flourishing province of English prose fiction for ten years, since
the death of Dickens. Though she had a vast company of competitors,
she did not suffer through that period from the rivalry of one writer
of her own class. If the Brontës had lived, or Mrs. Gaskell, the case
might have been different, for George Eliot had neither the passion of
_Jane Eyre_ nor the perfection of _Cranford_, but they were gone before
we lost Dickens, and so was Thackeray, who died while _Romola_ was
appearing. Charles Kingsley, whose WESTWARD HO! had just preceded her
first appearance, had unluckily turned into other and less congenial
paths. Charles Reade, whose IT IS NEVER TOO LATE TO MEND (1856) had
been her harbinger, scarcely maintained his position as her rival.
Anthony Trollope, excellent craftsman as he was, remained persistently
and sensibly at a lower intellectual level. Hence the field was free
for George Eliot, who, without haste or hesitation, built up slowly
such a reputation as no one in her own time could approach.
The gay world, which forgets everything, has forgotten what a solemn,
what a portentous thing was the contemporary fame of George Eliot.
It was supported by the serious thinkers of the day, by the people
who despised mere novels, but regarded her writings as contributions
to philosophical literature. On the solitary occasion when I sat in
company with Herbert Spencer on the committee of the London Library he
expressed a strong objection to the purchase of fiction, and wished
that for the London Library no novels should be bought, "except, of
course, those of George Eliot." While she lived, critics compared
her with Goethe, but to the disadvantage of the sage of Weimar.
People who started controversies about "evolutionism,"--a favourite
Victorian pastime,--bowed low at the mention of her name, and her own
sound good sense alone prevented her from being made the object of a
sort of priggish idolatry. A big-wig of that day remarked that "in
problems of life and thought which baffled Shakespeare her touch was
unfailing." For Lord Acton at her death "the sun had gone out," and
that exceedingly dogmatic historian observed, _ex cathedrâ_, that no
writer had "ever lived who had anything like her power of manifold
but disinterested and impartial sympathy. If Sophocles or Cervantes
had lived in the light of our culture, if Dante had prospered like
Manzoni, George Eliot might have had a rival." It is very dangerous
to write like that. A reaction is sure to follow, and in the case of
this novelist, so modest and strenuous herself, but so ridiculously
overpraised by her friends, it came with remarkable celerity.
The worship of an intellectual circle of admirers, reverberating upon a
dazzled and genuinely interested public, was not, however, even in its
palmiest days, quite unanimous. There were other strains of thought and
feeling making way, and other prophets were abroad. Robert Browning,
though an optimist, and too polite a man to oppose George Eliot
publicly, was impatient of her oracular manner. There was a struggle,
not much perceived on the surface of the reviews, between her faithful
worshippers and the new school of writers vaguely called preraphaelite.
She loved Matthew Arnold's poetry, and in that, as in so much else, she
was wiser and more clairvoyant than most of the people who surrounded
her, but Arnold presented an attitude of reserve with regard to her
later novels. She found nothing to praise or to attract her interest
in the books of George Meredith; on the other hand, Coventry Patmore,
with his customary amusing violence, voted her novels "sensational and
improper." To D. G. Rossetti they were "vulgarity personified," and his
brother defined them as "commonplace tempering the stuck-up." Swinburne
repudiated _Romola_ with vigour as "absolutely false." I daresay that
from several of these her great contemporaries estimates of her work
less harsh than these might be culled, but I quote these to show that
even at the height of her fame she was not quite unchallenged.
She was herself, it is impossible to deny, responsible for a good
deal of the tarnish which spread over the gold of her reputation.
Her early imaginative writings--in particular _Janet's Repentance_,
_Adam Bede_, the first two-thirds of _The Mill on the Floss_, and
much of _Silas Marner_--had a freshness, a bright vitality, which, if
she could have kept it burnished, would have preserved her from all
effects of contemporary want of sympathy. When we analyse the charm of
the stories just mentioned, we find that it consists very largely in
their felicity of expressed reminiscence. There is little evidence in
them of the inventive faculty, but a great deal of the reproductive.
Now, we have to remember that contemporaries are quite in the dark
as to matters about which, after the publication of memoirs and
correspondence and recollections, later readers are exactly informed.
We may now know that Sir Christopher Cheverel closely reproduces the
features of a real Sir Roger Newdigate, and that Dinah Morris is Mrs.
Samuel Evans photographed, but readers of 1860 did not know that, and
were at liberty to conceive the unknown magician in the act of calling
up a noble English gentleman and a saintly Methodist preacher from the
depths of her inner consciousness. Whether this was so or not would
not matter to anyone, if George Eliot could have continued the act of
pictorial reproduction without flagging. The world would have long
gazed with pleasure into the camera obscura of Warwickshire, as she
reeled off one dark picture after another, but unhappily she was not
contented with her success, and she aimed at things beyond her reach.
Her failure, which was, after all (let us not exaggerate), the partial
and accidental failure of a great genius, began when she turned from
passive acts of memory to a strenuous exercise of intellect. If we had
time and space, it would be very interesting to study George Eliot's
attitude towards that mighty woman, the full-bosomed caryatid of
romantic literature, who had by a few years preceded her. When George
Eliot was at the outset of her own literary career, which as we know
was much belated, George Sand had already bewitched and thrilled and
scandalised Europe for a generation. The impact of the Frenchwoman's
mind on that of her English contemporary produced sparks or flashes of
starry enthusiasm. George Eliot, in 1848, was "bowing before George
Sand in eternal gratitude to that great power of God manifested in
her," and her praise of the French peasant-idyls was unbounded. But
when she herself began to write novels she grew to be less and less in
sympathy with the French romantic school. A French critic of her own
day laid down the axiom that "il faut bien que le roman se rapproche
de la poésie ou de la science." George Sand had thrown herself
unreservedly into the poetic camp. She acknowledged "mon instinct m'eût
poussée vers les abîmes," and she confessed, with that stalwart good
sense which carried her genius over so many marshy places, that her
temperament had often driven her, "au mépris de la raison ou de la
vérité morale," into pure romantic extravagance.
But George Eliot, whatever may have been her preliminary enthusiasms,
was radically and permanently anti-romantic. This was the source of
her strength and of her weakness; this, carefully examined, explains
the soaring and the sinking of her fame. Unlike George Sand, she kept
to the facts; she found that all her power quitted her at once if she
dealt with imaginary events and the clash of ideal passions. She had
been drawn in her youth to sincere admiration of the Indianas and
Lelias of her florid French contemporary, and we become aware that in
the humdrum years at Coventry, when the surroundings of her own life
were arduous and dusty, she felt a longing to spread her wings and
fly up and out to some dim Cloud-Cuckoo Land the confines of which
were utterly vague to her. The romantic method of Dumas, for instance,
and even of Walter Scott, appealed to her as a mode of escaping to
dreamland from the flatness and vulgarity of life under the "miserable
reign of Mammon." But she could not achieve such flights; her literary
character was of a totally different formation. What was fabulous,
what was artificial, did not so much strike her with disgust as render
her paralysed. Her only escape from mediocrity, she found, was to
give a philosophical interest to common themes. In consequence, as
she advanced in life, and came more under the influence of George
Henry Lewes, she became less and less well disposed towards the French
fiction of her day, rejecting even Balzac, to whom she seems, strangely
enough, to have preferred Lessing. That Lessing and Balzac should be
names pronounced in relation itself throws a light on the temper of the
speaker.
Most novelists seem to have begun to tell stories almost as early
as musicians begin to trifle with the piano. The child keeps other
children awake, after nurse has gone about her business, by reeling
off inventions in the dark. But George Eliot showed, so far as records
inform us, no such aptitude in infancy or even in early youth. The
history of her start as a novel-writer is worthy of study. It appears
that it was not until the autumn of 1856 that she, "in a dreamy mood,"
fancied herself writing a story. This was, I gather, immediately on
her return from Germany, where she had been touring about with Lewes,
with whom she had now been living for two years. Lewes said to her,
"You have wit, description, and philosophy--those go a good way towards
the production of a novel," and he encouraged her to write about the
virtues and vices of the clergy, as she had observed them at Griff and
at Coventry. _Amos Barton_ was the immediate result, and the stately
line of stories which was to close in _Daniel Deronda_ twenty years
later was started on its brilliant career. But what of the author?
She was a storm-tried matron of thirty-seven, who had sub-edited the
_Westminster Review_, who had spent years in translating Strauss's
_Life of Jesus_ and had sunk exhausted in a still more strenuous
wrestling with the _Tractatus Theologico-Politicus_ of Spinoza, who had
worked with Delarive at Experimental Physics in Geneva, and who had
censured, as superficial, John Stuart Mill's treatment of Whewell's
_Moral Philosophy_. This heavily-built Miss Marian Evans, now dubiously
known as Mrs. Lewes, whose features at that time are familiar to us by
the admirable paintings and drawings of Sir Frederick Burton, was in
training to be a social reformer, a moral philosopher, an apostle of
the creed of Christendom, an anti-theological professor, anything in
the world rather than a writer of idle tales.
But the tales proved to be a hundred-fold more attractive to the
general public than articles upon taxation or translations from
German sceptics. We all must allow that at last, however tardily and
surprisingly, George Eliot had discovered her true vocation. Let us
consider in what capacity she entered this field of fiction. She
entered it as an observer of life more diligent and more meticulous
perhaps than any other living person. She entered it also with a store
of emotional experience and with a richness of moral sensibility which
were almost as unique. She had strong ethical prejudices, and a wealth
of recollected examples by which she could justify them. Her memory
was accurate, minute, and well-arranged, and she had always enjoyed
retrospection and encouraged herself in the cultivation of it. She was
very sympathetic, very tolerant, and although she had lived in the
very Temple of Priggishness with her Brays and her Hennells and her
Sibrees, she remained singularly simple and unaffected. Rather sad,
one pictures her in 1856, rather dreamy, burdened with an excess of
purely intellectual preoccupation, wandering over Europe consumed by
a constant, but unconfessed, nostalgia for her own country, coming
back to it with a sense that the Avon was lovelier than the Arno.
Suddenly, in that "dreamy mood," there comes over her a desire to build
up again the homes of her childhood, to forget all about Rousseau and
experimental physics, and to reconstruct the "dear old quaintnesses" of
the Arbury of twenty-five years before.
If we wish to see what it was which this mature philosopher and earnest
critic of behaviour had to produce for the surprise of her readers, we
may examine the description of the farm at Donnithorne in _Adam Bede_.
The solemn lady, who might seem such a terror to ill-doers, had yet a
packet of the most delicious fondants in the pocket of her bombazine
gown. The names of these sweetmeats, which were of a flavour and a
texture delicious to the tongue, might be Mrs. Poyser or Lizzie Jerome
or the sisters Dodson, but they all came from the Warwickshire factory
at Griff, and they were all manufactured with the sugar and spice of
memory. So long as George Eliot lived in the past, and extracted her
honey from those wonderful cottage gardens which fill her early pages
with their colour and their odour, the solidity and weight of her
intellectual methods in other fields did not interfere, or interfered
in a negligible way, with the power and intensity of the entertainment
she offered. We could wish for nothing better. English literature has,
of their own class, nothing better to offer than certain chapters of
_Adam Bede_ or than the beginning of _The Mill on the Floss_.
But, from the first, if we now examine coldly and inquisitively, there
was a moth sleeping in George Eliot's rich attire. This moth was
pedantry, the result doubtless of too much erudition encouraging a
natural tendency in her mind, which as we have seen was acquisitive
rather than inventive. It was unfortunate for her genius that after
her early enthusiasm for French culture she turned to Germany and
became, in measure, like so many powerful minds of her generation,
Teutonised. This fostered the very tendencies which it was desirable
to eradicate. One can but speculate what would have been the result on
her genius of a little more Paris and a little less Berlin. Her most
successful immediate rival in France was Octave Feuillet; the _Scenes
of Clerical Life_ answer in time to _Le Roman d'un Jeune Homme Pauvre_,
and _Monsieur de Camors_ to _Felix Holt_. There could not be a stronger
or more instructive contrast than between the elegant fairy-land of the
one and the robust realism of the other. But our admirable pastoral
writer, whose inward eye was stored with the harmonies and humours of
Shakespeare's country, was not content with her mastery of the past.
She looked forward to a literature of the future. She trusted to her
brain rather than to those tired servants, her senses, and more and
more her soul was invaded by the ambition to invent a new thing, the
scientific novel, dealing with the growth of institutions and the
analysis of individual character.
The critics of her own time were satisfied that she had done this,
and that she had founded the psychological novel. There was much to
be said in favour of such an opinion. In the later books it is an
undeniable fact that George Eliot displays a certain sense of the
inevitable progress of life which was new. It may seem paradoxical to
see the peculiar characteristics of Zola or of Mr. George Moore in
_Middlemarch_, but there is much to be said for the view that George
Eliot was the direct forerunner of those naturalistic novelists. Like
them, she sees life as an organism, or even as a progress. George Eliot
in her contemplation of the human beings she invents is a traveller,
who is provided with a map. No Norman church or ivied ruin takes her
by surprise, because she has seen that it was bound to come, and
recognises it when it does come. Death, the final railway station, is
ever in her mind; she sees it on her map, and gathers her property
around her to be ready when the train shall stop. This psychological
clairvoyance gives her a great power when she does not abuse it, but
unfortunately from the very first there was in her a tendency, partly
consequent on her mental training, but also not a little on her natural
constitution, to dwell in a hard and pedagogic manner on it. She was
not content to please, she must explain and teach as well.
Her comparative failure to please made its definite appearance first
in the laboured and overcharged romance of _Romola_. But a careful
reader will detect it in her earliest writings. Quite early in _Amos
Barton_, for instance, when Mrs. Hackit observes of the local colliers
that they "passed their time in doing nothing but swilling ale and
smoking, like the beasts that perish," the author immediately spoils
this delightful remark by explaining, like a schoolmaster, that Mrs.
Hackit was "speaking, we may presume, in a remotely analogical
sense." The laughter dies upon our lips. Useless pedantry of this kind
spoils many a happy touch of humour, Mrs. Poyser alone perhaps having
wholly escaped from it. It would be entirely unjust to accuse George
Eliot, at all events until near the end of her life, of intellectual
pride. She was, on the contrary, of a very humble spirit, timorous and
susceptible of discouragement. But her humility made her work all the
harder at her task of subtle philosophical analysis. It would have
been far better for her if she had possessed less of the tenacity of
Herbert Spencer and more of the recklessness of George Sand. An amusing
but painful example of her Sisyphus temper, always rolling the stone
uphill with groans and sweat, is to be found in her own account of the
way she "crammed up" for the composition of _Romola_. She tells us
of the wasting toil with which she worked up innumerable facts about
Florence, and in particular how she laboured long over the terrible
question whether Easter could have been "retarded" in the year 1492. On
this, Sir Leslie Stephen--one of her best critics, and one of the most
indulgent--aptly queries, "What would have become of _Ivanhoe_ if Scott
had bothered himself about the possible retardation of Easter? The
answer, indeed, is obvious, that _Ivanhoe_ would not have been written."
The effect of all this on George Eliot's achievement was what must
always occur when an intellect which is purely acquisitive and
distributive insists on doing work that is appropriate only to
imagination. If we read very carefully the scene preceding Savanarola's
sermon to the Dominicans at San Marco, we perceive that it is built
up almost in Flaubert's manner, but without Flaubert's magic, touch
by touch, out of books. The author does not see what she describes
in a sort of luminous hallucination, but she dresses up in language
of her own what she has carefully read in Burlamacchi or in Villari.
The most conscientious labour, expended by the most powerful brain,
is incapable of producing an illusion of life by these means. George
Eliot may even possibly have been conscious of this, for she speaks
again and again, not of writing with ecstasy of tears and laughter, as
Dickens did, but of falling into "a state of so much wretchedness in
attempting to concentrate my thoughts on the construction of my novel"
that nothing but a tremendous and sustained effort of the will carried
her on at all. In this vain and terrible wrestling with incongruous
elements she wore out her strength and her joy, and it is heart-rending
to watch so noble a genius and so lofty a character as hers wasted
in the whirlpool. One fears that a sense of obscure failure added to
her tortures, and one is tempted to see a touch of autobiography in
the melancholy of Mrs. Transome (in _Felix Holt_), of whom we are
told that "her knowledge and accomplishments had become as valueless
as old-fashioned stucco ornaments, of which the substance was never
worth anything, while the form is no longer to the taste of any living
mortal."
The notion that George Eliot was herself, in spite of all the laudation
showered upon her, consciously in want of some element essential
for her success is supported by the very curious fact that from
1864 to 1869, that is to say through nearly one quarter of her whole
literary career, she devoted herself entirely to various experiments
in verse. She was so preternaturally intelligent that there is nothing
unlikely in the supposition that she realised what was her chief want
as a writer of imaginative prose. She claims, and she will always
be justified in claiming, a place in the splendid roll of prominent
English writers. But she holds it in spite of a certain drawback which
forbids her from ever appearing in the front rank as a great writer.
Her prose has fine qualities of force and wit, it is pictorial and
persuasive, but it misses one prime but rather subtle merit, it never
sings. The masters of the finest English are those who have received
the admonition _Cantate Domino!_ They sing a new song unto the Lord.
Among George Eliot's prose contemporaries there were several who
obeyed this command. Ruskin, for instance, above all the Victorian
prose-writers, shouts like the morning-star. It is the peculiar
gift of all great prosaists. Take so rough an executant as Hazlitt:
"Harmer Hill stooped with all its pines, to listen to a poet, as he
passed!" That is the chanting faculty in prose, which all the greatest
men possess; but George Eliot has no trace of it, except sometimes,
faintly, in the sheer fun of her peasants' conversation. I do not
question that she felt the lack herself, and that it was this which,
subconsciously, led her to make a profound study of the art of verse.
She hoped, at the age of forty-four, to hammer herself into poetry by
dint of sheer labour and will-power. She read the great masters, and
she analysed them in the light of prosodical manuals. In 1871 she told
Tennyson that Professor Sylvester's "laws for verse-making had been
useful to her." Tennyson replied, "I can't understand that," and no
wonder. Sylvester was a facetious mathematician who undertook to teach
the art of poetry in so many lessons. George Eliot humbly working away
at Sylvester, and telling Tennyson that she was finding him "useful,"
and Tennyson, whose melodies pursued him, like bees in pursuit of a
bee-master, expressing a gruff good-natured scepticism--what a picture
it raises! But George Eliot persisted, with that astounding firmness
of application which she had, and she produced quite a large body of
various verse. She wrote a Comtist tragedy, _The Spanish Gypsy_, of
which I must speak softly, since, omnivorous as I am, I have never been
able to swallow it. But she wrote many other things, epics and sonnets
and dialogues and the rest of them, which are not so hard to read.
She actually printed privately for her friends two little garlands,
_Agatha_ (1868) and _Brother and Sister_ (1869), which are the only
"rare issues" of hers sought after by collectors, for she was not given
to bibliographical curiosity. These verses and many others she polished
and re-wrote with untiring assiduity, and in 1874 she published a
substantial volume of them. I have been reading them over again, in the
intense wish to be pleased with them, but it is impossible--the root
of the matter is not in them. There is an _Arion_, which is stately in
the manner of Marvell. The end of this lyric is tense and decisive,
but there is the radical absence of song. In the long piece called
_A College Breakfast Party_, which she wrote in 1874, almost all
Tennyson's faults are reconstructed on the plan of the Chinese tailor
who carefully imitates the rents in the English coat he is to copy.
There is a Goethe-like poem, of a gnomic order, called _Self and Life_,
stuffed with valuable thoughts as a turkey is stuffed with chestnuts.
And it is all so earnest and so intellectual, and it does so much
credit to Sylvester. After long consideration, I have come to the
conclusion that the following sonnet, from _Brother and Sister_, is the
best piece of sustained poetry that George Eliot achieved. It deals
with the pathetic and beautiful relations which existed between her and
her elder brother Isaac, the Tom Tulliver of _The Mill on the Floss_: