THE MILL ON THE FLOSS.
While the public had been trying to discover who the mysterious George
Eliot could possibly be, one person there was who immediately penetrated
the disguise, and felt positive as to the identity of the author. On
reading the 'Scenes,' and especially 'Adam Bede,' he was convinced that
no one but a member of his own family could have written these stories.
He recognised incidents, touches, a saying here or there, just the
things that no one outside his own home could by any chance have come
upon. But George Eliot's brother kept this discovery closely locked
within his own breast. He trembled lest any one else should discover the
secret, fearing the outcry of neighbours who might not always feel that
the author had represented them in colours sufficiently flattering.
When the 'Mill on the Floss' appeared, however, the veil was lifted, and
people heard that George Eliot had once been a Miss Marian Evans, who
came from the neighbourhood of Nuneaton in Warwickshire. To her brother
Isaac alone this was no news, as he had detected his sister in the first
of the 'Scenes.' The child-life of Tom and Maggie Tulliver was in many
respects an autobiography; and no biographer can ever hope to describe
the early history of George Eliot as she herself has done in the 'Mill
on the Floss.' How many joys and griefs of those happy careless days
must have been recalled to her brother--those days when little Mary Ann
had sat poring over Daniel Defoe's 'History of the Devil'--or sought
refuge in the attic at Griff house, after a quarrel with him: "This
attic was Maggie's favourite retreat on a wet day, when the weather was
not too cold; here she fretted out all her ill-humours, and talked aloud
to the worm-eaten floors and the worm-eaten shelves, and the dark
rafters festooned with cobwebs; and here she kept a Fetish which she
punished for all her misfortunes. This was the trunk of a large wooden
doll, which once stared with the roundest of eyes above the reddest of
cheeks, but was now entirely defaced by a long career of vicarious
suffering. Three nails driven into the head commemorated as many crises
in Maggie's nine years of earthly struggle, that luxury of vengeance
having been suggested to her by the picture of Jael destroying Sisera in
the old Bible."
Again, at some fields' distance from their old home there had been a
"Round Pool" called "The Moat," "almost a perfect round, framed in with
willows and tall reeds, so that the water was only to be seen when you
got close to the brink." This was a favourite resort of Isaac and Mary
Ann, as also of Tom and his sister when they went fishing together, and
"Maggie thought it probable that the small fish would come to her hook
and the large ones to Tom's." The "Red Deeps," too, where Maggie loved
to walk in June, when the "dog-roses were in their glory," and where she
lived through many phases of her shifting inner life was in the same
vicinity, and at one time a beloved haunt of the future novelist.
But although some of the spots mentioned in the 'Mill on the Floss'
have been easily identified as connected with George Eliot's early home,
the scenery of that novel is mainly laid in Lincolnshire. St. Oggs, with
"its red-fluted roofs and broad warehouse gables," is the ancient town
of Gainsborough. The Floss is a tidal river like the Trent, and in each
case the spring-tide, rushing up the river with its terrific wave and
flooding the land for miles round, is known as the Eagre, a name not a
little descriptive of the thing itself.
The 'Mill on the Floss' (a title adopted by the author at the suggestion
of Mr. Blackwood in preference to 'Sister Maggie') is the most poetical
of George Eliot's novels. The great Floss, hurrying between green
pastures to the sea, gives a unity of its own to this story, which opens
to the roar of waters, the weltering waters which accompany it at the
close. It forms the elemental background which rounds the little lives
of the ill-starred family group nurtured on its banks. The childhood of
Tom and Maggie Tulliver is inextricably blended with this swift river,
the traditions of which have been to them as fairy tales; its haunting
presence is more or less with them throughout their chequered existence;
and when pride and passion, when shame and sorrow have divided the
brother and sister, pursued as by some tragic fate, the Floss seems to
rise in sympathy, and submerges them in its mighty waters to unite them
once more "in an embrace never to be parted." It cannot fail to strike
the reader that in almost every one of George Eliot's novels there
occurs a death by drowning: as in the instance of Thias Bede, of Dunstan
Cass, of Henleigh Grandcourt, and nearly in that of Tito. This may be
accounted for by the fact that as a child the novelist became acquainted
with the sudden death of a near relative who had accidentally fallen
into a stream: an incident which sunk deeply into her retentive mind.
Fate plays a very conspicuous part in this as in most of George Eliot's
novels. But it is not the Fate of the Greeks, it is not a power that
affects human existence from without: it rather lies at the root of it,
more or less shaping that existence according to obscure inherited
tendencies, and in the collision between character and circumstance,
between passion and law, potent only in proportion as the individual
finally issues conquered or a conqueror from the struggle of life. This
action of character on circumstance, and of circumstance on character is
an ever-recurring _motif_ with George Eliot. We constantly see adverse
circumstances modifying and moulding the lives of the actors in her
stories. She has hardly, if ever, therefore, drawn a hero or heroine,
for these, instead of yielding, make circumstances yield to them.
Dorothea and Lydgate in abandoning their striving after the highest kind
of life; Tito in invariably yielding to the most pleasurable prompting
of the moment; Gwendolen in being mainly influenced by circumstances
acting on her, without her reacting on them, are all types of this kind.
Maggie belongs, on the whole, to the same type. She, too, is what Goethe
calls a problematic nature, a nature which, along with vast
possibilities and lofty aspirations, lacks a certain fixity of purpose,
and drifting helplessly from one extreme to another, is shattered almost
as soon as it has put out of port. In Maggie's case this evil springs
from the very fulness of her nature; from the acuteness of an
imagination which the many-sidedness of life attracts by turns in the
most opposite directions. Tom, on the other hand, with his narrow
practical understanding, entirely concentrated on the business in hand,
swerves neither to right nor left, because he may be said to resemble a
horse with blinkers, in that he sees only the road straight ahead.
Maggie, with all her palpable weaknesses and startling inconsistencies,
is the most adorable of George Eliot's women. In all poetry and fiction
there is no child more delicious than the "little wench" with her loving
heart and dreamy ways, her rash impulses and wild regrets, her fine
susceptibilities and fiery jets of temper--in a word, her singularly
fresh and vital nature. The same charm pervades every phase of her life.
In her case the child, if I may so far modify Wordsworth's famous
saying, is eminently the mother of the woman.
Profoundly affectionate by nature, and sympathising as she does with her
father in his calamity, she cannot help rebelling at the sordid
narrowness of her daily life, passionately craving for a wider field
wherein to develop her inborn faculties. In this state of yearning and
wild unrest, her accidental reading of Thomas a Kempis forms a crisis in
her life, by bringing about a spiritual awakening in which Christianity,
for the first time, becomes a living truth to her. Intense as she is,
Maggie now throws all the ardour of her nature into renunciation and
self-conquest. She seeks her highest satisfaction in abnegation of all
personal desire, and in entire devotion to others. In her young
asceticism she relinquishes a world of which she is ignorant, stifling
every impulse, however innocent, that seems opposed to her new faith.
But Maggie has more actual affinity with poets and artists than with
saints and martyrs. Her soul thrills like a finely-touched instrument to
the beauty of the world around her, and though she doubts whether there
may not even be a sinfulness in the indulgence of this enjoyment, yet
the summer flowers and the summer sunshine put her scruples to flight.
And then, when, through the intervention of Philip Wakem, the
enchantments of romance and poetry are brought within her reach, the
glory of the world again lays hold of her imagination, and a fresh
conflict is begun in her soul. Thus she drifts from one state into
another most opposed to it, and to an outside observer, such as Tom, her
abrupt transitions are a sign that she is utterly wanting in moral
stamina.
Not only Tom, but many eminent critics, who have descanted with fond
partiality on Maggie's early life, seem to be shocked by that part of
her story in which she allows herself to fall passionately in love with
such an ordinary specimen of manhood as Stephen Guest. The author has
even been accused of violating the truth of Nature, inasmuch as such a
high-minded woman as Maggie could never have inclined to so vulgar, so
commonplace a man as her lover. Others, while not questioning the truth
of the character, find fault with the poor heroine herself, whom they
pronounce an ineffective nature revealing its innate unsoundness by the
crowning error of an abject passion for so poor a creature as the dandy
of St. Oggs. This contention only proves the singular vitality of the
character itself, and nothing is more psychologically true in George
Eliot's studies of character than this love of the high-souled heroine
for a man who has no corresponding fineness of fibre in his nature, his
attraction lying entirely in the magnetism of mutual passion. This
vitality places Maggie Tulliver by the side of the Juliets, the Mignons,
the Consuelos, the Becky Sharps and other airy inheritors of
immortality. It is curious that Mr. Swinburne, in view of such a
character as this, or, indeed, bearing in mind a Silas Marner, a Dolly
Winthrop, a Tito, and other intrinsically living reproductions of human
nature, should describe George Eliot's as intellectually constructed
characters in contrast to Charlotte Bronte's creations, the former,
according to him, being the result of intellect, the latter of genius.
If ever character came simply dropped out of the mould of Nature it is
that of Maggie. His assumption, that the 'Mill on the Floss' can in any
sense have been suggested by, or partially based upon, Mrs. Gaskell's
story of 'The Moorland Cottage,' seems equally baseless. There is
certainly the identity of name in the heroines, and some resemblance of
situation as regards portions of the story, but both the name and the
situation are sufficiently common not to excite astonishment at such a
coincidence. Had George Eliot really known of this tale--a tale feebly
executed at the best--she would obviously have altered the name so as
not to make her obligation too patent to the world. As it is, she was
not a little astonished and even indignant, on accidentally seeing this
opinion stated in some review, and positively denied ever having seen
the story in question.
Indeed when one knows how this story grew out of her own experience, how
its earlier portions especially are a record of her own and her
brother's childhood--how even Mrs. Glegg and Mrs. Pullet were only too
faithfully done from the aunts of real life, one need not go far afield
to seek for its origin. Every author usually writes one book, which he
might more or less justly entitle 'My Confessions,' into which he pours
an intimate part of his life under a thin disguise of fiction, a book
invariably exciting a unique kind of interest in the reader be he
conscious or not of the presence of this autobiographical element.
Fielding's 'Amelia,' Thackeray's 'Pendennis,'Dickens's 'David
Copperfield,' Charlotte Bronte's 'Villette,' are cases in point. The
'Mill on the Floss' is a work of similar nature. Maggie Tulliver is
George Eliot herself, but only one side, one portion, one phase of
George Eliot's many-sided, vastly complex nature. It is George Eliot's
inner life in childhood and youth as it appeared to her own
consciousness. We recognise in it her mental acuteness, her clinging
affectionateness, her ambition, her outlook beyond the present, her
religious and moral preoccupations, even her genius is not so much
omitted as left in an undeveloped, rudimentary state. While her
make-believe stories, her thirst for knowledge, her spiritual
wrestlings, and the passionate response of her soul to high thinking,
noble music, and the beautiful in all its forms, show that the making of
genius was there in germ. Much in the same manner Goethe was fond of
partitioning his nature, and of giving only the weaker side to his
fictitious representatives. Conscious in himself of fluctuations of
purpose which he only got the better of by his indomitable will, he
usually endowed these characters with his more impulsive, pliant self,
as manifested in Werther, in Tasso, in Edward of the 'Elective
Affinities.' In this sense also Maggie Tulliver resembles George Eliot.
She is her potential self, such as she might have been had there not
been counterbalancing tendencies of unusual force, sufficient to hold in
check all erratic impulses contrary to the main direction of her life.
While tempted to dwell largely on Maggie Tulliver, the central figure of
'The Mill on the Floss,' it would be very unfair to slur over the other
admirably drawn characters of this novel. Her brother Tom, already
repeatedly alluded to, is in every sense the counterpart of "Sister
Maggie." Hard and narrow-minded he was from a boy, "particularly clear
and positive on one point, namely, that he would punish everybody who
deserved it: why, he wouldn't have minded being punished himself, if he
deserved it; but, then, he never _did_ deserve it." This strikes the
key-note of a character whose stern inflexibility, combined with much
practical insight and dogged persistence of effort, is at the same time
dignified by a high, if somewhat narrow, sense of family honour.
Conventional respectability, in fact, is Tom Tulliver's religion. He is
not in any sense bad, or mean, or sordid; he is only so circumscribed in
his perceptive faculties, that he has no standard by which to measure
thoughts or feelings that transcend his own very limited conception of
life.
Both by his good and his bad qualities, by his excellencies and his
negations, Tom Tulliver proves himself what he is--a genuine sprig of
the Dodson family, a chip of the old block! And the Dodson sisters are,
in their way, among the most amazingly living portraitures that George
Eliot ever achieved. Realism in art can go no further in this direction.
These women, if present in the flesh, would not be so distinctively
vivid as when beheld through the transfixing medium of George Eliot's
genius. For here we have the personages, with all their quaintnesses,
their eccentricities, their odd, old-fashioned twists and ways--only
observed by fragments in actual life--successfully brought to a focus
for the delight and amusement of generations of readers. There is
nothing grotesque, nothing exaggerated, in these humorous figures. The
comic effect is not produced, as is often the case with the inventions
of Dickens, by some set peculiarity of manner or trick of speech, more
in the spirit of caricature. On the contrary, it is by a strict
adherence to the just mean of nature, by a conscientious care not to
overstep her probabilities, that we owe these matchless types of English
provincial life. And the genuine humour of these types verges on the
pathetic, in that the infinitely little of their lives is so magnified
by them out of all proportion to its real importance. Mrs. Glegg, with
her dictatorial ways, her small economies, her anxiety to make a
handsome figure in her will, and her invariable reference to what was
"the way in our family," as a criterion of right behaviour on all
occasions: Mrs. Pullet, the wife of the well-to-do yeoman-farmer, bent
on proving her gentility and wealth by the delicacy of her health, and
the quantity of doctor's stuff she can afford to imbibe: Mrs. Tulliver,
the good, muddle-headed woman, whose husband "picked her from her
sisters o' purpose, 'cause she was a bit weak, like," and for whom the
climax of misery in bankruptcy is the loss of her china and table-linen:
these, as well as the henpecked Mr. Glegg, and the old-maidish Mr.
Pullet, are worthy pendants to Mrs. Poyser and Dolly Winthrop.
Whether too great a predominance may not be given to the narrow,
trivial views of these people, with their prosaic respectability, is a
nice question, which one is inclined to answer in the negative on
reading such a conjugal scene as that between Mr. and Mrs. Glegg, after
the latter's quarrel with Mr. Tulliver:
"It was a hard case that a vigorous mood for quarrelling, so highly
capable of using any opportunity, should not meet with a single remark
from Mr. Glegg on which to exercise itself. But by-and-by it appeared
that his silence would answer the purpose, for he heard himself
apostrophised at last in that tone peculiar to the wife of one's bosom.
"'Well, Mr. Glegg! it's a poor return I get for making you the wife I've
made you all these years. If this is the way I'm to be treated, I'd
better ha' known it before my poor father died, and then when I'd wanted
a home, I should ha' gone elsewhere--as the choice was offered me.'
"Mr. Glegg paused from his porridge and looked up, not with any new
amazement, but simply with that quiet, habitual wonder with which we
regard constant mysteries.
"'Why, Mrs. G., what have I done now?'
"'Done now, Mr. Glegg? _done now?_ ... I'm sorry for you.'
"Not seeing his way to any pertinent answer, Mr. Glegg reverted to his
porridge.
"'There's husbands in the world,' continued Mrs. Glegg, after a pause,
'as 'ud have known how to do something different to siding with
everybody else against their own wives. Perhaps I'm wrong, and you can
teach me better. But I've allays heard as it's the husband's place to
stand by the wife, instead of rejoicing and triumphing when folks insult
her."
"'Now what call have you to say that?' said Mr. Glegg rather warmly,
for, though a kind man, he was not as meek as Moses. 'When did I rejoice
or triumph over you?'
"'There's ways o' doing things worse than speaking out plain, Mr. Glegg.
I'd sooner you'd tell me to my face as you make light of me, than try to
make as everybody's in the right but me, and come to your breakfast in
the morning, as I've hardly slept an hour this night, and sulk at me as
if I was the dirt under your feet.'
"'Sulk at you?' said Mr. Glegg, in a tone of angry facetiousness.
'You're like a tipsy man as thinks everybody's had too much but
himself.'
"'Don't lower yourself with using coarse language to _me_, Mr. Glegg! It
makes you look very small, though you can't see yourself,' said Mrs.
Glegg, in a tone of energetic compassion. 'A man in your place should
set an example, and talk more sensible.'"
After a good deal of sparring in the same tone, Mr. Glegg at last bursts
forth: "'Did ever anybody hear the like i' this parish? A woman with
everything provided for her, and allowed to keep her own money the same
as if it was settled on her, and with a gig new stuffed and lined at no
end o' expense, and provided for when I die beyond anything she could
expect ... to go on i' this way, biting and snapping like a mad dog!
It's beyond everything, as God A'mighty should ha' made women _so_.'
(These last words were uttered in a tone of sorrowful agitation. Mr.
Glegg pushed his tea from him, and tapped the table with both his
hands.)
"'Well, Mr. Glegg! if those are your feelings, it's best they should be
known,' said Mrs. Glegg, taking off her napkin, and folding it in an
excited manner. 'But if you talk o' my being provided for beyond what I
could expect, I beg leave to tell you as I'd a right to expect a many
things as I don't find. And as to my being like a mad dog, it's well if
you're not cried shame on by the country for your treatment of me, for
it's what I can't bear, and I won't bear.'...
"Here Mrs. Glegg's voice intimated that she was going to cry, and,
breaking off from speech, she rang the bell violently.
"'Sally,' she said, rising from her chair, and speaking in rather a
choked voice, 'light a fire upstairs, and put the blinds down. Mr.
Glegg, you'll please order what you like for dinner. I shall have
gruel.'"
Equally well drawn in their way, though belonging to a different class
of character, are Maggie's cousin, the lovely, gentle, and refined Lucy;
Philip Wakem, whose physical malformation is compensated by exceptional
culture and nobility of nature; Mr. Tulliver, the headstrong, violent,
but withal generous, father of Maggie, and his sister Mrs. Moss, whose
motherliness and carelessness of appearances form a striking foil to the
Dodson sisters. Indeed, 'The Mill on the Floss' is so rich in minor
characters that it is impossible to do more than mention such capital
sketches as that of Bob Jakin and his dog Mumps, or of Luke, the head
miller, who has no opinion of reading, considering that "There's fools
enoo--an' rogues enoo--wi'out lookin' i' books for 'em."
The distinguishing feature of this novel, however, lies not so much in
its wealth of portraiture or freshness of humour as in a certain
passionate glow of youth, which emanates from the heroine, and seems to
warm the story through and through. For passion, pathos, and poetic
beauty of description, 'The Mill on the Floss' is certainly unique among
George Eliot's works.