot
would often visit the farmer's wife, and, sitting on a grassy bank just
beside the kitchen door, would discuss the growth of fruit and the quality
of butter in a manner so quiet and simple the good country folks were
astonished, expecting very different conversation from the great novelist.
The farmer was employed to drive them two or three times a week. They
occasionally visited Tennyson, whose home is only three miles distant,
though a rather tedious drive, since it is up hill nearly all the way.
George Eliot did not enjoy the ride much, for the farmer told us that,
'withal her being such a mighty clever body,--she were very nervous in a
carriage--allays wanted to go on a smooth road, and seemed dreadful feared
of being thrown out.' George Eliot was writing _Middlemarch_ during her
summer at Brookbank, and the term for which they had the cottage expired
before they wished to return to London. The Squire was away at the time, so
they procured permission to use his house during the remainder of the
visit. In speaking of them he said, 'I visited Mr. and Mrs. Lewes several
times before they went back to town, and found the authoress a very
agreeable woman, both in manner and appearance; but her mind was evidently
completely absorbed in her work; she seemed to have no time for anything
but writing from morning till night. Her hand could hardly convey her
thoughts to paper fast enough. It was an exceptionally hot summer, and yet
through it all Mrs. Lewes would have artificial heat placed at her feet to
keep up the circulation. Why, one broiling day I came home worn out,
longing for a gray sky and a cool breeze, and on going into the garden I
found her sitting there, her head just shaded by a deodara on the lawn,
writing away as usual. I expostulated with her for letting the midday sun
pour down on her like that. 'Oh,' she replied, 'I like it. To-day is the
first time I have felt warm this summer.' So I said no more, and went my
way.' And thus nearly all we could learn about George Eliot was that she
loved to bask in the sun and liked green peas. She visited some of the
cottagers, but only those living in secluded places, who knew nothing of
her. Just such people as these she used in her graphic and realistic
sketches of peasant life. With regard to the surrounding country, George
Eliot said that it pleased her more than any she knew of in England."

In these summer retreats she continued steadily at her work, and she
greatly delighted in the quiet and rest. Other summers were spent at
Witley, in the same county, where the fine scenery, lovely drives and
wide-reaching views from the hill-tops were to her a perpetual delight.
At this place a house was bought, and there was a project of giving up the
London residence and of visiting the city only for occasional relaxation.
This project was not carried out, for soon after their return from Witley
in the autumn of 1878, Mr. Lewes was taken ill, and died in November. His
death was a great blow to Mrs. Lewes, and he was deeply mourned, so much so
as to seriously impair her health. The state of her mind at this trying
period is well indicated in a letter written to Prof. David Kaufmann.


THE PRIORY, 21 NORTH BANK, REGENT'S PARK,
April 17, '79.

MY DEAR SIR,--Your kind letter has touched me very deeply. I confess that
my mind has more than once gone out to you as one from whom I should like
to have some sign of sympathy with my loss. But you were rightly inspired
in waiting till now, for during many weeks I was unable even to listen to
the letters which my generous friends were continually sending me. Now, at
last, I am eagerly interested in every communication that springs out of an
acquaintance with my husband and taskworks.

I thank you for telling me about the Hungarian translation of his History
of Philosophy, but what would I not have given if the volumes could have
come a few days before his death; for his mind was perfectly clear, and he
would have felt some joy in that sign of his work being effective. I do not
know whether you enter into the comfort I feel that he never knew he was
dying, and fell gently asleep after ten days of illness in which the
suffering was comparatively mild.....

One of the last things he did at his desk was to despatch a manuscript of
mine to the publishers. The book (not a story and not bulky) is to appear
near the end of May, and as it contains some words I wanted to say about
the Jews, I will order a copy to be sent to you.

I hope that your labors have gone on uninterruptedly for the benefit of
others, in spite of public troubles. The aspect of affairs with us is
grevious--industry languishing, and the best part of our nation indignant
at our having been betrayed into an unjustifiable war (in South Africa).

I have been occupied in editing my husband's MSS., so far as they are left
in sufficient completeness to be prepared for publication without the
obtrusion of another mind instead of his. A brief volume on _The Study of
Psychology_ will appear immediately, and a further volume of psychological
studies will follow in the autumn. But his work was cut short while he
still thought of it as the happy occupation of far-stretching months. Once
more let me thank you for remembering me in my sorrow, and believe me

Yours with high regard,
M.E. LEWES.

Writing to a friend soon after Lewes's death, who had also lost her
husband, she said,--

    There is but one refuge--the having much to do. Nothing can make the
    burden to be patiently borne, except the gradual adaptation of your
    soul to the new conditions.

The much to do she partly found in editing the uncompleted _Problems
of Life and Mind_, and in establishing a studentship for original
investigation in physiology, known as "The George Henry Lewes Studentship."
Its value is about two hundred pounds, and it is open to both sexes. These
labors enabled her to do honor to one she had trusted through many years,
whose name and fame she greatly revered, and to recover the even poise of
her life. She carefully managed the business affairs he had left in her
hands, and she provided for his children.

A year and a half after the death of Lewes, May 6, 1880, she was married at
the church of St. George's, Hanover Square, to John Walter Cross, the
senior partner in a London banking firm, whom she had first met in 1867,
and who had been a greatly valued friend both to herself and Lewes. Though
much younger than herself, he had many qualities to recommend him to her
regard. A visit to the continent after this ceremony lasted for several
months, a considerable portion of the time being spent in Venice. On their
return to London in the autumn after spending a happy summer in Surrey,
they went to live in the house of Mr. Cross at 4 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. The
old habits of her life were taken up, her studies were resumed, a new novel
was begun, her friends came as usual on Sunday afternoons, and many years
of work seemed before her, for her health had greatly improved. On Friday,
December 17, 1880, she attended the presentation of the _Agamemnon_ of
Aeschylus, in the original Greek, with the accompaniments of the ancient
theatre, by the undergraduates of Balliol College, Oxford. She was very
enthusiastic about this revival of ancient art, and planned to read anew
all the Greek dramatists with her husband. The next day she attended a
popular concert at St. James Hall, and listened with her usual intense
interest. Sitting in a draught, she caught cold, but that evening she
played through much of the music she had heard in the afternoon. The next
day she was not so well as usual, yet she met her friends in the afternoon.
On Monday her larynx was slightly affected, and a physician was called, but
no danger was apprehended. Yet her malady gained rapidly. On Tuesday night
she was in a dangerous condition, and on Wednesday the pericardium was
found to be seriously diseased. Towards midnight of that day, December 22,
after a period of unconsciousness, she quietly passed away. She was buried
on the 29th, in the unconsecrated portion of Highgate Cemetery, by the side
of George Henry Lewes. The funeral services were conducted by the Rev. Dr.
Sadler, a radical Unitarian minister, who spoke of her great genius, and
quoted her own words about a future life in the life of humanity. His
address contained many references to her personal characteristics, such as
could only come from an intimate friend. He said,--

"To those who are present it is given to think of the gentleness, and
delicate womanly grace and charm, which were combined with 'that breadth of
culture and universality of power which,' as one has expressed it, 'have
made her known to all the world.' To those who are present it is given to
know the diffidence and self-distrust which, notwithstanding all her public
fame, needed individual sympathy and encouragement to prevent her from
feeling too keenly how far the results of her labors fell below the
standard she had set before her. To those who are present too it may be
given--though there is so large a number to whom it is not given--to
understand how a nature may be profoundly devout, and yet unable to accept
a great deal of what is usually held as religious belief. No intellectual
difficulties or uncertainties, no sense of mental incapacity to climb the
heights of infinitude, could take from her the piety of the affections or
'the beliefs which were the mother-tongue of her soul.' I cannot doubt that
she spoke out of the fulness of her own heart when she put into the lips of
another the words, 'May not a man silence his awe or his love and take to
finding reasons which others demand? But if his love lies deeper than any
reasons to be found!' How patiently she toiled to render her work in all
its details as little imperfect as might be! How green she kept the
remembrance of all those companions to whom she felt that she owed a
moulding and elevating influence, especially in her old home, and of him
who was its head, her father! How her heart glowed with a desire to help to
make a heaven on earth, to be a 'cup of strength' to others, and when her
own days on earth should have closed, to have a place among those

          "'Immortal dead who still live on
  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 sell;
  In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars,
  And with their mild persistence urge man's search
  To vaster issues.'

"How she thus yearned 'to join the choir invisible, whose music is the
gladness of the world!' All this is known to those who had the privilege of
being near her."

The address was preceded by a simple burial service, and was followed by a
prayer, all being given in the chapel of the cemetery. The coffin, covered
with the finest floral tributes, was then borne to the grave, where the
burial service was completed, and was followed by a prayer and the
benediction. Although the day was a disagreeable one and rain was falling,
the chapel was crowded, and many not being able to gain admittance stood
about the open grave. Beside her personal friends and her family there were
present many persons noted for their literary or scientific attainments, On
the lid of the coffin was this inscription:

                       MARY ANN CROSS.
                      ("George Eliot")
          Born 22d Nov., 1819; died 22d Dec., 1880.

                       Quilla fonte
          Che spande di parlay si largo flume.

[Footnote: From Dante, and has been rendered into English thus:

                       That fountain
          Which spreads abroad so wide a river of speech.]


The novel which had been begun was left a mere fragment, and in accordance
with what it was thought would have been her wish, was destroyed by her
family. Perhaps it was better that her dislike of unfinished work should be
so respected.




VI.


LITERARY TRAITS AND TENDENCIES.

George Eliot was a painstaking, laborious writer. She did not proceed
rapidly, so carefully did she elaborate her pages. Her subjects were
thoroughly studied before the pen was taken in hand, patiently thought out,
planned with much care, and all available helps secured that could be had.
She threw her whole life into her work, became a part of the scenes she was
depicting; her life was absorbed until the work of writing became a painful
process both to body and mind. "Her beautifully written manuscript," says
her publisher, "free from blur or erasure, and with every letter delicately
and distinctly finished, was only the outward and visible sign of the
inward labor which she had taken to work out her ideas. She never drew any
of her facts or impressions from second hand; and thus, in spite of the
number and variety of her illustrations, she had rarely much to correct in
her proof-sheets. She had all that love of doing her work well for the
work's sake which she makes prominent characteristics of Adam Bede and
Stradivarius."

When a book was completed, so intense had been her application and the
absorption of her life in her work, a period of despondency followed. When
a correspondent praised _Middlemarch_, and expressed a hope that even a
greater work might follow, she replied, "As to the 'great novel' which
remains to be written, I must tell you that I never believe in future
books." Again, she wrote of the depression which succeeded the completion
of each of her works,--

    Always after finishing a book I have a period of despair that I
    can ever again produce anything worth giving to the world. The
    responsibility of writing grows heavier and heavier--does it not?--as
    the world grows older and the voices of the dead more numerous. It is
    difficult to believe, until the germ of some new work grows into
    imperious activity within one, that it is possible to make a really
    needed contribution to the poetry of the world--I mean possible to
    one's self to do it.

Owing probably somewhat to this tendency to take a despondent view
concerning her own work, and to distrust of the leadings of her own
genius, was her habit of never reading the criticisms made on her books.
She adopted this rule, she tells one correspondent, "as a necessary
preservative against influences that would have ended by nullifying her
power of writing." To another, who had written her in appreciation of her
books, she wrote this note, in which she alludes to the same habit of
shunning criticism:


MY DEAR MISS WELLINGTON,--The signs of your sympathy sent to me across the
wide water have touched me with the more effect because you imply that you
are young. I care supremely that my writing should be some help and
stimulus to those who have probably a long life before them.

Mr. Lewes does not let me read criticisms on my writings. He always reads
them himself, and gives me occasional quotations, when be thinks that they
show a spirit and mode of appreciation which will win my gratitude. He has
carefully read through the articles which were accompanied by your kind
letter, and he has a high opinion of the feeling and discernment exhibited
in them. Some concluding passages which he read aloud to me are such as I
register among the grounds of any encouragement in looking backward on what
I have written, if not in looking forward to my future writing.

Thank you, my dear young friend, whom I shall probably never know otherwise
than in this spiritual way. And certainly, apart from those relations in
life which bring daily duties and opportunities of lovingness, the most
satisfactory of all ties is this effective invisible intercourse of an
elder mind with a younger.

The quotation in your letter from Hawthorne's book offers an excellent type
both for men and women in the value it assigns to that order of work which
is called subordinate but becomes ennobling by being finely done.
[Footnote: A reference to Hilda's ceasing to consider herself an original
artist in the presence of the great masters. "Beholding the miracles of
beauty which the old masters had achieved, the world seemed already rich
enough in original designs and nothing more was so desirable as to diffuse
these selfsame beauties more widely among mankind.'--So Hilda became a
copyist."] Yours, with sincere obligations,

M.E. LEWES.

By the way, Mr. Lewes tells me that you ascribe to me a hatred of blue
eyes--which is amusing, since my own eyes are blue-gray. I am not in any
sense one of the "good haters;" on the contrary, my weaknesses all verge
toward an excessive tolerance and a tendency to melt off the outlines of
things.

THE PRIORY,
21 North Bank, Regent's Park, Jan. 16, '73.

[Footnote: From The Critic of December 31, 1881. This letter was addressed
to Miss Alice Wellington, now Mrs. Rollins.]

Her sensitiveness was great, and contact with an unappreciative and
unsympathetic public depressing to a large degree. It was a part of that
shrinking away from the world which kept her out of society, and away from
all but a select few whose tastes and sympathies were largely in accordance
with her own. Besides, she distrusted that common form of criticism which
presumes to tell an author how he ought to have written, and assumes to
itself an insight and knowledge greater than that possessed by genius
itself. Concerning the value of such criticism she wrote these pertinent
words:

    I get confirmed in my impression that the criticism of any new writing
    is shifting and untrustworthy. I hardly think that any critic can have
    so keen a sense of the shortcomings in my works as that I groan under
    in the course of writing them, and I cannot imagine any edification
    coming to an author from a sort of reviewing which consists in
    attributing to him or her unexpressed opinions, and in imagining
    circumstances which may be alleged as petty private motives for the
    treatment of subjects which ought to be of general human interest.

To the same correspondent she used even stronger words concerning her
dislike of ordinary criticism.

    Do not expect "criticism" from me. I hate "sitting in the seat of
    judgment," and I would rather try to impress the public generally with
    the sense that they may get the best result from a book without
    necessarily forming an "opinion" about it, than I would rush into
    stating opinions of my own. The floods of nonsense printed in the form
    of critical opinions seem to me a chief curse of our times--a chief
    obstacle to true culture.

It is not to be forgotten, however, that George Eliot had done much
critical work before she became a novelist, and that much of it was of a
keen and cutting nature. Severely as she was handled by the critics, no one
of them was more vigorous than was her treatment of Young and Cumming. Even
in later years, when she took up the critical pen, the effect was felt. Mr.
Lecky did not pass gently through her hands when she reviewed his
_Rationalism in Europe_. Her criticisms in _Theophrastus Such_ were
penetrating and severe.

For the same reason, she read few works of contemporary fiction, that her
mind might not be biassed and that she might not be discouraged in her own
work. Always busy with some special subject which absorbed all her time and
strength, she could give little attention to contemporary literature. To
one correspondent she wrote,--

    My constant groan is, that I must leave so much of the greatest writing
    which the centuries have sifted for me, unread for want of time.

The style adopted by George Eliot is for the most part fresh, vital and
energetic. It is pure in form, rich in illustrations, strong and expressive
in manner. There are exceptions to this statement, it is true, and she is
sometimes turgid and dry, again gaudy and verbose. Sententious in her
didactic passages, she is pure and noble in her sentiment, poetical and
impressive in her descriptions of nature. Her diction is choice, her range
of expression large, and she admirably suits her words to the thought she
would present. There is a rich, teeming fulness of life in her books, the
canvas is crowded, there is movement and action. An abundance of passion,
delicate feeling and fine sensibility is expressed.

The critics have almost universally condemned the plots of George Eliot's
novels for their want of unity. They tell us that the flow of events is
often not orderly, while improbable scenes are introduced, superfluous
incidents are common, the number of characters is too great, and the
analysis of character impedes the unity of events. These objections are not
always vital, and sometimes they are mere objections rather than genuine
criticisms. Instances of failure to follow the best methods may be cited in
abundance, one of which is seen in the first two chapters in _Daniel
Deronda_ being placed out of their natural order. The opening scenes in
_The Spanish Gypsy_ seem quite unnecessary to the development of the plot,
while the last two scenes of the second book are so fragmentary and
unconnected with the remainder of the story as to help it but little. In
the middle of _Adam Bede_ are several chapters devoted to the birthday
party, which are quite unnecessary to the development of the action.
_Daniel Deronda_ contains two narratives which are in many respects almost
entirely distinct from each other, and the reader is made to alternate
between two worlds that have little in common. There is much of the
improbable in the account of the Transome estate in _Felix Holt_, while the
closing scenes in the life of Tito Melema in _Romola_ are more tragical
than natural. Yet these defects are incidental to her method and art rather
than actual blemishes on her work. For the most part, her work is
thoroughly unitary, cause leads naturally into effect, and there is a moral
development of character such as is found in life itself. Her plots are
strongly constructed, in simple outlines, are easily comprehended and kept
in mind, and the leading motive holds steadily through to the end. Her
analytical method often makes an apparent interruption of the narrative,
and the unity of purpose is frequently developed through the philosophic
purport of the novel rather than in its literary form. Direct narrative is
often hindered, it is true, by her habit of studying the remote causes and
effects of character, but she never wanders far enough to forget the real
purpose had in view. She holds the many elements of her story well under
command, she concentrates them upon some one aim, and she gives to her
story a tragic unity of great moral splendor and effect. Even the diverse
elements, the minute side-studies and the profuse comments, are all woven
into the organic structure, and are essential to the unfoldment of the
plot. They seem to be quite irrelevant interruptions until we look back
upon the completed whole and study the perfected intent of the story. Then
we see how essential they are to the epic finish of the novel, and to that
total effect which a work of genius creates. Then it is seen that a
dramatic unity and well-studied intent hold together every part and make a
completed structure of great beauty.

Her dramatic skill is great, and her dialogues thoroughly good. Her
characters are full of power and life, and stand out as distinct
personalities. The conversation is sprightly, strong and wise. Probably no
novelist has created so many clearly cut, positive, intensely personal
characters as George Eliot, and this individualism is depicted as acting
within social and hereditary limits; hence dramatic action is constantly
arising. Shakspere and Browning only surpass her in dramatic power, as in
the creation of character. Yet her method of producing character differs
essentially from that of Shakspere, Homer and all the great creators. She
describes character, while they present it. Homer gives no description of
Helen; but of her beauty and her person we learn all the more because we
are left to find them out from the influence they produce. We know Hamlet
because he lives before us, and impresses his personality upon every
feature of the great drama in which he appears. George Eliot's manner is to
describe, to minutely portray, and to dissect to the last muscle and nerve.

She has also a rich and racy humor, sensitive and sober, refined and
delicate. She does not caricature folly with Dickens, or laugh at weakness
with Thackeray; but she shows us the limitations of life in such a manner
as to produce the finest humor. She is never repulsive, grotesque or
vulgar; but wise, laughter-loving and sympathetic. Her humor is pure and
homely as it is delicate and exquisite; and it is invariably human and
noble. She has an intense love and a wonderful appreciation of the
ludicrous, sees whatever is incongruous In life, and makes her laughter
genial and joyous. Her humor is the very quintessence of human experience,
strikes deadly blows at what is unjust and untrue. It is both intellectual
and moral, as Professor Dowden suggests. "The grotesque in human character
is reclaimed from the province of the humorous by her affections, when that
is possible, and is shown to be a pathetic form of beauty. Her humor
usually belongs to her entire conception of character, and cannot be
separated from it." She laughs at all, but sneers at no one,--for she has
keen sympathy with all.

George Eliot is not so good a satirist as she is humorist. Her humor is as
fresh and delightful as a morning in May, but her satire is nearly always
labored. She is too much in sympathy with human nature to laugh at its
follies and its weaknesses. Its joys, its bubbling humor and delight she
can appreciate, as well as all the pain and sorrow that come to men and
women; and she can fully enter into the life of her characters of every
kind, and portray their inmost motives and impulses; but the foibles of the
world she cannot treat in the vein of the satirist. In her earlier books
she is said to have been under the influence of Thackeray, but her satire
is heavy, and lacks his light touch and his tender undertone of compassion.
Here is a good specimen of her earlier attempts to be satirical:

    When a man is happy enough to win the affections of a sweet girl, who
    can soothe his cares with crochet, and respond to all his most
    cherished ideas with beaded urn-rugs and chair-covers in German wool,
    he has, at least, a guarantee of domestic comfort, whatever trials may
    await him out of doors. What a resource it is under fatigue and
    irritation to have your drawing-room well supplied with small mats,
    which would always be ready if you ever wanted to set anything on them!
    And what styptic for a bleeding heart can equal copious squares of
    crochet-work, which are useful for slipping down the moment you touch
    them? [Footnote: Janet's Repentance, chapter III.]

Similar to this is the account of Mrs. Pullett's grief.

    It is a pathetic sight and a striking example of the complexity
    Introduced into the emotions by a high state of civilization--the
    sight of a fashionably dressed female in grief. From the sorrow
    of a Hottentot to that of a woman in large buckram sleeves, with
    several bracelets on each arm, an architectural bonnet, and delicate
    ribbon-strings--what a long series of gradations! In the enlightened
    child of civilization the abandonment characteristic of grief is
    checked and varied in the subtlest manner, so as to present an
    interesting problem to the analytic mind. If, with a crushed heart and
    eyes half-blinded by the mist of tears, she were to walk with a too
    devious step through a door-place, she might crush her buckram sleeves,
    too, and the deep consciousness of this possibility produces a
    composition of forces by which she takes a line that just clears the
    door-post. Perceiving that the tears are hurrying fast, she unpins her
    strings and throws them languidly backward--a touching gesture,
    indicative, even in the deepest gloom, of the hope in future dry
    moments when cap-strings will once more have a charm. As the tears
    subside a little, and with her head leaning backward at an angle that
    will not injure her bonnet, she endures that terrible moment when
    grief, which has made all things else a weariness, has itself become
    weary; she looks down pensively at her bracelets, and adjusts their
    clasps with that pretty studied fortuity which would be gratifying to
    her mind if it were once more in a calm and healthy state. [Footnote:
    Mill on the Floss, chapter VII.]

In her later books the strained efforts at satire are partially avoided,
and though the satirical spirit is not withdrawn in any measure, yet it is
more delicately managed. It is less open, less blunt, but hardly more
subtle and penetrative. It is still a strained effort, and it is quite too
hard and bare in statement. We are told in _Middlemarch_ that

    Mrs. Bulstrode's _naďve_ way of conciliating piety and worldliness, the
    nothingness of this life and the desirability of cut glass, the
    consciousness at once of filthy rags and the best damask, was not a
    sufficient relief from the weight of her husband's invariable
    seriousness.

Such a turning of sentiment into satire as the following is rather jarring,
and is a good specimen of that "laborious smartness," as Mr. R.H. Hutton
justly calls it, which is found in all of George Eliot's books:--

    Young love-making--that gossamer web! Even the points it clings to--the
    things whence its subtile interlacings are swung--are scarcely
    perceptible: momentary touches of finger-tips, meetings of rays from
    blue and dark orbs, unfinished phrases, lightest changes of cheek and
    lip, faintest tremors. The web itself is made of spontaneous beliefs
    and indefinable joys, yearnings of one life toward another, visions of
    completeness, indefinite trust. And Lydgate fell to spinning that web
    from his inward self with wonderful rapidity, in spite of experience
    supposed to be finished off with the drama of Laure--in spite, too, of
    medicine and biology; for the inspection of macerated muscle or of eyes
    presented in a dish (like Santa Lucia's), and other incidents of
    scientific inquiry, are observed to be less incompatible with poetic
    love than a native dulness or a lively addiction to the lowest prose.
    [Footnote: Middlemarch, chapter XXXVI.]

This introduction of a scientific illustration will serve to bring another
tendency of George Eliot's to our attention. She makes a frequent use of
her large learning and culture in her novels. In the earlier ones a Greek
quotation is to be found here and there, while in the later, German seems
to have the preference. In _The Mill on the Floss_ she describes Bob
Jakin's thumb as "a singularly broad specimen of that difference between
the man and the monkey." Such references to recent scientific speculations
are not unfrequent. If they serve to show the tendencies of her mind
towards knowledge and large thought, they also indicate a too ready
willingness to imbibe, and to use in a popular manner, what is not
thoroughly assimilated truth. The force of such an illustration as the
following must be lost on most novel-readers:--

    Although Sir James was a sportsman, he had some other feelings toward
    women than toward grouse and foxes, and did not regard his future wife
    in the light of prey, valuable chiefly for the excitements of the
    chase. Neither was he so well acquainted with the habits of primitive
    races as to feel that an ideal combat for her, tomahawk in hand, so to
    speak, was necessary to the historical continuity of the marriage tie.
    [Footnote: Middlemarch, chapter VI.]

It is doubtful whether any reader will quite catch the meaning of this
sentence:

    Has any one ever pinched into its pilulous smallness the cobweb of
    prematrimonial acquaintanceship? [Footnote: Ibid, chapter II.]

Many of her critics have asserted that this use of the language of science,
and the adoption of the speculative ideas of the time, had largely
increased upon George Eliot in her later books; but this is not true. In
her _Westminster Review_ essays both tendencies are strongly developed. In
one of them she says, "The very chyme and chyle of a rector are conscious
of the gown and band." Again, she says,--

    The woman of large capacity can seldom rise beyond the absorption of
    ideas; her physical conditions refuse to support the energy required
    for spontaneous activity; the voltaic pile is not strong enough to
    produce crystallization.

It is not just to George Eliot, however, to refer to such mere casual
blemishes, without insisting on the largeness of thought, the wealth of
knowledge, and the comprehensive understanding of human experience with
which her books abound. She often turns aside to discuss the problems
suggested by the experiences of her characters, to point out how the effect
of their own thoughts and deeds re-act upon them, and to inculcate the
highest ethical lessons. In one of her "asides" she seems to reject this
method, in referring to Fielding.

    A great historian, as he insisted on calling himself, who had the
    happiness to be dead a hundred and twenty years ago, and so to take his
    place among the colossi whose huge legs our living pettiness is
    observed to walk under, glories in his copious remarks and digressions
    as the least imitable part of his work, and especially in those initial
    chapters to the successive books of his history, where he seems to
    bring his arm-chair to the proscenium, and chat with us in all the
    lusty ease of his fine English. But Fielding lived when the days were
    longer (for time, like money, is measured by our needs), when summer
    afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter
    evenings. We belated historians must not linger after his example; and
    if we did so, it is probable that our chat would be thin and eager, as
    if delivered from a campstool in a parrot-house. I, at least, have so
    much to do in unravelling certain human lots, and seeing how they were
    woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be
    concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that
    tempting range of relevancies called the universe. [Footnote:
    Middlemarch, chapter XV.]

She does not ramble away from her subject, it is true; but she likes to
pause often to discuss the doings of her personages, and to pour forth some
tender or noble thought. To many of her readers these bits of wisdom and of
sentiment are among the most valuable portions of her books, when taken in
their true environment in her pages. She has a purpose larger than that of
telling a story or of describing the loves of a few men and women. She
seeks to penetrate into the motives of life, and to reveal the hidden
springs of action; to show how people affect each other; how ideas mould
the destinies of the individual. To do all this in that large, artistic
spirit she has followed, requires that there shall be something more
than narration and conversation. That she has now and then commented
unnecessarily, and in a too-learned manner, is a very small detraction from
the interest of her books.

In _Adam Bede_ she turns aside for a whole chapter to defend her method of
depicting accurately, minutely, in the simplest detail, the feelings,
motives, actions and surroundings of very commonplace and uninteresting
people. Her reasons for this method in novel-writing apply to all her
works, and are worthy of the author of _Adam Bede_ and _Silas Marner_.

    I would not, even if I had the choice, be the clever novelist who could
    create a world so much better than this, in which we get up in the
    morning to do our daily work, that you would be likely to turn a
    harder, colder eye on the dusty streets and the common green fields--on
    the real breathing men and women, who can be chilled by your
    indifference or injured by your prejudice; who can be cheered and
    helped onward by your fellow-feeling, your  forbearance, your
    outspoken, brave justice.

    So I am content to tell my simple story, without trying to make things
    seem better than they were; dreading nothing, indeed, but falsity,
    which, in spite of one's best efforts, there is reason to dread.
    Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult. The pencil is conscious of a
    delightful facility in drawing a griffin--the longer the claws, and the
    larger the wings, the better; but that marvellous facility, which we
    mistook for genius, is apt to forsake us when we want to draw a real
    unexaggerated lion. Examine your words well, and you will find that,
    even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to
    say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings--much
    harder than to say something fine about them which is _not_ the exact
    truth.

    It is for this rare, precious quality of truthfulness that I delight in
    many Dutch paintings, which lofty-minded people despise. I find a
    source of delicious sympathy in these faithful pictures of a monotonous
    homely existence, which has been the fate of so many more among my
    fellow-mortals than a life of pomp or of absolute indigence, of tragic
    suffering or of world-stirring actions. I turn without shrinking, from
    cloud-borne angels, from prophets, sibyls and heroic warriors, to an
    old woman bending over her flower-pot, or eating her solitary dinner,
    while the noonday light, softened, perhaps, by a screen of leaves,
    falls on her mob-cap, and just touches the rim of her spinning-wheel
    and her stone jug, and all those cheap, common things which are the
    precious necessaries of life to her: or I turn to that village wedding,
    kept between four brown walls, where an awkward bridegroom opens the
    dance with a high-shouldered, broad-faced bride, while elderly and
    middle-aged friends look on, with very irregular noses and lips, and
    probably with quart pots in their hands, but with expression of
    unmistakable contentment and good-will. "Foh!" says my idealistic
    friend, "what vulgar details! What good is there in taking all these
    pains to give an exact likeness of old women and clowns? What a low
    phase of life! what clumsy, ugly people!"

    But, bless us, things may be lovable that are not altogether handsome,
    I hope? I am not at all sure that the majority of the human race have
    not been ugly, and even among those "lords of their kind," the British,
    squat figures, ill-shapen nostrils, and dingy complexions, are not
    startling exceptions. Yet there is a great deal of family love among
    us. I have a friend or two whose class of features is such that the
    Apollo curl on the summit of their brows would be decidedly trying;
    yet, to my certain knowledge, tender hearts have beaten for them, and
    their miniatures--flattering, but still not lovely--are kissed in
    secret by motherly lips. I have seen many an excellent matron who could
    never in her best days have been handsome, and yet she had a packet of
    yellow love-letters in a private drawer, and sweet children showered
    kisses on her sallow cheeks. And I believe there have been plenty of
    young heroes of middle stature and feeble beards, who have felt quite
    sure they could never love anything more insignificant than a Diana,
    and yet have found themselves in middle life happily settled with a
    wife who waddles. Yes! thank God; human feeling is like the mighty
    rivers that bless the earth; it does not wait for beauty--it flows with
    resistless force, and brings beauty with it.

    All honor and reverence to the divine beauty of form! Let us cultivate
    it to the utmost in men, women and children--in our gardens and in our
    houses; but let us love that other beauty, too, which lies in no secret
    of proportion, but in the secret of deep sympathy. Paint us an angel,
    if you can, with a floating violet robe, and a face paled by the
    celestial light; paint us yet oftener a Madonna, turning her mild face
    upward, and opening her arms to welcome the divine glory; but do not
    impose on us any aesthetic rules which shall banish from the regions of
    Art those old women scraping carrots with their work-worn hands, those
    heavy clowns taking holiday in a dingy pot-house--those rounded-backs
    and stupid, weather-beaten faces that have bent over the spade and done
    the rough work of the world--those homes with their tin pans, their
    brown pitchers, their rough curs, and their clusters of onions. In this
    world there are so many of these common, coarse people, who have no
    picturesque sentimental wretchedness! It is so needful we should
    remember their existence, else we may happen to leave them quite out of
    our religion and philosophy, and frame lofty theories which only fit a
    world of extremes. Therefore let Art always remind us of them;
    therefore let us always have men ready to give the loving pains of a
    life to the faithful representing of commonplace things--men who see
    beauty in these commonplace things, and delight in showing how kindly
    the light of heaven falls on them.

    There are few prophets in the world--few sublimely beautiful women--few
    heroes. I can't afford to give all my love and reverence to such
    rarities; I want a great deal of those feelings for my every-day
    fellow-men, especially for the few in the foreground of the great
    multitude, whose faces I know, whose hands I touch, for whom I have to
    make way with kindly courtesy. Neither are picturesque lazzaroni or
    romantic criminals half so frequent as your common laborer, who gets
    his own bread, and eats it vulgarly, but creditably, with his own
    pocket-knife. It is more needful that I should have a fibre of sympathy
    connecting me with that vulgar citizen who weighs out my sugar in a
    vilely assorted cravat and waistcoat, than with the handsomest rascal
    in red scarf and green feathers; more needful that my heart should
    swell with loving admiration at some trait of gentle goodness in the
    faulty people who sit at the same hearth with me, or in the clergyman
    of my own parish, who is, perhaps, rather too corpulent, and in other
    respects is not an Oberlin or a Tillotson, than at the deeds of heroes
    whom I shall never know except by hearsay, or at the sublimest abstract
    of all clerical graces that was ever conceived by an able novelist.
    [Footnote: Adam Bede, chapter XVII.]

In all her earlier novels George Eliot has shown the artistic possibilities
of the humblest lives and situations. In the most ordinary lives, as in the
case of the persons described in _Silas Marner_, and in the least
picturesque incidents of human existence, there is an interest for us
which, when properly brought out, will be sure to absorb our attention. She
has abundantly proved that dramatic situations, historic surroundings and
heroic attitudes are not necessary for the highest purposes of the
novelist. Hers are heart tragedies and spiritual histories; for life has
its tragic, pathetic and humorous elements of the keenest interest under
every social condition. Her realism is relieved, as in actual life, by
love, helpfulness and pathos; by deep sorrow, sufferings patiently borne,
and tender sympathy for others' woes. And if she sometimes sketches with
too free a hand the coarse and repulsive features of life, this fault is
relieved by her tender sympathy with the sorrows and weaknesses of her
characters. She asks her readers not to grudge Amos Barton his lovely wife,
that "large, fair, gentle Madonna," with an imposing mildness and the
unspeakable charm of gentle womanhood. He was a man of very middling
qualities and a quite stupid sort of person, but he loved his wife and made
the most he could of such talents as he had. She pleads in his behalf by
saying,--

    I have all my life had a sympathy for mongrel ungainly dogs, who are
    nobody's pets; and I would rather surprise one of them by a pat and a
    pleasant morsel, than meet the condescending advances of the loveliest
    Skye-terrier who has his cushion by my lady's chair.

Much the larger number of characters in these novels are of the same
unpromising quality. Most of them are ignorant, uncouth and simple-minded;
yet George Eliot gives them a warm place in our hearts, and we rejoice to
have known them all. This ignorant rusticity is discovered to have charms
and attractions of its own. Especially does the reader learn that what is
most human and what is most lovely in personal character may be found
within these rough exteriors and amid these unpromising circumstances.

Even so fine a character as Adam Bede, one of the best in all her books,
was a workman of limited education and little knowledge of the outside
world. The author does "not pretend that his was an ordinary character
among workmen." Yet such men as he are found among his class, and the noble
qualities he possessed are not out of place among workingmen. Her warm
sympathy with this class, the class in which she was born and reared, and
her earnest desire to do it justice, is seen in what she says of Adam.

    He was not an average man. Yet such men as he are reared here and there
    in every generation of our peasant artisans--with an inheritance of
    affections nurtured by a simple family life of common need and common
    industry, and an inheritance of faculties trained in skilful,
    courageous labor; they make their 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. Their lives have no discernible
    echo beyond the neighborhood where they dwelt, but you are almost sure
    to find there some good piece of road, some building, some application
    of mineral produce, some improvement in farming practice, some reform
    of parish abuses, with which their names are associated by one or two
    generations after them. Their employers were richer for them, the work
    of their hands has worn well, and the work of their brains has guided
    well the hands of other men. They went about in their youth in flannel
    or paper caps, in coats black with coal-dust or streaked with lime and
    red paint; in old age their white hairs are seen in a place of honor at
    church and at market, and they tell their well-dressed sons and
    daughters seated round the bright hearth on winter evenings, how
    pleased they were when they first earned their twopence a day. Others
    there are who die poor, and never put off the workman's coat on
    week-days; they have not had the art of getting rich; but they are men
    of trust, and when they die before the work is all out of them, it is
    as if some main screw had got loose in a machine; the master who
    employed them says, "Where shall I find their like?" [Footnote:
    Chapter XIX.]

In _Amos Barton_ she states her reasons for portraying characters of so
little outward interest. Amos had none of the more manly and sturdy
qualities of Adam Bede, and yet to George Eliot it was enough that he was
human, that trouble and heartache could come to him, and that he must carry
his share of the burdens and weaknesses of the world.

    The Rev. Amos Barton, whose sad fortunes I have undertaken to relate,
    was, you perceive, in no respect an ideal or exceptional character; and
    perhaps I am doing a bold thing to bespeak your sympathy on behalf of a
    man who was so very far from remarkable,--a man whose virtues were not
    heroic, and who had no undetected crime within his breast; who had not
    the slightest mystery hanging about him, but was palpably and
    unmistakably commonplace; who was not even in love, but had had that
    complaint many years ago. "An utterly uninteresting character!" I think
    I hear a lady reader exclaim,--Mrs. Farthingale, for example, who
    prefers the ideal in fiction; to whom tragedy means ermine tippets,
    adultery and murder; and comedy, the adventures of some personage who
    is quite a "character."

    But, my dear madam, it is so very large a majority of your
    fellow-countrymen that are of this insignificant stamp. At least
    eighty out of a hundred of your adult male fellow-Britons returned in
    the last census are neither extraordinarily silly, nor extraordinarily
    wicked, nor extraordinarily wise; their eyes are neither deep and
    liquid with sentiment, nor sparkling with suppressed witticisms; they
    have probably had no hairbreadth escapes or thrilling adventures; their
    brains are certainly not pregnant with genius, and their passions have
    not manifested themselves at all after the fashion of a volcano. They
    are simply men of complexions more or less muddy, whose conversation is
    more or less bald and disjointed. Yet these commonplace people--many of
    them--bear a conscience, and have felt the sublime prompting to do the
    painful right; they have their unspoken sorrows, and their sacred joys;
    their hearts have perhaps gone out towards their first-born, and they
    have mourned over the irreclaimable dead. Nay, is there not a pathos in
    their very insignificance,--in our comparison of their dim and narrow
    existence with the glorious possibilities of that human nature which
    they share?

    Depend upon it, you would gain unspeakably if you would learn with me
    to see some of the poetry and the pathos, the tragedy and the comedy,
    lying in the experience of a human soul that looks out through dull
    gray eyes, and that speaks in a voice of quite ordinary tones. In that
    case, I should have no fear of your not caring to know what further
    befell the Rev. Amos Barton, or of your thinking the homely details I
    have to tell at all beneath your attention.

In her hands the novel becomes the means of recording the history of those
whom no history takes note of, and of bringing before the world its unnamed
and unnoted heroes. Professor Dowden says her sympathy spreads with a
powerful and even flow in every direction. In this effort she has been
eminently successful; and her loving sympathy with all that is human; her
warm-hearted faith in the weak and unfortunate; the graciousness of her
love for the common souls who are faithful and true in their way and in
their places, will excuse much greater literary faults than any into which
she has fallen. The sincere and loving humanity of her books gives them a
great charm, and an influence wide-reaching and noble.

No one of her imitators and successors has gained anything of like power
which is given to her novels by her intense sympathy with her characters.
Others have described ignorant and coarse phases of life as something to
look at and study, but not to bring into the heart and love. George Eliot
loves her characters, has an intense affection for them, pours out her
motherliness upon them. Not so Daudet or James or Howells, who study
crude life on the surface, and because it is the fashion. There is no
heart-nearness in their work, little of passionate human desire to do
justice to phases of life hitherto neglected. She has in this regard the
genius of Scott and Hugo, who live in and with their characters, and so
make them living and real. She identifies herself with the life she
describes, and never looks at it from without, with curious and cold and
critical gaze, simply for the sake of making a novel.

She is more at home among villagers than in the drawing-room. A profound
intuition has led her to the very heart of English life among the happier
and worthier classes of working-people. There is no squalor in her books,
no general misery, but always conscience, respectability and home-comforts.
There is something of coarseness in some of her scenes, and a realism too
bare and bald; but for the most part she has come far short of what might
have been done in picturing the repulsive and sensual side of life. In all
her books there is abundant evidence of her painstaking, and of her anxious
desire to be truthful. She has studied life on the spot, and gives to it
the local coloring. In writing _Romola_, she searched into every corner of
Florentine history, custom and thought. She is true to every touch of local
incident and manner. In _Daniel Deronda_, she made herself familiar with
Jewish life, and has given the race aroma to her portraits and scenes. She
is thoroughly a realist, but a realist with a wide and attractive sympathy,
a profound insight into motives and impulses, and a strong imagination. She
is too great a genius to believe that the novelist can describe life as the
geologist describes the strata of the earth. She feels with her characters;
she has that form of insight or imagination which enables her to apprehend
a mind totally unlike her own. This is what saves the history of Hetty from
coarseness and repulsiveness. It is Hetty's own account of her life-woes.
Its infinite pathos, and the tenderness and pity it awakens, destroys our
concern for the other features of the narrative.

Psychologic analysis seems out of place in a novel, but with George Eliot
it is a chief purpose of her writing. She lays bare the soul, opens its
inmost secrets, and its anatomy is minutely studied. She devotes more space
to the inner life and character of her personalities than to her narratives
and conversations. She traces some of her characters through a long process
of development, and shows how they are affected by the experiences of life.
Her more important characters grow up under her pen, develop under the
influence of thought or sorrow. Novelists usually carry their characters
through their pages on the same level of mind and life; and George Eliot
not only does this with her uncultured characters, but she also shows the
soul in the process of unfolding or expanding. None of her leading
characters are at the end what they were in the beginning; with the most
subtle power she traces the growth of Tito Melema's mind through its
perilous descent into selfish corruption, and with equal or even greater
skill she unfolds the history of Daniel Deronda's development under the
impulse to find for himself a life-mission. In this direction George Eliot
is always great. Her skill is remarkable, albeit she has not sounded either
the highest or the lowest ranges of human capacity. The range within which
her studies are made is a wide one, however, and within it she has shown
herself the master of human motives and a consummate artist in portraying
the soul. She devotes the utmost care to describing some plain person who
appears in her pages for but a moment, and is as much concerned that he
shall be truly presented as if he were of the utmost consequence. More than
one otherwise very ordinary character acquires under this treatment of hers
the warmest interest for the reader. And she describes such persons,
because their influence is subtle or momentous as it affects the lives of
others. Personages and incidents play a part in her books not for the sake
of the plot or to secure dramatic unity, but for the sake of manifesting
the soul, in order that the unfoldment of psychologic analysis may go on.
The unity she aims at is that of showing the development of the soul under
influence of some one or more decisive impulses or as affected by given
surroundings. The lesser characters, while given a nature quite their own,
help in the process of unfolding the personality which gives central
purpose to each of her novels. The influence of opposite natures on each
other, the moulding power of circumstances, and especially the bearings of
hereditary impulses, all play a prominent part in this process of
psychologic analysis.

Through page after page and chapter after chapter she traces the feelings
and thoughts of her characters. How each decisive event appears to them is
explained at length. Moreover, the most trivial trait of character, the
most incidental impulse, is described in all its particularity. Through
many pages Hetty's conduct in her own bedroom is laid before the reader,
and in no other way could her nature have been so brought to our knowledge.
Her shallow lightness of heart and her vanity could not be realized by
ordinary intercourse with one so pretty and so bright; but George Eliot
describes Hetty's taking out the earrings given her by Arthur, and we see
what she is. The author seeks to open before us the inner life of that
childish soul, and we see into its nature and realize all its capacities
for good and evil.

    Oh, the delight of taking out that little box and looking at the
    earrings! Do not reason about it, my philosophical reader, and say that
    Hetty, being very pretty, must have known that it did not signify
    whether she had any ornaments or not; and that, moreover, to look at
    earrings which she could not possibly wear out of her bedroom could
    hardly be a satisfaction, the essence of vanity being a reference to
    the impressions produced on others; you will never understand women's
    natures if you are so excessively rational. Try rather to divest
    yourself of all your rational prejudices, as much as if you were
    studying the psychology of a canary-bird, and only watch the movements
    of this pretty round creature as she turns her head on one side with an
    unconscious smile at the earrings nestled in the little box. Ah! you
    think, it is for the sake of the person who has given them to her, and
    her thoughts are gone back now to the moment when they were put into
    her hands. No; else why should she have cared to have earrings rather
    than anything else? and I know that she had longed for earrings from
    among all the ornaments she could imagine.

This faculty of soul interpretation may be illustrated by innumerable
passages and from characters the most diverse in nature and capacity. As an
instance of her ability to interpret uncommon minds, those affected in some
peculiar manner, reference may be made to Baldassarre, in _Romola_. The
descriptions of this man's sufferings, the giving way of his mind under
them, and the purpose of revenge which took complete possession of him,
form a study in character unsurpassed. For subtle insight into the action
of a morbid mind, and for a majestic conception of human passion, the
passage wherein Baldassarre finds he can again read his Greek book is most
worthy of attention.

Her ability to delineate a growing mind, and a mind at work under the
influence of new and rare experiences, is shown in the case of Daniel
Deronda. His quiet love of ease as a boy is described as he sits one day
watching the falling rain, and meditates on the possibility which has been
suggested to him, that his is not to be the life of a gentleman.

    He knew a great deal of what it was to be a gentleman by inheritance,
    and without thinking much about himself--for he was a boy of active
    perceptions, and easily forgot his own existence in that of Robert
    Bruce--he had never supposed that he could be shut out from such a lot,
    or have a very different part in the world from that of the uncle who
    petted him...  But Daniel's tastes were altogether in keeping with his
    nurture: his disposition was one in which every-day scenes and habits
    beget not _ennui_ or rebellion but delight, affection, aptitudes;
    and now the lad had been stung to the quick by the idea that his
    uncle--perhaps his father--thought of a career for him which was
    totally unlike his own, and which he knew very well was not thought of
    among possible destinations for the sons of English gentlemen.

The mind of this lad expands; ideal desires awake in him; there is a
yearning for a life of noble knight-errantry in some heroic cause. The
reader is permitted to watch from step to step the growth of this longing,
and to behold each new deed by which it is expressed. He craves for a
broader life, but he is surrounded by such a social atmosphere as to make
his longing futile. As a young man who is seeking to know what there is in
the world for him to do, and who is eager for some task that is to end in a
larger life for man, he is again described.

    It happened that the very vividness of his impressions had often made
    him the more enigmatic to his friends, and had contributed to an
    apparent indefiniteness in his sentiments. His early wakened
    sensibility and reflectiveness, had developed into a many-sided
    sympathy, which threatened to hinder any persistent course of action:
    as soon as he took up any antagonism, though only in thought, he seemed
    to himself like the Sabine warriors in the memorable story--with
    nothing to meet his spear but flesh of his flesh, and objects that he
    loved. His imagination had so wrought itself to the habit of seeing
    things as they probably appeared to others, that a strong partisanship,
    unless it were against an immediate oppression, had become an
    insincerity for him. His plenteous, flexible sympathy had ended by
    falling into one current with that reflective analysis which tends to
    neutralize sympathy. Few men were able to keep themselves clearer of
    vices than he; yet he hated vices mildly, being used to think of them
    less in the abstract than as a part of mixed human natures having an
    individual history, which it was the bent of his mind to trace with
    understanding and pity. With the same innate balance he was fervidly
    democratic in his feeling for the multitude, and yet, through his
    affections and imagination, intensely conservative; voracious of
    speculations on government and religion, yet loath to part with
    long-sanctioned forms which, for him, were quick with memories and
    sentiments that no argument could lay dead... He was ceasing to care
    for knowledge--he had no ambition for practice--unless they could both
    be gathered up into one current with his emotions; and he dreaded, as
    if it were a dwelling-place of lost souls, that dead anatomy of culture
    which turns the universe into a mere ceaseless answer to queries, and
    knows, not everything, but everything else about everything--as if one
    should be ignorant of nothing concerning the scent of violets except
    the scent itself, for which one had no nostril. But how and whence was
    the needed event to come?--the influence that would justify partiality,
    and make him what he longed to be, yet was unable to make himself--an
    organic part of social life, instead of roaming in it like a yearning
    disembodied spirit, stirred with a vague, social passion, but without
    fixed local habitation to render fellowship real? To make a little
    difference for the better was what he was not contented to live
    without; but how make it? It is one thing to see your road, another to
    cut it.

He rescues Mirah and sets out in search of her brother. He finds Mordecai,
and gradually a way is opened to him along which his yearning is satisfied.
Step by step the reader is permitted to trace the expansion of his mind. A
window is opened into his soul, and we see its every movement as Daniel is
led on to find the mission which was to be his. When that task is fully
accepted he says to Mordecai,--

    Since I began to read and know, I have always longed for some
    ideal task, in which I might feel myself the heart and brain of a
    multitude--some social captainship, which would come to me as a duty,
    and not to be striven for as a personal prize.

In her strong tendency to psychologic analysis George Eliot much resembles
Robert Browning. It is the life of passion and ideas which both alike
delight to describe. They greatly differ, however, in their methods of
dissecting the inner life. Browning lays bare the soul in some startling
experience, George Eliot by the slow development of the mind through all
the stages of growth. He is impersonal, but she is always present to make
comments and to expound the causes of growth. Yet her characters are as
clear-cut, as individual, as his. His analysis is the more rapid, subtle
and complete in immediate expression; hers is the more penetrating,
vigorous and interesting. His lightning flash sees the soul through and
through in the present moment; her calmer and intenser gaze penetrates the
long succession of hidden causes by which the soul is shaped to its earthly
destiny.

Any account of George Eliot which dwells only on her humor and sarcasm, her
realism and her powers of analysis, does her grave injustice. She has also
in rare degree the power of artistic constructiveness, a strong and
brilliant imagination and genius of almost the highest range. She can
create character as well as analyze it, and with that brilliant command of
resources which indicates a high order of genius. She had culture almost
equal to Goethe's, and quite equal to Mrs. Browning's; and she had that
wide sympathy with life which was his, with an equal capacity for their
expression in an artistic reconstruction of human experience. While Mr. R.
H. Hutton is justified in saying that "few minds at once so speculative and
so creative have ever put their mark on literature," yet the critic needs
to beware lest he give the speculative tendency in her mind a place too
prominent compared with that assigned to her creative genius. The poet and
the novelist are so seldom speculative, so seldom put into their creations
the constant burden of great thoughts, that when one appears who does this,
it is likely to be dwelt upon too largely by the critics. George Eliot
speculates about life and its experiences, and it is evident she had a
philosophy of life at her command; but it is quite as true that she soars
on pinions free into the heavens of genius, and brings back the song which
no other has sung, and which is a true song. She has created characters,
she has described the histories of souls, in a manner which will cause some
of her books to endure for all time. If she has allied her genius to
current culture and speculation, it has in that way been given continuity
of purpose and definiteness of aim. The genius is there and cannot be
hidden or obscured; and those who love what is great and noble will be
profoundly attracted by her books. If a great thinker, she is still more
truly a great literary artist; and such is the largeness and gracious power
of her genius that those who do not love her speculations will be drawn to
her in spite of all objections. Her genius is generous, expansive,
illuminative, profound. Her creativeness is an elemental power; new births
are to be found in her books; life has grown under her moulding touch.




VII.


THEORY OF THE NOVEL.

Before George Eliot began her career as a novelist she had already turned
her attention to what is good and bad in fiction-writing, and had given
expression to her own theory of the novel. What she wrote on this subject
is excellent in itself, but it now has an additional interest in view of
her success as a novelist, and as throwing light on her conception of the
purposes to be followed in the writing of fiction. In what she wrote on
this subject two ideas stand out distinctly, that women are to find in
novel-writing a literary field peculiarly adapted to their capacities, and
that the novel should be a true portraiture of life.

She was a zealous advocate of woman's capacity to excel as a novelist, and
she saw in this form of literature a field especially adapted to her
greater powers of emotion and sympathy. Very generous and appreciative are
her references to the lady novelists whom she defends, the excellence of
whose work she maintains entitles them to the highest places as literary
artists. In the article on "Lady Novelists" she has drawn attention both to
those qualities in which woman may excel and to those in which she may
fail. In writing later of "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists" she criticised
unsparingly those women who write novels without comprehending life or any
of its problems, and who write in a merely artificial manner. The width of
her own culture, the vigor of her critical talent, the largeness of her
conception of life and its interests, are well expressed in these essays.
Only a large mind could have so truly conceived the real nature of woman's
relations to literature, and expressed them in a spirit so intelligent and
comprehensive. She would have the whole of life portrayed, and she believes
only a woman can truly speak for women. But her faith in woman seems not to
have been of the revolutionary character. She rather preferred that women
should achieve a higher social condition by deeds than by words. A great
intellectual career like her own, which places a woman in the front rank of
literary creators, does more to elevate the position of women than any
amount of agitation in favor of suffrage. That she sought for the highest
intellectual achievement, and that she labored to attain the widest results
of scholarship, is greatly to her credit; but more to her credit is it,
that she made no claim upon the public as a woman, but only as a literary
artist. She asked that her work should be judged on its literary merits, as
the product of intellect, and not with reference to her sex. While
believing that woman can do her work best by being true to the instincts,
sympathies and capacities of her sex, yet she would have the same standard
of literary judgment applied to women as to men. Its truthfulness, its
reality, its power to widen our sympathies and enlarge our culture, its
measure of genius and moral power, is the true test to be applied to any
literary work. Such being her conception of the manner in which women
should be judged when becoming literary creators, she had no excuses to
offer for those who make use of prejudices and a false culture in their own
behalf. She says that

    The most mischievous form of feminine silliness is the literary form,
    because it tends to confirm the popular prejudice against the solid
    education of women.

That she believed in the solid education of women is apparent in her own
efforts towards obtaining it for herself, and her conception of what is to
be done with it was large and generous. Mere learning she did not hold to
be an adornment in a woman. The culture must be transmuted into life-power,
and be poured forth, not as oracular wisdom in silly novels, but as
sympathy and enlarged comprehension of the daily duties of life. When
educated women "mistake vagueness for depth, bombast for eloquence, and
affectation for originality," she is not surprised that men regard
rhodomontade as the native accent of woman's intellect, or that they come
to the conclusion that "the average nature of women is too shallow and
feeble a soil to bear much tillage."

    It is true that the men who come to such a decision on such very
    superficial and imperfect observation may not be among the wisest in
    the world; but we have not now to contest their opinion--we are only
    pointing out how it is unconsciously encouraged by many women who have
    volunteered themselves as representatives of the feminine intellect. We
    do not believe that a man was ever strengthened in such an opinion by
    associating with a woman of true culture, whose mind had absorbed her
    knowledge instead of being absorbed by it. A really cultured woman,
    like a really cultured man, is all the simpler and the less obtrusive
    for her knowledge; it has made her see herself and her opinions in
    something like just proportions; she does not make it a pedestal from
    which she flatters herself that she commands a complete view of men and
    things, but makes it a point of observation from which to form a right
    estimate of herself.... She does not write books to confound
    philosophers, perhaps because she is able to write books that delight
    them, in conversation she is the least formidable of women, because she
    understands you, without wanting to make you aware that you _can't_
    understand her. She does not give you information, which is the raw
    material of culture,--she gives you sympathy, which is its subtlest
    essence.

After this estimate of the value of culture to women, it is interesting to
turn to George Eliot's words concerning the legitimate work which women can
perform in literature. What she says on this subject shows that she not
only had culture, but also the wisdom which is its highest result. She saw
that while a woman is to ask for no leniency towards her work because she
is a woman, yet that she is not to imitate men or to ignore her sex. She is
to portray life as a woman sees it, with a woman's sympathies and
experiences. To interpret the feminine side of life is her legitimate
province as a literary artist.

    If we regard literature as the expression of the emotions, the whims,
    the caprices, the enthusiasms, the fluctuating idealisms which move
    each epoch, we shall not be far wrong; and inasmuch as women
    necessarily take part in these things, they ought to give them _their_
    expression. And this leads us to the heart of the question, what does
    the literature of women mean? It means this: while it is impossible for
    men to express life otherwise than as they know it--and they can only
    know it profoundly according to their own experience--the advent of
    female literature promises woman's view of life, woman's experience; in
    other words, a new element. Make what distinctions you please in the
    social world, it still remains true that men and women have different
    organizations, consequently different experiences. To know life you
    must have both sides depicted. Let him paint what he knows. And if you
    limit woman's sphere to the domestic circle, you must still recognize
    the concurrent necessity of domestic life finding its homeliest and
    truest expression in the woman who lives it.

    Keeping to the abstract heights we have chosen, too abstract and
    general to be affected by exceptions, we may further say that the
    masculine mind is characterized by the predominance of the intellect,
    and the feminine by the predominance of the emotions. According to this
    rough division, the regions of philosophy would be assigned to men,
    those of literature to women. We need scarcely warn the reader against
    too rigorous an interpretation of this statement, which is purposely
    exaggerated the better to serve as a signpost. It is quite true that no
    such absolute distinction will be found in authorship. There is no man
    whose mind is shrivelled up into pure intellect; there is no woman
    whose intellect is completely absorbed by her emotions. But in most men
    the intellect does not move in such inseparable alliance with the
    emotions as in most women, and hence, although often not so great as in
    women, yet the intellect is more commonly dominant.  In poets, artists,
    and men of letters, _par excellence_, we observe this feminine trait,
    that their intellect habitually moves in alliance with their emotions;
    and one of the best descriptions of poetry was that given by Professor
    Wilson, as the "intellect colored by the feelings."

    Woman, by her greater affectionateness, her greater range and depth
    of emotional experience, is well fitted to give expression to
    the emotional facts of life, and demands a place in literature
    corresponding to that she occupies in society; and that literature
    must be greatly benefited thereby, follows from the definition we have
    given of literature.

    But hitherto, in spite of illustrations, the literature of woman has
    fallen short of its function, owing to a very natural and a very
    explicable weakness--it has been too much a literature of imitation. To
    write as men write, is the aim and besetting sin of women; to write as
    women, is the real office they have to perform. Our definition of
    literature includes this necessity. If writers are bound to express
    what they have really known, felt and suffered, that very obligation
    imperiously declares they shall not quit their own point of view for
    the point of view of others. To imitate is to abdicate. We are in no
    need of more male writers; we are in need of genuine female experience.
    The prejudices, notions, passions and conventionalisms of men are amply
    illustrated; let us have the same fulness with respect to women.
    Unhappily the literature of women may be compared with that of Rome: no
    amount of graceful talent can disguise the internal defect. Virgil,
    Ovid and Catullus were assuredly gifted with delicate and poetic
    sensibility; but their light is, after all, the light of moons
    reflected from the Grecian suns, and such as brings little life with
    its rays, To speak in Greek, to think in Greek, was the ambition of all
    cultivated Romans, who could not see that it would be a grander thing
    to utter their pure Roman natures in sincere originality. So of women.
    The throne of intellect has so long been occupied by men, that women
    naturally deem themselves bound to attend the court. Greece domineered
    over Rome; its intellectual supremacy was recognized, and the only way
    of rivalling it seemed to be imitation. Yet not so did Rome vanquish
    Pyrrhus and his elephants; not by employing elephants to match his, but
    by Roman valor.

    Of all departments of literature, fiction is the one to which, by
    nature and by circumstance, women are best adapted. Exceptional women
    will of course be found competent to the highest success in other
    departments; but speaking generally, novels are their forte. The
    domestic experiences which form the bulk of woman's knowledge finds an
    appropriate form in novels; while the very nature of fiction calls for
    that predominance of sentiment which we have already attributed to the
    feminine mind. Love is the staple of fiction, for it "forms the story
    of a woman's life." The joys and sorrows of affection, the incidents of
    domestic life, the aspirations and fluctuations of emotional life,
    assume typical forms in the novel. Hence we may be prepared to find
    women succeeding better in _finesse_ of detail, in pathos and
    sentiment, while men generally succeed better in the construction of
    plots and the delineation of character. Such a novel as _Tom Jones_ or
    _Vanity Fair_ we shall not get from a woman, nor such an effort of
    imaginative history as _Ivanhoe_ or _Old Mortality_; but Fielding,
    Thackeray and Scott are equally excluded from such perfection in its
    kind as _Pride and Prejudice_, _Indiana_ or _Jane Eyre_. As an artist
    Jane Austen surpasses all the male novelists that ever lived; and for
    eloquence and depth of feeling no man approaches George Sand.

    We are here led to another curious point in our subject, viz., the
    influence of sorrow upon female literature. It may be said without
    exaggeration that almost all literature has some remote connection with
    suffering. "Speculation," said Novalis, "is disease." It certainly
    springs from a vague disquiet. Poetry is analogous to the pearl which
    the oyster secretes in its malady.

                       "Most wretched men
      Are cradled into poetry by wrong,
      They learn in suffering what they teach in song."

    What Shelley says of poets, applies with greater force to women. If
    they turn their thoughts to literature, it is--when not purely an
    imitative act--always to solace by some intellectual activity the
    sorrow that in silence wastes their lives, and by a withdrawal of the
    intellect from the contemplation of their pain, or by a transmutation
    of their secret anxieties into types, they escape from the pressure of
    that burden. If the accidents of her position make her solitary and
    inactive, or if her thwarted affections shut her somewhat from that
    sweet domestic and maternal sphere to which her whole being
    spontaneously moves, she turns to literature as to another sphere. We
    do not here simply refer to those notorious cases where literature was
    taken up with the avowed and conscious purpose of withdrawing thoughts
    from painful subjects; but to the unconscious, unavowed influence of
    domestic disquiet and unfulfilled expectations, in determining the
    sufferer to intellectual activity. The happy wife and busy mother are
    only forced into literature by some hereditary organic tendency,
    stronger even than the domestic; and hence it is that the cleverest
    women are not those who have written books.

In the later essay on "Silly Novels" her powers of sarcasm were fully
displayed. It showed keen critical powers, and a clear insight into the
defects inherent in most novel-writing. She spared no faults, had no mercy
for presumption, and condemned unsparingly the pretence of culture.
She described four kinds of silly novels, classing them as being of the
_mind-and-millinery_, the _oracular, the _white-neck-cloth_, and the
_modern-antique_ varieties. All her powers of analysis and insight shown
in her novels appeared in this article.

Severe as her criticism is, it is always just. It aims at the presentation
of a truer conception of the purpose of novel-writing, and women are
judged simply as literary workers. This criticism is based on the clearest
apprehension of why it is that women fail as novel-writers; that it is not
because they are women, but because they are false to nature and to the
simplest conditions of literary art. These women write poor novels because
they aim at fine writing, and believe they must be learned and
grandiloquent. They ignore what they see about them every day, and which,
if they were to describe it in simple language, would give them real power.
It is this falsity in thought, method and purpose which is so severely
condemned. And it is the very justness of the criticism which makes it
severe, which gives to a true description of these novels the nature of a
stinging sarcasm. That these women are praised by the critics she justly
regards as a sure indication of their incapacity, or a sign of man's
chivalry towards the other sex, which does not permit him to speak the
truth about what he knows to be so false and immature. She also sees that
what women need is to be told the truth, and to be compelled to accept the
just consequences of their work,

    The standing apology for women who become writers without any special
    qualification is, that society shuts them out from other spheres of
    occupation. Society is a very culpable entity, and has to answer for
    the manufacture of many unwholesome commodities, from bad pickles to
    bad poetry. But society, like "matter" and her Majesty's Government,
    and other lofty abstractions, has its share of excessive blame as
    well as excessive praise. Where there is one woman who writes from
    necessity, we believe there are three who write from vanity; and
    besides, there is something so antiseptic in the mere healthy fact
    of working for one's bread, that the most trashy and rotten kind
    of literature is not likely to have been produced under such
    circumstances. "In all labor there is profit;" but ladies' silly
    novels, we imagine, are less the result of labor than of busy idleness.

    Happily we are not dependent on argument to prove that fiction is a
    department of literature in which women can, after their kind, fully
    equal men. A cluster of great names, both living and dead, rush to our
    memories in evidence that women can produce novels not only fine, but
    among the very finest;--novels, too, that have a precious specialty,
    lying quite apart from masculine aptitudes and experience. No
    educational restrictions can shut women out from the materials of
    fiction, and there is no species of art which is so free from rigid
    requirements. Like crystalline masses, it may take any form and yet
    be beautiful; we have only to pour in the right elements--genuine
    observation, humor and passion. But it is precisely this absence
    of rigid requirement which constitutes the fatal seduction of
    novel-writing to incompetent women. Ladies are not wont to be very
    grossly deceived as to their power of playing on the piano; here
    certain positive difficulties of execution have to be conquered, and
    incompetence inevitably breaks down. Every art which has its absolute
    _technique_ is, to a certain extent, guarded from the intrusions of
    mere left-handed imbecility. But in novel-writing there are no barriers
    for incapacity to stumble against, no external criteria to prevent a
    writer from mistaking foolish facility for mastery. And so we have
    again and again the old story of La Fontaine's ass, who puts his nose
    to the flute, and, finding that he elicits some sound, exclaims, "Moi,
    aussi, je joue de la flute;"--a fable which we commend, at parting, to
    the consideration of any feminine reader who is in danger of adding to
    the number of "silly novels by lady novelists."

Her praise of the great novelists is as enthusiastic as her condemnation of
the silly ones is severe. It is interesting to note that in the first of
these papers she selects Jane Austen and George Sand as the chiefest among
women novelists, and that she praises them for the truthfulness of their
portraitures of life, nor is she any the less aware of the defects of these
masters than of the deficiencies of silly women who write novels. She finds
that Jane Austen never penetrates into the deeper spiritual experiences of
life, and that George Sand lacks in that moral poise and purity which is so
necessary to the finest literary effort. Her sketches of these women are as
truthful as they are interesting.

    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 she has
    risked no failures by attempting to delineate that which she has not
    seen. Her circle may be restricted, but it is complete. Her world is a
    perfect orb and vital. Life, as it appears to an English gentlewoman
    peacefully yet actively engaged in her quiet village, is mirrored in
    her works with a purity and fidelity that must endow them with interest
    for all time. To read one of her books is like an actual experience of
    life; you know the people as if you had lived with them, and you feel
    something of personal affection towards them. The marvellous reality
    and subtle distinctive traits noticeable in her portraits has led
    Macaulay to call her a prose Shakspere. If the whole force of the
    distinction which lies in that epithet _prose_ be fairly appreciated,
    no one, we think, will dispute the compliment; for out of Shakspere it
    would be difficult to find characters so typical yet so nicely
    demarcated within the limits of their kind. We do not find such
    profound psychological insight as may be found in George Sand (not to
    mention male writers), but taking the type to which the characters
    belong, we see the most intimate and accurate knowledge in all Miss
    Austen's creations.

    Only cultivated minds fairly appreciate the exquisite art of Miss
    Austen. Those who demand the stimulus of effects, those who can only
    see by strong lights and shadows, will find her tame and uninteresting.
    We may illustrate this by one detail. Lucy Steele's bad English, so
    delicately and truthfully indicated, would in the hands of another have
    been more obvious, more "effective" in its exaggeration, but the loss
    of this comic effect is more than replaced to the cultivated reader by
    his relish of the nice discrimination visible in its truthfulness. And
    so of the rest. _Strong_ lights are unnecessary, _true_ lights being
    at command. The incidents, the characters, the dialogue--all are of
    every-day life, and so truthfully presented that to appreciate the art
    we must try to imitate it, or carefully compare it with that of others.

    We are but echoing an universal note of praise in speaking thus highly
    of her works, and it is from no desire of simply swelling that chorus
    of praise that we name her here, but to call attention to the peculiar
    excellence, at once womanly and literary, which has earned this
    reputation. Of all imaginative writers she is the most _real_. Never
    does she transcend her own actual experience, never does her pen trace
    a line that does not touch the experience of others. Herein we
    recognize the first quality of literature. We recognize the second and
    more special quality of womanliness in the tone and point of view; they
    are novels written by a woman, an Englishwoman, a gentlewoman; no
    signature could disguise that fact; and because she has so faithfully
    (although unconsciously) kept to her own womanly point of view, her
    works are durable. There is nothing of the _doctrinaire_ in Jane
    Austen; not a trace of woman's "mission;" but as the most truthful,
    charming, humorous, pure-minded, quick-witted and unexaggerated of
    writers, female literature has reason to be proud of her.

And this is her suggestive portrait of the other, drawn with that skill
which is only displayed when one genius interprets another through
community of feeling and purpose.

    Of greater genius, and incomparably deeper experience, George Sand
    represents woman's literature more illustriously and more obviously. In
    her, quite apart from the magnificent gifts of nature, we see the
    influence of sorrow as a determining impulse to write, and the abiding
    consciousness of the womanly point of view as the subject matter of her
    writings. In vain has she chosen the mask of a man: the features of a
    woman are everywhere visible. Since Goethe no one has been able to say
    with so much truth, "My writings are my confessions." Her biography
    lies there, presented, indeed, in a fragmentary shape and under wayward
    disguises, but nevertheless giving to the motley groups the strong and
    uumistakable charm of reality. Her grandmother, by whom she was brought
    up, disgusted at her not being a boy, resolved to remedy the misfortune
    as far as possible by educating her like a boy. We may say of this, as
    of all the other irregularities of her strange and exceptional life,
    that whatever unhappiness and error may be traceable thereto, its
    influence on her writings has been beneficial, by giving a greater
    range to her experience. It may be selfish to rejoice over the malady
    which secretes a pearl, but the possessor of the pearl may at least
    congratulate himself that at any rate the pearl has been produced; and
    so of the unhappiness of genius. Certainly few women have had such
    profound and varied experience as George Sand; none have turned it to
    more account. Her writings contain many passages that her warmest
    admirers would wish unwritten; but although severe criticism may detect
    the weak places, the severest criticism must conclude with the
    admission of her standing among the highest minds of literature. In the
    matter of eloquence, she surpasses everything France has yet produced.
    There has been no style at once so large, so harmonious, so expressive,
    and so unaffected: like a light shining through an alabaster vase, the
    ideas shine through her diction; while as regards rhythmic melody of
    phrase, it is a style such as Beethoven might have written had he
    uttered in words the melodious passion that was in him. But deeper than
    all eloquence, grander than all grandeur of phrase, is that forlorn
    splendor of a life of passionate experience painted in her works. There
    is no man so wise but he may learn from them, for they are the
    utterances of a soul in pain, a soul that has been tried. No man could
    have written her books, for no man could have had her experience, even
    with a genius equal to her own. The philosopher may smile sometimes at
    her philosophy, for _that_ is only the reflex of some man whose ideas
    she has adopted; the critic may smile sometimes--at her failure in
    delineating men; but both philosopher and critic must perceive that
    those writings of hers are _original_ and genuine, are transcripts of
    experience, and as such fulfil the primary condition of all literature.

This clear, intellectual apprehension of what woman can effect in
literature, had much to do with George Eliot's own success. Yet it is
doubtful if she was so true, in some directions, to the instincts of her
sex as was George Sand, Mrs. Browning or Charlotte Brontë. Hers was in
large measure an intellect without sex; and though she was a woman in all
the instincts of her heart, yet intellectually she occupied the human
rather than the woman's point of view. With a marvellous insight into the
heart of woman, and great skill in portraying womanly natures, she had a
man's way, the logical and impersonal manner, of viewing, the greater
problems of human existence. Charlotte Brontë more truly represents the
woman's way of viewing life; the trustful way of one educated in the
conventional views of religion. She has given a corrector interpretation of
the meaning of love to woman than George Eliot has been able to present,
and simply because she thought and lived more nearly as other women think
and live. Hers was the genius of spontaneous insight and emotion, that
vibrated to every experience and was moved by every sentiment. Life played
upon her heart like the wind upon an Aescolian harp, and she reflected its
every movement of joy and sorrow. George Eliot studied life, probed into
it, cut it in pieces, constructed a theory of it, and then told us what it
means. In this she was unlike other women who have made a deep impression
on literature. Mrs. Browning had nearly as much culture, was as thoughtful
as she, but more genuinely feminine at the heart-core. Love she painted in
a purer and happier fashion than that adopted by George Eliot, and she had
the warmer impulses of a woman's tenderness. Her account of life is the
truer, because it is the more ideal; and this may be said for Charlotte
Brontë also. George Eliot had the larger intellect, the keener mind, was a
profounder thinker; but her realism held her back from that instinctive
conception of life which realizes its larger ideal meanings. It is not
enough to see what is; man desires to know what ought to be. The poet is
the seer, the one who apprehends, who has that finer eye for facts by which
he is able to behold what the facts give promise of. This ideal vision Mrs.
Browning had, and in so far she was the superior of George Eliot. The same
may be said for George Sand, who, with all her wildness and impurity, was a
woman through and through. She was all heart, all impulse, lived in her
instincts and emotions. She had the abandon, enthusiasm and spontaneity
which George Eliot lacked. If the one represents the head, the other
expresses the heart of woman. George Eliot, as a woman, thought, reasoned,
philosophized; George Sand felt, gave every emotion reign, lived out all
her impulses. What the one lacks the other had; where one was weak the
other was strong. With somewhat of George Sand's idealism and emotional
zeal for wider and freer life, George Eliot would have been a greater
writer. Could she have moulded Dorothea with what is best in Consuelo, she
would have been the rival of the greatest literary artists among men. Yet,
with her limitations, it must be said that George Eliot is the superior of
all other women in her literary accomplishments. If others are her
superiors in some directions, in the totality of her powers she surpasses
all. Even as an interpreter of woman's nature and the feminine side of
life, she does not fail to keep well ahead of the best of feminine writers.
She is more thoroughly the master of her powers, is more self-centred,
looks out upon human experience more calmly and with a more penetrating
gaze. Foremost of the half-dozen women who during the present century have
sought to interpret the feminine side of life, she has done much for her
sex. Daring more than others, she has given a greater promise than any
other of what woman is to accomplish when her nature blossoms out into all
its possibilities.

The chief rule for novel-writing laid down by George Eliot in these essays
is, that the novel shall be the result of experience and true to nature.
She emphasizes the importance of this condition, and says that the novelist
is bound to use actual experience as his material, and that alone, or else
keep silent. Weak and silly novels are the result of an effort to break
away from this rule; but the writer who ventures to disregard it never can
be other than silly or weak. Novelists, she says, may either portray
experience outwardly through observation, or inwardly through sentiment, or
through a combination of both.

    Observation without sentiment usually leads to humor or satire;
    sentiment without observation to rhetoric and long-drawn lachrymosity.
    The extreme fault of the one is flippant superficiality, that of the
    other is what is called sickly sentimentality.

All true literature, she says, is based on fact, describes life as it is
lived by men and women, touches and is fragrant with reality. This cardinal
principle of literary art she has defined and illustrated in her own strong
and expressive manner in this _Review_ article.

   All poetry, all fiction, all comedy, all _belles-lettres_, even to the
   playful caprices of fancy, are but the expression of experiences and
   emotions; and these expressions are the avenues through which we reach
   the sacred _adytum_ of humanity, and learn better to understand our
   fellows and ourselves. In proportion as these expressions are the forms
   of universal truths, of facts common to all nations or appreciable by
   all intellects, the literature which sets them forth is permanently good
   and true. Hence the universality and immortality of Homer, Shakspere,
   Cervantes, Moliere. But in proportion as these expressions are the forms
   of individual, peculiar truths, such as fleeting fashions or
   idiosyncrasies, the literature is ephemeral. Hence tragedy never grows
   old, for it arises from elemental experience; but comedy soon ages, for
   it arises from peculiarities. Nevertheless, even idiosyncrasies are
   valuable as side glances; they are aberrations that bring the natural
   orbit into more prominent distinctness.

    It follows from what has been said, that literature, being essentially
    the expression of experience and emotion--of what we have seen, felt
    and thought--that only _that_ literature is effective, and to be prized
    accordingly, which has _reality for its basis_ (needless to say that
    emotion is as real as the three-per-cents), _and effective in
    proportion to the depth and breadth of that basis_.

In writing? of the authors of _Jane Eyre_ and _Mary Barton_, she shows how
important to her mind it is that the novel should have its basis in actual
experience, and that it should be an expression of reality.

    They have both given imaginative expression to actual experience--they
    have not invented, but reproduced; they have preferred the truth, such
    as their own experience testified, to the vague, false, conventional
    notions current in circulating libraries. Whatever of weakness may be
    pointed out in their works will, we are positive, be mostly in those
    parts where experience is deserted, and the supposed requirements of
    fiction have been listened to; whatever has really affected the public
    mind is, we are equally, certain, the transcript of some actual
    incident, character or emotion. Note, moreover, that beyond this basis
    of actuality these writers have the further advantage of deep feeling
    united to keen observation.

Especially severe is her condemnation of the tendency to introduce only
fashionable or learned people into novels. She says the silly novelists
rarely make us acquainted with "any other than very lofty and fashionable
society," and very often the authors know nothing of such society except
from the reading of other such novels.

    It is true that we are constantly struck with the want of
    verisimilitude in their representations of the high society in which
    they seem to live; but then they betray no closer acquaintance with
    any other form of life. If their peers and peeresses are improbable,
    their literary men, tradespeople and cottagers are impossible; and
    their intellect seems to have the peculiar impartiality of reproducing
    both what they _have_ seen and heard, and what they have _not_ seen
    and heard, with equal faithfulness.

What is simple, natural, unaffected, she pleads for as the true material of
fiction. How she would apply this idea may be seen in her condemnation of a
novelist who devoted her pages to a defence of Evangelicalism. This writer
is "tame and feeble" because she attempts to depict a form of society with
which she is not familiar. That the common phases of religious life are
capable of affording the richest material for the novelist, George Eliot
has abundantly shown, and what she says of their value in this discussion
of "Silly Novelists" is of great interest in view of her own success in
this kind of portraiture. What she suggested as a fine field for the
novelist was to be the one she herself was so well to occupy. Her success
proved how clearly she comprehended the nature of novel-writing, and how
well she understood the character of the material with which the best
results can be attained.

    It is less excusable in an Evangelical novelist than any other,
    gratuitously to seek her subjects among titles and carriages. The real
    drama of Evangelicalism--and it has abundance of fine drama for any one
    who has genius enough to discern and reproduce it--lies among the
    middle and lower classes; and are not Evangelical opinions understood
    to give an especial interest in the weak things of the earth, rather
    than in the mighty? Why, then, cannot our Evangelical novelists show
    us the operation of their religious views among people (there really
    are many such in the world) who keep no carriage, "not so much as a
    brass-bound gig," who even manage to eat their dinner without a silver
    fork, and in whose mouths the authoress's questionable English would be
    strictly consistent? Why can we not have pictures of religious life
    among the industrial classes in England as interesting as Mrs. Stowe's
    pictures of religious life among the negroes?

Was this question a prophecy? It indicates that the writer's attention
had already been directed to the richness of this material for the purposes
of the novelist. After reading these words we see why she took up the
common life of the English village as she had herself been familiar with
it from childhood. In order to be true to her own conception of the novel,
there was no other field she could occupy. That she understood the
picturesqueness of this form of life no reader of her novels will doubt,
or that she saw and understood its capacities for artistic delineation.
The opening paragraphs of her _Westminster Review_ article on the "Natural
History of German Life" afford further evidence of her insight and
wisdom on this subject. They also afford evidence of her hatred of the
conventional and the artificial in art, literature and life. The spirit of
imitation and mannerism common to the eighteenth century was in every way
repugnant to her. She could have had only contempt for the literary art of
a Pope or a Boileau. The nature of her realism, and the conception she had
of its importance, may be understood from these paragraphs, for in them she
has unfolded her theory more clearly than in anything else she has written,
and with that genius for sympathetic description which is so marked in her
novels.

    How little the real characteristics of the working-classes are known to
    those who are outside them, how little their natural history has been
    studied, is sufficiently disclosed by our art as well as by our
    political and social theories. Where, in our picture exhibitions, shall
    we find a group of true peasantry? What English artist even attempts to
    rival in truthfulness such studies of popular life as the pictures of
    Teniers or the ragged boys of Murillo? Even one of the greatest
    painters of the pre-eminently realistic school, while in his picture of
    "The Hireling Shepherd" he gave us a landscape of marvellous
    truthfulness, placed a pair of peasants in the foreground who were not
    much more real than the idyllic swains and damsels of our chimney
    ornaments. Only a total absence of acquaintance and sympathy with our
    peasantry could give a moment's popularity to such a picture as "Cross
    Purposes," where we have a peasant girl who looks as if she knew
    L.E.L.'s poems by heart, and English rustics whose costumes seem to
    indicate that they are meant for ploughmen with exotic features that
    remind us of a handsome _primo tenore_. Rather than such cockney
    sentimentality as this as an education for the taste and sympathies, we
    prefer the most crapulous group of boors that Teniers ever painted. But
    even those among our painters who aim at giving the rustic type of
    features, who are far above the effeminate feebleness of the "Keepsake"
    style, treat their subjects under the influence of traditions and
    prepossessions rather than of direct observation. The notion that
    peasants are joyous, that the typical moment to represent a man in a
    smock-frock is when he is cracking a joke and showing a row of sound
    teeth, that cottage matrons are usually buxom, and village children
    necessarily rosy and merry, are prejudices difficult to dislodge from
    the artistic mind, which looks for its subjects into literature instead
    of life. The painter is still under the influence of idyllic
    literature, which has always expressed the imagination of the
    cultivated and town-bred, rather than the truth of rustic life. Idyllic
    ploughmen are jocund when they drive their team afield; idyllic
    shepherds make bashful love under hawthorn bushes; idyllic villagers
    dance in the chequered shade, and refresh themselves, not immoderately,
    with spicy nut-brown ale. But no one who has seen much of actual
    ploughmen thinks them jocund; no one who is well acquainted with the
    English peasantry can pronounce them merry. The slow gaze, in which no
    sense of beauty beams, no humor twinkles,-the slow utterance and the
    heavy slouching walk, remind one rather of that melancholy animal, the
    camel, than of the sturdy countryman with striped stockings, red waist
    coat and hat aside, who represents the traditional English peasant.
    Observe a company of haymakers, when you see them at a distance,
    tossing up the forkfuls of hay in the golden light, while the wagon
    creeps--slowly with its increasing burthen over the meadow, and the
    bright green space which tells of work done gets larger and larger, you
    pronounce the scene "smiling," and you think that these companions in
    labor must be as bright and cheerful as the picture to which they give
    animation. Approach nearer, and you will certainly find that haymaking
    time is a time of joking, especially it there are women among the
    laborers; but the coarse laugh that bursts out every now and then, and
    expresses the triumphant taunt, is as far as possible from your idyllic
    conception of idyllic merriment. That delicious effervescence of the
    mind which we call fun has no equivalent for the northern peasant,
    except tipsy revelry; the only realm of fancy and imagination for the
    English clown exists at the bottom of the third quart-pot.

    The conventional countryman of the stage, who picks up pocket books and
    never looks into them, and who is too simple even to know that honesty
    has its opposite, represents the still lingering mistake that an
    unintelligible dialect is a guarantee for ingenuousness, and that
    slouching shoulders indicate an upright disposition. It is quite true
    that a thresher is likely to be innocent of any adroit arithmetical
    cheating, but he is not the less likely to carry home his master's corn
    in his shoes and pocket; a reaper is not given to writing begging
    letters, but he is quite capable of cajoling the dairy-maid into
    filling his small-beer bottle with ale. The selfish instincts are not
    subdued by the sight of buttercups, nor is integrity in the least
    established by that classic rural occupation, sheep-washing. To make
    men moral, something more is requisite than to turn them out to grass.

    Opera peasants, whose unreality excites Mr. Ruskin's indignation, are
    surely too frank an idealization to be misleading; and since popular
    chorus is one of the most effective elements of the opera, we can
    hardly object to lyric rustics in elegant laced bodices and picturesque
    motley, unless we are prepared to advocate a chorus of colliers in
    their pit costume, or a ballet of charwomen and stocking-weavers. But
    our social novels profess to represent the people as they are, and the
    unreality of their representations is a grave evil. The greatest
    benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet or novelist, is
    the extension of our sympathies. Appeals founded on generalizations
    and statistics require a sympathy ready-made, a moral sentiment already
    in activity; but a picture of human life such as a great artist can
    give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention
    to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material
    of moral sentiment. When Scott takes us into Luckie Mucklebackit's
    cottage, or tells the story of The Two Drovers,--when Wordsworth
    sings to us the reverie of Poor Susan,--when Kingsley shows us Alton
    Locke gazing yearningly over the gate which leads from the highway
    into the first wood he ever saw,--when Harnung paints a group of
    chimney-sweepers,--more is done towards linking the higher classes
    with the lower, towards obliterating the vulgarity of exclusiveness,
    than by hundreds of sermons and philosophical dissertations. Art is the
    nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and
    extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our
    personal lot. All the more sacred is the task of the artist when he
    undertakes to paint the life of the people. Falsification here is far
    more pernicious than in the more artificial aspects of life. It is not
    so very serious that we should have false ideas about evanescent
    fashions--about the manners and conversation of beaux and duchesses;
    but it _is_ serious that our sympathy with the perennial joys and
    struggles, the toil, the tragedy and the humor in the life of our more
    heavily laden fellow-men,--should be perverted, and turned towards a
    false object instead of the true one.

    This perversion is not the less fatal because the misrepresentation
    which gives rise to it has what the artist considers a moral end. The
    thing for mankind to know is, not what are the motives and influences
    which the moralist thinks _ought_ to act on the laborer or the artisan,
    but what are the motives and influences which do act on him. We want to
    be taught to feel, not for the heroic artisan or the sentimental
    peasant, but for the peasant in all his coarse apathy, and the artisan
    in all his suspicious selfishness.

    We have one great novelist who is gifted with the utmost power of
    rendering the external traits of our town population; and if he could
    give us their psychological character--their conceptions of life, and
    their emotions--with the same truth as their idiom and manners, his
    books would be the greatest contribution art has ever made to the
    awakening of social sympathies. But while he can copy Mrs. Plornish's
    colloquial style with the delicate accuracy of a sun-picture, while
    there is the same startling inspiration in his description of the
    gestures and phrases of "Boots," as in the speeches of Shakspere's mobs
    or numskulls, he scarcely ever passes from the humorous and external to
    the emotional and tragic, without becoming as transcendent in his
    unreality as he was a moment before in his artistic truthfulness. But
    for the precious salt of his humor, which compels him to reproduce
    external traits that serve, in some degree, as a corrective to his
    frequently false psychology, his preternaturally virtuous poor children
    and artisans, his melodramatic bootmen and courtesans, would be as
    noxious as Eugene Sue's idealized proletaires in encouraging the
    miserable fallacy that high morality and refined sentiment can grow
    out of harsh social relations, ignorance and want; or that the
    working-classes are in a condition to enter at once into a millennial
    state of _altruism_, wherein every one is caring for every one else,
    and no one for himself.

    If we need a true conception of the popular character to guide our
    sympathies rightly, we need it equally to check our theories, and
    direct us in their application. The tendency created by the splendid
    conquests of modern generalization, to believe that all social
    questions are merged in economical science, and that the relations of
    men to their neighbors may be settled by algebraic equations,--the
    dream that the uncultured classes are prepared for a condition which
    appeals principally to their moral sensibilities,--the aristocratic
    dilettantism which attempts to restore the "good old times" by a sort
    of idyllic masquerading, and to grow feudal fidelity and veneration as
    we grow prize turnips, by an artificial system of culture,--none of
    these diverging mistakes can co-exist with a real knowledge of the
    people, with a thorough study of their habits, their ideas, their
    motives. The landholder, the clergyman, the mill-owner, the mining
    agent, have each an opportunity for making precious observations on
    different sections of the working-class, but unfortunately their
    experience is too often not registered at all, or its results are too
    scattered to be available as a source of information and stimulus to
    the public mind generally. If any man of sufficient moral and
    intellectual breadth, whose observations would not be vitiated by a
    foregone conclusion, or by a professional point of view, would devote
    himself to studying the natural history of our social classes,
    especially of the small shop-keepers, artisans and peasantry,--the
    degree in which they are influenced by local conditions, their maxims
    and habits, the points of view from which they regard their religious
    teachers, and the degree in which they are influenced by religious
    doctrines, the interaction of the various classes on each other, and
    what are the tendencies in their position towards disintegration or
    towards development,--and if, after all this study, he would give us
    the result of his observations in a book well nourished with specific
    facts, his work would be a valuable aid to the social and political
    reformer.

The estimates given in these essays of the writings of Jane Austen, George
Sand, Charlotte Brontë and Thackeray, show the soundness of George Eliot's
critical judgment. She fully appreciated Jane Austen's artistic skill, as
she did George Sand's impassioned love of liberty and naturalness. She also
saw how tame are Miss Austen's scenes, how humanly imperfect are
Thackeray's characters. Her own work is wanting in Jane Austen's artistic
skill and finish, but there is far more of originality and character in her
books, more of thought and purpose. Miss Austen tells her story wonderfully
well, but her books are all on the same level of social mediocrity and
flatness. No fresh, strong, natural, aspiring life is to be found in one of
them. George Eliot has not Jane Austen's artistic skill, but she has
thought, depth of purpose, originality of expression and conception, and a
marvellous creative insight into character. She is less passionate and bold
than George Sand, not the same daring innovator, more rational and
sensible. She is not so much a poet, has little of George Sand's power of
improvisation, much less of eloquence and abandon. She has more literary
skill than Charlotte Brontë, less originality, but none of her crudeness.
She has not so much of the subtle element of genius, but more of solidity
and thought.

Her theories concerning the novel place George Eliot fully in sympathy with
what may very properly be called the British school of fiction. The natural
history of man is the subject matter used by this school; and to describe
accurately, minutely, some portion of the human race, some social
community, is its main object. Richardson, Fielding, Miss Austen and
Thackeray are the masters in this school, who have given direction to its
aims and methods. They have sought to accomplish in novel-writing somewhat
the same results as those aimed at by Wordsworth and Browning in poetry, to
follow the natural, to make much of the common, to describe things as they
are. They are realists both in method and philosophy, though differing
widely from the minuteness and coarseness of Tourguénief and Zola, in that
they show a large element of the ideal interfused with the real. This
school is seldom coarse, vulgar or sensuous, does not mistake the depraved
and beastly for the natural. Its members delight in simple scenes, plain
life, common joys; the scenes, life and joys which are open to every
Englishman. They have made use of the facts lying immediately about them,
those with which they were the most familiar. They have broken away from
the traditional theories of life, the manners of books of etiquette and the
rules of fashionable society, for the life which is natural and instinct
with impulses of its own. The life of the professions is described, local
dialects and provincialisms appear, places and scenery are carefully
painted, and the disagreeable and painful become elements in these novels,
because common to humanity.

To this special theory of the novel, as it had been worked out by the
English masters of prose-poetry, George Eliot added nothing essential.
Thackeray, Mrs. Gaskell, Miss Austen, Miss Mitford, Fielding and Richardson
had preceded her along the way she was to follow. Their methods became
hers, she accepted their influence, and her work was done in the spirit
they had so ably illustrated. In one direction, however, she far surpassed
any one of her masters, and gave to the novel a richness of power and
fulness of aim it had not attained to with any of her predecessors. George
Eliot combined other methods with that of naturalism, not adhering rigidly
to the purpose of painting life as it appears on the surface. Not only from
the pre-Raphaelites, but from such romanticists as Scott, did she learn
much. Past scenes became natural, and history was discovered to be a vast
element in the thought of the present. Scott's power of reviving the past
in all its romantic and picturesque features, which gave him such capacity
for re-creating the life that had once passed away, was not possessed by
George Eliot. Still, if not a romancist, she realized how mighty is the
shaping power of the past over the present. For this reason, she endeavored
to recast old scenes, to revive in living shapes the times that had gone
by. The living movements of the present, its efforts at reform, its cries
for liberty, its searchings after a freer and purer life, also became a
prominent element in her novels. If in this tendency she somewhat enlarged
upon the methods of her masters, yet she was quite in sympathy with many
who came just before her, and with many more who were her contemporaries.
In another direction she kept along the way followed by many of her
co-workers, and brought philosophy and socialistic speculation to the aid
of the naturalistic method. Indeed, she so far departed from that method,
and from the soundest theories of art, as to become to some extent a
_doctrinaire_.

Her novels, like much of the poetry of the same period, are eclectic in
spirit, combining with the naturalistic methods those of the historic,
socialistic, culture and speculative schools. Art and culture for their own
sake combined in her novels with the purpose to use history and social life
obedient to a distinct conception of their meanings. To describe life
accurately there must be a clear conception of what life means. Genius
never works aimlessly; and in seeing life as it is, always sees that it has
a tendency and direction. A mind so thoughtful as George Eliot's, with so
strong a love of speculative interest in it, was likely to give to
novel-writing done by her a large philosophic element. Yet her philosophy
is nearly always subject to her imagination and to her naturalism. Her love
of nature, her intimate interest in life and its elemental problems, her
passionate sympathy with all human passions and experiences, saves her from
becoming a mere _doctrinaire_, and gives to her speculations a pathetic,
living interest. The poetic elements of her novels are so many as to
subordinate the philosophic to the true purposes of art.

In one direction George Eliot departed from the methods of her
predecessors, and to so great an extent as to be herself the originator of
a new school of fiction. She followed the bent of her time for analysis and
psychologic interpretation. It is here more than anywhere else she differs
from Charlotte Brontë and George Sand. These two great novelists create
character by direct representation, by making their persons live and act.
George Eliot shows her characters to the reader by analyzing their motives
and by giving the history of their development. The disadvantages of the
analytic method are apparent when George Eliot is compared with Scott.
Unique, personal and human are his creations, instinct with all human
emotions, and profoundly real. It is only the poetic side of life which he
sees, not its philosophic. George Eliot wanted to know the meanings of
things, and this very desire brings a largeness into her books which is not
found in Scott's. She was much the more thoughtful of the two, the one who
tried to realize to the intellect what life means. Yet her method of doing
this is not always the best one for the poet or the novelist. Scott was no
realist, and yet George Eliot has not been more accurate than he. Indeed,
he is far more truly accurate in so far as he paints the soul as well as
the body of life. The sad endings of her novels grew out of a false theory,
and from her inability to see anything of spiritual reality beyond the
little round of man's earthly destiny. She did not accept the doctrine that
art is to be cultivated only for art's sake, for art was always to her the
vehicle of moral or philosophic teaching. The limitations of her art
largely lay in the direction of her agnosticism. Scott and George Sand gain
for their work a great power and effect by their acceptance of the
spiritual as real. There is a light, a subtle aroma, a width of vision, a
sense of reality, in their work from this source, which is wanting in
George Eliot's. The illimitable mystery beyond the region of the real is
the greatest fact man has presented to him, and that region is a reality in
all the effects it works on humanity. No poet can ignore it or try to limit
it to humanity without a loss to his work. It is this subtle, penetrative,
aromatic and mystic power of the ideal which is most to be felt as lacking
in the works of George Eliot. Much as we may praise her, we can but feel
this limitation. Great as is our admiration, we can but feel that there is
a higher range of poetic and artistic creation than any she reached.

The quotations presented from her early writings prove that George Eliot
began her career as a novelist with a fully elaborated conception of the
purposes of the novel and of the methods to be followed in its production.
She had thoroughly studied the subject, had read many of the best works of
the best writers, and had formed a carefully digested theory of the novel.
That she could do this is rather an indication of critical than of creative
power. Her novels everywhere betray the greatness of her reasoning powers,
that she was a thinker, that she had strong powers of intellectual
analysis, and that she had a logical, accurate mind. Had her mind taken no
other direction than this, however, she never could have become a great
novelist. These essays indicated something beside powers of reasoning and
psychological analysis. They also indicated her capacity for imaginative
insight into the motives and impulses of human nature, and an intuitive
comprehension of what is most natural to human thought and action. They
showed appreciation of sympathy and feeling, and delicate perception of the
finer cravings and tendencies of even the commonest souls. They gave
promise of so much creative power, her friends saw that in novel-writing
she was to find the true expression of her large qualities of mind and
heart. The person who could so skilfully point out the faults in the poor
novels rapidly issuing from the press, and realize the true indications of
a master's power in the creations of the literary artists, might herself
possess the genius necessary to original work of her own. Her early essays
are now chiefly of value for this promise they give of larger powers than
those which could be fully expressed in such work. They prophesied the
future, and made her friends zealous to overcome her own reluctance to
enter upon a larger work. She doubted her own genius, but it was not
destined to remain unfruitful.




VIII.


POETIC METHODS.

Had George Eliot written nothing else than the poems which bear her name,
she would have been assigned a permanent place among the poets. Having
first attained her rank in the highest order of novelists, however, her
poetry suffers in comparison with her prose. The critics tell us that no
person gifted with supreme excellence in one form of creative expression
has ever been able to attain high rank in another. They forget that Goethe
was great both in prose and poetry; that his _Wilhelm Meister_ is of
scarcely inferior genius to his _Faust_. They also forget that Victor Hugo
holds the first place among the French poets of the present century, at the
same time that he is the greatest of all French novelists. It would be well
for them also to remember that Scott held high rank as a poet before he
began his wonderful career as a novelist. A contemporary of George Eliot's,
to name a single instance of another kind, was equally excellent as poet
and painter. Dante Rossetti made for himself a lasting place in both
directions, and in both he did work of a high order.

In reality, the novel much resembles the narrative or epic poem; and if a
work of true genius, it is difficult to distinguish it from the poem except
as they differ in external form. The novel has for its main elements those
qualities of imagination, description, high-wrought purpose, which are also
constituents of much of the best poetry. The novel is more expansive than
the poem, one of the chief characteristics of which is condensation; its
theme may take a wider range, and it may embrace those cruder and more
common features of life which are inappropriate to the poem. The novelist
can make a greater use of humor, he can give more detail to description,
and portrayal of character can be carried to a much greater extent, than is
usual with the poet. The poet requires a subject more sublime, inspiring
and naturally beautiful than the novelist, who seeks what is the more
human, nearer the level of daily social existence, and full of the
affecting even if ruder interests and passions of life. The novel is so
similar to the poem, and in so many ways requires such similar qualities of
mind for its production, that there is no inherent reason why the same
person cannot do equally good work in both. The supposition is that the
poet may become a novelist, or the novelist a poet, in all cases except
where there is some outward disqualification. The novelist may not have the
sense of rhythmical form and of metrical expression; and the poet may not
possess that constructive faculty which builds up plots, incidents and
characters. In nearly all respects but these the two forms of creative
genius so nearly assimilate each other, it is to be expected a novelist may
turn poet if he have a large imagination and a stimulating capacity for
metrical expression.

Novelists of strong imagination and a ready command of expressive words,
barely escape writing poetry when they only purpose to write prose. This is
true of Hugo, Auerbach, Dickens and George Eliot, again and again. The glow
of creation, the high-wrought impulse of imagination, the ideal conception
of life, all move the novelist in the direction of poetry. With much effort
he keeps meter and rhyme out of his prose, but simile and metaphor,
condensed expression, unusual words, poetic compounds, alliteration,
sublime and picturesque expression, will intrude themselves. Dickens even
permits meter and rhyme to conquer him, and weakens his style in
consequence. He grows sentimental, and the real strength of pure prose is
lost. George Eliot is often poetical in expression, touches the very
borders of poetry continually, but she seldom permits herself to lapse from
the strong, energetic and impressive prose which she almost uniformly
writes. Specimens of this noble poetic-prose may be found very often in her
pages. While it would be difficult by any transposition of words to turn it
into poetry, as may often be done in the case of Dickens's prose, yet it
contains most of the elements of a high order of poetry. In the account of
the death of Maggie and Tom is to be found a fine specimen of her style,
the last words being good iambics.

    The boat reappeared, but brother and sister had gone down in an embrace
    never to be parted; living through again, in one supreme moment, the
    days when they _had clasped their little hands in love, and roamed the
    daisied fields together_.

In the first paragraph of the thirty-third chapter of _Adam Bede_ is a
sentence which makes a successful stanza in iambics by the addition of a
single word.

  The woods behind the chase,
  And all the hedgerow trees,
  Took on a solemn splendor _then_
  Under the dark low-hanging skies.

It is very seldom, however, that George Eliot permits anything like meter
in her prose, and she is usually very reticent of rhythm. There is fervor
and enthusiasm, imagination and poetic insight, but all kept within the
limits of robust and manly prose. This capacity of prose to serve most of
the purposes of poetry may be seen in a marked degree in all of George
Eliot's novels. In the account of Adam Bede's love for Hetty this subtle
power of words and ideas to give the charm and impression of poetry without
rhythm or rhyme is exhibited in a characteristic manner.

    I think the deep love he had for that sweet, rounded, blossom-like,
    dark-eyed Hetty, of whose inward self he was really very ignorant, came
    out of the very strength of his nature, and not out of any inconsistent
    weakness. Is it any weakness, pray, to be wrought on by exquisite
    music? to feel its wondrous harmonies searching the subtlest windings
    of your soul, the delicate fibres of life where no memory can
    penetrate, and binding together your whole being, past and present, in
    one unspeakable vibration; melting you in one moment with all the
    tenderness, all the love that has been scattered through the toilsome
    years, concentrating in one emotion of heroic courage or resignation
    all the hard-learned lessons of self-renouncing sympathy, blending your
    present joy with past sorrow, and your present sorrow with all your
    past joy? If not, then neither is it a weakness to be so wrought upon
    by the exquisite curves of a woman's cheek and neck and arms, by the
    liquid depths of her beseeching eyes, or the sweet childish pout of her
    lips. For the beauty of a lovely woman is like music; what can one say
    more? Beauty has an expression beyond and far above the one woman's
    soul that it clothes, as the words of genius have a wider meaning than
    the thought that prompted them; it is more than a woman's love that
    moves us in a woman's eyes--it seems to be a far-off, mighty love
    that     has come near to us, and made speech for itself there; the
    rounded neck, the dimpled arm, move us by something more than their
    prettiness--by their close kinship with all we have known of tenderness
    and peace. [Footnote: Adam Bede, chapter XXXIII.]

Love, music and beautiful landscapes continually inspire the poetic side of
her nature; and these themes, which are constantly recurring in her
chapters, draw forth her imagination and give fervor and enthusiasm to her
expression. Her love of nature is deep and most appreciative of all its
transformations and beauties. This sensitiveness to the changes of the
outward world is a large element in her mind, and indicates the reality of
her poetic gifts. This may be seen in a passage such as the following:--

    The ride to Stone Court, which Fred and Rosamond took the next morning,
    lay through a pretty bit of midland landscape, almost all meadows and
    pastures, with hedgerows still allowed to grow in bushy beauty, and to
    spread out coral fruit for the birds. Little details gave each field a
    particular physiognomy, dear to the eyes that have looked on them from
    childhood; the pool in the corner where the grasses were dank and
    trees leaned whisperingly; the great oak shadowing a bare place in
    mid-pasture; the high bank where the ash-trees grew; the sudden slope
    of the old marl-pit making a red background for the burdock; the
    huddled roofs and ricks of the homestead without a traceable way of
    approach; the gray gate and fences against the depths of the bordering
    wood; and the stray hovel, its old, old thatch full of mossy hills and
    valleys, with wondrous modulations of light and shadow, such as we
    travel far to see in later life, and see larger, but not more
    beautiful. These are the things that made the gamut of joy in landscape
    to midland-bred souls--the things they toddled among, or perhaps
    learned by heart, standing between their father's knees while he drove
    leisurely. [Footnote: Middlemarch, chapter XII.]

It is nature as affecting man, and man as transformed into a creature of
feeling and passion by the mysterious conditions of his existence, which
oftenest arouses the poetic fervor in her. The enthusiasm of high resolves,
yearnings after the pure and beautiful, and love's regenerating power, give
to her themes which kindle poetic expression to a glow. The vision of
Mordecai on Blackfriars' bridge affords a fine example of her love of the
ideal in moral purpose, and shows how stimulating it is to her imagination.
It is a poetic picture of the finest quality she has given in this chapter,
one that could easily have been made to find expression in verse of great
beauty; but it is poetry in thought and spirit alone, not in form or
structure. It is true prose in form, strong in its fulness of detail, knit
together with words of the right texture, built up into a true prose image
of beauty in thought.

    Mordecai's mind wrought so constantly in images that his coherent
    trains of thought often resembled the significant dreams attributed to
    sleepers by waking persons in their most inventive moments; nay, they
    often resembled genuine dreams in their way of breaking off the passage
    from the known to the unknown. Thus, for a long while, he habitually
    thought of the Being answering to his need as one distinctly
    approaching or turning his back toward him, darkly painted against a
    golden sky. The reason of the golden sky lay in one of Mordecai's
    habits. He was keenly alive to some poetic aspects of London; and a
    favorite resort of his, when strength and leisure allowed, was to some
    one of the bridges, especially about sunrise or sunset. Even when he
    was bending over watch-wheels and trinkets, or seated in a small upper
    room looking out on dingy bricks and dingy cracked windows, his
    imagination spontaneously planted him on some spot where he had a
    far-stretching scene;  his thought went on in wide spaces, and whenever
    he could, he tried to have in reality the influences of a large sky.
    Leaning on the parapet of Blackfriars' bridge, and gazing meditatively,
    the breadth and calm of the river, with its long vista half hazy, half
    luminous, the grand dim masses or tall forms of buildings which were
    the signs of world-commerce, the on-coming of boats and barges from the
    still distance into sound and color, entered into his mood and blent
    themselves indistinguishably with his thinking, as a fine symphony to
    which we can hardly be said to listen, makes a medium that bears up our
    spiritual wings. Thus it happened that the figure representative of
    Mordecai's longing was mentally seen darkened by the excess of light
    in the aerial background. But in the inevitable progress of his
    imagination toward fuller detail he ceased to see the figure with its
    back toward him. It began to advance, and a face became discernible;
    the words youth, beauty, refinement, Jewish birth, noble gravity,
    turned into hardly individual but typical form and color: gathered from
    his memory of faces seen among the Jews of Holland and Bohemia, and
    from the paintings which revived that memory. Reverently let it be said
    of this mature spiritual need that it was akin to the boy's and girl's
    picturing of the future beloved; but the stirrings of such young desire
    are feeble compared with the passionate current of an ideal life
    straining to embody itself, made intense by resistance to imminent
    dissolution. The visionary form became a companion and auditor, keeping
    a place not only in the waking imagination, but in those dreams of
    lighter slumber of which it is truest to say, "I sleep, but my heart is
    awake"--when the disturbing trivial story of yesterday is charged with
    the impassioned purpose of years. [Footnote: Daniel Deronda, chapter
    XXXVIII.]

Many times in her prose George Eliot has recognized the true character of
poetry, and she has even given definitions of it which show how well she
knew its real nature. She makes Will Ladislaw say that--

    To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of
    quality escapes it, and so quick to feel that discernment is but a hand
    playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion--a soul in
    which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling
    flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. [Footnote: Middlemarch,
    chapter XXII.]

She thinks poetry and romance are as plentiful in the world as ever they
were, that they exist even amidst the conditions created by invention and
science; and if we do not find them there it is only because poetry and
romance are absent from our own minds. If we have not awe and tenderness,
wonder and enthusiasm, poetry cannot come near us, and we shall not be
thrilled and exalted by it. [Footnote: Daniel Deronda, chanter XIX.] Yet it
is not difficult to see that George Eliot is not a poet in the fullest
sense, because hers is not thoroughly and always a poetic mind, because she
reasons about things too much. The poet is impressed, moved, thrilled and
exalted, and pours out his song from his feelings and transfused with
emotion. George Eliot was given to speculation, loved exactness of
expression, and kept too close to the real. She had not that lightness of
touch, that deftness and flexibility of expression, and that versatility of
imaging forth her ideas, which the real poet possesses. Her mind moved with
a ponderous tread, which needed a prose style large and stately as its true
medium of expression. While she had poetic ideas in abundance, and an
imaginative discernment of nature and life, she had not the full gift of
poetic speech. She lacked inspiration as well as flexibility of thought,
her imagination was not sufficiently rich, and she had not the full sense
of rhythmic harmony.

George Eliot first began to write in verse, as was to be expected of one
gifted with an imagination vigorous as hers. Her love of music, her keen
perception of the beauties of nature, her love of form and color, gave
added attraction and impetus in the same direction. That she did not
continue through many years to write poetry seems to have been partly the
result of her intense interest in severer studies. The speculative cast of
her mind predominated the poetical so nearly as to turn her away from the
poetic side of life to find a solution for its graver and more intricate
problems. Her return to the poetic form of expression may be accounted for
partly as the result of a greater confidence in her own powers which came
from success, and partly from a desire for a new and richer medium of
utterance.

So far as can be judged from the dates of her poems, as appended to many of
them, "How Lisa Loved the King" was the earliest written. This was written
in the year of the publication of _Romola_, and was followed the next year
by the first draft of _The Spanish Gypsy_. The poetical mottoes of _Felix
Holt_, however, were the first to be published; and not until these
appeared did the public know of her poetic gifts. _The Spanish Gypsy_ was
not published until 1868, and "How Lisa Loved the King" appeared the
following year.

The original mottoes in _Felix Holt_ gave good hint of George Eliot's
poetic gifts. They are solid with thought, pregnant with the ripe wisdom of
daily experience, significant for dramatic expression, or notable for their
humor. They are rather heavy and ponderous in style, though sonorous in
expression. A stately tread, a largeness of expression, an air of weighty
meaning, appear in nearly all these mottoes. As a specimen of the more
philosophic, the following will indicate the truthfulness of this
description:--

  Truth is the precious harvest of the earth,
  But once, when harvest waved upon a land,
  The noisome cankerworm and caterpillar,
  Locusts, and all the swarming, foul-born broods,
  Fastened upon it with swift, greedy jaws,
  And turned the harvest into pestilence,
  Until men said, What profits it to sow?

Her capacity for dramatic expression, in which a rich comprehension of
life is included, may be seen in these lines:

    1ST CITIZEN. Sir, there's a hurry in the veins of youth
                 That makes a vice of virtue by excess.

     2D CITIZEN. What if the coolness of our tardier veins
                 Be loss of virtue?

    1ST CITIZEN.            All things cool with time--
                 The sun itself, they say, till heat shall find
                 A general level, nowhere in excess.

     2D CITIZEN. 'Tis a poor climax, to my weaker thought,
                 That future middlingness.

Wisdom alloyed with humor appears in another motto:

  "It is a good and soothfast saw;
  Half-roasted never will be raw;
  No dough is dried once more to meal.
  No crock new-shapen by the wheel;
  You can't turn curds to milk again
  Nor Now, by wishing, back to Then;
  And having tasted stolen honey,
  You can't buy innocence for money."

Mr. Buxton Forman says, that "in the charming headings to the chapters of
_Felix Holt_ it seemed as though the strong hand which had, up to that
point, exercised masterly control over the restive tendency of high prose
to rear up into verse, had relaxed itself just for the sake of a holiday,
and no more. These headings did not bear the stamp of original poetry upon
them. Forcible as were some, admirable in thought and applicability to the
respective chapters as were all, none bore traces of that clearly defined
individuality of style betrayed by all great and accomplished practitioners
of verse, in even so small a compass as these headings. Some of them
possess the great distinctive technical mark of poetry,--condensation; but
this very condensation is compassed not in an original and individual
method, but in the method of some pre-existent model; and it is hardly
necessary to enforce that power of assimilation or reproduction, however
large, is no infallible index of self-existent poetical faculty." This
critic finds traces of Shakspere, Wordsworth and Mrs. Browning in these
mottoes, and thinks they are all imitative, even when they are best. It is
too easy, however, to dispose of a piece of literary work in this manner,
and such criticism is very apt to have little meaning in it. George Eliot
has proven herself far too original, both in prose and poetry, to make such
a criticism of much value. Even if the charge of imitation is a valid one,
it is far more probable that it was conscious and purposed, than that
George Eliot's poetic gifts could only be exercised when impelled by the
genius of some other. To give the impression of quotation may have been a
part of George Eliot's purpose in writing these mottoes, which are original
enough, and thoughtful enough, to have been attributed to any of the great
poets. The real defects of her poetry lie in quite another direction than
that of a lack of originality. She has enough to say that is fresh and
interesting, she has no need to consult others for what she is to utter;
but she has not the fervor of expression, the impressive touch, which
separates poetry from prose. There is intellectual power enough, thought
even in excess, but she does not soar and sing. She walks steadily,
majestically along on the ground, she has no wings for the clear ether.
Indeed, she is too much a realist to breathe in that upper air of pure
song; it is too fine and delicate for one who loves the solid facts of
earth so well as she.

If George Eliot often wrote prose which is almost poetry, she also wrote
poetry which is almost prose. The concentrated, image-bearing phrases of
poetry are wanting oftentimes in her verse. There is meter but no other
quality of poetry, and not a few passages could be printed as prose with
scarce a suspicion to the reader that they were intended for poetry. Mr.
Buxton Forman has given a passage from _The Spanish Gypsy_ in this way,
adding only six insignificant words, and restoring _i_ to _is_ in two
instances. He rightly says that the passage printed in prose "would surely
be read by any one who saw it for the first time, without any suspicion
that it merely required the excision of six little words and two letters to
transform it to verse; no single expression betraying the secret that the
passage is from a poem."

    _Do_ you hear the trumpet! There _is_ old Eamon's
    blast. No bray but his can shake the air so well. He takes his
    trumpeting as solemnly as _an_ angel charged to wake the
    dead; thinks war was made for trumpeters, and _that_ their
    great art _was_ made solely for themselves who understand
    it. His features have all shaped themselves to blowing, and when
    his trumpet _is either_ bagged or left at home he seems
    _like_ a chattel in a broker's booth, a spoutless
    watering-can, a promise to pay no sum particular!

George Eliot had not full command of poetic expression. This frequently
appears, not only in the fact that many lines are simply prose in thought,
but in the defects of the poetic form. Some lines are too short and others
too long, some having four and some six feet. An instance of the former is
to be found in these words between Don Silva and the Prior, forming one
line:

  Strong reasons, father.
                              Ay, but good?

Of the latter:

  And starry flashing steel and pale vermilion.

Still more suggestive are the expedients she resorts to in order to
complete the line. Lopez is made to say,--

  Santiago! Juan, thou art hard to please.
  I speak not for my own delighting, I.
  I can be silent, I.

Very near this, Lopez is spoken of in this line:

  That was not what he drew his sword at--he!

Such defects as these are not, certainly, of vital importance, and may
doubtless be found in even the greatest poets; but they are noticeable here
because of one texture with that which limits the quality of her poetic
art. The principal criticism to be made on her poetry is that it was
composed and did not create itself out of a full poetic mind. It was
wrought out, was the result of study and composition, is wanting in
spontaneity and enthusiasm. The most serious defect of her poetry is also
the most marked defect of her prose, and this is a want of the ideal
element. She was a realist by nature, and could not free herself from the
tendency to look at the world on its surface only.

In her poetry George Eliot is much more a _doctrinaire_ than in her novels.
All her poems, except a few of the shorter ones, are devoted to the
inculcation of some moral or philosophic teaching. The very effort she was
obliged to make to give herself utterance in poetry predisposed her to
intellectual subjects and those of a controversial nature. For this reason
her verse has a special interest for those who are attracted to her
teachings. Her pen was freer, more creative, in her great novels than in
her poems. In fact, her novels, especially _Adam Bede_ and _The Mill on the
Floss_, are much more poetical than much she did in verse. In her verse she
tried to present the more spiritual side of life, to make living and
effective her own conceptions of the unseen and eternal. Yet she was
burdened constantly in this effort by the fact that she had a new theory of
the spiritual and ideal side of life to interpret. The poets who win the
homage of mankind, and conquer all hearts to themselves, take the accepted
interpretations of the great spiritual problems of life as the basis of
their work and give those a larger, loftier meaning through their poetic
and ideal insight and capacity of interpretation. They shun theories which
must be expounded and interpretations for which no one is prepared. It is
here George Eliot is seriously at fault as a poet, however much she may be
commended as a teacher and reformer. Perhaps the truest piece of poetic
work she did was _Agatha_, in which, however, there is a greater reliance
than in most of her poems, on the accepted interpretations of spiritual
beliefs. In portraying the trust, childlike and simple, of an old woman,
and in endeavoring to realize the poetic elements of that trust and
simplicity, she was very effective. In such work as this she would have
been much more successful, from the strictly poetic point of view, than she
has been, if she had not attempted to give her theories a clothing in
verse. In her "Brother and Sister" she was also very successful, but
especially so in the "Two Lovers." There is an exquisite charm and power in
some of these minor poems. Where the heart was free, and the intellect was
not dominant and insistent on the importance of its theories, there was
secured a genuine poetic beauty. There is true poetry in these lines:

  Two lovers by a moss-grown spring:
   They lean soft cheeks together there,
   Mingled the dark and sunny hair,
  And heard the wooing thrushes sing.
            Oh budding time!
            Oh love's blest prime!

  Two wedded from the portal stept:
    The bells made happy carrollings,
    The air was soft as passing wings,
  White petals on the pathway slept.
            Oh pure-eyed bride!
            Oh tender pride!

There is a beauty and majesty in the poem on subjective immortality which
is likely to make it, as it has already become, the one popular poem among
all she wrote. There is a stimulus, enthusiasm and abandon about it which
is attained but seldom in her other verses. The love of humanity, its
passionate longing to sacrifice self for the good of all, is acceptable to
much of the thought and purpose of the present time; and its spirit of
sacrifice is one which may commend it to all earnest souls. In the more
extended poems there is genuine accomplishment just in proportion as the
leading purpose was artistic rather than philosophic or moral.

Difficult as it was for a successful novelist to secure applause as a poet,
George Eliot overcame the distrust of her admirers and gained also a not
unmerited place as a poet. Her verse has been a real addition to her work,
and is likely to command an increasing interest in the future. That it is
not always successful from the merely artistic point of view, that it is
not to be placed by the side of the best poetry of the time, is no reason
why it will not appeal to many minds and enlist its own company of
admirers. Next after the universal poets are those who appeal to a select
circle and charm a particular class of minds. Among these George Eliot will
stand as one of the foremost and one of those most worthy of homage. As the
poet of positivism, she will long delight those in sympathy with her
teachings. It would be extravagant praise to call her a second Lucretius,
and yet that which has given the Roman author his place among poets will
also give George Eliot rank in the same company. With all his merits as a
poet, it has not been his poetic power, or his love of nature, or his worth
as an interpreter of human nature, which has given Lucretius his reputation
as a poet. With real poetic power,--for he would have been a much smaller
man without this,--he combined a philosophic mind and a daring genius for
speculation. The poetry gave charm and ideal grandeur to the speculations,
and the philosophy made the poetry full of meaning and earnest intellectual
purpose. He read life and nature with a keener eye and a more profound
penetration than others of his time; he tried to grasp the secret of the
universe, and because of it he left behind the touch of a strong mind. In
some such way as this, George Eliot's poetry is likely to be read in the
future. As poetry merely, it cannot take high rank; but for the sake of its
philosophy, which is conceived as a poet would conceive it, there is
promise that its future is to be one that is lasting. Even for poetry there
must be thought, and the larger, profounder it is the better for the
poetry, if it is imaginatively conceived and expressed. It is not thought,
or even philosophy, which annuls poetry, but want of ideal and creative
insight. To Goethe, Wordsworth or Browning there was a gain by enlargement
of intellectual materials, but these were suffused in true poetic fire, and
came forth a new creation. In so far as George Eliot has attained this
result is she a poet, and is she sure of the future suffrages of those who
accept her philosophy. At the least, her admirers must rejoice at the
enlarged range of expression she secured by the use of the poetic form.




IX.


PHILOSOPHIC ATTITUDE.

George Eliot was pre-eminently a novelist and a poet; but she is also the
truest literary representative the nineteenth century has yet afforded of
its positivist and scientific tendencies. What Comte and Spencer have
taught in the name of philosophy, Tyndall and Haeckel in the name of
science, she has applied to life and its problems. Their aims, spirit and
tendencies have found in her a living embodiment, and re-appear in her
pages as forms of genius, as artistic creations. They have experimented,
speculated, elaborated theories of the universe, drawn out systems of
philosophy; but she has reconstructed the social life of man through her
creative insight. What they mean, whither they lead, is not to be
discovered nearly so plainly in their books as in hers. She is their
interpreter through that wonderful insight, genius and creative power which
enabled her to see what they could not themselves discover,--the effect of
their teachings on man as an individual and as a social being.

Whoever would know what the agnostic and evolution philosophy of the time
has to teach about man, his social life, his moral responsibilities, his
religious aspirations, should go to the pages of George Eliot in preference
to those of any other. The scientific spirit, the evolution philosophy,
live in her pages, reveal themselves there in all their strength and in all
their weakness. She was a thinker equal to any of those whose names stand
forth as the representatives of the philosophy she accepted, she was as
competent, as they to think out the problems of life and to interpret
social existence in accordance with their theories of man and nature.
Competent to grasp and to interpret the positive philosophy in all its
details and in all its applications, she also had that artistic spirit of
reconstruction which enabled her to apply to life what she held in theory.
Along with the calm philosophic spirit which thinks out "the painful riddle
of the earth," she had the creative spirit of the artist which delights in
portraying life in all its endeavors, complexities and consequences. She
not only accepted the theory of hereditary transmission as science has
recently developed it, and as it has been enlarged by positivism into a
shaping influence of the past upon the present, but she made this law vital
with meaning as she developed its consequences in the lives of her
characters. To her it was not merely a theory, but a principle so pregnant
with meaning as to have its applications in every phase of human
experience. Life could not be explained without it; the thoughts, deeds and
aspirations of men could be understood only with reference to it; much that
enters into human life of weal and woe is to be comprehended only with
reference to this law. In regard to all the other evolution problems and
principles her knowledge was as great, her insight as clear, and her
constructive use of them as original.

A new theory of life and the universe may be intellectually accepted as
soon as its teachings are comprehended; but the absorption of that theory
into the moral tissues, so that it becomes an active and constant impulse
and motive in feeling and conduct, is a long and difficult process. It
takes generations before it can associate itself with the instinctive
impulses of the mind. It is one thing to accept the theory of universal law
as an intellectual explanation of the sequences of phenomena, but it is
quite another to be guided by that theory in all the most spontaneous
movements of feeling, conscience and thought. A few minds are able to make
such a theory at once their own by virtue of genius of a very instinctive
and subtle order; but for the great majority of mankind this result can
only be reached after generations of instruction. The use made of such
theories by the poets and novelists is a sure test of their popular
acceptance. When the poets accept such a theory, and naturally express
themselves in accordance with its spirit, the people may soon feel and
think according to its meaning.

The theory of evolution will not easily adjust the human mind to its
conclusions and methods. It is therefore very remarkable that George Eliot,
the contemporary of Comte, Spencer, Darwin, Lewes and Tyndall, should be
able to give a true literary expression to their speculations. She has not
only been able to follow these men, to accept their theories and to
understand them in all their implications and tendencies, but she has so
absorbed these theories into her mind, and so made them a part of all its
processes, that she has painted life thoroughly in accordance with their
spirit. Should the teachings of the evolutionists of to-day be finally
accepted, and after a few generations become the universally received
explanations of life and the universe, it is not likely any poet or
novelist will more genuinely and entirely express their spirit than George
Eliot has done. The evolutionary spirit and ways of looking at life became
instinctive to her; she saw life and read its deepest experiences wholly in
the light shed by this philosophy. For this reason her writings are of
great value to those who would understand the evolution philosophy in its
higher phases.

George Eliot accepted the intellectual conclusions of evolution, and the
outline thus afforded she filled in with feeling and poetry. She
interpreted the pathos, the tragedy, the aspirations of life in the light
of this philosophy. Accepting with a bold and undismayed intellect the
implications and consequences of evolution, rejecting or abating no least
portion of it, she found in it a place for art, poetry and religion; and
she tried to show how it touches and moulds and uplifts man. She shrank
from nothing which would enable her to reveal how man is to live in such a
universe as she believed in; she saw all its hardness, cruelty, anguish and
mystery, and resolutely endeavored to show how these enter into and help to
form his destiny. In doing this she followed the lead of the positivists in
the acceptance of feeling as the basis and the true expression of man's
inner life. The emotional life is made the essential life; and all its
phases of manifestation in art, poetry and religion are regarded as of
great importance. George Eliot viewed the higher problems of life from this
point of view, giving to the forms in which the emotional side of man's
nature is expressed a supreme importance. Religion, as the response of
feeling to the mystery of existence, occupied a most important place in her
philosophy. That her interpretation of the emotional elements of life is
the true one, that she has discovered their source or their real ideal
significance, may well be doubted; but there is every reason for believing
that she realized their great value, and she certainly tried in an earnest
spirit to make them helpful in the life of ideal beauty and truthfulness.

All that agnostic science and the evolution philosophy had to teach, George
Eliot accepted, its doctrine of descent, its new psychology, and its
theories of society and human destiny. Its doctrine of experience, its
ethical theories, were equally hers. Yet into her interpretation of
existence went a woman's heart, the widest and tenderest sympathy, and a
quick yearning purpose to do what good she could in the world. She saw with
the lover's eyes, motherhood revealed itself in her soul, the child's trust
was in her heart. The new philosophy she applied to life, revealed its
relations to duty, love, sorrow, trial and death. To her it had a deep
social meaning, a vital connection with the heart, its hopes and its
burdens, and for her it touched the spiritual content of life with reality.
It was in this way she became the truest interpreter of the evolution
philosophy, the best apostle of the ethics taught by agnostic science. She
not only speculated, she also felt and lived. Philosophy was to her more
than an abstract theory of the universe; into it entered a tender sympathy
for all human weakness, a profound sense of the mystery of existence, and a
holy purpose to make life pure and true to all she could reach. This larger
comprehension gives a new significance to her interpretation of evolution.
It makes it impossible that this philosophy should be fully understood
without a study of her books.

It is because George Eliot was not a mere speculative thinker that her
teachings become so important. The true novelist, who is gifted with
genius, who creates character and situation with a master's hand, must have
some theory of life. He must have some notion of what life means, what the
significance of the pathos and tragedy of human experience, and why it is
that good and evil in conduct do not produce the same results. Such a
theory of life, if firmly grasped and worked out strongly, becomes a
philosophy. Much depends with the novelist on that philosophy, what it
places foremost, what it sees destiny to mean. It will affect his insight,
give shape to his plots, decide his characters, guide his ethical
interpretations, fix his spiritual apprehension. It was because George
Eliot adopted a new and remarkable philosophy, one that teaches much which
the instincts of the race have rejected, and repudiates much which the race
has accepted as necessary to its welfare, that her teachings become so
noteworthy. Genius first of all she had, and the artist's creative power;
but the way she used these, and the limitations she put upon them by her
philosophy, give her books an interest which not even her wonderful genius
could alone produce. That philosophy is in debate; and it is not yet
decided whether it is mainly false because growing out of wrong methods,
or if it be in reality a true explanation of existence. Its revolutionary
character, its negative spirit, its relations to ethics and religion,
make it remarkable, and even startling. Profound thinkers, men of
commanding philosophic apprehension and power of generalization, have
accepted it; physical science has largely lent its aid to the support of
its conclusions. Yet on its side genius, imagination, creative instinct,
artistic apprehension, have not given their aid. Without them it is
defective, and cannot command the ideal sentiments and hopes of the race.
First to fill this gap came George Eliot, and she yet remains its only
great literary ally and coadjutor. Tyndall, Haeckel and DuBois Raymond can
give us science; but this is not enough. Comte, Mill and Spencer can give
us philosophy; but that is inadequate. They have also essayed, one and all,
to say some true word about morals, religion and the social ideals; but
they have one and all failed. They are too speculative, too far away from
the vital movements of life, know too little of human experience as it
throbs out of the heart and sentiments. They can explain their theories
in terms of science, ethics and philosophy; but George Eliot explains them
in terms of life. They have speculated, she has felt; they have made
philosophies, she has created ideal characters and given us poetry; they
have studied nature, she has studied experience and life; they have tried
to resolve the mind into its constituent elements; she has entered into the
heart and read its secrets; they have looked on to see what history meant,
she has lived all heart tragedies and known all spiritual aspirations.

George Eliot was not a mere disciple of any of the great teachers of
evolution. Though of their school, and largely in accord and sympathy with
them, yet she often departed from the way they went, and took a position
quite in opposition to theirs. Her standpoint in philosophy was arrived at
quite independently of their influence, and in many of its main features
her philosophy was developed before she had any acquaintance either with
them or their books. She wrote concerning John Stuart Mill, [Footnote:
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps' "Last words from George Eliot," is Harper Magazine
for March 1882. The names of Mill and Spencer are not given in this
article, but the words from her letters so plainly refer to them that they
have been quoted here as illustrating her relations to these men.]--

    I never had any personal acquaintance with him, never saw him to my
    knowledge except in the House of Commons; and though I have studied his
    books, especially his _Logic_ and _Political Economy_ with much
    benefit, I have no consciousness of their having made any marked epoch
    in my life.

Concerning another leading positivist she has said,--

    Of [Herbert Spencer's] friendship I have had the honor and advantage
    for twenty years, but I believe that every main bias of my mind had
    been taken before I knew him. Like the rest of his readers, I am, of
    course, indebted to him for much enlargement and clarifying of thought.

Not long previous to her death, in reading Bridges' version of _The General
View of Positivism_, she expressed her dissent more often than her assent,
and once she said,--

    I cannot submit my intellect or my soul to the guidance of Comte.

George Eliot did not take up her residence in London until her
thirty-second year, and previous to that time her acquaintance with the
positivist leaders must have been slight. Before that age the opinions of
most persons are formed, and such was the case with George Eliot. It is
likely her opinions underwent many changes after this date, but only in the
direction of those already established and in modification of the
philosophy already accepted. She became an evolutionist without the aid of
those men who are supposed to be the originators of this theory. Every new
idea or new way of interpreting nature and life grows into form gradually,
and under the influence of many different minds. The evolution philosophy
was long accepted before it became a doctrine or was formulated into a
philosophy. The same influences worked in many quarters to produce the same
conclusions. It was given to George Eliot to come under a set of influences
which led her to accept all the leading ideas of evolution before she had
any opportunity to know that philosophy as it has been elaborated by the
men whose names are most often connected with it. A brief account of the
successive philosophic influences which most directly and personally
touched her mind will largely help towards the comprehension of her
teachings.

The most intimate friend of her youth, who gave her a home when trouble
came with her family, and stimulated her mind to active inquiry after
truth, was a philosopher of no mean ability. Charles Bray not only was the
first philosopher she knew, but her opinions of after years were mainly in
the direction he marked out for her. In his _Philosophy of Necessity_,
published in 1841, he maintained that the only reality is the _Great
Unknown_ which we name God, that all natural laws are actions of the first
cause. He taught that the world is created in our own minds, the result of
some unknown cause without us, which we call matter; but it is thus God
mirrors himself to us. "All we see is but the vesture of God, and what we
call laws of nature are but attributes of Deity." Matter is known to us
only as the cause of sensations, while the soul is the principle of
sensation, dependent upon the nervous system; the nervous system depending
upon life, and life upon organization. All knowledge comes to man through
the action of the external world upon the senses; all truth, all progress,
come to us out of experience. "Reason is dependent for its exercise upon
experience, and experience is nothing more than the knowledge of the
invariable order of nature, of the relations of cause and effect." All acts
of men are ruled by necessity. Pain produces our ideas of right and wrong,
and happiness is the test of all moral action. There are no such things
as sin and evil, only pains and pleasures. Evil is the natural and
necessary limitation of our faculties, and our consequent liability to
error; and pain, which we call evil, is its corrective. Nothing, under the
circumstances, could have happened but that which did happen; and the
actions of men, under precisely the same circumstances, must always issue
in precisely the same results. Death, treated of in a separate chapter, is
shown to be good, and a necessary aid to progress. Society is regarded as
an organism, and man is to find his highest life in the life of others.
"The great body of humanity (considered as an individual), with its soul,
the principle of sensation, is ever fresh and vigorous and increasing in
enjoyment. Death and birth, the means of renewal and succession, bear
the same relation to this body of society as the system of waste and
reproduction do to the human body; the old and useless and decayed material
is carried out, and fresh substituted, and thus the frame is renovated
and rendered capable of ever-increasing happiness.... The minds, that is
to say, the ideas and feelings of which they were composed, of Socrates,
Plato, Epicurus, Galileo, Bacon, Locke, Newton, are thus forever in
existence, and the immortality of the soul is preserved, not in
individuals, but in the great body of humanity.... To the race, though
not to individuals, all beautiful things are preserved forever; all that
is really good and profitable is immortal."

Nearly every idea here presented was accepted by George Eliot and
re-appears in her writings. In Bray's later books much also is to be found
which she embraced. He therein says that all outside of us is a delusion of
the senses. [Footnote: This summary of Bray's philosophy is condensed from
an article in the Westminster Review for April, 1879.] The senses conspire
with the intellect to impose upon us. The constitution of our faculties
forces us to believe in an external world, but it has no more reality than
our dreams. Each creature is the creator of its own separate, different
world. The unity of outward things is imposed on them by the faculty of
individuality, and is a mere fiction of the mind. Matter is a creature of
the imagination, and is a pure assumption. It is the centre of force, as
immaterial as spirit, as ethereal and unsubstantial. As centres of force
imply locality, and locality space, so space must have an extension of its
own. Not so; it is a pure creation of the mind. The same holds true of
time. The world of mind, the moral world as well, are our own creations.
Man has no power over himself; nothing could have been otherwise than as
it is. Repentance and remorse are foolish regrets over what could not have
been otherwise. All actions and motives are indifferent; only in their
consequences can any distinction be observed between them. Such as minister
to man's pleasure he calls good; such as produce pain he calls evil.
 Thereis no good but pleasure, and no evil but pain. Hence there is no
distinction between moral and physical evil. Morality is the chemistry of
the mind, its attractions and repulsions, likes and dislikes. God is an
illusion, as are all moral conclusions based on his existence, Nor has
man any reality; he is the greatest illusion and delusion of all. The
faculty of individuality gives us all our ideas and feelings, and creates
for us what we call our minds. A mind is an aggregate of a stream of
consciousness. Ideas, feelings, states of consciousness, do not inhere in
anything; each is a distinct entity. "Thinking is," is what we should say,
not "I think." Here we are at the ground fact of what constitutes being, on
solid footing; consciousness cannot deceive us. Thinking is, even if mind
and matter, self and not-self, are illusory. It is, even if we deny both
the external and internal causes of consciousness. We know our own
consciousness, that alone. All is inference beside. When we consider what
inferences are most probable, we are led to build up a constructive
philosophy. Consciousness says we have a body, body a brain, and pressure
on the brain stops consciousness; hence a close connection between the
brain and consciousness. The two go together, and in the brain we must lay
the foundation of our philosophy. The mental faculties create the world of
individual consciousness, it the outside world. We know only what is
revealed in consciousness. Matter and mind are one. Life and mind are
correlates of physical force; they are the forms assumed by physical force
when subjected to organic conditions. Yet there is no such thing as mere
physical force. Every atom of matter acts intelligently; it has so acted
always. The conscious intelligence of the universe has subsided into
natural law, and acts automatically. This universal agent of life in all
things is God. All consciousness and physical force are but "the varied
God." There is in reality no agent but mind, conscious or unconscious. God
is nature; matter is mind solidified. Matter is force as revealed by the
senses. It is the body, force is the soul. In nature, as in man, body and
soul are one and indivisible. Mind builds up organisms. There is a living
will, conscious or unconscious, in all things. The One and All requires the
resignation of the individual and personal, of all that is selfish, to the
Infinite whole.

The basis of Bray's philosophy was idealism and pantheism, assuming form
under the influence of modern science. He quoted Emerson frequently, and
the school of thought Emerson represents affected him greatly. On the other
hand, he was then a strong phrenologist, had imbibed much of the teaching
of Combe's _Constitution of Man_, and he eagerly embraced those notions of
the relations of body and mind which have been propagated in the name of
physical science.

The same double influence is to be seen at work upon the next thinker who
was destined to give direction to George Eliot's philosophy. Feuerbach was
a disciple of Hegel, whose influence is deeply marked through all his
earlier writings. He also was affected by physical science, and he found in
sensationalism an element for his system. To him all thought is the product
of experience; he founded his ideas on materials which can be appropriated
only through the activity of the senses. The external world affects the
senses and generates feeling, feeling produces ideas. Feeling re-acts upon
the external world, interprets it according to its own wants. Feeling is
thus the source of all knowledge; feeling is the basis alike of religion
and philosophy. Feuerbach, as well as Bray, finds that man creates the
outward world in consciousness; all that is out of man which he can know,
is but a reflection of what is in him. This conception of consciousness,
this pure idealism, becomes the source of Feuerbach's philosophy of
religion. He says that religion is based on the differences between man and
the brute; man has consciousness, which is only present in a being to whom
his species, his essential nature, is an object of thought. Man thinks,
converses with himself, is at once I and Thou, can put himself in the place
of another. Religion is identical with self-consciousness, and expresses
man's sense of the infinitude of his own faculties. Man learns about
himself through what is objective to him, but the object only serves to
bring out what is in him; his own nature becomes the absolute to him.
Consciousness marks the self-satisfaction, self-perfection of man, that
all truth is in him. As feeling is the cause of the outward world, or of
that notion of it man has, it becomes the organ of religion. The nature of
God is nothing else than an expression of the nature of feeling. As man
lives mainly in feeling, finds there the sources of all his mental and
moral life, he comes to regard feeling as the divinest part of his nature,
the noblest and most excellent; so it becomes to him the organ of the
divine. When man thinks what is infinite he in reality does nothing more
than to perceive and affirm that to him feeling has an infinite power.
If you feel the infinite, you feel and affirm the infinitude of the power
of feeling. The object of the intellect is intellect objective to itself;
the object of feeling is feeling objective to itself. God is pure,
unlimited, free feeling. In religion, consciousness of the object and
self-consciousness coincide. The object of any subject is nothing else than
the subject's own nature taken objectively. God is like our thoughts and
dispositions; consciousness of God is self-consciousness, knowledge of God
is self-knowledge. Religion is the unveiling of a man's hidden treasures,
the revelation of his intimate thoughts, the open confession of his love
secrets. It is to the understanding Feuerbach attributes man's capacity for
objectifying himself or of attributing to the outward world those qualities
which really exist only within. Man's consciousness of God is nothing else
than his consciousness of his species. "Man has his highest being, his God,
in himself; not in himself as an individual, but in his essential nature,
his species. No individual is an adequate representative of his species,
but only the human individual is conscious of the distinction between the
species and the individual. In the sense of this distinction lies the root
of religion. The yearning of man after something above himself is nothing
else than the longing after the perfect type of his nature, the yearning to
be free from himself, _i.e._, from the limits and defects of his
individuality. Individuality is the self-conditioning, the self-limitation
of the species. Thus man has cognizance of nothing above himself, of
nothing beyond the nature of humanity; but to the individual man this
nature presents itself under the form of an individual man. All feelings
which man experiences towards a superior man, nay, in general, all moral
feelings which man has towards man, are of a religious nature. Man feels
nothing towards God which he does not also feel towards man." The dogmas of
Christianity are interpreted by Feuerbach from this standpoint of
conceiving religion as a projection of feeling upon the outward world. So
he explains the incarnation as man's love for man, man's yearning to help
his fellows, the renunciation and suffering man undergoes for man. The
passion of Christ represents freely accepted suffering for others in love
of them. The trinity typifies the participated, social life of the species;
it shows the father, mother and son as the symbols of the race. The _logos_
or son is the nature of the imagination made objective, the satisfaction of
the need for mental images, the reflected splendor of the imagination.
Faith in providence is faith in one's own worth; it indicates the divine
reality and significance of our own being. Prayer is an expression of the
power of feeling, a dialogue of man with his own heart. Faith is confidence
in the reality of the subjective in opposition to the limitations or laws
of nature and reason. Its specific object is miracle; faith and miracle are
absolutely inseparable. That which is objectively miracle is subjectively
faith. Faith is the miracle of feeling; it is nothing else than belief in
the absolute reality of subjectivity. The power of miracle is the power of
the imagination, for imagination corresponds to personal feeling; it sets
aside all limits, all laws painful to the feelings, and thus makes
objective to man the immediate, absolutely unlimited satisfaction of his
subjective wishes. The belief in miracle accepts wishes as realities. In
fact, the fundamental dogmas of Christianity are simply realized wishes of
the heart. This is true, because the highest law of feeling is the
immediate unity of will and deed, of wishing and reality. To religion, what
is felt or wished is regarded as real. In the Redeemer this is realized,
wish becomes fact. All things are to be wrought, according to religion, by
belief. Thus the future life is a life where feeling realizes every desire.
Its whole import is that of the abolition of the discordance which exists
between wish and reality. It is the realization of a state which
corresponds to the feelings, in which man is in unison with himself. The
other world is nothing more than the reality of a known idea, the
satisfaction of a conscious desire, the fulfilment of a wish. "The sum of
the future life is happiness, the everlasting bliss of personality, which
is here limited and circumscribed by nature. Faith in the future life is
therefore faith in the freedom of subjectivity from the limits of nature;
it is faith in the eternity and infinitude of personality, and not of
personality viewed in relation to the idea of the species, in which it
forever unfolds itself in new individuals, but of personality as belonging
to already existing individuals; consequently, it is the faith of man in
himself. But faith in the kingdom of heaven is one with faith in God; the
context of both ideas is the same; God is pure absolute subjectivity
released from all natural limits; he is what individuals ought to be and
will be; faith in God is therefore the faith of man in the infinitude and
truth of his own nature; the Divine Being is the subjective human being in
his absolute freedom and unlimitedness."

It is not probable that George Eliot confined her philosophic studies to
the writings of Charles Bray and Feuerbach, but it is quite certain that in
their books which she did faithfully study, are to be found some of the
leading principles of her philosophy. What gives greater confirmation to
the supposition that her philosophy was largely shaped under their
influence is the fact that her intimate friend, Sara Hennell, drew from the
same sources for the presentation of theories quite identical with hers.
Sara Hennell's _Thoughts in Aid of Faith_, published in 1860, is an attempt
to show that the religious sentiments may be retained when the doctrines of
theology are intellectually rejected, that a disposition of the heart akin
to Paul's may be present though conviction be extinct. In securing this
result, she too takes Feuerbach as her guide, and his teachings she claims
are fully corroborated by the philosophy of Herbert Spencer. Religion she
regards as the result of the tendency of man's mind towards philosophy, the
outgrowth of the activity of his mental faculties seeking satisfaction for
themselves in explaining the world given for his contemplation and study.
"The growth of religion in the human intelligence (thereby distinguished
from mere blind emotion), is coincident with, or rather immediately
consequent upon, the power of forming abstract ideas; that is to say, it is
a generalization effected by the operation of the intellect upon the
sentiments and emotions, when these have attained to so great extent and
distinctness as to become self-conscious." Man early objectifies the
qualities he finds in himself and his fellows, regards them as entities, is
prostrated in awe and worship before them, conceives them to be gods. He
attributes to outward objects his subjective states, and regards them as
like himself, only infinitely more powerful. His emotions he believes are
caused by these objective beings, and he thinks he is inspired, that the
gods are at work within him. Feeling becomes the voice of God, the
revelator of religions and theologies. Christianity Miss Hennell regards as
"the form in which the religious affections, struggling against earthly
limitations, have created for themselves the satisfaction they demand, and,
therefore, in so far, real, just as the affections are real." Feeling, she
says, is real as logic, and must equally have its real foundation. That is,
feeling gives us the truth, actually answers to the realities of things as
man can know them. She is here an ontologist, and she is convinced that
feeling is a direct witness of the deeper knowledge and reality which man
seeks in religion. The permanency and validity of religion she believes in,
and she testifies to its wholesome and ennobling effect upon the race.
"Christianity, having formed an actual portion of the composition both of
our own individual experience and of the world's history, can no more be
annihilated out of them than the sum of what we learned during a certain
number of years of our childhood, from the one, or the effects of any
notable occurrence, such as the fall of the Roman Empire, or the Norman
invasion, from the other;--Christianity on every view, whether of its truth
or falsity, and consequently of its good or bad effect, has undoubtedly
contributed to make us what we are; without it we should have grown into
something incalculably different from our present selves.... And how can it
be otherwise than real to us, this belief that has nourished the souls
of us all, and seems to have moulded actually anew their internal
constitution, as well as stored them up with its infinite variety of
external interests and associations? What other than a very real thing has
it been in the life of the world, sprang out of, and again causing to
spring forth, such volumes of human emotion? making a current, as it were,
of feeling, that has drawn within its own sphere all the moral vitality of
so many ages. In all this reality of influence there is indeed the
testimony of Christianity having truly formed an integral portion of the
organic life of humanity."

Though Miss Hennell is so earnest a believer in Christianity, yet she
totally rejects the idea of any objective reality corresponding to its
dogmas. This conclusion is based on the philosophic notion, which she
shares with Bray, Feuerbach, George Eliot, Spencer and Lewes, that man has
no real knowledge whatever except that which is given in consciousness.
This philosophy, shared in common by these persons, is called by Lewes
"reasoned realism," and by Spencer "transfigured realism." It accepts the
reality of an outward world, but says that all man knows of it is, that it
produces impressions on his senses which are transmuted into sensations.
Sensations produce feelings, and feelings become ideas. According to
Spencer, the steps of knowledge are three: the co-ordinating of sensations
in a living organism; the registering of impressions within the organism in
such a way as to build up a store of experiences; the transmission of the
organism and its susceptibilities to offspring. Miss Hennell accepts
Spencer's theory that feeling is the source of all our knowledge. Not only,
as she says, does it "constitute the essential and main vitality of our
nature," but when it is stored up in the human organism and inherited, it
becomes the vital source out of which all moral and religious truth is
built up. Experience, transformed into inherited feeling, takes on the form
of those intuitions which "are the only reliable ground of solid belief."
"These sentiments which are born within us, slumbering as it were in our
nature, ready to be awakened into action immediately they are roused by
hint of corresponding circumstances, are drawn out of the whole of previous
human existence. They constitute our treasured inheritance out of all the
life that has been lived before us, to which no age, no human being who has
trod the earth and laid himself to rest with all his mortal burden upon her
maternal bosom, has failed to add his contribution. No generation has had
its engrossing conflict, surely battling out the triumphs of mind over
material force, and through forms of monstrous abortions concurrent with
its birth, too hideous for us now to bear in contemplation, moulding the
early intelligence by every struggle, and winning its gradual powers,--no
single soul has borne itself through its personal trial,--without
bequeathing to us of its fruit. There is not a religious thought that we
take to ourselves for secret comfort in our time of grief, that has not
been distilled out of the multiplicity of the hallowed tears of mankind;
not an animating idea is there for our fainting courage that has not
gathered its inspiration from the bravery of the myriad armies of the
world's heroes. All this best of humanity's hard earnings has been hoarded
with generous care by our _alma natura naturans_; so that at last, in our
rich ages, the _mens naturafa_ opens its gaze with awful wonder upon its
environment of spiritual possessions."

The intimate sympathy of George Eliot and Miss Hennell indicates that they
followed much the same studies, and it is certain they arrived at very
similar conclusions. That the one was directly influenced or led by the
other there seem to be no reasons for believing. All that is probable is,
that there was a close affinity of thought and purpose between them, and
that they arrived at similar philosophical conclusions. The same is to be
said in regard to George Eliot's relations to George Henry Lewes. Her
theories of life, as has been already clearly indicated, were firmly fixed
before she knew him, and her philosophical opinions were formed. The
similarity of their speculative opinions doubtless had something to do with
bringing them together; and it is certain that the tenor of their thoughts,
their views about life, and their spiritual aspirations, were very much
alike, giving promise of a most thorough sympathy in all their intellectual
and moral pursuits. If she was influenced by him, he was quite as much
influenced by her. Lewes accepted the philosophical side of Comte's
Positive Philosophy, but the religious side of it he rejected and strongly
condemned. In his _History of Philosophy_, he says, "Antagonism to the
method and certain conclusions of the _Politique positive_ led me for many
years to regard that work as a deviation from the Positive Philosophy in
every way unfortunate. My attitude has changed now that I have learned
(from the remark of one very dear to me) to regard it as an Utopia,
presenting hypotheses rather than doctrines, suggestions for inquirers
rather than dogmas for adepts--hypotheses carrying more or less of truth,
and serviceable as a provisional mode of colligating facts, to be confirmed
or contradicted by experience." It is altogether probable, as in this case,
that George Eliot gave Lewes the suggestive aid of her acute mind. If she
was aided by him, it was only as one strong mind aids another, by collision
and suggestion rather than by direct teaching.

Lewes may have had the effect to deepen and establish firmly the
conclusions already reached by George Eliot, and a consideration of his
philosophy must confirm this conjecture. He, too, makes feeling the basis
of all knowing. From this point, however, he diverges widely from Herbert
Spencer and the other English empiricists. Spencer regards matter and mind
as two phases of an underlying substance, which he presents as the unknown
and unknowable. Lewes at once denies the duality implied in the words
matter and mind, motion and feeling, and declares these are one and the
same thing, objectively or subjectively presented. Feeling is motion, and
motion is feeling; mind is the spiritual aspect of the material organism,
and matter is the objective aspect of feeling. Feeling is not the cause of
motion, as idealism would suggest; and motion does not cause or turn into
feeling, as materialism teaches. The two are absolutely identical; there is
no dualism or antithesis. In the same way, cause and effect are but two
aspects of one phenomenon; there is no separation between them, but one and
the same thing before and after. He applies this idea to the conception of
natural law, and declares it to be only the persistence of phenomena; that
is, the persistence of feeling. He denies that there is any absolute behind
phenomena; the absolute is in the phenomena, which is the only reality. The
phenomenal universe is simply a group of relations, nothing more; and what
seems to be, really exists, because the relations are real.

It is not necessary here to enter into a full presentation of Lewes's
philosophy, but his theories about the functions of feeling are of
importance, in view of George Eliot's acceptance of them. They have been
summarized into the statement that "all truths are alike feelings, ideally
distinguishable according to the aspects under which they are viewed. There
is no motion apart from feeling, for the motion _is_ the feeling; there is
no force apart from matter which compels it to moves for the force _is_ the
matter, as matter is motion--differently viewed; there is no essence or
substance which determines the properties, for the substance is the whole
group of properties; there are no causes outside of effects, no laws
outside the processes, no reality outside the phenomena, no absolute
outside the relative, which determine things to be as they are and not
otherwise, for all these are but different sides of one and the same
thing." The central thought presented by Lewes is, that "for us there is
nothing but feeling, whose subjective side is sensations, perceptions,
memories, reasonings, the ideal constructions of science and philosophy,
emotions, pleasures, pains; whose objective side is motion, matter, force,
cause, the absolute." The outcome of this theory is, it enables Lewes to
believe that the inner and outer practically agree, that our feelings give
a sufficiently correct picture of the universe. In reality, the two do not
agree, and even "science is in no respect a plain transcript of reality;"
but so intimate are feeling and the outer world, that the inward report is
to be regarded as practically a correct one.

In many ways Lewes differed from his contemporaries, disagreeing again and
again with Spencer, Bain and Huxley. He often seems much nearer Schelling
than Haeckel. He differs from Schelling in his demand for verification and
the inductive method, and in claiming that all his conclusions are the
result of scientific experiments and deductions. He agrees with Schelling
in his rejection of mechanical processes and in his acceptance of a vital,
organic method in nature and in social development. He differs from many of
the other leaders of speculative science in his rejection of reflex action,
maintaining that the brain is not the only seat of sensation, and that all
cerebral processes are mental processes. With equal vigor he rejects the
theory of animal automatism, and the assertion that animal actions can be
completely expressed and accounted for in terms of nervous matter and
motion. The laws of the mind, he maintained, are not to be deduced from
physiological processes, but with them must be joined the psychical
processes of the individual and the social man. He separates man by an
impassable barrier from the lower animals, this gulf between them being due
to human society and to the social acquisition of language. In the social
factor he finds an important element of psychology, and one that must
always come in to overturn any mechanical theories of mental activity.

It has been very truly said, that Lewes must be credited with the doctrine
of the dependence of the human mind on the social medium. Others had hit
upon this idea, and it had been very well developed by Spencer and Comte;
but Lewes gave it a wider and profounder interpretation than any other. One
of his critics says that Lewes "has the sort of claim to have originated
this theory that Bacon has to be considered the discoverer of the inductive
method." He not only held with Spencer and other evolutionists, that the
human mind is the product of experience in contact with the outer world,
that experience transmitted by heredity and built up into mental processes
and conclusions; but he maintained that the social medium is a much greater
and more important factor. The past makes the present; the social life
develops the individual. Our language, our thought, as individuals, are the
product of the collective life of the race. "We are to seek in the social
organism for all the main conditions of the higher functions, and in the
social medium of beliefs, opinions, institutions, &c., for the atmosphere
breathed by the intellect. Man is no longer to be considered simply as an
assemblage of organs, but also as an organ in a collective organism. From
the former he derives his sensations, judgments, primary impulses; from the
latter, his conceptions, theories and virtues. This is very clear when we
learn how the intellect draws both its inspiration and its instrument from
the social needs. All the materials of intellect are images and symbols,
all its processes are operations on images and symbols. Language--which is
wholly a social product for a social need--is the chief vehicle of
symbolical operation, and the only means by which abstraction is
affected.... Language is the creator and sustainer of that ideal world in
which the noblest part of human activity finds a theatre, the world of
thought and spiritual insight, of knowledge and duty, loftily elevated
above that of sense and appetite. Into this ideal world man absorbs the
universe as in a transfiguration. It is here that he shapes the programme
of his existence; and to that programme he makes the real world conform.
It is here he forms his highest rules of conduct. It is here he plants
his hopes and joys. It is here he finds his dignity and power. The ideal
world becomes to him the supreme reality." Lewes said that what a man
thinks "is the necessary product of his organism and external conditions."
The "organism itself is the product of its history; it is what it has
become; it is a part of the history of the race." Because man is a creature
of feeling he is susceptible to the influences of the outer world, and
from the influences and experiences thus received the foundations of his
mental life are laid. The structure erected on this foundation, however, is
the product of man's social environment. As a social being, he inherits
mental capacities, and all the instruments of mental, moral and social
development, as these have been produced in the past. The social structure
takes up and preserves the results of individual effort; and social
capacity enlarges mental and moral power quite beyond what mere inheritance
produces.

Lewes assigned as high a value to introspection as to observation in
psychology, and said that whatever place is assigned to the one in
scientific method must be assigned to the other. He therefore accorded a
high value to imagination and intuition, and to all ideal constructions of
life and its meanings which are based on science. All knowledge grows out
of feeling, and must be expressible again in feeling, if it is to have any
value. Accordingly, man's life is of little value apart from sentiment, and
the emotional nature must always be satisfied. As Lewes begins his
philosophy in feeling, he holds that the final object of philosophy is to
develop feeling into a perfect expression, in accordance with the ideal
wants of man's nature. In other words, the final and supreme object of
philosophy is the expression of religion and the founding of a moral and
spiritual system of life. He believed that religion will continue to
regulate the evolution of humanity, and in "a religion founded on science
and expressing at each stage what is known of the world and of man." As
much as any zealous Christian believer he accepted man's need of spiritual
culture and religious development. At the same time, his philosophy
rejected a substantive absolute, or any other spiritual realities or
existences apart from the universe given in feeling and consciousness.
Accordingly, man must find his ideal satisfactions, his spiritual realities
and moral ideals, within the limits of the universe as known to philosophy,
and in the organic life of the race.

George Eliot was also largely influenced by the teachings of Auguste Comte.
The place he assigned to positive knowledge and the inductive method, to
feeling, to development and the influence of the past upon the present,
were all accepted by her in an enthusiastic spirit. Altruism commanded her
hearty belief, and to its principles she devoted her life. Comte's
conceptions in regard to sentiment, and the vital importance of religion
and social organization, had her entire assent. She differed from him in
regard to spiritual and social organization, and she could not accept his
arbitrary and artificial methods. One of the leaders of positivism in
England [Footnote: Some Public Aspects of Positivism, the annual address
before the Postivist Society, London, January 1, 1881, by Professor E.G.
Beesley, of University College.] has given this account of her relations to
its organized movements and to its founder:

"Her powerful intellect had accepted the teaching of Auguste Comte, and she
looked forward to the reorganization of belief on the lines which he had
laid down. Her study of his two great works was diligent and constant. The
last time I saw her--a few days before her death--I found that she had just
been reading over again, with closest attention, that wonderful treatise,
_The General View of Positivism_, a book which always seems full of fresh
wisdom, however often one comes back to it. She had her reservations, no
doubt. There were details in Comte's work which did not satisfy her. But
all who knew her were aware--and I speak from an acquaintance of eighteen
years--that she had not only cast away every shred of theology and
metaphysics, but that she had found refuge from mere negativism in the
system of Comte. She did not write her positivism in broad characters on
her books. Like Shakspere, she was first an artist and then a philosopher;
and I imagine she thought it to be her business as an artist rather to
paint humanity as it is than as she would have it to be. But she could not
conceal her intellectual conviction, and few competent persons read her
books without detecting her standpoint. If any doubt could have existed, it
was set at rest by that noble poem on 'Subjective Immortality,' the
clearest, and at the same time the most beautiful, expression that has yet
been given to one of the most distinctive doctrines of positivism; a
composition of which we can already say with certainty that it will enter
into the positivist liturgies of all countries and through all time.
Towards positivism as an organization, a discipline,--in short, as a
church,--her attitude must be plainly stated. She had much sympathy with
it, as she showed by regularly subscribing to positivist objects, as, for
instance, to the fund of the central organization in Paris presided over by
M. Laffitte. But she sought membership neither in that nor any other
church. Like most of the stronger and thoroughly emancipated minds in this
period of transition and revolutionary disturbance, she looked not beyond
her own conscience for guidance and authority, but judged for herself,
appealing to no external tribunal from the solitary judgment-seat within. I
do not for a moment suppose that she looked on the organization of a church
as unattainable; but she did not regard it as attained."

Another of her friends [Footnote: W.M.W. Call in the Westminster Review
for July, 1881.] has indicated very clearly the nature and extent of her
dissent from Comte. He remarks that "her apologetic representation of the
_Politique_ as an _Utopia_ evinces that she did not admit the cogency of
its reasoning, or regard the entire social reconstruction of Comte as
demonstrably valid. Her dissatisfaction with some of his speculations, as
expressed to ourselves in the spring of 1880, was very decided.... All
membership with the positivist community she steadily rejected. That a
philosophy originally so catholic as that of Comte should assume a
sectarian character, was a contingency she foreboded and deprecated." In
this last remark we doubtless have the explanation of George Eliot's
dissent from Comte. She believed in an organic, vital development of a
higher social structure, which will be brought about in the gradual
evolution of humanity. Comte's social structure was artificial, the
conception of one mind, and therefore as ill adapted to represent the wants
of mankind as any other system devised by an individual thinker. His
philosophy proper, his system of positive; thought, she accepted with but
few reservations. Her views in this direction, as in many others, were
substantially those presented by Lewes in his many works bearing on
positivism. She was profoundly indebted to Comte, although in her later
years she largely passed beyond his influence to the acceptance of the new
evolution philosophy. In fact, she belonged to that school of English
positivists which has only accepted the positive philosophy of Comte, and
which has rejected his later work in the direction of social and religious
construction. Lewes was the earliest of English thinkers to look at Comte
in this way; but other representative members of the school are John Stuart
Mill, George Eliot, Frederic Harrison and John Morley. Zealously accepting
Comte's position that philosophy must limit itself to positive data and
methods, they look upon the "Religion of Humanity," with Prof. Tyndall, as
Catholicism minus Christianity, and reject it.

She certainly came nearer to Comte in some directions than to Herbert
Spencer, for the latter has not so fully recognized those elements of the
mental and social life which most attracted her attention. Her theory of
duty is one which he does not accept. He insists in his _Data of Ethics_
that duty will become less and less _obligatory_ and necessary in the
future, because all action will be in harmony with the impulses of the
inner man and with the conditions of the environment. This conclusion is
entirely opposed to the moral-theory of George Eliot, and is but one
instance of their wide divergence. He insists, in his _Study of Sociology_,
that the religious consciousness will not change its lines of evolution. He
distinctly rejects the conclusion arrived at by George Eliot, that there is
no Infinite Reality knowable to man, and that the substance and reality of
religion is purely subjective. "That the object-matter of religion," he
says, "can be replaced by another object-matter, as supposed by those who
think the 'religion of humanity' will be the religion of the future, is a
belief countenanced neither by induction nor by deduction. However dominant
may become the moral sentiment enlisted on behalf of humanity, it can never
exclude the sentiment alone properly called religious, awakened by that
which is behind humanity and behind all other things." George Eliot was
content with humanity, and believed that all religion arises out of the
subjective elements of human life. At the same time that she made religion
a development from feeling, she limited the moral law to emotional
sanctions. On the contrary, Spencer is much more a rationalist, and insists
on the intellectual basis both of morals and of religion. He makes less of
feeling than she; and in this fact is to be found a wide gulf of separation
between them. She could have been no more content with his philosophy than
she was indebted to it in the construction of her own. As much one as they
are in their philosophic basis and general methods, they are antagonistic
in their conceptions about man and in the place assigned to nature in the
development of religion. To George Eliot, religion is the development of
feeling. To Spencer, it is the result of our "_thought_ of a power of which
humanity is but a small and fugitive product." In these, as in other
directions, they were not in sympathy. Her realism, her psychologic method,
her philosophic theories, her scientific sympathies, she did not derive
from him, diligently as she may have studied his books.

George Eliot agreed with Comte and all other positivists in setting aside
every inquiry into causes, and limiting philosophy to the search after
laws. The idea of causes is idealistic, and a cause of any kind whatever
is, according to these thinkers, not to be found. "The knowledge of laws,"
says Comte, "is henceforth to take the place of the search after causes."
In other words, it is impossible for man to find out _why_ anything is, he
can only know _how_ it is. George Eliot entirely agreed with Comte as to
the universal dominion of law. She also followed him in his teachings about
heredity, which he held to be the cause of social unity, morality, and the
higher or subjective life. His conception of feeling as the highest
expression of human life confirmed the conclusions to which she had already
arrived from the study of Feuerbach. She was an enthusiastic believer in
the Great Being, Humanity; she worshipped at that shrine. More to her than
all other beliefs was her belief that we are to live for others. With Comte
she said, "Altruism alone can enable us to live in the highest and truest
sense." She would have all our doctrines about _rights_ eliminated from
morality and politics. They are as absurd, says Comte, as they are immoral.

George Eliot had a strong tendency towards philosophical speculations.
While yet a student she expressed an ardent desire that she might live to
reconcile the philosophy of Locke with that of Kant. In positivism, as
developed and modified by Lewes, she found that reconciliation. She went
far towards accepting the boldest speculations of the agnostic science of
the time, but she modified it again and again to meet the needs of her own
broader mind and heart. Yet it is related of her that in parting with one
of the greatest English poets, probably Tennyson, when he said to her,
"Well, good-by, you and your molecules," she replied, "I am quite content
with my molecules." Her speculations led to the rejection of anything like
a positive belief in God, to an entire rejection of faith in a personal
immortality, and to a repudiation of all idealistic conceptions of
knowledge derived from supersensuous sources. Her theories are best
represented by the words environment, experience, heredity, development,
altruism, solidarité, subjective immortality. These speculations confront
the reader in nearly every chapter of her novels, and they gave existence
to all but a very few of her poems.




X.


DISTINCTIVE TEACHINGS.

Science was accepted by George Eliot as furnishing the method and the proof
for her philosophic and religious opinions. She was in hearty sympathy with
Spencer and Darwin in regard to most of their speculations, and the
doctrine of evolution was one which entirely approved itself to her mind.
All her theories were based fundamentally on the hypothesis of universal
law, which she probably interpreted with Lewes, in his _Foundations of a
Creed_, as the uniformities of Infinite Activity. Not only in the physical
world did she see law reigning, but also in every phase of the moral and
spiritual life of man. In reviewing Lecky's _Rationalism in Europe_, she
used these suggestive words concerning the uniformity of sequences she
believed to be universal in the fullest sense:

    The supremely important fact that the gradual reduction of all
    phenomena within the sphere of established law, which carries as a
    consequence the rejection of the miraculous, and has its determining
    current in the development of physical science, seems to have engaged
    comparatively little of his attention; at least he gives it no
    prominence. The great conception of uniform regular sequence, without
    partiality and without caprice--the conception which is the most potent
    force at work in the modification of our faith, and of the practical
    form given to our sentiments--could only grow out of that patient
    watching of external fact, and that silencing of preconceived notions,
    which are urged upon the mind by the problems of physical science.
    [Footnote: Fortnightly Review, May, 1865.]

The uniformities of nature have the effect upon man, through his nervous
organization, of developing a responsive feeling and action. He learns to
respond to that uniformity, to conform his actions to it. The habits thus
acquired are inherited by his children, and moral conduct is developed.
Heredity has as conspicuous a place in the novels of George Eliot as in the
scientific treatises of Charles Darwin. She has attempted to indicate the
moral and social influences of heredity, that it gives us the better part
of our life in all directions. Heredity is but one phase of the uniformity
of nature and the persistence of its forces. That uniformity never changes
for man; his life it entirely ignores. He is crushed by its forces; he is
given pain and sorrow through its unpitying disregard of his tender nature.
Not only the physical world, but the moral world also, is unfailing in the
development of the legitimate sequences of its forces. There is no
cessation of activity, no turning aside of consequences, no delay in the
transformation of causes into necessary effects.

George Eliot never swerves from this conception of the universe, physical
and moral; everywhere cause is but another name for effect. The unbending
order adopts man into its processes, helps him when he conforms to them,
and gives him pain when he disregards them. The whole secret of man's
existence is to be found in the agreement of his life with the invariable
sequences of nature and moral activity; harmony with them brings true
development, discord brings pain and sorrow. The unbending nature of law,
and man's relations to it, she has portrayed in "Mr. Gilfil's Love Story,"
when describing Tina's sorrows.

    While this poor little heart was being bruised with a weight too heavy
    for it, Nature was holding on her calm inexorable way, in unmoved and
    terrible beauty. The stars were rushing in their eternal courses; the
    tides swelled to the level of the last expectant weed; the sun was
    making brilliant day to busy nations oil the other side of the
    expectant earth. The stream of human thought and deed was hurrying and
    broadening onward. The astronomer was at his telescope; the great ships
    were laboring over the waves; the toiling eagerness of commerce, the
    fierce spirit of revolution, were only ebbing in brief rest, and
    sleepless statesmen were dreading the possible crisis of the morrow.
    What were our little Tina and her trouble in this mighty torrent,
    rushing from one awful unknown to another? Lighter than the smallest
    centre of quivering life in the water-drop, hidden and uncared for as
    the pulse of anguish in the breast of the tiniest bird that has
    fluttered down to its nest with the long-sought food, and has found the
    nest torn and empty.

The effect of the uniformities of nature upon man, as George Eliot regarded
them, is not quite that which would be inferred from these words alone.
While she believed that nature is as unbending and pitiless as is here
indicated, yet that unbending uniformity, which never changes its direction
for man, is a large influence towards the development of his higher life.
It has the effect on man to develop feeling which is the expression of all
that is best and most human in his life.

George Eliot believed that the better and nobler part of man's life is to
be found in feeling. It is the first expression which he makes as a
sentient being, to have emotions; and his emotions more truly represent him
than the purely intellectual processes of the mind. She would have us
believe that feeling is rather to be trusted than the intellect, that it is
both a safer and a surer guide. In _Middlemarch_ she says that "our good
depends on the quality and breadth of our emotions." Her conception of the
comparative worth of feeling and logic is expressed in _Romola_ with a
characteristic touch.

    After all has been said that can be said about the widening influence
    of ideas, it remains true that they would hardly be such strong
    agents unless they were taken in a solvent of feeling. The great
    world-struggle of developing thought is continually foreshadowed in
    the struggle of the affections, seeking a justification for love and
    hope.

In _Daniel Deronda_, when considering the causes which prevent men from
desecrating their fathers' tombs for material gain, she says, "The only
check to be alleged is a sentiment, which will coerce none who do not hold
that sentiments are the better part of the world's wealth." To the same
effect is her saying in _Theophrastus Such_, that "our civilization,
considered as a splendid material fabric, is helplessly in peril without
the spiritual police of sentiments or ideal feelings." She expresses the
conviction in _Adam Bede_, that "it is possible to have very erroneous
theories and very sublime feelings;" and she does not hesitate through
all her writings to convey the idea, that sublime feelings are much to
be preferred to profound thoughts or the most perfect philosophy. She
makes Adam Bede say that "it isn't notions sets people doing the right
thing--it's feelings," and that "feeling's a sort o' knowledge." Feeling
gives us the only true knowledge we have of our fellow-men, a knowledge
in every way more perfect than that which is to be derived from our
intellectual inquiries into their natures and wants. In _Janet's
Repentance_ this power of feeling to give us true knowledge of others,
to awaken us to the deeper needs of our own souls, when we come in contact
with those who are able to move and inspire us, is eloquently presented.

    Blessed influence of one true loving human soul on another! Not
    calculable by algebra, not deducible by logic, but mysterious,
    effectual, mighty as the hidden process by which the tiny seed is
    quickened, and bursts forth into tall stem and broad leaf, and glowing
    tasselled flower. Ideas are often poor ghosts; our sun-filled eyes
    cannot discern them; they pass athwart us in thin vapor, and cannot
    make themselves felt. But sometimes they are made flesh; they breathe
    upon us with warm breath; they touch us with soft responsive hands;
    they look at us with sad, sincere eyes, and speak to us in appealing
    tones; they are clothed in a living human soul, with all its conflicts,
    its faith and its love. Then their presence is a power; then they shake
    us like a passion, and we are drawn after them with gentle compulsion,
    as flame is drawn to flame. [Footnote: Chapter XIX.]

She returns to the same subject when considering the intellectual theories
of happiness and the proportion of crime there is likely to occur in the
world. She shows her entire dissent from such a method of dealing with
human woe, and she pleads for that sympathy and love which will enable us
to feel the pain of others as our own. This fellow-feeling gives us the
most adequate knowledge we can have.

    It was probably a hard saying to the Pharisees, that "there is more joy
    in heaven over one sinner that repenteth than over ninety and nine just
    persons that need no repentance." And certain ingenious philosophers
    of our own day must surely take offence at a joy so entirely out of
    correspondence with arithmetical proportion. But a heart that has
    been  taught by its own sore struggles to bleed for the woes of
    another--that has "learned pity through suffering"--is likely to find
    very imperfect satisfaction in the "balance of happiness," "doctrine of
    compensations," and other short and easy methods of obtaining thorough
    complacency in the presence of pain; and for such a heart that saying
    will not be altogether dark. The emotions I have observed are but
    slightly influenced by arithmetical considerations: the mother, when
    her sweet lisping little ones have all been taken from her one after
    another, and she is hanging over her last dead babe, finds small
    consolation in the fact that the tiny dimpled corpse is but one of a
    necessary average, and that a thousand other babes brought into the
    world at the same time are doing well, and are likely to live; and if
    you stood beside that mother--if you knew her pang and shared it--it is
    probable you would be equally unable to see a ground of complacency in
    statistics. Doubtless a complacency resting on that basis is highly
    rational; but emotion, I fear, is obstinately irrational; it insists on
    caring for individuals; it absolutely refuses to adopt the quantitative
    view of human anguish, and to admit that thirteen happy lives are a
    set-off against twelve miserable lives, which leaves a clear balance on
    the side of satisfaction. This is the inherent imbecility of feeling,
    and one must be a great philosopher to have got quite clear of all
    that, and to have emerged into the serene air of pure intellect, in
    which it is evident that individuals really exist for no other purpose
    than that abstractions maybe drawn from them--abstractions that may
    rise from heaps of ruined lives like the sweet savor of a sacrifice in
    the nostrils of philosophers, and of a philosophic Deity. And so it
    comes to pass that for the man who knows sympathy because he has known
    sorrow, that old, old saying about the joy of angels over the repentant
    sinner outweighing their joy over the ninety-nine just, has a meaning
    which does not jar with the language of his own heart. It only tells
    him that for angels too there is a transcendent value in human pain
    which refuses to be settled by equations; that the eyes of angels too
    are turned away from the serene happiness of the righteous to bend with
    yearning pity on the poor erring soul wandering in the desert where no
    water is; that for angels too the misery of one casts so tremendous a
    shadow as to eclipse the bliss of ninety-nine. [Footnote: Chapter
    XXII.]

Again, she says in the same story,--

    Surely, surely the only true knowledge of our fellow-man is that
    which enables us to feel with him--which gives us a fine ear for the
    heart-pulses that are beating under the mere clothes of circumstance
    and opinion. Our subtlest analogies of schools and sects must miss the
    essential truth, unless it be lit up by the love that sees in all forms
    of human thought and-work the life-and-death struggles of separate
    human beings.

George Eliot would have us believe, that until we can feel with man,
enter sympathetically into his emotions and yearnings, we cannot know
him. It is because we have common emotions, common experiences, common
aspirations, that we are really able to understand man; and not because of
statistics, natural history, sociology or psychology. The objective facts
have their place and value, but the real knowledge we possess of mankind is
subjective, grows out of fellow-feeling.

The mental life of man, according to George Eliot, is simply an expansion
of the emotional life. At first the mental life is unconscious, it is
instinctive, simply the emotional response of man to the sequences of
nature. This instinctive life of the emotions always remains a better part
of our natures, and is to be trusted rather than the more formal activities
of the intellectual faculties. In the most highly developed intellects
even, there is a subconscious mental activity, an instinctive life of
feeling, which is rather to be trusted than reason itself. This is a
frequently recurring statement, which George Eliot makes in the firmest
conviction of its truthfulness. It appears in such a sentence as this, in
_The Mill on the Floss_: "Watch your own speech, and notice how it is
guided by your less conscious purposes." In _Daniel Deronda_ it finds
expression in the assertion that "there is a great deal of unmapped country
within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of
our gusts and storms." It is more explicitly presented in _Adam Bede_.

    Do we not all agree to call rapid thought and noble impulses by the
    name of inspiration? After our subtlest analysis of the mental process,
    we must still say that our highest thoughts and our best deeds are all
    given to us.

George Eliot puts into the mouth of Mordecai the assertion that love lies
deeper than any reasons which are to be found for its exercise. In the same
way, she would have us believe that feeling is safer than reason. Daniel
Deronda questions Mordecai's visions, and doubts if he is worth listening
to, except for pity's sake. On this the author comments, in defence of the
visions, as against reason.

    Suppose he had introduced himself as one of the strictest reasoners: do
    they form a body of men hitherto free from false conclusions and
    illusory speculations? The driest argument has its hallucinations, too
    hastily concluding that its net will now at last be large enough to
    hold the universe. Men may dream in demonstrations, and cut out an
    illusory world in the shape of axioms, definitions and propositions,
    with a final exclusion of fact signed Q.E.D. No formulas for thinking
    will save us mortals from mistake in our imperfect apprehension of the
    matter to be thought about. And since the unemotional intellect may
    carry us into a mathematical dream-land where nothing is but what is
    not, perhaps an emotional intellect may have absorbed into its
    passionate vision of possibilities some truth of what will be--the more
    comprehensive massive life feeding theory with new material, as the
    sensibility of the artist seizes combinations which science explains
    and justifies. At any rate, presumptions to the contrary are not to be
    trusted. [Footnote: Chapter XLI.]

As explicit is a passage in _Theophrastus Such_, wherein imagination is
regarded as a means of knowledge, because it rests on a subconscious
expression of experience.

    It is worth repeating that powerful imagination is not false outward
    vision, but intense inward representation, and a creative energy
    constantly fed by susceptibility to the veriest minutiae of experience,
    which it reproduces and constructs in fresh and fresh wholes; not the
    habitual confusion of probable fact with the fictions of fancy and
    transient inclination, but a breadth of ideal association which informs
    every material object, every incidental fact, with far-reaching
    memories and stored residues of passion, bringing into new light the
    less obvious relations of human existence. [Footnote: Chapter XIII.]

Imagination, feeling and the whole inward life are being constantly shaped
by our actions. Experience gives new character to the inward life, and at
the same time determines its motives and its inclinations. The muscles
develop as they are used; what has been once done it is easier to do again.
In the same way, our deeds influence our lives, and compel us to repeat our
actions. At least this is George Eliot's opinion, and one she is fond of
re-affirming. After Arthur had wronged Hetty, his life was changed, and of
this change wrought in his character by his conduct, George Eliot says,--

    Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds; and until we
    know what has been or will be the peculiar combination of outward with
    inward facts which constitute a man's critical actions, it will be
    better not to think ourselves wise about his character. There is a
    terrible coercion in our deeds which may at first turn the honest man
    into a deceiver, and then reconcile him to the change; for this
    reason--that the second wrong presents itself to him in the guise of
    the only practicable right. The action which before commission has been
    seen with that blended common sense and fresh untarnished feeling which
    is the healthy eye of the soul, is looked at afterward with the lens of
    apologetic ingenuity, through which all things that men call beautiful
    and ugly are seen to be made up of textures very much alike. Europe
    adjusts itself to a _fait accompli_, and so does an individual
    character--until the placid adjustment is disturbed by a convulsive
    retribution. [Footnote: Chapter XXIX.]

What we have done, determines what we shall do, even in opposition to
our wills. After Tito Melema had done his first act towards denying his
foster-father, we have this observation of the author's:

    Our deeds are like children that are born to us; they live and act
    apart from our own will. Nay, children may be strangled, but deeds
    never; they have an indestructible life both in and out of our
    consciousness; and that dreadful vitality of deeds was pressing hard on
    Tito for the first time.

When Tito had openly denied that father, at an unexpected moment, we hear
the ever-present chorus repeating this great ethical truth:

    Tito was experiencing that inexorable law of human souls, that we
    prepare ourselves for sudden deeds by the reiterated choice of good or
    evil that gradually determines character.

As a river moves in the channel made for it, as a plant grows towards the
sunlight, so man does again what he has once done. The impression of his
act is left upon his nature, it is taken up into his motives, it leads to
feeling and impulse, it repeats itself in future conduct. His deed lives in
memory, it lives in weakness or strength of impulse, it lives in disease or
in health, it lives in mental listlessness or in mental vigor. What is
done, determines our natures in their character and tendency for the
future. "A man can never separate himself from his past history," says
George Eliot in one of the mottoes of _Felix Holt_. We cannot rid ourselves
of the effects of our actions; they follow us forever. This truth takes
shape in _Romola_ in these words:

    Our lives make a moral tradition for our individual selves, as the life
    of mankind at large makes a moral tradition for the race; and to have
    once acted greatly, seems a reason why we should always be noble. But
    Tito was feeling the effect of an opposite tradition: he had now no
    memories of self-conquest and perfect faithfulness from which he could
    have a sense of falling.

A motto in _Daniel Deronda_ reiterates this oft-repeated assertion.

  Deeds are the pulse of Time, his beating life,
  And righteous or unrighteous, being done,
  Must throb in after-throbs till Time itself
  Be laid in stillness, and the universe
  Quiver and breathe upon no mirror more.

Feeling is to be preferred to logic, according to George Eliot, because it
brings us the results of long-accumulating experiences, because it embodies
the inherited experiences of the race. She was an earnest believer in
"far-reaching memories and stored residues of passion," for she was
convinced that the better part of all our knowledge is brought to us by
inheritance. The deeds of the individual make the habits of his life, they
remain in memory, they guide the purposes of the will, and they give
motives to action. Deeds often repeated give impulse and direction to
character, and these appear in the offspring as predispositions of body
and mind. In this way our deeds "throb in after-throbs" of our children;
and in the same manner the deeds of a people live in the life of the race
and become guiding motives in its future deeds. As the deeds of a person
develop into habits, so the deeds of a people develop into national
tendencies and actions.

George Eliot was a thorough believer in the Darwinian theories of heredity,
and she has in all her books shown the effects of hereditary conditions on
the individual and even upon a people. Family and race are made to play a
very important part in her writings. Other novelists disregard the
conditions and limitations imposed by heredity, and consider the individual
as unrestricted by other laws than those of his own will; but George Eliot
gives conspicuous prominence to the laws of heredity, both individual and
social. Felix Holt never ceases in her pages to be the son of his mother,
however enlarged his ideas may become and broad his culture. Rosamond Vincy
also has a parentage, and so has Mary Garth. Daniel Deronda is a Jew by
birth, the son of a visionary mother and a truth-seeking father. This
parentage expresses itself throughout his life, even in boyhood, in all his
thought and conduct. Heredity shapes the destiny of Tito Melema, Romola,
Fedalma, Maggie Tulliver, Will Ladislaw, Gwendolen Harleth and many another
character in George Eliot's novels. It is even more strongly presented in
her poems. In _The Spanish Gypsy_ she describes Fedalma as a genuine
daughter of her father, as inheriting his genius and tendencies, which are
stronger than all the Spanish culture she had received. When Fedalma says
she belongs to him she loves, and that love

                       is nature too,
  Forming a fresher law than laws of birth,--

Zarca replies,--

  Unmake yourself, then, from a Zincala--
  Unmake yourself from being child of mine!
  Take holy water, cross your dark skin white;
  Round your proud eyes to foolish kitten looks;
  Walk mincingly, and smirk, and twitch your robe:
  Unmake yourself--doff all the eagle plumes
  And be a parrot, chained to a ring that slips
  Upon a Spaniard's thumb, at will of his
  That you should prattle o'er his words again!

Fedalma cannot unmake herself; she has already danced in the plaza, and she
is soon convinced that she is a Zincala, that her place is with her father
and his tribe. The Prior had declared,--

                       That maiden's blood
  Is as unchristian as the leopard's,

and it so proves. His statement of reasons for this conviction expresses
the author's own belief.

  What! Shall the trick of nostrils and of lips
  Descend through generations, and the soul
  That moves within our frame like God in worlds--
  Convulsing, urging, melting, withering--
  Imprint no record, leave no documents,
  Of her great history? Shall men bequeath
  The fancies of their palates to their sons,
  And shall the shudder of restraining awe,
  The slow-wept tears of contrite memory,
  Faith's prayerful labor, and the food divine
  Of fasts ecstatic--shall these pass away
  Like wind upon the waters, tracklessly?
  Shall the mere curl of eyelashes remain,
  And god-enshrining symbols leave no trace
  Of tremors reverent?

This larger or social heredity is that which claims much the larger share
of George Eliot's attention, and it is far more clearly and distinctively
presented in her writings. She gives a literary expression here to the
teachings of the evolutionists, shows the application to life of what has
been taught by Spencer, Haeckel and Lewes. In his _Foundations of a Creed_,
Lewes has stated this theory in discussing "the limitations of knowledge."
"It is indisputable," he says, "that every particular man comes into the
world with a heritage of organized forms and definite tendencies, which
will determine his feeling and thinking in certain definite ways, whenever
the suitable conditions are present. And all who believe in evolution
believe that these forms and tendencies represent ancestral experiences and
adaptations; believe that not only is the pointer born with an organized
tendency to point, the setter to set, the beaver to build, and the bird to
fly, but that the man is born with a tendency to think in images and
symbols according to given relations and sequences which constitute logical
laws, that _what_ he thinks is the necessary product of his organism and
the external conditions. This organism itself is a product of its history;
it _is_ what it has _become_; it is a part of the history of the human
race; it is also specially individualized by the particular personal
conditions which have distinguished him from his fellow-men. Thus
resembling all men in general characters, he will in general feel as
they feel, think as they think; and differing from all men in special
characters, he will have personal differences of feeling and shades of
feeling, thought and combinations of thought.... The mind is built up
out of assimilated experiences, its perceptions being shaped by its
pre-perceptions, its conceptions by its pre-conceptions. Like the body,
the mind is shaped through its history." In other words, experience is
inherited and shapes the mental and social life. What some philosophers
have called intuitions, and what Kant called the categories of the mind,
Lewes regarded as the inherited results of human experience. By a slow
process of evolution the mind has been produced and shaped into harmony
with its environment; the results of inherited experience take the form of
feelings, intuitions, laws of thought and social tendencies. Its intuitions
are to be accepted as the highest knowledge, because the transmitted
results of all human experience.

As the body performs those muscular operations most easily to which it
is most accustomed, so men as social beings perform those acts and think
those thoughts most easily and naturally to which the race has been longest
accustomed. Man lives and thinks as man has lived and thought; he inherits
the past. In his social life he is as much the child of the past as he is
individually the son of his father. If he inherits his father's physiognomy
and habits of thought, so does he socially inherit the characteristics of
his race, its social and moral life. George Eliot was profoundly convinced
of the value of this fact, and she has presented it in her books in all
its phases. In her _Fortnightly Review_ essay on "The Influence of
Rationalism," she says all large minds have long had "a vague sense" "that
tradition is really the basis of our best life." She says, "Our sentiments
may be called organized traditions; and a large part of our actions gather
all their justification, all their attractions and aroma, from the memory
of the life lived, of the actions done, before we were born." Tradition is
the inherited experience of the race, the result of its long efforts, its
many struggles, after a larger life. It lives in the tendencies of our
emotions, in the intuitions and aspirations of our minds, as the wisdom
which our minds hold dear, as the yearnings of our hearts after a wider
social life. These things are not the results of our own reasonings, but
they are the results of the life lived by those who have gone before us,
and who, by their thoughts and deeds, have shaped our lives, our minds, to
what they are. Tradition is the inherited experience, feeling, yearning,
pain, sorrow and wisdom of the ages. It furnishes a great system of
customs, laws, institutions, ideas, motives and feelings into which we are
born, which we naturally adopt, which gives shape and strength to our
growing life, which makes it possible for us to take up life at that stage
it has reached after the experiences of many generations. George Eliot says
in _Middlemarch_ that "a kind Providence furnishes the limpest personality
with a little gum or starch in the form of tradition." We come into a world
made ready for us, and find prepared for our immediate use a vast complex
of customs and duties and ideas, the results of the world's experience.
George Eliot believed, with Comte, that with each generation the influence
of the past over the present becomes greater, and that men's lives are more
and more shaped by what has been. In _The Spanish Gypsy_ she makes Don
Silva say that

  The only better is a Past that lives
  On through an added Present, stretching still
  In hope unchecked by shaming memories
  To life's last breath.

This deep conviction of the blessed influence of the past upon us is well
expressed in the little poem on "Self and Life," one of the most fully
autobiographical of all her poems, where she makes Life bid Self remember

  How the solemn, splendid Past
    O'er thy early widened earth
  Made grandeur, as on sunset cast
    Dark elms near take mighty girth.
      Hands and feet were tiny still
      When we knew the historic thrill,
      Breathed deep breath in heroes dead,
      Tasted the immortals' bread.

In expressive sentences, in the development of her characters, and in many
other ways, she affirms this faith in tradition. In one of the mottoes
in _Felix Holt_ she uses a fine sentence, which is repeated in "A Minor
Prophet."

  Our finest hope is finest memory.

The finest hope of the race is to be found in memory of its great deeds, as
its saddest loss is to be found in forgetfulness of a noble past. In _The
Mill on the Floss_, when describing St. Ogg's, she attributes its sordid
and tedious life to its neglect of the past and its inspiring memories.

    The mind of St. Ogg's did not look extensively before or after. It
    inherited a long past without thinking of it, and had no eyes for the
    spirits that walk the streets, Since the centuries when St. Ogg with
    his boat, and the Virgin Mother at the prow, had been seen on the wide
    water, so many memories had been left behind, and had gradually
    vanished like the receding hill-tops! And the present time was like the
    level plain where men lose their belief in volcanoes and earthquakes,
    thinking to-morrow will be as yesterday, and the giant forces that used
    to shake the earth are forever laid to sleep. The days were gone when
    people could be greatly wrought upon by their faith, still less change
    it: the Catholics were formidable because they would lay hold of
    government and property, and burn men alive; not because any sane and
    honest parishioner of St. Ogg's could be brought to believe in the
    Pope. One aged person remembered how a rude multitude had been swayed
    when John Wesley preached in the cattle-market; but for a long while it
    had not been expected of preachers that they should shake the souls of
    men. An occasional burst of fervor in Dissenting pulpits on the subject
    of infant baptism was the only symptom of a zeal unsuited to sober
    times when men had done with change. Protestantism sat at ease,
    unmindful of schisms, careless of proselytism; Dissent was an
    inheritance along with a superior pew and a business connection; and
    Churchmanship only wondered contemptuously at Dissent as a foolish
    habit that clung greatly to families in the grocery and chandlering
    lines, though not incompatible with prosperous wholesale dealing.
    [Footnote: Chapter XII.]

This faith in tradition, as giving the basis of all our best life, is
perhaps nowhere so expressively set forth by George Eliot as in _The
Spanish Gypsy_. It is distinctly taught by all the best characters in the
words they speak, and it is emphatically taught in the whole purpose and
spirit of the poem. Zarca says his tribe has no great life because it has
no great national memories. He calls his people

      Wanderers whom no God took knowledge of
  To give them laws, to fight for them, or blight
  Another race to make them ampler room;
  Who have no whence or whither in their souls,
  No dimmest lure of glorious ancestors
  To make a common breath for piety.

As his people are weak because they have no traditional life, he proposes
by his deeds to make them national memories and hopes and aims.

                        No lure
  Shall draw me to disown them, or forsake
  The meagre wandering herd that lows for help--
  And needs me for its guide, to seek my pasture
  Among the well-fed beeves that graze at will.
  Because our race has no great memories,
  I will so live, it shall remember me
  For deeds of such divine beneficence
  As rivers have, that teach, men what is good
  By blessing them. I have been schooled--have caught
  Lore from Hebrew, deftness from the Moor--
  Know the rich heritage, the milder life,
  Of nations fathered by a mighty Past.

The way in which such a past is made is suggested by Zarca, in answer to a
question about the Gypsy's faith; it is made by a common life of faith and
brotherhood, that gives origin to a common inheritance and memories.

                           O, it is a faith
  Taught by no priest, but by their beating hearts
  Faith to each other: the fidelity
  Of fellow-wanderers in a desert place
  Who share the same dire thirst, and therefore share
  The scanty water: the fidelity
  Of men whose pulses leap with kindred fire,
  Who in the flash of eyes, the clasp of hands,
  The speech that even in lying tells the truth
  Of heritage inevitable as birth,
  Nay, in the silent bodily presence feel
  The mystic stirring of a common life
  Which makes the many one: fidelity
  To that deep consecrating oath our sponsor Fate
  Made through our infant breath when we were born
  The fellow-heirs of that small island, Life,
  Where we must dig and sow and reap with brothers.
  Fear thou that oath, my daughter--nay, not fear,
  But love it; for the sanctity of oaths
  Lies not in lightning that avenges them,
  But in the injury wrought by broken bonds
  And in the garnered good of human trust.
  And you have sworn--even with your infant breath
  You too were pledged.

George Eliot's faith in tradition, as furnishing the basis of our best
life, and the moral purpose and law which is to guide it, she has
concentrated into one question asked by Maggie Tulliver.

    If the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie? We should
    have no law but the inclination of the moment.

Although this question is asked in regard to an individual's past, the
answer to it holds quite as good for the race as for the individual. She
repudiates all theories which give the individual authority to follow
inclination, or even to follow some inner or personal guide. The true
wisdom is always social, always grows out of the experiences of the race,
and not out of any personal inspiration or enlightenment. Tradition
furnishes the materials for reason to use, but reason does not penetrate
into new regions, or bring to us wisdom apart from that we obtain through
inherited experiences. George Eliot compares these two with each other in
_The Spanish Gypsy_ in the words of Sephardo.

                              I abide
  By that wise spirit of listening reverence
  Which marks the boldest doctors of our race.
  For Truth, to us, is like a living child
  Born of two parents: if the parents part
  And will divide the child, how shall it live?
  Or, I will rather say: Two angels guide
  The path of man, both aged and yet young,
  As angels are, ripening through endless years.
  On one he leans: some call her Memory,
  And some, Tradition; and her voice is sweet,
  With deep mysterious accords: the other,
  Floating above, holds down a lamp which streams
  A light divine and searching on the earth,
  Compelling eyes and footsteps. Memory yields,
  Yet clings with loving check, and shines anew
  Reflecting all the rays of that bright lamp
  Our angel Reason holds. We had not walked
  But for Tradition; we walk evermore
  To higher paths, by brightening Reason's lamp.

Man leans on tradition, it is the support of his life, by its strength he
is able to move forward. Reason is a lamp which lights the way, gives
direction to tradition; it is a beacon and not a support. Tradition not
only brings us the wisdom of all past experience, but it develops into a
spiritual atmosphere in which we live, move and have our being. This was
Comte's idea, that the spiritual life is developed out of tradition, that
the world's experiences have produced for us intangible hopes, yearnings
and aspirations; awe, reverence and sense of subtle mystery: mystic trust,
faith in invisible memories, joy in the unseen power of thought and love;
and that these create for us a spiritual world most real in its nature, and
most powerful in its influence. On every hand man is touched by the
invisible, mystical influences of the past, spiritual voices call to him
out of the ages, unseen hands point the way he is to go. He breathes this
atmosphere of spiritual memories, he is fed on thoughts other men have made
for his sustenance, he is inspired by the heroisms of ages gone before. In
an article in the _Westminster Review_ in July, 1856, on "The Natural
History of German Life," in review of W.H. Riehl's books on the German
peasant, and on land and climate, she presents the idea that a people can
be understood only when we understand its history. Society, she says, has
developed through many generations, and has built itself up in many
memories and associations. To change it we must change its traditions.
Nothing can be done _de novo_; a fresh beginning cannot be had. The dream
of the French Revolution, that a new nation, a new life, a new morality,
was to be created anew and fresh out of the cogitations of philosophers, is
not in any sense to be realized. Tradition forever asserts itself, the past
is more powerful than all philosophers, and new traditions must be made
before a new life can be had for society. These ideas are well expressed by
George Eliot in her review of Riehl's books.

    He sees in European society _incarnate history_, and any attempt to
    disengage it from its historical elements must, he believes, be simply
    destruction of social vitality. What has grown up historically can only
    die out historically, by the gradual operation of necessary laws. The
    external conditions which society has inherited from the past are but
    the manifestation of inherited internal conditions in the human beings
    who compose it; the internal conditions and the external are related to
    each other as the organism and its medium, and development can take
    place only by the gradual consentaneous development of both. As a
    necessary preliminary to a purely rational society, you must obtain
    purely rational men, free from the sweet and bitter prejudices of
    hereditary affection and antipathy; which is as easy as to get running
    streams without springs, or the leafy shade of the forest without the
    secular growth of trunk and branch.

    The historical conditions of society may be compared with those of
    language. It must be admitted that the language of cultivated nations
    is in anything but a rational state; the great sections of the
    civilized world are only approximately intelligible to each other, and
    even that, only at the cost of long study; one word stands for many
    things, and many words for one thing; the subtle shades of meaning, and
    still subtler echoes of association, make language an instrument which
    scarcely anything short of genius can wield with definiteness and
    certainty. Suppose, then, that the effort which has been again and
    again made to construct a universal language on a rational basis has
    at length succeeded, and that you have a language which has no
    uncertainty, no whims of idiom, no cumbrous forms, no fitful shimmer of
    many-hued significance, no hoary archaisms "familiar with forgotten
    years,"--a patent deodorized and non-resonant language, which effects
    the purpose of communication as perfectly and rapidly as algebraic
    signs. Your language may be a perfect medium of expression to science,
    but will never express _life_, which is a great deal more than science.
    With the anomalies and inconveniences of historical language, you will
    have parted with its music and its passion, with its vital qualities
    as an expression of individual character, with its subtle capabilities
    of wit, with everything that gives it power over the imagination; and
    the next step in simplification will be the invention of a talking
    watch, which will achieve the utmost facility and despatch in the
    communication of ideas by a graduated adjustment of ticks, to be
    represented in writing by a corresponding arrangement of dots. A
    "melancholy language of the future!" The sensory and motor nerves that
    run in the same sheath are scarcely bound together by a more necessary
    and delicate union than that which binds men's affections, imagination,
    wit and humor with the subtle ramifications of historical language.
    Language must be left to grow in precision, completeness and unity, as
    minds grow in clearness, comprehensiveness and sympathy. And there is
    an analogous relation between the moral tendencies of men and the
    social conditions they have inherited. The nature of European men has
    its roots intertwined with the past, and can only be developed by
    allowing those roots to remain undisturbed while the process of
    development is going on, until that perfect ripeness of the seed which
    carries with it a life independent of the root....

    It has not been sufficiently insisted on, that in the various branches
    of social science there is an advance from the general to the special,
    from the simple to the complex, analogous with that which is found in
    the series of the sciences, from mathematics to biology. To the laws of
    quantity comprised in mathematics and physics are superadded, in
    chemistry, laws of quality; to those again are added, in biology, laws
    of life; and lastly, the conditions of life in general branch out into
    its special conditions, or natural history, on the one hand, and into
    its abnormal conditions, or pathology, on the other. And in this series
    or ramification of the sciences, the more general science will not
    suffice to solve the problems of the more special. Chemistry embraces
    phenomena which are not explicable by physics; biology embraces
    phenomena which are not explicable by chemistry; and no biological
    generalization will enable us to predict the infinite specialties
    produced by the complexity of vital conditions. So social science,
    while it has departments which in their fundamental generality
    correspond to mathematics and physics, namely, those grand and simple
    generalizations which trace out the inevitable march of the human race
    as a whole, and, as a ramification of these, the laws of economical
    science, has also, in the departments of government and jurisprudence,
    which embrace the conditions of social life in all their complexity,
    what may be called its biology, carrying us on to innumerable special
    phenomena which outlie the sphere of science, and belong to natural
    history. And just as the most thorough acquaintance with physics, or
    chemistry, or general physiology, will not enable you at once to
    establish the balance of life in your private vivarium, so that your
    particular society of zoophytes, molluscs and echinoderms may feel
    themselves, as the Germans say, at ease in their skins; so the most
    complete equipment of theory will not enable a statesman or a political
    and social reformer to adjust his measures wisely, in the absence of a
    special acquaintance with the section of society for which he
    legislates, with the peculiar characteristics of the nation, the
    province, the class whose well-being he has to consult. In other words,
    a wise social policy must be based not simply on abstract social
    science but on the natural history of social bodies.

Her conception of the corporate life of the nice has been clearly expressed
by George Eliot in the concluding essay in _Theophrastus Such_. In that
essay she writes of the powerful influence wrought upon national life by
"the divine gift of memory which inspires the moments with a past, a
present and a future, and gives the sense of corporate existence that
raises man above the otherwise more respectable and innocent brute." The
nations which lead the world on to a larger civilization are not merely
those with most genius, originality, gift of invention or talent for
scientific observation, but those which have the finest traditions. As a
member of such a nation, the individual can be noble and great. We should
almost be persuaded, reading George Eliot's eloquent rhetoric on this
subject, that personal genius is of little moment in comparison with a rich
inheritance of national memories. It is indeed true that Homer, Virgil,
Dante, Milton and Shakspere have used the traditions of their people for
the materials of their immortal works, but what would those traditions have
been without the genius of the men who deal with the traditions in a
fashion quite their own, giving them new meaning and vitality! The poet,
however, needs materials for his song, and memories to inspire it. The
influence of these George Eliot well understands in calling them "the deep
suckers of healthy sentiment."

    The historian guides us rightly in urging us to dwell on the virtues of
    our ancestors with emulation, and to cherish our sense of a common
    descent as a bond of obligation.  The eminence, the nobleness of a
    people, depends on its capability of being stirred by memories, and for
    striving for what we call spiritual ends--ends which consist not in an
    immediate material possession, but in the satisfaction of a great
    feeling that animates the collective body as with one soul. A people
    having the seed of worthiness in it must feel an answering thrill when
    it is adjured by the deaths of its heroes who died to preserve its
    national existence; when it is reminded of its small beginnings and
    gradual growth through past labors and struggles, such as are still
    demanded of it in order that the freedom and well-being thus inherited
    may be transmitted unimpaired to children and children's children; when
    an appeal against the permission of injustice is made to great
    precedents in its history and to the better genius breathing in its
    institutions. It is this living force of sentiment in common which
    makes a national consciousness. Nations so moved will resist conquest
    with the very breasts of their women, will pay their millions and their
    blood to abolish slavery, will share privation in famine and all
    calamity, will produce poets to sing "some great story of a man," and
    thinkers whose theories will bear the test of action. An individual
    man, to be harmoniously great, must belong to a nation of this order,
    if not in actual existence yet existing in the past--in memory, as a
    departed, invisible, beloved ideal, once a reality, and perhaps to be
    restored.... Not only the nobleness of a nation depends on the presence
    of this national consciousness, but also the nobleness of each
    individual citizen. Our dignity and rectitude are proportioned to our
    sense of relationship with something great, admirable, pregnant with
    high possibilities, worthy of sacrifice, a continual inspiration to
    self-repression and discipline by the presentation of aims larger and
    more attractive to our generous part than the securing of personal ease
    or prosperity. [Footnote: Theophrastus Such, chapter XVIII.]

Zealous as is George Eliot's faith in tradition, she is broad-minded enough
to see that it is limited in its influence by at least two causes,--by
reason and by the spirit of universal brotherhood. We have already seen
that she makes reason one of man's guides. In _Romola_ the right of the
individual to make a new course for action is distinctly expressed. Romola
had "the inspiring consciousness," we are told, "that her lot was vitally
united with the general lot which exalted even the minor details of
obligation into religion," and so "she was marching with a great army, she
was feeling the stress of a common life." Yet she began to feel that she
must not merely repeat the past; and the influence of Savonarola, in
breaking with Rome for the sake of a pure and holy life, inspired her.

    To her, as to him, there had come one of those moments in life when the
    soul must dare to act on its own warrant, not only without external law
    to appeal to, but in face of a law which is not unarmed with divine
    lightnings--lightnings that may yet fall if the warrant has been false.

It is reason's lamp by which "we walk evermore to higher paths;" and by its
aid, new deeds are to be done, new memories created, fresher traditions
woven into feeling and hope. National memories are to be superseded by the
spirit of brotherhood, for, as the race advances, nations are brought
closer to each other, have more in common, and development is made of
world-wide traditions. Theophrastus Such, in the last of his essays, tells
us that "it is impossible to arrest the tendencies of things towards the
quicker or slower fusion of races."

The environment of her characters George Eliot makes of very great
importance. She dwells upon the natural scenery which they love, but
especially does she magnify the importance of the social environment, and
the perpetual influence it has upon the whole of life. Mr. James Sully has
clearly interpreted her thought on this subject, and pointed out its
engrossing interest for her.

"A character divorced from its surroundings is an abstraction. A
personality is only a concrete living whole, when we attach it by a network
of organic filaments to its particular environment, physical and social.
Our author evidently chooses her surroundings with strict regard to her
characters. She paints nature less in its own beauty than in its special
aspect and significance for those whom she sets in its midst. 'The bushy
hedgerows,' 'the pool in the corner of the field where the grasses were
dank,' 'the sudden slope of the old marl-pit, making a red background for
the burdock'--these things are touched caressingly and lingered over
because they are so much to the 'midland-bred souls' whose history is here
recorded; so much because of cumulative recollection reaching back to the
time when they 'toddled among' them, or perhaps 'learnt them by heart
standing between their father's knees while he drove leisurely.' And what
applies to the natural environment applies still more to those narrower
surroundings which men construct for themselves, and which form their daily
shelter, their work-shop, their place of social influence. The human
interest which our author sheds about the mill, the carpenter's shop, the
dairy, the village church, and even the stiff, uninviting conventicle,
shows that she looks on these as having a living continuity with the people
whom she sets among them. Their artistic value is but a reflection of all
that they mean to those for whom they have made the nearer and habitually
enclosing world." The larger influence in the environment of any person,
according to George Eliot, is that which arises from tradition. Cut off
from the sustenance given by tradition, the person loses the motives, the
supports of his life. This is well shown in the case of Silas Marner, who
had fled from his early home and all his life held dear. George Eliot
describes the effect of such a change of environment.

    Even people whose lives have been made various by learning, sometimes
    find it hard to keep a fast hold on their habitual views of life, on
    their faith in the Invisible--nay, on the sense that their past joys
    and sorrows are a real experience, when they are suddenly transported
    to a new land, where the beings around them know nothing of their
    history, and share none of their ideas--where their mother earth shows
    another lap, and human life has other forms than those on which their
    souls have been nourished. Minds that have been unhinged from their old
    faith and love, have perhaps sought this Lethean influence of exile, in
    which the past becomes dreamy because its symbols have all vanished,
    and the present too is dreamy because it is linked with no memories.
    [Footnote: Chapter II.]

She delights to return again and again to the influences produced upon us
by the environment of childhood. In _The Mill on the Floss_ she tells us
how dear the earth becomes by such associations.

    We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood
    in it,--if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again
    every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat
    lisping to ourselves on the grass--the same hips and haws on the autumn
    hedgerows--the same redbreasts that we used to call "God's birds,"
    because they did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth
    that sweet monotony where everything is known, and _loved_ because it
    is known?

    The wood I walk in on this mild May day, with the young yellow-brown
    foliage of the oaks between me and the blue sky, the white
    star-flowers, and the blue-eyed speedwell, and the ground-ivy at
    my feet--what grove of tropic palms, what strange ferns or splendid
    broad-petalled blossoms, could ever thrill such deep and delicate
    fibres within me as this home-scene? These familiar flowers, these
    well-remembered bird-notes, this sky with its fitful brightness,
    these furrowed and grassy fields, each with a sort of personality given
    to it by the capricious hedgerows--such things as these are the mother
    tongue of our imagination, the language that is laden with all the
    subtle inextricable associations the fleeting hours of our childhood
    left behind them. Our delight in the sunshine on the deep-bladed grass
    to-day might be no more than the faint perception of wearied souls,
    if it were not for the sunshine and the grass in the far-off years,
    which still live in us, and transform our perception into love.
    [Footnote: Chapter V.]

In the backward glance of _Theophrastus Such_ this anchorage of the life in
familiar associations is described as a source of our faith in the
spiritual, even when all the childhood thoughts about those associations
cannot be retained.

    The illusions that began for us when we were less acquainted with evil
    have not lost their value when we discern them to be illusions. They
    feed the ideal better, and in loving them still, we strengthen, the
    precious habit of loving something not visibly, tangibly existent, but
    a spiritual product of our visible, tangible selves.

In the evolution philosophy she found the reconciliation between Locke and
Kant which she so earnestly desired to discover in girlhood. The old school
of experimentalists did not satisfy her with their philosophy; she saw
that the dictum that all knowledge is the result of sensation was not
satisfactory, that it was shallow and untrue. On the other hand, the
intellectual intuition of Schelling was not acceptable, nor even Kant's
categories of the mind. She wished to know why the mind instinctively
throws all experiences and thoughts under certain forms, and why it must
think under certain general methods. She found what to her was a perfectly
satisfactory answer to these questions in the theory of evolution as
developed by Darwin and Spencer. Through the aid of these men she found the
reconciliation between Locke and Kant, and discovered that both were wrong
and both right. So familiar has this reconciliation become, and so wide is
its acceptance, that no more than a mere hint of its meaning will be needed
here. This philosophy asserts, with Locke, that all knowledge begins in
sensation and experience; but with Kant, it affirms that knowledge passes
beyond experience and becomes intuitional. It differs from Kant as to the
source of the intuitions, pronouncing them the results of experience built
up into legitimate factors of the mind by heredity. Experience is inherited
and becomes intuitions. The intuitions are affirmed to be reliable, and, to
a certain extent, sure indications of truth. They are the results, to use
the phrase adopted by Lewes, of "organized experience;" experience verified
in the most effective manner in the organism which it creates and modifies.
According to this philosophy, man must trust the results of experience, but
he can by no means be certain that those results correspond with actuality.
They are actual for him, because it is impossible for him to go beyond
their range. Within the little round created by "organized experience,"
which is also Lewes's definition of science, man may trust his knowledge,
because it is consistent with itself; but beyond that strict limit he can
obtain no knowledge, and even knows that what is without it does not
correspond with what is within it. In truth, man knows only the relative,
not the absolute; he must rely on experience, not on creative reason.

George Eliot would have us believe that the sources of life are not inward,
but outward; not dependent on the deep affirmations of individual reason,
or on the soul's inherent capacity to see what is true, but on the effects
of environment and the results of social experience. Man is not related to
an infinite world of reason and spiritual truth, but only to a world of
universal law, hereditary conditions and social traditions. Invariable law,
heredity, feeling, tradition; these words indicate the trend of George
Eliot's mind, and the narrow limitations of her philosophy. Man is not only
the product of nature, but, according to this theory, nature limits his
moral capacity and the range of his mental activity. Environment is
regarded as all-powerful, and the material world as the _source_ of such
truth as we can know. In her powerful presentation of this philosophy of
life George Eliot indicates her great genius and her profound insight. At
the same time, her work is limited, her genius cramped, and her imagination
crippled, by a philosophy so narrow and a creed so inexpansive.




XI.


RELIGIOUS TENDENCIES.

As a great literary creator, George Eliot holds a singular position in
reference to religious beliefs. To most literary artists religion is a
vital part of life, which enters as a profound element into their teachings
or into their interpretations of character and incident. Religion deeply
affects the writings of Tennyson, Browning and Ruskin; its problems, its
hopes, its elements of mystery and infinity touch all their pages. In an
equal degree, though with a further departure from accredited beliefs, and
with a greater effect from philosophical or humanitarian influences, has it
wrought itself into the genius of Goethe, Carlyle and Hugo. Even the pages
of Voltaire, Shelley and Heine have been touched by its magic influence;
their words glow with its great interests, and bloom into beauty through
its inspiration. None of these is more affected by religion than George
Eliot has been; nor does it form a greater element in their writings than
in hers.

What is singular about George Eliot's position is, that she both affirms
and denies; she is deeply religious and yet rejects all religious
doctrines. No writer of the century has given religion a more important
relation to human interests or made it a larger element in his creative
work; and yet no other literary artist has so completely rejected all
positive belief in God and immortality. In her books she depicts every
phase of religious belief and life, and with sympathy and appreciation. A
very large proportion of her characters are clergymen or other religious
persons, who are described with accuracy and sympathy. Her own faith, the
theory of religion she accepts, is not given to any of her characters. What
she believes, appears only in her comments, and in the general effect which
life produces on the persons she describes. She believed Christianity is
subjectively true, that it is a fit expression of the inner nature and of
the spiritual wants of the soul. She did not propagate the pantheism of
Spinoza or the theism of Francis Newman, because she did not regard them as
so near the truth as the Christianity of Paul. As intellectual theories
they may have been preferable to her, but from the outlook of feeling which
she ever occupied, Paul was the truer teacher, and especially because his
teachings are linked with the spiritual desires and outpourings of many
generations. The spontaneous movements of the human mind, which have taken
possession of vast numbers of people through long periods of time, have a
depth of meaning which the speculations of no individual theorizer can ever
possess. Especially did she regard Christianity as a pure and noble
expression of the soul's inner wants and aspirations. It is an objective
realization of feeling and sentiment, it gives purpose and meaning to man's
cravings for a diviner life, it links generation to generation in a
continued series of beautiful traditions and noble inspirations. Her
intellectual view of the subject was expressed to a friend in these words:

    Deism seems to me the most incoherent of all systems, but to
    Christianity I feel no objection but its want of evidence.

She also expressed more sympathy with the simple faith of the multitude
than with the intellectual speculations of philosophers and theologians;
and again, she said that she felt more sympathy with than divergence from
the narrowest and least cultivated believer in Christianity. As a vehicle
of the accumulated hopes and traditions of the world's feeling and sorrow
she appreciated Christianity, saw its beauty, felt deeply in sympathy with
its spirit of renunciation, accepted its ideal of a divine life. She
learned from Feuerbach that religion, that Christianity, gives fit
expression to the emotional life and spiritual aspirations of man, and that
what it finds within in no degree corresponds with that which surrounds man
without.

Barren and lifeless as this view must seem to most persons, it was a source
of great confidence and inspiration to George Eliot. It enabled her to
appreciate the religious experiences of men, to portray most accurately and
sympathetically a great variety of religious believers, and to give this
side of life its place and proportion. At the same time, it was a personal
satisfaction to her to be able to keep in unbroken sympathy with the
religious experiences of her childhood and youth while intellectually
unable to accept the beliefs on which these experiences rested. More than
this, she believed that religion and spirituality of life are necessary
elements of human existence, that man can never cast them off, and that man
will lead a happy and harmonious life only when they have a true and
fitting expression in his culture and civilization. She maintained, with
Sara Hennell, that we may retain the religious sentiments in all their glow
and in all their depth of influence, at the same time that the doctrines of
theology and all those conceptions of nature and man on which they rest are
rejected; that we may have a disposition of the heart akin to that of the
prophets and saints of religion, while we intellectually cast aside all
which gave meaning to their faith and devotion. According to George Eliot,
religion rests upon feeling and the relations of man to humanity, as well
as upon his irreversible relations to the universe. In _The Mill on the
Floss_ she has given a definition of it, in speaking of Maggie's want of

    that knowledge of the irreversible laws within and without her, which,
    governing the habits, becomes morality, and developing the feelings of
    submission and dependence, becomes religion. [Footnote: Book IV.,
    chapter III.]

It is the human side of religion which interests George Eliot, its
influence morally, its sympathetic impulse, its power to comfort and
console. Its supernatural elements seem to have little influence over her
mind, at least only so far as they serve the moral aims of life. It is
humanity which attracts her mind, inspires her ideal hopes, kindles her
enthusiasms. Religion, apart from human encouragement and elevation, the
suppression of human sin and sorrow, and the increase of human sympathy and
joy, has little attraction for her. She takes no ground of opposition to
the beliefs of others, expresses no contempt for any form of belief in God;
but she measures all beliefs by their moral influence and their power to
enkindle the enthusiasm of humanity.

The pantheistic theism defended by Lewes in his book on Comte, in 1853,
seems to have been also accepted by George Eliot. We are told that her mind
long wavered between the two, though pantheism was less acceptable than
theism, on account of its moral indifference. It was undoubtedly the moral
bearings of the subject which all the time had the greatest weight with
her, and probably Kant's position had not a little effect on her opinions.
She came, at least, to find final satisfaction in agnosticism, to believe
that all intellectual speculations on the subject are in vain. At the same
time, her moral convictions grew stronger, and she believed in the power of
moral activity to work out a solution of life when no other can be found.
At this point she stood with Kant rather than with Comte, in accepting the
moral nature as a true guide. She very zealously believed with Fichte in a
moral order of the world, approving of the truth which underlies the words
of Fichte's English disciple, Matthew Arnold, when he discourses of "the
Eternal, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness." Her positive
convictions and beliefs on the subject lie in this direction, and she
firmly accepted the idea of a moral order and purpose. So much she thought
we can know and rely on; beyond this she believed we can know nothing. Her
later convictions on this subject have been expressed in a graphic manner
by one of her friends. "I remember how," says this person, "at Cambridge,
I walked with her once in the Fellows' Garden, of Trinity, on an evening
of rainy May; and she, stirred somewhat beyond her wont, and taking as her
text the three words which have been used so often as the inspiring
trumpet-calls of man,--the words _God, Immortality, Duty_,--pronounced,
with terrible emphasis, how inconceivable was the _first_, how unbelievable
the _second_, and yet how peremptory and absolute the _third_. Never,
perhaps, have sterner accents affirmed the sovereignty of impersonal and
unrecompensed law. I listened, and night fell; her grave, majestic
countenance turned towards me like a sibyl's in the gloom; it was as though
she withdrew from my grasp, one by one, the two scrolls of promise, and
left me the third scroll only, awful with inevitable fates." [Footnote:
F.W.H. Myers in The Century Magazine for November, 1881.] All her later
writings, at least, confirm this testimony to her assertion of the
inconceivableness of God, and her open denial of faith in theism. She
cannot have gone so far as to assert the non-existence of God, affirming
only that she could not conceive of such a being as actually existing. She
could not believe in a personal God, but Lewes's conception of a dynamic
life was doubtless acceptable.

With as much emphasis she pronounced immortality unbelievable. She early
accepted the theory of Charles Bray and Sara Hennell, that we live
hereafter only in the life of the race. The moral bearings of the subject
here also were most effective over her mind, for she felt that what we
ought most of all to consider is our relations to our fellow-men, and that
another world can have little real effect upon our present living. In her
_Westminster Review_ article on "Evangelical Teaching" as presented in
Young's _Night Thoughts_, she criticises the following declaration:--

  "Who tells me he denies his soul immortal,
  What'er his boast, has told me he's a knave.
  His duty 'tis to love himself alone,
  Nor care though mankind perish, if he smiles."

Her comments on these lines of Young's are full of interest, in view of her
subsequent teachings, and they open an insight into her tendencies of mind
very helpful to those who would understand her fully. Her interest in all
that is human, her craving for a more perfect development of human sympathy
and co-operation, are very clearly to be seen.

    We may admit that if the better part of virtue consists, as Young
    appears to think, in contempt for mortal joys, in "meditation of our
    own decease," and in "applause" of God in the style of a congratulatory
    address to Her Majesty--all which has small relation to the well-being
    of mankind on this earth--the motive to it must be gathered from
    something that lies quite outside the sphere of human sympathy. But,
    for certain other elements of virtue, which are of more obvious
    importance to untheological minds,--a delicate sense of our neighbor's
    rights, an active participation in the joys and sorrows of our
    fellow-men, a magnanimous acceptance of privation or suffering for
    ourselves when it is the condition of good to others,--in a word, the
    extension and intensification of our sympathetic nature,--we think it
    of some importance to contend that they have no more direct relation
    to the belief in a future state than the interchange of gases in the
    lungs has to the plurality of worlds. Nay, to us it is conceivable
    that in some minds the deep pathos lying in the thought of human
    mortality--that we are here for a little while and then vanish away,
    that this earthly life is all that is given to our loved ones and to
    our many suffering fellow-men--lies nearer the fountains of moral
    emotion than the conception of extended existence. And surely it ought
    to be a welcome fact, if the thought of _mortality_, as well as of
    immortality, be favorable to virtue. Do writers of sermons and
    religious novels prefer that we should be vicious in order that there
    may be a more evident political and social necessity for printed
    sermons and clerical fictions? Because learned gentlemen are
    theological, are we to have no more simple honesty and good-will? We
    can imagine that the proprietors of a patent water-supply have a dread
    of common springs; but, for our own part, we think there cannot be too
    great security against a lack of fresh water or of pure morality. To us
    it is a matter of unmixed rejoicing that this latter necessary of
    healthful life is independent of theological ink, and that its
    evolution is insured in the interaction of human souls as certainly as
    the evolution of science or art, with which, indeed, it is but a twin
    ray, melting into them with undefinable limits.

The considerations here presented are very effective ones, and quite as
truthful as effective. There are human supports for morality of the most
important and far-reaching character, and such as are outside of any
theological considerations. We ought, as George Eliot so well says, to
rejoice that the reasons for being moral are manifold, that sympathy with
others, as well as the central fires of personality, or the craving to be
in harmony with the Eternal, is able to conduce to a righteous conduct. Her
objections to Young's narrow and selfish defence of immortality are well
presented and powerful, but they do not touch such high considerations as
those offered by Kant. The craving for personal freedom and perfection is
as strong and as helpful to the race as sympathy for others and yearning to
lift up the weak and fallen. When the sense of personality is gone, man
loses much of his character; and personality rests on a deep spiritual
foundation which does not mean egotism merely, but which does mean for the
majority a conviction of a continued existence. The tendency of the present
time is to dwell less upon the theological and more upon the human motives
to conduct; but it is to be doubted if the highest phases of morality can
be retained without belief in God and a future life. The common virtues,
the sympathetic motives to conduct, the spirit of helpfulness, may be
retained intact, and even increased in power and efficiency, by those
motives George Eliot presents; but the loftier virtues of personal heroism
and devotion to truth in the face of martyrdom of one form or another, the
saintly craving for purity and holiness, and the sturdy spirit of liberty
which will suffer no bonds to exist, can be had in their full development
only with belief that God calls us to seek for perfect harmony with
himself. Kant's view that a divine law within, the living word of God,
calls ever to us as personal beings to attain the perfection of our natures
in the perfection of the race, and in conformity to the eternal law of
righteousness, is far nobler and truer than that which George Eliot
accepted.

She was not a mere unbeliever, however, for she did not thrust aside the
hope of immortality with a contemptuous hand. This problem she left where
she left that concerning God, in the background of thought, among the
questions which cannot be solved. She believed that the power to contribute
to the future good of the race is hope and promise enough. At the same
time, she was very tender of the positive beliefs of others, and especially
of that yearning so many feel after personal recognition and development.
Writing to one who passionately clung to such a hope, she said,--

    I have no controversy with the faith that cries out and clings from the
    depths of man's need. I only long, if it were possible to me, to help
    in satisfying the need of those who want a reason for living in the
    absence of what has been called consolatory belief. But all the while I
    gather a sort of strength from the certainty that there must be limits
    or negations in my own moral powers and life experience which may
    screen from me many possibilities of blessedness for our suffering
    human nature. The most melancholy thought surely would be that we in
    our own persons had measured and exhausted the sources of spiritual
    good. But we know the poor help the poor.

These words seem to be uttered in quite another tone than that in which she
asserted the unbelievableness of immortality, though they do not indicate
anything more than a tender yearning for human good and a belief that she
could not herself measure all the possibilities of such good. The
consolation of which she writes, comes only of human sympathy and
helpfulness. In writing to a friend suffering under the anguish of a recent
bereavement, she said,--

    For the first sharp pangs there is no comfort;--whatever goodness may
    surround us, darkness and silence still hang about our pain. But slowly
    the clinging companionship with the dead is linked with our living
    affections and duties, and we begin to feel our sorrow as a solemn
    initiation preparing us for that sense of loving, pitying fellowship
    with the fullest human lot which, I must think, no one who has tasted
    it will deny to be the chief blessedness of our life. And especially to
    know what the last parting is, seems needful to give the utmost
    sanctity of tenderness to our relations with each other. It is that
    above all which gives us new sensibilities to "the web of human things,
    birth and the grave, that are not as they were." And by that faith we
    come to find for ourselves the truth of the old declaration, that there
    is a difference between the ease of pleasure and blessedness, as the
    fullest good possible to us wondrously mixed mortals.

In these words she suggests that sorrow for the dead is a solemn initiation
into that full measure of human sympathy and tenderness which best fits us
to be men. Looking upon all human experience through feeling, she regarded
death as one of the most powerful of all the shaping agents of man's
destiny in this world. She speaks of death, in _Adam Bede, as "the great
reconciler" which unites us to those who have passed away from us. In the
closing scenes of _The Mill on the Floss it is presented as such a
reconciler, and as the only means of restoring Maggie to the affections of
those she had wronged. It is in _The Legend of Jubal, however, that George
Eliot has expressed her thought of what death has been in the individual
and social evolution of mankind. The descendants of Cain

                in glad idlesse throve,
  Nor hunted prey, nor with each other strove;

but all was peace and joy with them. There were no great aspirations, no
noble achievements, no tending toward progress and a higher life. On an
evil day, Lamech, when engaged in athletic sport, accidentally struck and
killed his fairest boy. All was then changed, the old love and peace passed
away; but good rather than evil came, for man began to lead a larger life.

  And a new spirit from that hour came o'er
  The race of Cain: soft idlesse was no more,
  But even the sunshine had a heart of care,
  Smiling with hidden dread--a mother fair
  Who folding to her breast a dying child
  Beams with feigned joy that but makes sadness mild.
  Death was now lord of Life, and at his word
  Time, vague as air before, new terrors stirred,
  With measured wing now audibly arose
  Throbbing through all things to some unknown close.
  Now glad Content by clutching Haste was torn,
  And Work grew eager, and Devise was born.
  It seemed the light was never loved before,
  Now each man said, "'Twill go and come no more."
  No budding branch, no pebble from the brook,
  No form, no shadow, but new dearness took
  From the one thought that life must have an end;
  And the last parting now began to send
  Diffusive dread through love and wedded bliss,
  Thrilling them into finer tenderness.
  Then Memory disclosed her face divine,
  That like the calm nocturnal lights doth shine
  Within the soul, and shows the sacred graves,
  And shows the presence that no sunlight craves,
  No space, no warmth, but moves among them all;
  Gone and yet here, and coming at each call,
  With ready voice and eyes that understand,
  And lips that ask a kiss, and dear responsive hand.
  Thus to Cain's race death was tear-watered seed
  Of various life and action-shaping need.
  But chief the sons of Lamech felt the stings
  Of new ambition, and the force that springs
  In passion beating on the shores of fate.
  They said, "There comes a night when all too late
  The mind shall long to prompt the achieving hand,
  The eager thought behind closed portals stand,
  And the last wishes to the mute lips press
  Buried ere death in silent helplessness.
  Then while the soul its way with sound can cleave,
  And while the arm is strong to strike and heave,
  Let soul and arm give shape that will abide
  And rule above our graves, and power divide
  With that great god of day, whose rays must bend
  As we shall make the moving shadows tend.
  Come, let us fashion acts that are to be,
  When we shall lie in darkness silently,
  As our young brother doth, whom yet we see
  Fallen and slain, but reigning in our will
  By that one image of him pale and still."

Death brings discord and sorrow into a world once happy and unaspiring, but
it also brings a spiritual eagerness and a divine craving. Jabal began to
tame the animals and to cultivate the soil, Tubal-Cain began to use fire
and to work metals, while Jubal discovered song and invented musical
instruments. Out of the longing and inner unrest which death brought, came
the great gift of music. It had power to

  Exult and cry, and search the inmost deep
  Where the dark sources of new passion sleep.

Jubal passes to other lands to teach them the gift of song, but at last
returns an old man to share in the affections of his people. He finds them
celebrating with great pomp the invention of music, but they will not
accept him as the Jubal they did honor to and believed dead. Then the voice
of his own past instructs him that he should not expect any praises or
glory in his own person; it is enough to live in the joy of a world
uplifted by music. Thus instructed, his broken life succumbs.

  Quitting mortality, a quenched sun-wave,
  The All-creating Presence for his grave.

In this poem George Eliot regards death as a means of drawing men into a
deeper and truer sympathy with each other. The same thought is more fully
presented when she exultingly sings,--

  O may I 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,
  And with their mild persistence urge man's search
  To vaster issues.

Death teaches us to forget self, to live for others, to pour out unstinted
sympathy and affection for those whose lives are short and difficult. It is
the same thought as that given in reply to Young; mortal sorrows and pains
should move us as hopes of immortality cannot. There accompanies this idea
the larger one, that our future life is to be found in the better life we
make for those who come after us. George Eliot believed with Comte, that we
are to live again in minds made better by what we have done and been, that
an influence goes out from every helpful and good life which makes the
lives of those who come after us fairer and grander.

She rests this belief on no sentimental or ideal grounds. Its justification
is to be found in science, in the law of hereditary transmission. Darwin
and Spencer base the great world-process of evolution on the two laws of
transmission and variation. The fittest survives, and the world advances.
The survival of every fit and positive form of life in the better forms
which succeed it is in accordance with a process or a law which holds true
up into all the highest and subtlest expressions of man's inner life.
Heredity is as true morally and spiritually as physically, and our moral
and spiritual offspring will partake of our own qualities; and, standing on
the vantage ground of our lives, will rise higher than we. What George
Eliot regards as the positive teaching of science becomes also an inspiring
religious belief to her.

George Eliot accepted the belief of an immortality in the race with a deep
and earnest conviction. It gave a great impulse to her life, it satisfied
her craving for closer harmony and sympathy with her fellows, it satisfied
her longing for the power to assuage sorrow and to comfort pain.

               So to live is heaven;
  To make undying music in the world,

and to have an influence for good result from our lives far down the
future. Through the beneficent influences we can awake in the world

  All our rarer, better, truer self.
  That sobbed religiously in yearning song,
  That watched to ease the burthen of the world,
     ... shall live till human time
  Shall fold its eyelids, and the human sky
  Be gathered like a scroll within the tomb
  Unread forever.

It was this belief, so satisfying to her and so ardently entertained, which
inspired the best and noblest of her poems. With an almost exultant joy,
with the enthusiasm of an old-time devotee, she sings of that immortality
which consists in renouncing all which is personal. The diffusive good
which sweetens life for others through all time is the real heaven she
sought.

        This is life to come,
  Which martyred men have made more glorious
  For us who strive to follow. May I reach
  That purest heaven, be to other souls
  The cup of strength in some great agony,
  Enkindle generous ardor, 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.

Believing that humanity represents an organic life and development, it was
easy for George Eliot to accept the idea of immortality in the race. She
reverenced the voice of truth

  Sent by the invisible choir of all the dead.

It was to her a divine voice, full of tenderness, sympathy and strength.
She was fascinated by this thought of the solemn, ever-present and
all-powerful influence of the dead over the living; there was mystery and
inspiration in this belief for her. All phases of religious history, all
religious experiences, were by her interpreted in the light of this
conception. The power of Jesus's life is, that his trancendent beauty of
soul lives in the "everlasting memories" of men, and that the cross of his
shame has become

                               The sign
  Of death that turned to more diffusive life

His influence, his memory, has lifted up the world with a great effect, and
made his life, spirit and ideas an inherent part of humanity. He has been
engrafted into the organic life of the race, and lives there a mighty and
an increasing influence. What has happened in his case happens in the case
of all the gifted and great. According to what they were living they enter
into the life of the world for weal or woe. To become an influence for good
in the future, to leave behind an undying impulse of thought and sympathy,
was the ambition of George Eliot; and this was all the immortality she
desired.

The religious tendencies of George Eliot's mind are rather to be noted in
her conception of renunciation than in her beliefs about God and
immortality. These latter beliefs were of a negative character as she
entertained them, but her doctrine of renunciation was of a very positive
nature. The central motive of that belief was not faith in God, but faith
in man. It gained all its charm and power for her out of her conception of
the organic life of the race. Her thought was, that we should live not for
self, but for humanity. What so many ardent souls have been willing to do
for the glory of God she was willing to do for the uplifting of man. The
spirit of renunciation with her took the old theologic form of expression
to a considerable extent, associated itself in her thought with the lofty
spiritual consecration and self-abnegation of other ages. So ardently did
she entertain this doctrine, so fully did she clothe it with the old forms
of expression, that many have been deceived into believing her a devoted
Christian. A little book was published in 1879 for the express purpose of
showing that "the doctrine of the cross" is the main thought presented
throughout all George Eliot's books. [Footnote: The Ethics of George
Eliot's Works. By the late John Crombie Brown. Edinburgh: William Blackwood
and Sons. 1879.] This book was read by George Eliot with much delight, and
was regarded by her as the only criticism of her works which did full
justice to her purpose in writing them. She is presented in that book as
the writer of fiction who "stands out as the deepest, broadest and most
catholic illustrator of the true ethics of Christianity; the most earnest
and persistent expositor of the true doctrine of the cross, that we are
born and should live to something higher than love of happiness."
"Self-sacrifice as the divine law of life, and its only true fulfilment;
self-sacrifice, not in some ideal sphere sought out for ourselves in the
vain spirit of self-pleasing, but wherever God has placed us, amid homely,
petty anxieties, loves and sorrows; the aiming at the highest attainable
good in our own place, irrespective of all results of joy or sorrow, of
apparent success or failure--such is the lesson" that is conveyed in all
her books. George Eliot is presented as a true teacher of the doctrine
which admonishes us to love not pleasure but God, to forsake all things
else for the sake of obedience and devotion, to shun the world and to
devote ourselves perpetually to God's service. The Christian doctrine of
renunciation has always bidden men put their eyes on God, forget everything
beside, and seek only for that divine life which is spiritual union with
the Eternal.

That doctrine was not George Eliot's. Christianity bids men renounce the
world for the sake of a perfect union with God; George Eliot desires men to
renounce selfishness for the sake of humanity. The Christian idea includes
the renunciation of all self-seeking, it bids us give ourselves for others,
it even teaches us that others are to be preferred to ourselves. Yet all
this is to be done, not merely for the sake of the present, but in view of
an eternal destiny, and because we can thus only fulfil God's will and
attain to holy oneness with him. George Eliot did, however, throughout her
writings, identify the altruist impulse to live for others with the
Christian doctrine of the cross. To her, the life of devotion to humanity,
which she has so beautifully presented in the poem, "O may I join the Choir
Invisible," was the true interpretation of the Christian doctrine of
self-sacrifice. She accepted this world-old religious belief, consecrated
with all the tears and sacrifices and martyrdoms of the world, as a true
expression of a want of the soul, as the poetic expression of emotions and
aspirations which ever live in man. It is a beautiful symbolism of that
need of his fellows man ever has, of the conviction which is growing
stronger, that man must live for the race and not for himself. The
individual is nothing except as he identifies himself with the corporate
body of humanity; the true fulfilment of life comes only to those who in
some way recognize this fact, and give themselves for the good of the
world. George Eliot even goes so far in her willingness to renounce self
that she says in _Theophrastus Such_, "I am really at the point of finding
that this world would be worth living in without any lot of one's own. Is
it not possible for me to enjoy the scenery of earth without saying to
myself, I have a cabbage-garden in it?"

The relations of the individual to the past and the present of the race
make duties and burdens and woes for him which he has not created, but
which are given him to bear. The sins of others bring pain and sorrow to
us; we are a part of all the good and evil of the world. The present is
determined by the past; we must accept the lot created for us by those who
have gone before us. "He felt the hard pressure of our common lot, the yoke
of that mighty, resistless destiny laid upon us by the past of other men."
says George Eliot of one of her characters. The past brings us burdens and
sorrows difficult to bear; it also brings us duties. We owe to it many
things; our debt to the race is an immense one. That debt can only be
discharged by a life of devotion and loyalty, by doing what we can to make
humanity better. The Christian idea of a debt owed to God, which we can
only repay by perfect loyalty and self-abnegation, becomes to George Eliot
a debt owed to humanity, which we can only repay in the purest altruistic
spirit.

The doctrine of renunciation has been presented again and again by George
Eliot; her books are full of it. It is undoubtedly the central theme of all
her teaching. In the conversation between Romola and Savonarola when she is
escaping from her home and is met by him, it is vividly expressed.
Savonarola speaks as a Christian, as a Catholic, as a monk; but the words
he uses quite as well serve to express George Eliot's convictions. The
Christian symbolism laid aside, and all was true to her; yet her feelings,
her sense of corporate unity with the past, would not even suffer her to
lay aside the symbolism in presenting her thoughts on this subject. Romola
pleads that she would not have left Florence as long as she could fulfil a
duty to her father: but Savonarola reminds her that there are other duties,
other ties, other burdens.

    "If your own people are wearing a yoke, will you slip from under it,
    instead of struggling with them to lighten it? There is hunger and
    misery in our streets, yet you say, 'I care not; I have my own sorrows;
    I will go away, if peradventure I can ease them.' The servants of God
    are struggling after a law of justice, peace and charity, that the
    hundred thousand citizens among whom you were born may be governed
    righteously; but you think no more of that than if you were a bird,
    that may spread its wings and fly whither it will in search of food to
    its liking. And yet you have scorned the teaching of the Church, my
    daughter. As if you, a wilful wanderer, following your own blind
    choice, were not below the humblest Florentine woman who stretches
    forth her hands with her own people, and craves a blessing for them;
    and feels a close sisterhood with the neighbor who kneels beside her,
    and is not of her own blood; and thinks of the mighty purpose that God
    has for Florence; and waits and endures because the promised work is
    great, and she feels herself little."

She then asserts her purpose not to go away to a life of ease and
self-indulgence, but rather to one of hardship; but that plea is not
suffered to pass.

    "You are seeking your own will, my daughter. You are seeking some good
    other 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? Sorrow without duty--bitter herbs,
    and no bread with them."

Savonarola bids her draw the crucifix from her bosom, which she secretly
carries, and appeals to her by that symbol of devotion and self-sacrifice
to remain true to her duties, to accept willingly the burdens given her to
bear, not to think of self, but only of others. He condemns the pagan
teaching she had received, of individual self-seeking, and the spirit of
culture, refinement and ease which accompanied that teaching. She looks on
the image of a suffering life, a life offered willingly as a sacrifice for
others' good, and he says,--

    "Conform your life to that image, my daughter; make your sorrow an
    offering; and when the fire of divine charity burns within you, and you
    behold the need of your fellow-men by the light of that flame, you will
    not call your offering great. You have carried yourself proudly, as one
    who held herself not of common blood or of common thoughts; but you
    have been as one unborn to the true life of man. What! you say your
    love for your father no longer tells you to stay in Florence? Then,
    since that tie is snapped, you are without a law, without religion; you
    are no better than a beast of the field when she is robbed of her
    young. If the yearning of a fleshly love is gone, you are without love,
    without obligation. See, then, my daughter, how you are below the life
    of the believer who worships that image of the Supreme Offering, and
    feels the glow of a common life with the lost multitude for whom that
    offering was made, and beholds the history of the world as the history
    of a great redemption, in which he is himself a fellow-worker, in his
    own place and among his own people! If you held that faith, my beloved
    daughter, you would not be a wanderer flying from suffering, and
    blindly seeking the good of a freedom which is lawlessness. You would
    feel that Florence was the home of your soul as well as your
    birthplace, because you would see the work that was given you to do
    there. If you forsake your place, who will fill it? You ought to be in
    your place now, helping in the great work by which God will purify
    Florence and raise it to be the guide of the nations. What! the earth
    is full of iniquity--full of groans--the light is still struggling with
    a mighty darkness, and you say, 'I cannot bear my bonds; I will burst
    them asunder; I will go where no man claims me?' My daughter, every
    bond of your life is a debt: the right lies in the payment of that
    debt; it can lie nowhere else. In vain will you wander over the earth;
    you will be wandering forever away from the right."

Romola hesitates,