(GEORGE ELIOT)
1819-1880
[Sidenote: _Harper’s Magazine_, 1881.]
“In more than one striking passage in his novels Mr. Hardy has
recognised the fact that the beauty of the future, as the race is more
developed in intellect, cannot be the mere physical beauty of the past;
and in one of the most remarkable he says that ‘ideal physical beauty
is incompatible with mental development, and a full recognition of
the evil of things. Mental luminousness must be fed with the oil of
life, even though there is already a physical need for it.’ And this
was the case with George Eliot. The face was one of a group of four,
not all equally like each other, but all of the same spiritual family,
and with a curious interdependance of likeness. These four are Dante,
Savonarola, Cardinal Newman, and herself.... In the group of which
George Eliot was one there is 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 lip and eye....
The two or three portraits that exist, though valuable, give but a very
imperfect presentiment. The mere shape of the head 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.”
[Sidenote: _The Century_, 1881.]
“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 so 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
work of feeling 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 had not, indeed, the serene felicity of souls to
whose child-like confidence all heaven and earth are fair. Rather it
was the look (if I may use a platonic phrase) of a strenuous Demiurge,
of a soul on which high tasks are laid, and which finds in their
accomplishment its only imagination of joy.”
[Sidenote: William Morgan’s _George Eliot_. *]
“I was disappointed when I found the illustrated papers gave no
portraits of George Eliot, and I afterwards learned that, celebrated
as she is in other ways, she enjoys the rare, and perhaps unique,
distinction that she was never photographed. Two portraits of her are,
however, in existence. One, by Mr. Lawrence, hangs in Mr. Blackwood’s
drawing-room in Edinburgh; the other, by Mr. Buxton, was in her own
house at Chelsea. She is described as a woman of large, massive, and
homely features, which were softened and irradiated by a gracious
and winning smile. The size, shape, and poise of her head were very
noticeable, and some of her friends have been struck by her resemblance
to the portrait of Savonarola by Fra Bartolommea. Her voice was rich
and melodious, and those who best knew her speak of her as a strangely
fascinating and sympathetic woman, who left on every one who approached
her an impression of goodness and greatness. Her conversation had no
traces of the rich humour which runs through some of her writings, but
she joined very heartily in the jocularity of others.”