The illustrious woman who is the subject of these volumes makes a
remark to her publisher which is at least as relevant now as it was
then. Can nothing be done, she asks, by dispassionate criticism towards
the reform of our national habits in the matter of literary biography?
“Is it anything short of odious that as soon as a man is dead his desk
should be raked, and every insignificant memorandum which he never
meant for the public be printed for the gossiping amusement of people
too idle to read his books?” Autobiography, she says, at least saves a
man or a woman that the world is curious about, from the publication of
a string of mistakes called Memoirs. Even to autobiography, however,
she confesses her deep repugnance unless it can be written so as
to involve neither selfglorification nor impeachment of others—a
condition, by the way, with which hardly any, save Mill’s, can be said
to comply. “I like,” she proceeds, “that _He being dead yet speaketh_
should have quite another meaning than that” (iii. 226, 297, 307). She
shows the same fastidious apprehension still more clearly in another
way. “I have destroyed almost all my friends’ letters to me,” she says,
“because they were only intended for my eyes, and could only fall into
the hands of persons who knew little of the writers, if I allowed them
to remain till after my death. In proportion as I love every form of
piety—which is venerating love—I hate hard curiosity; and, unhappily,
my experience has impressed me with the sense that hard curiosity is
the more common temper of mind” (ii. 286). There is probably little
difference among us in respect of such experience as that.
Much biography, perhaps we might say most, is hardly above the level
of that “personal talk,” to which Wordsworth sagely preferred long
barren silence, the flapping of the flame of his cottage fire, and
the undersong of the kettle on the hob. It would not, then, have
much surprised us if George Eliot had insisted that her works should
remain the only commemoration of her life. There be some who think
that those who have enriched the world with great thoughts and fine
creations, might best be content to rest unmarked “where heaves the
turf in many a mouldering heap,” leaving as little work to the literary
executor, except of the purely crematory sort, as did Aristotle, Plato,
Shakespeare, and some others whose names the world will not willingly
let die. But this is a stoic’s doctrine; the objector may easily retort
that if it had been sternly acted on, we should have known very little
about Dr. Johnson, and nothing about Socrates.
This is but an ungracious prelude to some remarks upon a book, which
must be pronounced a striking success. There will be very little
dispute as to the fact that the editor of these memorials of George
Eliot has done his work with excellent taste, judgment, and sense.
He found no autobiography nor fragment of one, but he has skilfully
shaped a kind of autobiography by a plan which, so far as we know, he
is justified in calling new, and which leaves her life to write itself
in extracts from her letters and journals. With the least possible
obtrusion from the biographer, the original pieces are formed into a
connected whole “that combines a narrative of day to day life with the
play of light and shade which only letters written in serious moods can
give.” The idea is a good one, and Mr. Cross deserves great credit for
it. We may hope that its success will encourage imitators. Certainly
there are drawbacks. We miss the animation of mixed narrative. There
is, too, a touch of monotony in listening for so long to the voice of
a single speaker addressing others who are silent behind a screen. But
Mr. Cross could not we think, have devised a better way of dealing with
his material: it is simple, modest, and effective.
George Eliot, after all, led the life of a studious recluse, with none
of the bustle, variety, motion, and large communication with the outer
world, that justified Lockhart and Moore in making a long story of the
lives of Scott and Byron. Even here, among men of letters, who were
also men of action and of great sociability, are not all biographies
too long? Let any sensible reader turn to the shelf where his Lives
repose; we shall be surprised if he does not find that nearly every one
of them, taking the present century alone, and including such splendid
and attractive subjects as Goethe, Hume, Romilly, Mackintosh, Horner,
Chalmers, Arnold, Southey, Cowper, would not have been all the better
for judicious curtailment. Lockhart, who wrote the longest, wrote
also the shortest, the Life of Burns; and the shortest is the best,
in spite of defects which would only have been worse if the book had
been bigger. It is to be feared that, conscientious and honorable as
his self-denial has been, even Mr. Cross has not wholly resisted the
natural and besetting error of the biographer. Most people will think
that the hundred pages of the Italian tour (vol. ii.), and some other
not very remarkable impressions of travel, might as well or better have
been left out.
As a mere letter-writer, George Eliot will not rank among the famous
masters of what is usually considered especially a woman’s art. She
was too busy in serious work to have leisure for that most delightful
way of wasting time. Besides that, she had by nature none of that
fluency, rapidity, abandonment, pleasant volubility, which make
letters amusing, captivating, or piquant. What Mr. Cross says of
her as the mistress of a _salon_, is true of her for the most part
as a correspondent:—“Playing around many disconnected subjects, in
talk, neither interested nor amused her much. She took things too
seriously, and seldom found the effort of entertaining compensated
by the gain” (iii. 335). There is the outpouring of ardent feeling
for her friends, sobering down, as life goes on, into a crooning
kindliness, affectionate and honest, but often tinged with considerable
self-consciousness. It was said of some one that his epigrams did
honor to his heart; in the reverse direction we occasionally feel that
George Eliot’s effusive playfulness does honor to her head. It lacks
simplicity and _verve_. Even in an invitation to dinner, the words
imply a grave sense of responsibility on both sides, and sense of
responsibility is fatal to the charm of familiar correspondence.
As was inevitable in one whose mind was so habitually turned to the
deeper elements of life, she lets fall the pearls of wise speech even
in short notes. Here are one or two:—
“My own experience and development deepen every day my conviction that
our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathise
with individual suffering and individual joy.”
“If there is one attitude more odious to me than any other of the many
attitudes of ‘knowingness,’ it is that air of lofty superiority to the
vulgar. She will soon find out that I am a very commonplace woman.”
“It so often happens that others are measuring us by our past self
while we are looking back on that self with a mixture of disgust and
sorrow.”
The following is one of the best examples, one of the few examples, of
her best manner:—
“I have been made rather unhappy by my husband’s impulsive proposal
about Christmas. We are dull old persons, and your two sweet young
ones ought to find each Christmas a new bright bead to string on their
memory, whereas to spend the time with us would be to string on a
dark shrivelled berry. They ought to have a group of young creatures
to be joyful with. Our own children always spend their Christmas with
Gertrude’s family; and we have usually taken our sober merry-making
with friends out of town. Illness among these will break our custom
this year; and thus _mein Mann_, feeling that our Christmas was
free, considered how very much he liked being with you, omitting the
other side of the question—namely, our total lack of means to make a
suitably joyous meeting, a real festival, for Phil and Margaret. I was
conscious of this lack in the very moment of the proposal, and the
consciousness has been pressing on me more and more painfully ever
since. Even my husband’s affectionate hopefulness cannot withstand my
melancholy demonstration. So pray consider the kill-joy proposition
as entirely retracted, and give us something of yourselves only on
simple black-letter days, when the Herald Angels have not been raising
expectations early in the morning.”
This is very pleasant, but such pieces are rare, and the infirmity
of human nature has sometimes made us sigh over these pages at the
recollection of the cordial cheeriness of Scott’s letters, the high
spirits of Macaulay, the graceful levity of Voltaire, the rattling
dare-devilry of Byron. Epistolary stilts among men of letters went
out of fashion with Pope, who, as was said, thought that unless every
period finished with a conceit, the letter was not worth the postage.
Poor spirits cannot be the explanation of the stiffness in George
Eliot’s case, for no letters in the English language are so full of
playfulness and charm as those of Cowper, and he was habitually sunk
in gulfs deeper and blacker than George Eliot’s own. It was sometimes
observed of her, that in her conversation, _elle s’écoutait quand elle
parlait_—she seemed to be listening to her own voice while she spoke.
It must be allowed that we are not always free from an impression of
self-listening, even in the most caressing of the letters before us.
This is not much better, however, than trifling. I dare say that if
a lively Frenchman could have watched the inspired Pythia on the
sublime tripod, he would have cried, _Elle s’écoute quand elle parle_.
When everything of that kind has been said, we have the profound
satisfaction, which is not quite a matter of course in the history of
literature, of finding, after all that the woman and the writer were
one. The life does not belie the books, nor private conduct stultify
public profession. We close the third volume of the biography, as we
have so often closed the third volume of her novels, feeling to the
very core that in spite of a style that the French call _alambiqué_, in
spite of tiresome double and treble distillations of phraseology, in
spite of fatiguing moralities, gravities, and ponderosities, we have
still been in communion with a high and commanding intellect, and a
great nature. We are vexed by pedantries that recall the _précieuses_
of the Hôtel Rambouillet, but we know that she had the soul of the
most heroic women in history. We crave more of the Olympian serenity
that makes action natural and repose refreshing, but we cannot miss
the edification of a life marked by indefatigable labor after generous
purposes, by an unsparing struggle for duty, and by steadfast and
devout fellowship with lofty thoughts.
Those who know Mr. Myers’s essay on George Eliot will not have
forgotten its most imposing passage:—
“I remember how at Cambridge, I walked with her once in the Fellows’
Garden of Trinity, on an evening of rainy May; and she, stirred
somewhat beyond her wont, and taking as her text the three words
which have been used so often as the inspiring trumpet-calls of
men.—the words _God_, _Immortality_, _Duty_,—pronounced, with terrible
earnestness, how inconceivable was the _first_, how unbelievable the
_second_, and yet how peremptory and absolute the _third_. Never,
perhaps, had sterner accents affirmed the sovereignty of impersonal
and unrecompensing law. I listened, and night fell; her grave,
majestic countenance turned toward me like a Sibyl’s in the gloom; it
was as though she withdrew from my grasp, one by one, the two scrolls
of promise, and left me the third scroll only, awful with inevitable
fates.”
To many, the relation, which was the most important event in George
Eliot’s life, will seem one of those irretrievable errors which reduce
all talk of duty to a mockery. It is inevitable that this should be so,
and those who disregard a social law have little right to complain.
Men and women whom in every other respect it would be monstrous to
call bad, have taken this particular law into their own hands before
now, and committed themselves to conduct of which “magnanimity owes
no account to prudence.” But if they had sense and knew what they
were about, they have braced themselves to endure the disapproval of
a majority fortunately more prudential than themselves. The world is
busy, and its instruments are clumsy. It cannot know all the facts;
it has neither time nor material for unravelling all the complexities
of motive, or for distinguishing mere libertinage from grave and
deliberate moral misjudgment; it is protecting itself as much as it
is condemning the offenders. On all this, then, we need have neither
sophistry nor cant. But those who seek something deeper than a verdict
for the honest working purpose of leaving cards and inviting to dinner,
may feel, as has been observed by a contemporary writer, that men and
women are more fairly judged, if judge them we must, by the way in
which they bear the burden of an error, than by the decision that laid
the burden on their lives. Some idea of this kind was in her own mind
when she wrote to her most intimate friend in 1857, “If I live five
years longer, the positive result of my existence on the side of truth
and goodness will outweigh the small negative good that would have
consisted in my not doing anything to shock others” (i. 461). This
urgent desire to balance the moral account may have had something to do
with that laborious sense of responsibility which weighed so heavily on
her soul, and had so equivocal an effect upon her art. Whatever else is
to be said of this particular union, nobody can deny that the picture
on which it left a mark was an exhibition of extraordinary self-denial,
energy, and persistency in the cultivation and the use of great gifts
and powers for what their possessor believed to be the highest objects
for society and mankind.
A more perfect companionship, one on a higher intellectual level, or of
more sustained mental activity, is nowhere recorded. Lewes’s mercurial
temperament contributed as much as the powerful mind of his consort to
prevent their seclusion from degenerating into an owlish stagnation. To
the very last (1878) he retained his extraordinary buoyancy. “Nothing
but death could quench that bright flame. Even on his worst days he
had always a good story to tell; and I remember on one occasion in the
drawing-room at Witley, between two bouts of pain, he sang through
with great _brio_, though without much voice, the greater portion of
the tenor part in the _Barber of Seville_, George Eliot playing his
accompaniment, and both of them thoroughly enjoying the fun” (iii.
334). All this gaiety, his inexhaustible vivacity, the facility of
his transitions from brilliant levity to a keen seriousness, the
readiness of his mental response, and the wide range of intellectual
accomplishments that were much more than superficial, made him a source
of incessant and varied stimulation. Even those, and there were some,
who thought that his gaiety bordered on flippancy, that his genial
self-content often came near to shockingly bad taste, and that his
reminiscences of poor Mr. Fitzball and the green-room and all the rest
of the Bohemia in which he had once dwelt, too racy for his company,
still found it hard to resist the alert intelligence with which he rose
to every good topic, and the extraordinary heartiness and spontaneity
with which the wholesome spring of human laughter was touched in him.
Lewes had plenty of egotism, not to give it a more unamiable name, but
it never mastered his intellectual sincerity. George Eliot describes
him as one of the few human beings she has known who will, in the
heat of an argument, see, and straightway confess, that he is in the
wrong, instead of trying to shift his ground or use any other device of
vanity. “The intense happiness of our union,” she wrote to a friend,
“is derived in a high degree from the perfect freedom with which we
each follow and declare our own impressions. In this respect I know
_no_ man so great as he—that difference of opinion rouses no egotistic
irritation in him, and that he is ready to admit that another argument
is the stronger, the moment his intellect recognises it” (ii. 279).
This will sound very easy to the dispassionate reader, because it is
so obviously just and proper, but if the dispassionate reader ever
tries, he may find the virtue not so easy as it looks. Finally, and
above all, we can never forget in Lewes’s case how much true elevation
and stability of character was implied in the unceasing reverence,
gratitude, and devotion with which for five-and-twenty years he treated
her to whom he owed all his happiness, and who most truly, in his own
words (ii. 76), had made his life a new birth.
The reader will be mistaken if he should infer from such passages as
abound in her letters that George Eliot had any particular weakness
for domestic or any other kind of idolatry. George Sand, in _Lucrezia
Floriani_ where she drew so unkind a picture of Chopin, has described
her own life and character as marked by “a great facility for
illusions, a blind benevolence of judgment, a tenderness of heart that
was inexhaustible; consequently great precipitancy, many mistakes, much
weakness, fits of heroic devotion to unworthy objects, enormous force
applied to an end that was wretched in truth and fact, but sublime in
her thought.” George Eliot had none of this facility. Nor was general
benignity in her at all of the poor kind that is incompatible with a
great deal of particular censure. Universal benevolence never lulled
an active critical faculty, nor did she conceive true humility as at
all consisting in hiding from an impostor that you have found him out.
Like Cardinal Newman, for whose beautiful passage at the end of the
_Apologia_ she expresses such richly deserved admiration (ii. 387),
she unites to the gift of unction and brotherly love, a capacity for
giving an extremely shrewd nip to a brother whom she does not love.
Her passion for Thomas-a-Kempis did not prevent her, and there was no
reason why it should, from dealing very faithfully with a friend, for
instance (ii. 271); from describing Mr. Buckle as a conceited, ignorant
man; or castigating Brougham and other people in slashing reviews; or
otherwise from showing that great expansiveness of the affections went
with a remarkably strong, hard, masculine, positive, judging head.
The benefits that George Eliot gained from her exclusive companionship
with a man of lively talents were not without some compensating
drawbacks. The keen stimulation and incessant strain, unrelieved by
variety of daily intercourse, and never diversified by participation
in the external activities of the world, tended to bring about a
loaded, over-conscious, over-anxious state of mind, which was not only
not wholesome in itself, but was inconsistent with the full freshness
and strength of artistic work. The presence of the real world in
his life has, in all but one or two cases, been one element of the
novelist’s highest success in the world of imaginative creation. George
Eliot had no greater favorite than Scott, and when a series of little
books upon English men of letters was planned, she said that she
thought that writer among us the happiest to whom it should fall to
deal with Scott. But Scott lived full in the life of his fellow-men.
Even of Wordsworth, her other favorite, though he was not a creative
artist, we may say that he daily saturated himself in those natural
elements and effects, which were the material, the suggestion, and the
sustaining inspiration of his consoling and fortifying poetry. George
Eliot did not live in the midst of her material, but aloof from it and
outside of it. Heaven forbid that this should seem to be said by way of
censure. Both her health and other considerations made all approach to
busy sociability in any of its shapes both unwelcome and impossible.
But in considering the relation of her manner of life to her work,
her creations, her meditations, one cannot but see that when compared
with some writers of her own sex and age, she is constantly bookish,
artificial, and mannered. She is this because she fed her art too
exclusively, first on the memories of her youth, and next from books,
pictures, statues, instead of from the living model, as seen in its
actual motion. It is direct calls and personal claims from without that
make fiction alive. Jane Austen bore her part in the little world of
the parlor that she described. The writer of _Sylvia’s Lovers_, whose
work George Eliot appreciated with unaffected generosity (i. 305), was
the mother of children, and was surrounded by the wholesome actualities
of the family. The authors of _Jane Eyre_ and _Wuthering Heights_
passed their days in one long succession of wild, stormy, squalid,
anxious, and miserable scenes—almost as romantic, as poetic, and as
tragic, to use George Eliot’s words, as their own stories. George Sand
eagerly shared, even to the pitch of passionate tumult and disorder,
in the emotions, the aspirations, the ardor, the great conflicts and
controversies of her time. In every one of these, their daily closeness
to the real life of the world has given a vitality to their work which
we hardly expect that even the next generation will find in more
than one or two of the romances of George Eliot. It may even come to
pass that their position will be to hers as that of Fielding is to
Richardson in our own day.
In a letter to Mr. Harrison, which is printed here (ii. 441), George
Eliot describes her own method, as “the severe effort of trying to make
certain ideas thoroughly incarnate, as if they had revealed themselves
to me first in the flesh and not in the spirit,” The passage recalls
a discussion one day at the Priory in 1877. She was speaking of the
different methods of the poetic or creative art, and said that she
began with moods, thoughts, passions, and then invented the story for
their sake, and fitted it to them; Shakespeare, on the other hand,
picked up a story that struck him, and then proceeded to work in
the moods, thoughts, passions, as they came to him in the course of
meditation on the story. We hardly need the result to convince us that
Shakespeare chose the better part.
The influence of her reserved fashion of daily life was heightened
by the literary exclusiveness which of set purpose she imposed upon
herself. “The less an author hears about himself,” she says, in one
place, “the better.” “It is my rule, very strictly observed, not
to read the criticisms on my writings. For years I have found this
abstinence necessary to preserve me from that discouragement as an
artist, which ill-judged praise, no less than ill-judged blame, tends
to produce in us.” George Eliot pushed this repugnance to criticism
beyond the personal reaction of it upon the artist, and more than
disparaged its utility, even in the most competent and highly trained
hands. She finds that the diseased spot in the literary culture of our
time is touched with the finest point by the saying of La Bruyère,
that “the pleasure of criticism robs us of the pleasure of being
keenly moved by very fine things” (iii. 327). “It seems to me,” she
writes (ii. 412), “much better to read a man’s own writings, than to
read what others say about him, especially when the man is first-rate
and the others third-rate. As Goethe said long ago about Spinoza, ‘I
always preferred to learn from the man himself what _he_ thought,
rather than to hear from some one else what he ought to have thought.’”
As if the scholar will not always be glad to do both, to study his
author and not to refuse the help of the rightly prepared commentator;
as if even Goethe himself would not have been all the better acquainted
with Spinoza, if he could have read Mr. Pollock’s book upon him. But
on this question Mr. Arnold has fought a brilliant battle, and to him
George Eliot’s heresies may well be left.
On the personal point whether an author should ever hear of himself,
George Eliot oddly enough contradicts herself in a casual remark upon
Bulwer. “I have a great respect,” she says, “for the energetic industry
which has made the most of his powers. He has been writing diligently
for more than thirty years, constantly improving his position, and
profiting by the lessons of public opinion and of other writers” (ii.
322). But if it is true that the less an author hears about himself
the better, how are these salutary “lessons of public opinion” to
penetrate to him? “Rubens,” she says, writing from Munich, in 1858 (ii.
28), “gives me more pleasure than any other painter whether right or
wrong. More than any one else he makes me feel that painting is a great
art, and that he was a great artist. His are such real breathing men
and women, moved by passions, not mincing, and grimacing, and posing
in mere imitation of passion.” But Rubens did not concentrate his
intellect on his own ponderings, nor shut out the wholesome chastenings
of praise and blame, lest they should discourage his inspiration.
Beethoven, another of the chief objects of George Eliot’s veneration,
bore all the rough stress of an active and troublesome calling,
though of the musician, if of any, we may say, that his is the art of
self-absorption.
Hence, delightful and inspiring as it is to read this story of diligent
and discriminating cultivation, of accurate truth and real erudition
and beauty, not vaguely but methodically interpreted, one has some of
the sensations of the moral and intellectual hothouse. Mental hygiene
is apt to lead to mental valetudinarianism. “The ignorant journalist”
may be left to the torment which George Eliot wished that she could
inflict on one of those literary slovens whose manuscripts bring even
the most philosophic editor to the point of exasperation: “I should
like to stick red-hot skewers through the writer, whose style is as
sprawling as his handwriting.” By all means. But much that even the
most sympathetic reader finds repellent in George Eliot’s later work
might perhaps never have been, if Mr. Lewes had not practised with
more than Russian rigor a censorship of the press and the post office
which kept every disagreeable whisper scrupulously from her ear. To
slop every draft with sandbags, screens, and curtains, and to limit
one’s exercise to a drive in a well-warmed brougham with the windows
drawn up, may save a few annoying colds in the head, but the end of the
process will be the manufacture of an invalid.
Whatever view we may take of the precise connection between what she
read, or abstained from reading, and what she wrote, no studious man
or woman can look without admiration and envy on the breadth, variety,
seriousness, and energy, with which she set herself her tasks and
executed them. She says in one of her letters, “there is something
more piteous almost than soapless poverty in the application of
feminine incapacity to literature” (ii. 16). Nobody has ever taken
the responsibilities of literature more ardently in earnest. She was
accustomed to read aloud to Mr. Lewes three hours a day, and her
private reading, except when she was engaged in the actual stress of
composition, must have filled as many more. His extraordinary alacrity
and her brooding intensity of mind, prevented these hours from being
that leisurely process in slippers and easy chair which passes with
many for the practice of literary cultivation. Much of her reading was
for the direct purposes of her own work. The young lady who begins to
write historic novels out of her own head will find something much to
her advantage if she will refer to the list of books read by George
Eliot during the latter half of 1861, when she was meditating _Romola_
(ii. 325). Apart from immediate needs and uses, no student of our time
has known better the solace, the delight, the guidance that abide in
great writings. Nobody who did not share the scholars enthusiasm could
have described the blind scholar in his library in the adorable fifth
chapter of _Romola_; and we feel that she must have copied out with
keen gusto of her own those words of Petrarch which she puts into old
Bardo’s mouth—“_Libri medullitus delectant, colloquuntur, consulunt, et
viva quadam nobis atque arguta familiaritate junguntur_.”
As for books that are not books, as Milton bade us do with “neat
repasts with wine,” she wisely spared to interpose them oft. Her
standards of knowledge were those of the erudite and the savant,
and even in the region of beauty she was never content with any but
definite impressions. In one place in these volumes, by the way,
she makes a remark curiously inconsistent with the usual scientific
attitude of her mind. She has been reading Darwin’s _Origin of
Species_, on which she makes the truly astonishing criticism that it is
“sadly wanting in illustrative facts,” and that “it is not impressive
from want of luminous and orderly presentation” (ii. 43-48). Then
she says that “the development theory, and all other explanation of
processes by which things came to be produce a feeble impression
compared with the mystery that lies under processes.” This position
it does not now concern us to discuss, but at least it is in singular
discrepancy with her strong habitual preference for accurate and
quantitative knowledge, over vague and misty moods in the region of the
unknowable and the unreachable.
George Eliot’s means of access to books were very full. She knew
French, German, Italian, and Spanish accurately. Greek and Latin, Mr.
Cross tells us, she could read with thorough delight to herself; though
after the appalling specimen of Mill’s juvenile Latinity that Mr. Bain
has disinterred, the fastidious collegian may be sceptical of the
scholarship of prodigies. Hebrew was her favorite study to the end of
her days. People commonly supposed that she had been inoculated with
an artificial taste for science by her companion. We now learn that
she took a decided interest in natural science long before she made
Mr. Lewes’s acquaintance, and many of the roundabout pedantries that
displeased people in her latest writings, and were set down to his
account, appeared in her composition before she had ever exchanged a
word with him.
All who knew her well enough were aware that she had what Mr. Cross
describes as “limitless persistency in application.” This is an
old account of genius, but nobody illustrates more effectively the
infinite capacity of taking pains. In reading, in looking at pictures,
in playing difficult music, in talking, she was equally importunate
in the search, and equally insistent on mastery. Her faculty of
sustained concentration was part of her immense intellectual power.
“Continuous thought did not fatigue her. She could keep her mind on
the stretch hour after hour; the body might give way, but the brain
remained unwearied” (iii. 422). It is only a trifling illustration of
the infection of her indefatigable quality of taking pains, that Lewes
should have formed the important habit of re-writing every page of his
work, even of short articles for Reviews, before letting it go to the
press. The journal shows what sore pain and travail composition was to
her. She wrote the last volume of _Adam Bede_ in six weeks; she “could
not help writing it fast, because it was written under the stress of
emotion.” But what a prodigious contrast between her pace, and Walter
Scott’s twelve volumes a year! Like many other people of powerful
brains, she united strong and clear general retentiveness, with a weak
and untrustworthy verbal memory. “She never could trust herself to
write a quotation without verifying it.” “What courage and patience,”
she says of some one else, “are wanted for every life that aims to
produce anything,” and her own existence was one long and painful
sermon on that text.
Over few lives have the clouds of mental dejection hung in such heavy
unmoving banks. Nearly every chapter is strewn with melancholy words.
“I cannot help thinking more of your illness than of the pleasure in
prospect—according to my foolish nature, which is always prone to live
in past pain.” The same sentiment is the mournful refrain that runs
through all. Her first resounding triumph, the success of _Adam Bede_,
instead of buoyancy and exultation, only adds a fresh sense of the
weight upon her future life. “The self-questioning whether my nature
will be able to meet the heavy demands upon it, both of personal duty
and intellectual production—presses upon me almost continually in a
way that prevents me even from tasting the quiet joy I might have in
the _work done_. I feel no regret that the fame, as such, brings no
pleasure; but it _is_ a grief to me that I do not constantly feel
strong in thankfulness that my past life has vindicated its uses.”
_Romola_ seems to have been composed in constant gloom. “I remember
my wife telling me, at Witley,” says Mr. Cross, “how cruelly she
had suffered at Dorking from working under a leaden weight at this
time. The writing of _Romola_ ploughed into her more than any of her
other books. She told me she could put her finger on it as marking a
well-defined transition in her life. In her own words, ‘I began it a
young woman—I finished it an old woman.’” She calls upon herself to
make “greater efforts against indolence and the despondency that comes
from too egoistic a dread of failure.” “This is the last entry I mean
to make in my old book in which I wrote for the first time at Geneva
in 1849. What moments of despair I passed through after that—despair
that life would ever be made precious to me by the consciousness
that I lived to some good purpose! It was that sort of despair that
sucked away the sap of half the hours which might have been filled by
energetic youthful activity; and the same demon tries to get hold of
me again whenever an old work is dismissed, and a new one is being
meditated” (ii. 307). One day the entry is: “Horrible scepticism about
all things paralysing my mind. Shall I ever be good for anything
again? Ever do anything again?” On another, she describes herself to
a trusted friend as “a mind morbidly desponding, and a consciousness
tending more and more to consist in memories of error and imperfection
rather than in a strengthening sense of achievement.” We have to turn
to such books as Bunyan’s _Grace Abounding_ to find any parallel to
such wretchedness.
Times were not wanting when the sun strove to shine through the gloom,
when the resistance to melancholy was not wholly a failure, and when,
as she says, she felt that Dante was right in condemning to the Stygian
marsh those who had been sad under the blessed sunlight. “Sad were we
in the sweet air that is gladdened by the sun, bearing sluggish smoke
in our hearts; now lie we sadly here in the black ooze.” But still for
the most part sad she remained in the sweet air, and the look of pain
that haunted her eyes and brow even in her most genial and animated
moments, only told too truly the story of her inner life.
That from this central gloom a shadow should spread to her work was
unavoidable. It would be rash to compare George Eliot with Tacitus,
with Dante, with Pascal. A novelist—for as a poet, after trying hard
to think otherwise, most of us find her magnificent but unreadable—as
a novelist bound by the conditions of her art to deal in a thousand
trivialities of human character and situation, she has none of their
severity of form. But she alone of moderns has their note of sharp-cut
melancholy, of sombre rumination, of brief disdain. Living in a time
when humanity has been raised, whether formally or informally, into a
religion, she draws a painted curtain of pity before the tragic scene.
Still the attentive ear catches from time to time the accents of an
unrelenting voice, that proves her kindred with those three mighty
spirits and stern monitors of men. In George Eliot, a reader with a
conscience may be reminded of the saying that when a man opens Tacitus
he puts himself in the confessional. She was no vague dreamer over
the folly and the weakness of men, and the cruelty and blindness of
destiny. Hers is not the dejection of the poet who “could lie down
like a tired child, And weep away this life of care,” as Shelley at
Naples; nor is it the despairing misery that moved Cowper in the
awful verses of the _Castaway_. It was not such self-pity as wrung
from Burns the cry to life, “Thou art a galling load, Along, a rough,
a weary road, To wretches such as I;” nor such general sense of the
woes of the race as made Keats think of the world as a place where
men sit and hear each other groan, “Where but to think is to be full
of sorrow, And leaden-eyed despairs.” She was as far removed from the
plangent reverie of Rousseau as from the savage truculence of Swift.
Intellectual training had given her the spirit of order and proportion,
of definiteness and measure, and this marks her alike from the great
sentimentalists and the sweeping satirists. “Pity and fairness,” as
she beautifully says (iii. 317), “are two little words which, carried
out, would embrace the utmost delicacies of the moral life.” But hers
is not seldom the severe fairness of the judge, and the pity that may
go with putting on the black cap after a conviction for high treason.
In the midst of many an easy flowing page, the reader is surprised by
some bitter aside, some judgment of intense and concentrated irony with
the flash of a blade in it, some biting sentence where lurks the stern
disdain and the anger of Tacitus, and Dante, and Pascal. Souls like
these are not born for happiness.
* * * * *
This is not the occasion for an elaborate discussion of George Eliot’s
place in the mental history of her time, but her biography shows
that she travelled along the road that was trodden by not a few in
her day. She started from that fervid evangelicalism which has made
the base of many a powerful character in this century, from Cardinal
Newman downwards. Then with curious rapidity she threw it all off,
and embraced with equal zeal the rather harsh and crude negations
which were then associated with the _Westminster Review_. The second
stage did not last much longer than the first. “Religious and moral
sympathy with the historical life of man,” she said (ii. 363), “is the
larger half of culture;” and this sympathy, which was the fruit of
her culture, had by the time she was thirty become the new seed of a
positive faith and a semi-conservative creed. Here is a passage from a
letter of 1862 (she had translated Strauss, we may remind ourselves,
in 1845, and Feuerbach in 1854):—
“Pray don’t ask me ever again not to rob a man of his religious
belief, as if you thought my mind tended to such robbery. I have
too profound a conviction of the efficacy that lies in all sincere
faith, and the spiritual blight that comes with no-faith, to have any
negative propagandism in me. In fact, I have very little sympathy with
Freethinkers as a class, and have lost all interest in mere antagonism
to religious doctrines. I care only to know, if possible, the lasting
meaning that lies in all religious doctrine from the beginning till
now” (ii. 243).