THE 'WESTMINSTER REVIEW.'
Dr. and Mrs. Chapman were at this time in the habit of admitting a few
select boarders, chiefly engaged in literary pursuits, to their large
house in the Strand, and Miss Evans, at their invitation, made her home
with them. Thus she found herself at once in the centre of a circle
consisting of some of the most advanced thinkers and brilliant
_litterateurs_ of the day; a circle which, partly consisting of
contributors to the _Westminster Review_, was strongly imbued with
scientific tendencies, being particularly partial to the doctrines of
Positive Philosophy.
Those were in truth the palmy days of the _Westminster Review_. Herbert
Spencer, G. H. Lewes, John Oxenford, James and Harriet Martineau,
Charles Bray, George Combe, and Professor Edward Forbes were among the
writers that made it the leading expositor of the philosophic and
scientific thought of the age. It occupied a position something midway
between that of the _Nineteenth Century_ and the _Fortnightly_.
Scorning, like the latter, to pander to the frivolous tastes of the
majority, it appealed to the most thoughtful and enlightened section of
the reading public, giving especial prominence to the philosophy of the
Comtist School; and while not so fashionable as the _Nineteenth
Century_, it could boast among its contributors names quite as famous,
destined as they were to become the foremost of their time and country.
With this group of illustrious writers Miss Evans was now associated,
and the articles she contributed from the year 1852 to 1858 are among
the most brilliant examples of periodical literature. The first notice
by her pen is a brief review of Carlyle's 'Life of Sterling' for January
1852, and judging from internal evidence, as regards style and method of
treatment, the one on Margaret Fuller, in the next number, must be by
the same hand.
To the biographer there is a curious interest in what she says in her
first notice about this kind of literature, and it would be well for the
world if writers were to lay it more generally to heart. "We have often
wished that genius would incline itself more frequently to the task of
the biographer, that when some great or good personage dies, instead of
the dreary three-or five-volumed compilations of letter, and diary, and
detail, little to the purpose, which two-thirds of the public have not
the chance, nor the other third the inclination, to read, we could have
a real "life," setting forth briefly and vividly the man's inward and
outward struggles, aims, and achievements, so as to make clear the
meaning which his experience has for his fellows. A few such lives
(chiefly autobiographies) the world possesses, and they have, perhaps,
been more influential on the formation of character than any other kind
of reading." Then again, speaking of the 'Memoirs of Margaret Fuller,'
she remarks, in reference to the same topic, "The old-world biographies
present their subjects generally as broken fragments of humanity,
noticeable because of their individual peculiarities, the new-world
biographies present their subjects rather as organic portions of
society."
George Eliot's estimate of Margaret Fuller (for there can be little
doubt that it is hers) possesses too rare an interest for readers not to
be given here in her own apposite and pungent words: "We are at a loss
whether to regard her as the parent or child of New England
Transcendentalism. Perhaps neither the one nor the other. It was
essentially an intellectual, moral, spiritual regeneration--a renewing
of the whole man--a kindling of his aspirations after full development
of faculty and perfect symmetry of being. Of this sect Margaret Fuller
was the priestess. In conversation she was as copious and oracular as
Coleridge, brilliant as Sterling, pungent and paradoxical as Carlyle;
gifted with the inspired powers of a Pythoness, she saw into the hearts
and over the heads of all who came near her, and, but for a sympathy as
boundless as her self-esteem, she would have despised the whole human
race! Her frailty in this respect was no secret either to herself or her
friends.... We must say that from the time she became a mother till the
final tragedy when she perished with her husband and child within sight
of her native shore, she was an altered woman, and evinced a greatness
of soul and heroism of character so grand and subduing, that we feel
disposed to extend to her whole career the admiration and sympathy
inspired by the closing scenes.
"While her reputation was at its height in the literary circles of
Boston and New York, she was so self-conscious that her life seemed to
be a studied act, rather than a spontaneous growth; but this was the
mere flutter on the surface; the well was deep, and the spring genuine;
and it is creditable to her friends, as well as to herself, that such at
all times was their belief."
In this striking summing-up of a character, the penetrating observer of
human nature--taking in at a glance and depicting by a few masterly
touches all that helps to make up a picture of the real living
being--begins to reveal herself.
These essays in the _Westminster Review_ are not only capital reading in
themselves, but are, of course, doubly attractive to us because they let
out opinions, views, judgments of things and authors, which we should
never otherwise have known. Marian Evans had not yet hidden herself
behind the mask of George Eliot, and in many of these wise and witty
utterances of hers we are admitted behind the scenes of her mind, so to
speak, and see her in her own undisguised person--before she had assumed
the _role_ of the novelist, showing herself to the world mainly through
her dramatic impersonations.
In these articles, written in the fresh maturity of her powers, we learn
what George Eliot thought about many subjects; we learn who were her
favourite authors in fiction; what opinions she held on art and poetry;
what was her attitude towards the political and social questions of the
day; what was her conception of human life in general. There is much
here, no doubt, that one might have been prepared to find, but a good
deal, too, that comes upon one with the freshness of surprise.
A special interest attaches naturally to what she has to say about her
own branch of art--the novel. Though she had probably no idea that she
was herself destined to become one of the great masters of fiction, she
had evidently a special predilection for works of that kind, noticeable
because hitherto her bent might have appeared almost exclusively towards
philosophy. To the three-volume circulating-library novel of the
ordinary stamp she is merciless in her sarcasm. One of her most pithy
articles of this time, or rather later, its date being 1856, is directed
against "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists." "These," she says, "consist of
the frothy, the prosy, the pious, or the pedantic. But it is a mixture
of all these--a composite order of feminine fatuity, that produces the
largest class of such novels, which we shall distinguish as the _mind
and millinery_ species. We had imagined that destitute women turned
novelists, as they turned governesses, because they had no other
'ladylike' means of getting their bread. Empty writing was excused by an
empty stomach, and twaddle was consecrated by tears.... It is clear that
they write in elegant boudoirs, with violet-coloured ink and a ruby pen,
that they must be entirely indifferent to publishers' accounts, and
inexperienced in every form of poverty except poverty of brains."
After finding fault with what she sarcastically calls the _white
neck-cloth_ species of novel, "a sort of medical sweetmeat for Low
Church young ladies," she adds, "The real drama of Evangelicalism, and
it has abundance of fine drama for any one who has genius enough to
discern and reproduce it, lies among the middle and lower classes. Why
can we not have pictures of religious life among the industrial classes
in England, as interesting as Mrs. Stowe's pictures of religious life
among the negroes?"
She who asked that question was herself destined, a few years later, to
answer her own demand in most triumphant fashion. Already here and there
we find hints and suggestions of the vein that was to be so fully worked
out in 'Scenes of Clerical Life' and 'Adam Bede.' Her intimate knowledge
of English country life, and the hold it had on her imagination, every
now and then eats its way to the surface of her writings, and stands out
amongst its surrounding matter with a certain unmistakable native force.
After censuring the lack of reality with which peasant life is commonly
treated in art, she makes the following apposite remarks, suggested by
her own experience: "The notion that peasants are joyous, that the
typical moment to represent a man in a smock-frock is when he is
cracking a joke and showing a row of sound teeth, that cottage matrons
are usually buxom, and village children necessarily rosy and merry, are
prejudices difficult to dislodge from the artistic mind which looks for
its subjects into literature instead of life. The painter is still under
the influence of idyllic literature, which has always expressed the
imagination of the town-bred rather than the truth of rustic life.
Idyllic ploughmen are jocund when they drive their team afield; idyllic
shepherds make bashful love under hawthorn bushes; idyllic villagers
dance in the chequered shade and refresh themselves not immoderately
with spicy nut-brown ale. But no one who has seen much of actual
ploughmen thinks them jocund, no one who is well acquainted with the
English peasantry can pronounce them merry. The slow gaze, in which no
sense of beauty beams, no humour twinkles; the slow utterance, and the
heavy slouching walk, remind one rather of that melancholy animal the
camel, than of the sturdy countryman, with striped stockings, red
waistcoat, and hat aside, who represents the traditional English
peasant. Observe a company of haymakers. When you see them at a distance
tossing up the forkfuls of hay in the golden light, while the wagon
creeps slowly with its increasing burden over the meadow, and the bright
green space which tells of work done gets larger and larger, you
pronounce the scene 'smiling,' and you think these companions in labour
must be as bright and cheerful as the picture to which they give
animation. Approach nearer and you will find haymaking time is a time
for joking, especially if there are women among the labourers; but the
coarse laugh that bursts out every now and then, and expresses the
triumphant taunt, is as far as possible from your conception of idyllic
merriment. That delicious effervescence of the mind which we call fun
has no equivalent for the northern peasant, except tipsy revelry; the
only realm of fancy and imagination for the English clown exists at the
bottom of the third quart pot.
"The conventional countryman of the stage, who picks up pocket-books and
never looks into them, and who is too simple even to know that honesty
has its opposite, represents the still lingering mistake, that an
unintelligible dialect is a guarantee for ingenuousness, and that
slouching shoulders indicate an upright disposition. It is quite sure
that a thresher is likely to be innocent of any adroit arithmetical
cheating, but he is not the less likely to carry home his master's corn
in his shoes and pocket; a reaper is not given to writing
begging-letters, but he is quite capable of cajoling the dairy-maid into
filling his small-beer bottle with ale. The selfish instincts are not
subdued by the sight of buttercups, nor is integrity in the least
established by that classic rural occupation, sheep-washing. To make men
moral something more is requisite than to turn them out to grass."
Every one must see that this is the essay writing of a novelist rather
than of a moral philosopher. The touches are put on with the vigour of a
Velasquez. Balzac, or Flaubert, or that most terrible writer of the
modern French school of fiction, the author of 'Le Sabot Rouge,' never
described peasant life with more downright veracity. In the eyes of Miss
Evans this quality of veracity is the most needful of all for the
artist. Because "a picture of human life, such as a great artist can
give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to
what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of
sentiment." For "art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of
amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men
beyond the bounds of our personal lot. All the more sacred is the task
of the artist when he undertakes to paint the life of the People.
Falsification here is far more pernicious than in the more artificial
aspects of life. It is not so very serious that we should have false
ideas about evanescent fashions--about the manners and conversation of
beaux and duchesses; but it is serious that our sympathy with the
perennial joys and struggles, the toil, the tragedy, and the humour in
the life of our more heavily laden fellow-men should be perverted, and
turned towards a false object instead of a true one."
George Eliot afterwards faithfully adhered to the canons fixed by the
critic. Whether this consciousness of a moral purpose was altogether a
gain to her art may be more fitly discussed in connection with the
analysis of her works of fiction. It is only needful to point out here
how close and binding she wished to make the union between ethics and
aesthetics.
Almost identical views concerning fundamental laws of Art are discussed
in an equally terse, vigorous, and pictorial manner in an article called
'Realism in Art: Recent German Fiction.' This article, however, is not
by George Eliot, but by George Henry Lewis. It was published in October
1858, and appeared after their joint sojourn in Germany during the
spring and summer of that year. I think that if one carefully compares
'Realism in Art' with George Eliot's other articles, there appears
something like a marriage of their respective styles in this paper. It
seems probable that Lewis, with his flexible adaptiveness, had come
under the influence of George Eliot's powerful intellect, and that many
of the views he expresses here at the same time render George Eliot's,
as they frequently appear, identical with hers. In the article in
question the manner as well as the matter has a certain suggestion of
the novelist's style. For example she frequently indicates the quality
of human speech by its resemblance to musical sounds. She is fond of
speaking of "the _staccato_ tones of a voice," "an _adagio_ of utter
indifference," and in the above-mentioned essay there are such
expressions as the "stately _largo_" of good German prose. Again, in the
article in question, we find the following satirical remarks about the
slovenly prose of the generality of German writers: "To be gentlemen of
somewhat slow, sluggish minds is perhaps their misfortune; but to be
writers deplorably deficient in the first principles of composition is
assuredly their fault. Some men pasture on platitudes, as oxen upon
meadow-grass; they are at home on a dead-level of common-place, and do
not desire to be irradiated by a felicity of expression." And in another
passage to the same effect the author says sarcastically, "Graces are
gifts: it can no more be required of a professor that he should write
with felicity than that he should charm all beholders with his personal
appearance; but literature requires that he should write intelligibly
and carefully, as society requires that he should wash his face and
button his waistcoat." Some of these strictures are very similar in
spirit to what George Eliot had said in her review of Heinrich Heine,
published in 1856, where complaining of the general cumbrousness of
German writers, she makes the following cutting remark: "A German comedy
is like a German sentence: you see no reason in its structure why it
should ever come to an end, and you accept the conclusion as an
arrangement of Providence rather than of the author."
A passage in this article, which exactly tallies with George Eliot's
general remarks on Art, must not be omitted here. "Art is a
representation of Reality--a Representation inasmuch as it is not the
thing itself, but only represents it, must necessarily be limited by the
nature of its medium.... Realism is thus the basis of all Art, and its
antithesis is not Idealism but Falsism.... To misrepresent the forms of
ordinary life is no less an offence than to misrepresent the forms of
ideal life: a pug-nosed Apollo, or Jupiter in a great-coat, would not be
more truly shocking to an artistic mind than are those senseless
falsifications of Nature into which incompetence is led under the
pretence of 'beautifying' Nature. Either give us true peasants or leave
them untouched; either paint no drapery at all, or paint it with the
utmost fidelity; either keep your people silent, or make them speak the
idiom of their class."
Among German novelists (or rather writers of short stories), Paul Heyse
is one of the few who is singled out for special praise in this review.
And it is curious that there should be a tale by this eminent author
called 'The Lonely Ones' (which also appeared in 1858), in which an
incident occurs forcibly recalling the catastrophe of Grandcourt's death
in 'Daniel Deronda': the incident--although unskilfully introduced--of a
Neapolitan fisherman whose momentary murderous hesitation to rescue his
drowning friend ends in lifelong remorse for his death.
What makes the article in question particularly interesting are the
allusions to the German tour, which give it an almost biographical
interest. As has been mentioned already, Mr. Lewis and George Eliot were
travelling in Germany in the spring of 1858, and in a letter to a friend
she writes: "Then we had a delicious journey to Salzburg, and from
thence through the Salz-Kammergut to Vienna, from Vienna to Prague, and
from Prague to Dresden, where we spent our last six weeks in quiet work
and quiet worship of the Madonna." And in his essay on Art Mr. G. H.
Lewis alludes to the most priceless art-treasure Dresden contains,
"Raphael's marvellous picture, the Madonna di San Sisto," as furnishing
the most perfect illustration of what he means by Realism and Idealism.
Speaking of the child Jesus he says: "In the never-to-be-forgotten
divine babe, we have at once the intensest realism of presentation with
the highest idealism of conception: the attitude is at once grand, easy
and natural; the face is that of a child, but the child is divine: in
those eyes and in that brow there is an indefinable something which,
greater than the expression of the angels, grander than that of pope or
saint, is to all who see it a perfect _truth_; we feel that humanity in
its highest conceivable form is before us, and that to transcend such a
form would be to lose sight of the _human_ nature there represented." A
similar passage occurs in 'The Mill on the Floss,' where Philip Wakem
says: "The greatest of painters only once painted a mysteriously divine
child; he couldn't have told how he did it, and we can't tell why we
feel it to be divine."
Enough has probably been quoted from George Eliot's articles to give the
reader some idea of her views on art. But they are so rich in happy
aphorisms, originality of illustration, and raciness of epithet that
they not only deserve attentive study because they were the first fruits
of the mind that afterwards gave to the world such noble and perfect
works as 'The Mill on the Floss' and 'Silas Marner,' but are well worth
attention for their own sake. Indeed nothing in George Eliot's fictions
excels the style of these papers. And what a clear, incisive, masterly
style it was! Her prose in those days had a swiftness of movement, an
epigrammatic felicity, and a brilliancy of antithesis which we look for
in vain in the over-elaborate sentences and somewhat ponderous wit of
'Theophrastus Such.'
A very vapid paper on 'Weimar and its Celebrities,' April 1859, which a
writer in the _Academy_ attributes to the same hand, I know not on what
authority, does not possess a single attribute that we are in the habit
of associating with the writings of George Eliot. That an author who, by
that time, had already produced some of her very finest work, namely,
the 'Scenes of Clerical Life,' and 'Adam Bede,' should have been
responsible simultaneously for the trite commonplaces ventilated in this
article is simply incredible. It is true that Homer is sometimes found
nodding, and the right-hand of the greatest master may forget its
cunning, but would George Eliot in her most abject moments have been
capable of penning such a sentence as this in connection with Goethe?
"Would not Fredricka or Lili have been a more genial companion than
Christina Vulpius for that great poet of whom his native land is so
justly proud?" It is not worth while to point out other platitudes such
as flow spontaneously from the facile pen of a penny-a-liner; but the
consistent misspelling of every name may be alluded to in passing. Thus
we read "Lily" for "Lely," "Zetter" for "Zelter," "Quintus Filein" for
"Fixlein," "Einsedel" for "Einsiedel," etc. etc. This, in itself, would
furnish no conclusive argument, supposing George Eliot to have been on
the Continent and out of the way of correcting proofs. But as it
happened she was in England in April 1859, and it is, therefore, on all
grounds impossible that this worthless production should be hers.
Perhaps her two most noteworthy articles are the one called 'Evangelical
Teaching,' published in 1855, and the other on 'Worldliness and other
Worldliness,' which appeared in 1857. This happy phrase, by the way, was
first used by Coleridge, who says, "As there is a worldliness or the too
much of this life, so there is another _worldliness_ or rather _other
worldliness_ equally hateful and selfish with _this worldliness_." These
articles are curious because they seem to occupy a midway position
between George Eliot's earliest and latest phase of religious belief.
But at this period she still felt the recoil from the pressure of a
narrowing dogmatism too freshly not to launch back at it some of the
most stinging shafts from the armoury of her satire. Not Heine himself,
in his trenchant sallies, surpasses the irony with which some of her
pages are bristling. To ignore this stage in George Eliot's mental
development would be to lose one of the connecting links in her history:
a history by no means smooth and uneventful, as some times superficially
represented, but full of strong contrasts, abrupt transitions, outward
and inward changes sympathetically charged with all the meaning of this
transitional time. Two extracts from the above-mentioned articles will
amply testify to what has just been said.
"Given a man with a moderate intellect, a moral standard not higher than
the average, some rhetorical affluence and great glibness of speech,
what is the career in which, without the aid of birth or money, he may
most easily attain power and reputation in English society? Where is
that Goshen of intellectual mediocrity in which a smattering of science
and learning will pass for profound instruction, where platitudes will
be accepted as wisdom, bigoted narrowness as holy zeal, unctuous egoism
as God-given piety? Let such a man become an evangelical preacher; he
will then find it possible to reconcile small ability with great
ambition, superficial knowledge with the prestige of erudition, a
middling morale with a high reputation for sanctity. Let him shun
practical extremes, and be ultra only in what is purely theoretic. Let
him be stringent on predestination, but latitudinarian on fasting;
unflinching in insisting on the eternity of punishment, but diffident of
curtailing the substantial comforts of time; ardent and imaginative on
the pre-millenial advent of Christ, but cold and cautious towards every
other infringement of the _status quo_. Let him fish for souls, not with
the bait of inconvenient singularity, but with the drag-net of
comfortable conformity. Let him be hard and literal in his
interpretation only when he wants to hurl texts at the heads of
unbelievers and adversaries, but when the letter of the Scriptures
presses too closely on the genteel Christianity of the nineteenth
century, let him use his spiritualising alembic and disperse it into
impalpable ether. Let him preach less of Christ than of Antichrist; let
him be less definite in showing what sin is than in showing who is the
Man of Sin; less expansive on the blessedness of faith than on the
accursedness of infidelity. Above all, let him set up as an interpreter
of prophecy, rival 'Moore's Almanack' in the prediction of political
events, tickling the interest of hearers who are but moderately
spiritual by showing how the Holy Spirit has dictated problems and
charades for their benefit; and how, if they are ingenious enough to
solve these, they may have their Christian graces nourished by learning
precisely to whom they may point as 'the horn that had eyes,' 'the lying
prophet,' and the 'unclean spirits.' In this way he will draw men to him
by the strong cords of their passions, made reason-proof by being
baptized with the name of piety. In this way he may gain a metropolitan
pulpit; the avenues to his church will be as crowded as the passages to
the opera; he has but to print his prophetic sermons, and bind them in
lilac and gold, and they will adorn the drawing-room table of all
evangelical ladies, who will regard as a sort of pious 'light reading'
the demonstration that the prophecy of the locusts, whose sting is in
their tail, is fulfilled in the fact of the Turkish commander having
taken a horse's tail for his standard, and that the French are the very
frogs predicted in the Revelations."
Even more scathing than this onslaught on a certain type of the popular
evangelical preacher, is the paper on the poet Young, one of the
wittiest things from George Eliot's pen, wherein she castigates with all
her powers of sarcasm and ridicule that class of believers who cannot
vilify this life sufficiently in order to make sure of the next, and
who, in the care of their own souls, are careless of the world's need.
Her analysis of the 'Night Thoughts' remains one of the most brilliant
criticisms of its kind. Young's contempt for this earth, of all of us,
and his exaltation of the starry worlds above, especially provoke his
reviewer's wrath. This frame of mind was always repulsive to George
Eliot, who could never sufficiently insist on the need of man's
concentrating his love and energy on the life around him. She never felt
much toleration for that form of aspiration that would soar to some
shadowy infinite beyond the circle of human fellowship. One of the most
epigrammatic passages in this article is where she says of Young, "No
man can be better fitted for an Established Church. He personifies
completely her nice balance of temporalities and spiritualities. He is
equally impressed with the momentousness of death and of burial fees;
he languishes at once for immortal life and for 'livings;' he has a
fervid attachment to patrons in general, but on the whole prefers the
Almighty. He will teach, with something more than official conviction,
the nothingness of earthly things; and he will feel something more than
private disgust, if his meritorious efforts in directing men's attention
to another world are not rewarded by substantial preferment in this. His
secular man believes in cambric bands and silk stockings as
characteristic attire for 'an ornament of religion and virtue;' he hopes
courtiers will never forget to copy Sir Robert Walpole; and writes
begging letters to the king's mistress. His spiritual man recognizes no
motives more familiar than Golgotha and 'the skies;' it walks in
graveyards, or soars among the stars.... If it were not for the prospect
of immortality, he considers it would be wise and agreeable to be
indecent, or to murder one's father; and, heaven apart, it would be
extremely irrational in any man not to be a knave. Man, he thinks, is a
compound of the angel and the brute; the brute is to be humbled by being
reminded of its 'relation to the stars,' and frightened into moderation
by the contemplation of deathbeds and skulls; the angel is to be
developed by vituperating this world and exalting the next, and by this
double process you get the Christian--'the highest style of man.' With
all this our new-made divine is an unmistakable poet. To a clay
compounded chiefly of the worldling and the rhetorician there is added a
real spark of Promethean fire. He will one day clothe his apostrophes
and objurgations, his astronomical religion and his charnel house
morality, in lasting verse, which will stand, like a Juggernaut made of
gold and jewels, at once magnificent and repulsive: for this divine is
Edward Young, the future author of the 'Night Thoughts.'"
It has seemed appropriate to quote thus largely from these essays,
because, never having been reprinted, they are to all intents and
purposes inaccessible to the general reader. Yet they contain much that
should not willingly be consigned to the dust and cobwebs, among which
obsolete magazines usually sink into oblivion. They may as well be
specified here according to their dates. 'Carlyle's Life of Sterling,'
January 1852; 'Woman in France: Madame de Sable,' October 1854;
'Evangelical Teaching: Dr. Cumming,' October 1855; 'German Wit: Heinrich
Heine,' January 1856; 'Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,' October 1856;
'The Natural History of German Life,' July 1856; and 'Worldliness and
other Worldliness: the Poet Young,' January 1857.
Miss Evans's main employment on the _Westminster Review_ was, however,
editorial. She used to write a considerable portion of the summary of
contemporary literature at the end of each number. But her co-operation
as sub-editor ceased about the close of 1853, when she left Dr.
Chapman's house, and went to live in apartments in a small house in
Cambridge Terrace, Hyde Park. Marian Evans was not entirely dependent at
this time on the proceeds of her literary work, her father having
settled the sum of 80l. to 100l. a year on her for life, the capital of
which, however, did not belong to her. She was very generous with her
money; and although her earnings at this time were not considerable,
they were partly spent on her poor relations.