Since the death of George Eliot much public curiosity has been excited by
the repeated allusions to, and quotations from, her contributions to
periodical literature, and a leading newspaper gives expression to a
general wish when it says that “this series of striking essays ought to
be collected and reprinted, both because of substantive worth and because
of the light they throw on the author’s literary canons and
predilections.” In fact, the articles which were published anonymously
in _The Westminster Review_ have been so pointedly designated by the
editor, and the biographical sketch in the “Famous Women” series is so
emphatic in its praise of them, and so copious in its extracts from one
and the least important one of them, that the publication of all the
Review and magazine articles of the renowned novelist, without abridgment
or alteration, would seem but an act of fair play to her fame, while at
the same time a compliance with a reasonable public demand.
Nor are these first steps in her wonderful intellectual progress any the
less, but are all the more noteworthy, for being first steps. “To ignore
this stage,” says the author of the valuable little volume to which we
have just referred—“to ignore this stage in George Eliot’s mental
development would be to lose one of the connecting links in her history.”
Furthermore, “nothing in her fictions excels the style of these papers.”
Here is all her “epigrammatic felicity,” and an irony not surpassed by
Heine himself, while her paper on the poet Young is one of her wittiest
bits of critical analysis.
Her translation of Status’s “Life of Jesus” was published in 1840, and
her translation of Feuerbach’s “Essence of Christianity” in 1854. Her
translation of Spinoza’s “Ethics” was finished the same year, but remains
unpublished. She was associate editor of _The Westminster Review_ from
1851 to 1853. She was about twenty-seven years of age when her first
translation appeared, thirty-three when the first of these magazine
articles appeared, thirty-eight at the publication of her first story,
and fifty-nine when she finished “Theophrastus Such.” Two years after
she died, at the age of sixty-one. So that George Eliot’s literary life
covered a period of about thirty-two years.
The introductory chapter on her “Analysis of Motives” first appeared as a
magazine article, and appears here at the request of the publishers,
after having been carefully revised, indeed almost entirely rewritten by
its author.
“GEORGE ELIOT’S” ANALYSIS OF MOTIVES.
George Eliot is the greatest of the novelists in the delineation of
feeling and the analysis of motives. In “uncovering certain human lots,
and seeing how they are woven and interwoven,” some marvellous work has
been done by this master in the two arts of rhetoric and fiction.
If you say the telling of a story is her forte, you put her below Wilkie
Collins or Mrs. Oliphant; if you say her object is to give a picture of
English society, she is surpassed by Bulwer and Trollope; if she be
called a satirist of society, Thackeray is her superior; if she intends
to illustrate the absurdity of behavior, she is eclipsed by Dickens; but
if the analysis of human motives be her forte and art, she stands first,
and it is very doubtful whether any artist in fiction is entitled to
stand second. She reaches clear in and touches the most secret and the
most delicate spring of human action. She has done this so well, so
apart from the doing of everything else, and so, in spite of doing some
other things indifferently, that she works on a line quite her own, and
quite alone, as a creative artist in fiction. Others have done this
incidentally and occasionally, as Charlotte Brontë and Walter Scott, but
George Eliot does it elaborately, with laborious painstaking, with
purpose aforethought. Scott said of Richardson: “In his survey of the
heart he left neither head, bay, nor inlet behind him until he had traced
its soundings, and laid it down in his chart with all its minute
sinuosities, its depths and its shallows.”
This is too much to say of Richardson, but it is not too much to say of
George Eliot. She has sounded depths and explored sinuosities of the
human heart which were utterly unknown to the author of “Clarissa
Harlowe.” It is like looking into the translucent brook—you see the
wriggling tad, the darting minnow, the leisurely trout, the motionless
pike, while in the bays and inlets you see the infusoria and animalculæ
as well.
George Eliot belongs to and is the greatest of the school of artists in
fiction who write fiction as a means to an end, instead of as an end.
And, while she certainly is not a story-teller of the first order,
considered simply as a story-teller, her novels are a striking
illustration of the power of fiction as a means to an end. They remind
us, as few other stories do, of the fact that however inferior the story
may be considered simply as a story, it is indispensable to the
delineation of character. No other form of composition, no discourse, or
essay, or series of independent sketches, however successful, could
succeed in bringing out character equal to the novel. Herein is at once
the justification of the power of fiction. “He spake a parable,” with an
“end” in view which could not be so expeditiously attained by any other
form of address.
A story of the first-class, with the story as end in itself, and a story
of the first class told as a means to an end, has never been, and it is
not likely ever will be, found together. The novel with a purpose is
fatal to the novel written simply to excite by a plot, or divert by
pictures of scenery, or entertain as a mere panorama of social life. So
intense is George Eliot’s desire to dissect the human heart and discover
its motives, that plot, diction, situations, and even consistency in the
vocabulary of the characters, are all made subservient to it. With her
it is not so much that the characters do thus and so, but why they do
thus and so. Dickens portrays the behavior, George Eliot dissects the
motive of the behavior. Here comes the human creature, says Dickens, now
let us see how he will behave. Here comes the human creature, says
George Eliot, now let us see why he behaves.
“Suppose,” she says, “suppose we turn from outside estimates of a man, to
wonder with keener interest what is the report of his own consciousness
about his doings, with what hindrances he is carrying on his daily
labors, and with what spirit he wrestles against universal pressure,
which may one day be too heavy for him and bring his heart to a final
pause.” The outside estimate is the work of Dickens and Thackeray, the
inside estimate is the work of George Eliot.
Observe in the opening pages of the great novel of “Middlemarch” how soon
we pass from the outside dress to the inside reasons for it, from the
costume to the motives which control it and color it. It was “only to
close observers that Celia’s dress differed from her sister’s,” and had
“a shade of coquetry in its arrangements.” Dorothea’s “plain dressing
was due to mixed conditions, in most of which her sister shared.” They
were both influenced by “the pride of being ladies,” of belonging to a
stock not exactly aristocratic, but unquestionably “good.” The very
quotation of the word good is significant and suggestive. There were “no
parcel-tying forefathers” in the Brooke pedigree. A Puritan forefather,
“who served under Cromwell, but afterward conformed and managed to come
out of all political troubles as the proprietor of a respectable family
estate,” had a hand in Dorothea’s “plain” wardrobe. “She could not
reconcile the anxieties of a spiritual life involving eternal
consequences with a keen interest in gimp and artificial protrusions of
drapery,” but Celia “had that common-sense which is able to accept
momentous doctrines without any eccentric agitation.” Both were examples
of “reversion.” Then, as an instance of heredity working itself out in
character “in Mr. Brooke, the hereditary strain of Puritan energy was
clearly in abeyance, but in his niece Dorothea it glowed alike through
faults and virtues.”
Could anything be more natural than for a woman with this passion for,
and skill in, “unravelling certain human lots,” to lay herself out upon
the human lot of woman, with all her “passionate patience of genius?”
One would say this was inevitable. And, for a delineation of what that
lot of woman really is, as made for her, there is nothing in all
literature equal to what we find in “Middlemarch,” “Romola,” “Daniel
Deronda,” and “Janet’s Repentance.” “She was a woman, and could not make
her own lot.” Never before, indeed, was so much got out of the word
“lot.” Never was that little word so hard worked, or well worked. “We
women,” says Gwendolen Harleth, “must stay where we grow, or where the
gardeners like to transplant us. We are brought up like the flowers, to
look as pretty as we can, and be dull without complaining. That is my
notion about the plants, and that is the reason why some of them have got
poisonous.” To appreciate the work that George Eliot has done you must
read her with the determination of finding out the reason why Gwendolen
Harleth “became poisonous,” and Dorothea, with all her brains and
“plans,” a failure; why “the many Theresas find for themselves no epic
life, only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual
grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity.” You must search
these marvellous studies in motives for the key to the blunders of “the
blundering lives” of woman which “some have felt are due to the
inconvenient indefiniteness with which the Supreme power has fashioned
the natures of women.” But as there is not “one level of feminine
incompetence as strict as the ability to count three and no more, the
social lot of woman cannot be treated with scientific certitude.” It is
treated with a dissective delineation in the women of George Eliot
unequalled in the pages of fiction.
And then woman’s lot, as respects her “social promotion” in matrimony, so
much sought, and so necessary for her to seek, even in spite of her
conscience, and at the expense of her happiness—the unravelling of that
lot would also come very natural to this expert unraveller. And never
have we had the causes of woman’s “blunders” in match-making, and man’s
blunders in love-making, told with such analytic acumen, or with such
pathetic and sarcastic eloquence. It is not far from the question of
woman’s social lot to the question of questions of human life, the
question which has so tremendous an influence upon the fortunes of
mankind and womankind, the question which it is so easy for one party to
“pop” and so difficult for the other party to answer intelligently or
sagaciously.
Why does the young man fall in love with the young woman who is most
unfit for him of all the young women of his acquaintance, and why does
the young woman accept the young man, or the old man, who is better
adapted to making her life unendurable than any other man of her circle
of acquaintances? Why does the stalwart Adam Bede fall in love with
Hetty Sorrel, “who had nothing more than her beauty to recommend her?”
The delineator of his motives “respects him none the less.” She thinks
that “the deep love he had for that sweet, rounded, 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 upon by exquisite music? To feel its
wondrous harmonies searching the subtlest windings of your soul, the
delicate fibres of life which no memory can penetrate, and binding
together your whole being, past and present, in one unspeakable
vibration? 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 depth of her beseeching eyes, or the sweet girlish pout of her
lips. For the beauty of a lovely woman is like music—what can one say
more?” And so “the noblest nature is often blinded to the character of
the woman’s soul that beauty clothes.” Hence “the tragedy of human life
is likely to continue for a long time to come, in spite of mental
philosophers who are ready with the best receipts for avoiding all
mistakes of the kind.”
How simple the motive of the Rev. Edward Casaubon in popping the question
to Dorothea Brooke, how complex her motives in answering the question!
He wanted an amanuensis to “love, honor, and obey” him. She wanted a
husband who would be “a sort of father, and could teach you even Hebrew
if you wished it.” The matrimonial motives are worked to draw out the
character of Dorothea, and nowhere does the method of George Eliot show
to greater advantage than in probing the motives of this fine, strong,
conscientious, blundering young woman, whose voice “was like the voice of
a soul that once lived in an Æolian harp.” She had a theoretic cast of
mind. She was “enamored of intensity and greatness, and rash in
embracing what seemed to her to have those aspects.” The awful divine
had those aspects, and she embraced him. “Certainly such elements in the
character of a marriageable girl tended to interfere with her lot, and
hinder it from being decided, according to custom, by good looks, vanity,
and merely canine affection.” That’s a George Eliot stroke. If the
reader does not see from that what she is driving at he may as well
abandon all hope of ever appreciating her great forte and art.
Dorothea’s goodness and sincerity did not save her from the worst blunder
that a woman can make, while her conscientiousness only made it
inevitable. “With all her eagerness to know the truths of life she
retained very childlike ideas about marriage.” A little of the goose as
well as the child in her conscientious simplicity, perhaps. She “felt
sure she would have accepted the judicious Hooker if she had been born in
time to save him from that wretched mistake he made in matrimony, or John
Milton, when his blindness had come on, or any other great man whose odd
habits it would be glorious piety to endure.”
True to life, our author furnishes the “great man,” and the “odd habits,”
and the miserable years of “glorious” endurance. “Dorothea looked deep
into the ungauged reservoir of Mr. Casaubon’s mind, seeing reflected
there every quality she herself brought.” They exchanged experiences—he
his desire to have an amanuensis, and she hers, to be one. He told her
in the billy-cooing of their courtship that “his notes made a formidable
range of volumes, but the crowning task would be to condense these
voluminous, still accumulating results, and bring them, like the earlier
vintage of Hippocratic books, to fit a little shelf.” Dorothea was
altogether captivated by the wide embrace of this conception. Here was
something beyond the shallows of ladies’ school literature. Here was a
modern Augustine who united the glories of doctor and saint. Dorothea
said to herself: “His feeling, his experience, what a lake compared to my
little pool!” The little pool runs into the great reservoir.
Will you take this reservoir to be your husband, and will you promise to
be unto him a fetcher of slippers, a dotter of I’s and crosser of T’s and
a copier and condenser of manuscripts; until death doth you part? I
will.
They spend their honeymoon in Rome, and on page 211 of Vol. I. we find
poor Dorothea “alone in her apartments, sobbing bitterly, with such an
abandonment to this relief of an oppressed heart as a woman habitually
controlled by pride will sometimes allow herself when she feels securely
alone.” What was she crying about? “She thought her feeling of
desolation was the fault of her own spiritual poverty.” A characteristic
George Eliot probe. Why does not Dorothea give the real reason for her
desolateness? Because she does not know what the real reason
is—conscience makes blunderers of us all. “How was it that in the weeks
since their marriage Dorothea had not distinctly observed, but felt, with
a stifling depression, that the large vistas and wide fresh air which she
had dreamed of finding in her husband’s mind were replaced by anterooms
and winding passages which seemed to lead no whither? I suppose it was
because in courtship everything is regarded as provisional and
preliminary, and the smallest sample of virtue or accomplishment is taken
to guarantee delightful stores which the broad leisure of marriage will
reveal. But, the door-sill of marriage once crossed, expectation is
concentrated on the present. Having once embarked on your marital
voyage, you may become aware that you make no way, and that the sea is
not within sight—that in fact you are exploring an inclosed basin.” So
the ungauged reservoir turns out to be an inclosed basin, but Dorothea
was prevented by her social lot, and perverse goodness, and puritanical
“reversion,” from foreseeing that. She might have been saved from her
gloomy marital voyage “if she could have fed her affection with those
childlike caresses which are the bent of every sweet woman who has begun
by showering kisses on the hard pate of her bald doll, creating a happy
soul within that woodenness from the wealth of her own love.” Then,
perhaps, Ladislaw would have been her first husband instead of her
second, as he certainly was her first and only love. Such are the
chances and mischances in the lottery of matrimony.
Equally admirable is the diagnosis of Gwendolen Harleth’s motives in
“drifting toward the tremendous decision,” and finally landing in it.
“We became poor, and I was tempted.” Marriage came to her as it comes to
many, as a temptation, and like the deadening drug or the maddening bowl,
to keep off the demon of remorse or the cloud of sorrow, like the forgery
or the robbery to save from want. “The brilliant position she had longed
for, the imagined freedom she would create for herself in marriage”—these
“had come to her hunger like food, with the taint of sacrilege upon it,”
which she “snatched with terror.” Grandcourt “fulfilled his side of the
bargain by giving her the rank and luxuries she coveted.” Matrimony as a
bargain never had and never will have but one result. “She had a root of
conscience in her, and the process of purgatory had begun for her on
earth.” Without the root of conscience it would have been purgatory all
the same. So much for resorting to marriage for deliverance from poverty
or old maidhood. Better be an old maid than an old fool. But how are we
to be guaranteed against “one of those convulsive motiveless actions by
which wretched men and women leap from a temporary sorrow into a lifelong
misery?” Rosamond Lydgate says, “Marriage stays with us like a murder.”
Yes, if she could only have found that out before instead of after her
own marriage!
But “what greater thing,” exclaims our novelist, “is there for two human
souls than to feel that they are joined for life, to strengthen each
other in all labor, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with
each other in silent, unspeakable memories at the last parting?”
While a large proportion of her work in the analysis of motives is
confined to woman, she has done nothing more skilful or memorable than
the “unravelling” of Bulstrode’s mental processes by which he “explained
the gratification of his desires into satisfactory agreement with his
beliefs.” If there were no Dorothea in “Middlemarch” the character of
Bulstrode would give that novel a place by itself among the masterpieces
of fiction. The Bulstrode wound was never probed in fiction with more
scientific precision. The pious villain finally finds himself so near
discovery that he becomes conscientious. “His equivocation now turns
venomously upon him with the full-grown fang of a discovered lie.” The
past came back to make the present unendurable. “The terror of being
judged sharpens the memory.” Once more “he saw himself the banker’s
clerk, as clever in figures as he was fluent in speech, and fond of
theological definition. He had striking experience in conviction and
sense of pardon; spoke in prayer-meeting and on religious platforms.
That was the time he would have chosen now to awake in and find the rest
of dream. He remembered his first moments of shrinking. They were
private and were filled with arguments—some of these taking the form of
prayer.”
Private prayer—but “is private prayer necessarily candid? Does it
necessarily go to the roots of action? Private prayer is inaudible
speech, and speech is representative. Who can represent himself just as
he is, even in his own reflections?”
Bulstrode’s course up to the time of his being suspected “had, he
thought, been sanctioned by remarkable providences, appearing to point
the way for him to be the agent in making the best use of a large
property.” Providence would have him use for the glory of God the money
he had stolen. “Could it be for God’s service that this fortune should
go to” its rightful owners, when its rightful owners were “a young woman
and her husband who were given up to the lightest pursuits, and might
scatter it abroad in triviality—people who seemed to lie outside the path
of remarkable providences?”
Bulstrode felt at times “that his action was unrighteous, but how could
he go back? He had mental exercises calling himself naught, laid hold on
redemption and went on in his course of instrumentality.” He was
“carrying on two distinct lives”—a religious one and a wicked one. “His
religious activity could not be incompatible with his wicked business as
soon as he had argued himself into not feeling it incompatible.”
“The spiritual kind of rescue was a genuine need with him. There may be
coarse hypocrites, who consciously affect beliefs and emotions for the
sake of gulling the world, but Bulstrode was not one of them. He was
simply a man whose desires had been stronger than his theoretic beliefs,
and who had gradually explained the gratification of his desires into
satisfactory agreement with those beliefs.”
And now Providence seemed to be taking sides against him. “A threatening
Providence—in other words, a public exposure—urged him to a kind of
propitiation which was not a doctrinal transaction. The divine tribunal
had changed its aspect to him. Self-prostration was no longer enough.
He must bring restitution in his hand. By what sacrifice could he stay
the rod? He believed that if he did something right God would stay the
rod, and save him from the consequences of his wrong-doing.” His
religion was “the religion of personal fear,” which “remains nearly at
the level of the savage.” The exposure comes, and the explosion.
Society shudders with hypocritical horror, especially in the presence of
poor Mrs. Bulstrode, who “should have some hint given her, that if she
knew the truth she would have less complacency in her bonnet.” Society
when it is very candid, and very conscientious, and very scrupulous,
cannot “allow a wife to remain ignorant long that the town holds a bad
opinion of her husband.” The photograph of the Middlemarch gossips
sitting upon the case of Mrs. Bulstrode is taken accurately. Equally
accurate, and far more impressive, is the narrative of circumstantial
evidence gathering against the innocent Lydgate and the guilty
Bulstrode—circumstances that will sometimes weave into one tableau of
public odium the purest and the blackest characters. From this tableau
you may turn to that one in “Adam Bede,” and see how circumstances are
made to crush the weak woman and clear the wicked man. And then you can
go to “Romola,” or indeed to almost any of these novels, and see how
wrong-doing may come of an indulged infirmity of purpose, that
unconscious weakness and conscious wickedness may bring about the same
disastrous results, and that repentance has no more effect in averting or
altering the consequences in one case than the other. Tito’s ruin comes
of a feeble, Felix Holt’s victory of an unconquerable, will. Nothing is
more characteristic of George Eliot than her tracking of Tito through all
the motives and counter motives from which he acted. “Because he tried
to slip away from everything that was unpleasant, and cared for nothing
so much as his own safety, he came at last to commit such deeds as make a
man infamous.” So poor Romola tells her son, as a warning, and adds: “If
you make it the rule of your life to escape from what is disagreeable,
calamity may come just the same, and it would be calamity falling on a
base mind, which is the one form of sorrow that has no balm in it.”
Out of this passion for the analysis of motives comes the strong
character, slightly gnarled and knotted by natural circumstances, as
trees that are twisted and misshapen by storms and floods—or characters
gnarled by some interior force working in conjunction with or in
opposition to outward circumstances. She draws no monstrosities, or
monsters, thus avoiding on the one side romance and on the other
burlesque. She keeps to life—the life that fails from “the meanness of
opportunity,” or is “dispersed among hindrances” or “wrestles”
unavailingly “with universal pressure.”
Why had Mr. Gilfil in those late years of his beneficent life “more of
the knots and ruggedness of poor human nature than there lay any clear
hint of it in the open-eyed, loving” young Maynard? Because “it is with
men as with trees: if you lop off their finest branches into which they
were pouring their young life-juice, the wounds will be healed over with
some rough boss, some odd excrescence, and what might have been a grand
tree, expanding into liberal shade, is but a whimsical, misshapen trunk.
Many an irritating fault, many an unlovely oddity, has come of a hard
sorrow which has crushed and maimed the nature just when it was expanding
into plenteous beauty; and the trivial, erring life, which we visit with
our harsh blame, may be but as the unsteady motion of a man whose best
limb is withered. The dear old Vicar had been sketched out by nature as
a noble tree. The heart of him was sound, the grain was of the finest,
and in the gray-haired man, with his slipshod talk and caustic tongue,
there was the main trunk of the same brave, faithful, tender nature that
had poured out the finest, freshest forces of its life-current in a first
and only love.”
Her style is influenced by her purpose—may be said, indeed, to be created
by it. The excellences and the blemishes of the diction come of the end
sought to be attained by it. Its subtleties and obscurities were equally
inevitable. Analytical thinking takes on an analytical phraseology. It
is a striking instance of a mental habit creating a vocabulary. The
method of thought produces the form of rhetoric. Some of the sentences
are mental landscapes. The meaning seems to be in motion on the page.
It is elusive from its very subtlety. It is more our analyst than her
character of Rufus Lyon, who “would fain find language subtle enough to
follow the utmost intricacies of the soul’s pathways.” Mrs. Transome’s
“lancet-edged epigrams” are dull in comparison with her own. She uses
them with startling success in dissecting motive and analyzing feeling.
They deserve as great renown as “Nélaton’s probe.”
For example: “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, especially about your own feelings—much harder than to say
something fine about them which is not the exact truth.” That ought to
make such a revelation of the religious diary-keeper to himself as to
make him ashamed of himself. And this will fit in here: “Our consciences
are not of the same pattern, an inner deliverance of fixed laws—they are
the voice of sensibilities as various as our memories;” and this: “Every
strong feeling makes to itself a conscience of its own—has its own
piety.”
Who can say that the joints of his armor are not open to this thrust?
“The lapse of time during which a given event has not happened is in the
logic of habit, constantly alleged as a reason why the event should never
happen, even when the lapse of time is precisely the added condition
which makes the event imminent. A man will tell you that he worked in a
mine for forty years unhurt by an accident as a reason why he should
apprehend no danger, though the roof is beginning to sink.” Silas Marner
lost his money through his “sense of security,” which “more frequently
springs from habit than conviction.” He went unrobbed for fifteen years,
which supplied the only needed condition for his being robbed now. A
compensation for stupidity: “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all
ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the
squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar that lies on the
other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well
wadded with stupidity.” Who does not at once recognize “that mixture of
pushing forward and being pushed forward” as “the brief history of most
human beings?” Who has not seen “advancement hindered by impetuous
candor?” or “private grudges christened by the name of public zeal?” or
“a church built with an exuberance of faith and a deficiency of funds?”
or a man “who would march determinedly along the road he thought best,
but who was easily convinced which was best?” or a preacher “whose
oratory was like a Belgian railway horn, which shows praiseworthy
intentions inadequately fulfilled?”
There is something chemical about such an analysis as this of Rosamond:
“Every nerve and muscle was adjusted to the consciousness that she was
being looked at. She was by nature an actress of parts that entered into
her physique. She even acted her own character, and so well that she did
not know it to be precisely her own!” Nor is the exactness of this any
less cruel: “We may handle extreme opinions with impunity, while our
furniture and our dinner-giving link us to the established order.” Why
not own that “the emptiness of all things is never so striking to us as
when we fail in them?” Is it not better to avoid “following great
reformers beyond the threshold of their own homes?” Does not “our moral
sense learn the manners of good society?”
The lancet works impartially, because the hand that holds it is the hand
of a conscientious artist. She will endure the severest test you can
apply to an artist in fiction. She does not betray any religious bias in
her novels, which is all the more remarkable now that we find it in these
essays. Nor is it at all remarkable that this bias is so very easily
discovered in the novels by those who have found it in her essays!
Whatever opinions she may have expressed in her critical reviews, she is
not the Evangelical, or the Puritan, or the Jew, or the Methodist, or the
Dissenting Minister, or the Churchman, any more than she is the Radical,
the Liberal, or the Tory, who talks in the pages of her fiction.
Every side has its say, every prejudice its voice, and every prejudice
and side and vagary even has the philosophical reason given for it, and
the charitable explanation applied to it. She analyzes the religious
motives without obtrusive criticism or acrid cynicism or nauseous
cant—whether of the orthodox or heretical form.
The art of fiction has nothing more elevated, or more touching, or fairer
to every variety of religious experience, than the delineation of the
motives that actuated Dinah Morris the Methodist preacher, Deronda the
Jew, Dorothea the Puritan, Adam and Seth Bede, and Janet Dempster.
Who can object to this? “Religious ideas have the fate of melodies,
which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of
instruments, some of them woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until
people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.”
Is it not one of the “mixed results of revivals” that “some gain a
religious vocabulary rather than a religious experience?” Is there a
descendant of the Puritans who will not relish the fair play of this?
“They might give the name of piety to much that was only Puritanic
egoism; they might call many things sin that were not sin, but they had
at least the feeling that sin was to be avoided and resisted, and
color-blindness, which may mistake drab for scarlet, is better than total
blindness, which sees no distinction of color at all.” Is not Adam Bede
justified in saying that “to hear some preachers you’d think a man must
be doing nothing all his life but shutting his eyes and looking at what’s
going on in the inside of him,” or that “the doctrines are like finding
names for your feelings so that you can talk of them when you’ve never
known them?” Read all she has said before you object to anything she has
said. Then see whether you will find fault with her for delineating the
motives of those with whom “great illusions” are mistaken for “great
faith;” of those “whose celestial intimacies do not improve their
domestic manners,” however “holy” they may claim to be; of those who
“contrive to conciliate the consciousness of filthy rags with the best
damask;” of those “whose imitative piety and native worldliness is
equally sincere;” of those who “think the invisible powers will be
soothed by a bland parenthesis here and there, coming from a man of
property”—parenthetical recognition of the Almighty! May not “religious
scruples be like spilled needles, making one afraid of treading or
sitting down, or even eating?”
But if this is a great mind fascinated with the insoluble enigma of human
motives, it is a mind profoundly in sympathy with those who are puzzling
hopelessly over the riddle or are struggling hopelessly in its toils.
She is “on a level and in the press with them as they struggle their way
along the stony road through the crowd of unloving fellow-men.” She says
“the only true knowledge of our fellows is that which enables us to feel
with them, which gives us a finer ear for the heart-pulses that are
beating under the mere clothes of circumstance and opinion.” No artist
in fiction ever had a finer ear or a more human sympathy for the
straggler who “pushes manfully on” and “falls at last,” leaving “the
crowd to close over the space he has left.” Her extraordinary skill in
disclosing “the peculiar combination of outward with inward facts which
constitute a man’s critical actions,” only makes her the more charitable
in judging them. “Until we know what this combination has been, or will
be, it will be better not to think ourselves wise about” the character
that results. “There is a terrible coercion in our deeds which may first
turn the honest man into a deceiver, and then reconcile him to the
change. And for this reason the second wrong presents itself to him in
the guise of the only practicable right.” There is nothing of the spirit
of “served him right,” or “just what she deserved,” or “they ought to
have known better,” in George Eliot. That is not in her line. The
opposite of that is exactly in her line. This is characteristic of her:
“In this world there are so many of these common, coarse people, who have
no picturesque or sentimental wretchedness! And 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.” She does not leave them out. Her books are
full of them, and of a Christly charity and plea for them. Who can ever
forget little Tiny, “hidden and uncared for as the pulse of anguish in
the breast of the bird that has fluttered down to its nest with the
long-sought food, and has found the nest torn and empty?” There is
nothing in fiction to surpass in pathos the picture of the death of Mrs.
Amos Barton. George Eliot’s fellow-feeling comes of the habit she
ascribes to Daniel Deronda, “the habit of thinking herself imaginatively
into the experience of others.” That is the reason why her novels come
home so pitilessly to those who have had a deep experience of human life.
These are the men and women whom she fascinates and alienates. I know
strong men and brave women who are afraid of her books, and say so. It
is because of her realness, her unrelenting fidelity to human nature and
human life. It is because the analysis is so delicate, subtle, and
far-in. Hence the atmosphere of sadness that pervades her pages. It was
unavoidable. To see only the behavior, as Dickens did, amuses us; to
study only the motive at the root of the behavior, as George Eliot does,
saddens us. The humor of Mrs. Poyser and the wit of Mrs. Transome only
deepen the pathos by relieving it. There is hardly a sarcasm in these
books but has its pensive undertone.
It is all in the key of “Ye Banks and Braes o’ Bonnie Doon,” and that
would be an appropriate key for a requiem over the grave of George Eliot.
All her writings are now before the world, and are accessible to all.
They have taken their place, and will keep their place, high among the
writings of those of our age who have made that age illustrious in the
history of the English tongue.