“There is
One great society alone on earth:
The noble Living and the noble Dead.”
Underneath this growth and diversity of opinion we see George Eliot’s
oneness of character, just, for that matter, as we see it in Mill’s
long and grave march from the uncompromising denials instilled into him
by his father, then through Wordsworthian mysticism and Coleridgean
conservatism, down to the pale belief and dim starlight faith of his
posthumous volume. George Eliot was more austere, more unflinching,
and of ruder intellectual constancy than Mill. She never withdrew
from the position that she had taken up, of denying and rejecting;
she stood to that to the end: what she did was to advance to the far
higher perception that denial and rejection are not the aspects best
worth attending to or dwelling upon. She had little patience with those
who fear that the doctrine of protoplasm must dry up the springs of
human effort. Any one who trembles at that catastrophe may profit by
a powerful remonstrance of hers in the pages before us (iii. 245-250,
also 228).
“The consideration of molecular physics is not the direct ground of
human love and moral action, any more than it is the direct means of
composing a noble picture or of enjoying great music. One might as
well hope to dissect one’s own body and be merry in doing it, as take
molecular physics (in which you must banish from your field of view
what is specifically human) to be your dominant guide, your determiner
of motives, in what is solely human. That every study has its bearing
on every other is true; but pain and relief, love and sorrow, have
their peculiar history which make an experience and knowledge over and
above the swing of atoms.
“With regard to the pains and limitations of one’s personal lot, I
suppose there is not a single man, or woman, who has not more or less
need of that stoical resignation which is often a hidden heroism, or
who, in considering his or her past history, is not aware that it
has been cruelly affected by the ignorant or selfish action of some
fellow-being in a more or less close relation of life. And to my mind,
there can be no stronger motive, than this perception, to an energetic
effort that the lives nearest to us shall not suffer in a like manner
from _us_.
“As to duration and the way in which it affects your view of the human
history, what is really the difference to your imagination between
infinitude and billions when you have to consider the value of human
experience? Will you say that since your life has a term of threescore
years and ten, it was really a matter of indifference whether you were
a cripple with a wretched skin disease, or an active creature with a
mind at large for the enjoyment of knowledge, and with a nature which
has attracted others to you?”
For herself, she remained in the position described in one of her
letters in 1860 (ii. 283):—“I have faith in the working out of higher
possibilities than the Catholic or any other Church has presented;
and those who have strength to wait and endure are bound to accept
no formula which their whole souls—their intellect, as well as their
emotions—do not embrace with entire reverence. The highest calling and
election is _to do without opium_, and live through all our pain with
conscious, clear-eyed endurance.” She would never accept the common
optimism. As she says here:—“Life, though a good to men on the whole,
is a doubtful good to many, and to some not a good at all. To my
thought it is a source of constant mental distortion to make the denial
of this a part of religion—to go on pretending things are better than
they are.”
Of the afflicting dealings with the world of spirits, which in those
days were comparatively limited to the untutored minds of America, but
which since have come to exert so singular a fascination for some of
the most brilliant of George Eliot’s younger friends (see iii. 204),
she thought as any sensible Philistine among us persists in thinking to
this day:—
“If it were another spirit aping Charlotte Brontë—if here and there
at rare spots and among people of a certain temperament, or even at
many spots and among people of all temperaments, tricksy spirits
are liable to rise as a sort of earth-bubbles and set furniture in
movement, and tell things which we either know already or should be as
well without knowing—I must frankly confess that I have but a feeble
interest in these doings, feeling my life very short for the supreme
and awful revelations of a more orderly and intelligible kind which
I shall die with an imperfect knowledge of. If there were miserable
spirits whom we could help—then I think we should pause and have
patience with their trivial-mindedness; but otherwise I don’t feel
bound to study them more than I am bound to study the special follies
of a peculiar phase of human society. Others, who feel differently,
and are attracted towards this study, are making an experiment for us
as to whether anything better than bewilderment can come of it. At
present it seems to me that to rest any fundamental part of religion
on such a basis is a melancholy misguidance of men’s minds from the
true sources of high and pure emotion” (iii. 161).
The period of George Eliot’s productions was from 1856, the date of her
first stories, down to 1876, when she wrote, not under her brightest
star, her last novel of _Daniel Deronda_. During this time the great
literary influences of the epoch immediately preceding had not indeed
fallen silent, but the most fruitful seed had been sown. Carlyle’s
_Sartor_ (1833-4), and his _Miscellaneous Essays_ (collected, 1839),
were in all hands; but he had fallen into the terrible slough of his
Prussian history (1858-65), and the last word of his evangel had gone
forth to all whom it concerned. _In Memoriam_, whose noble music and
deep-browed thought awoke such new and wide response in men’s hearts,
was published in 1850. The second volume of _Modern Painters_, of which
I have heard George Eliot say, as of _In Memoriam_ too, that she owed
much and very much to it, belongs to an earlier date still (1846), and
when it appeared, though George Eliot was born in the same year as its
author, she was still translating Strauss at Coventry. Mr. Browning,
for whose genius she had such admiration, and who was always so good
a friend, did indeed produce during this period some work which the
adepts find as full of power and beauty as any that ever came from his
pen. But Mr. Browning’s genius has moved rather apart from the general
currents of his time, creating character and working out motives from
within, undisturbed by transient shadows from the passing questions and
answers of the day.
The romantic movement was then upon its fall. The great Oxford
movement, which besides its purely ecclesiastical effects, had linked
English religion once more to human history, and which was itself one
of the unexpected out-comes of the romantic movement, had spent its
original force, and no longer interested the stronger minds among the
rising generation. The hour had sounded for the scientific movement.
In 1859, was published the _Origin of Species_, undoubtedly the most
far-reaching agency of the time, supported as it was by a volume of
new knowledge which came pouring in from many sides. The same period
saw the important speculations of Mr. Spencer, whose influence on
George Eliot had from their first acquaintance been of a very decisive
kind. Two years after the _Origin of Species_ came Maine’s _Ancient
Law_, and that was followed by the accumulations of Mr. Tylor and
others, exhibiting order and fixed correlation among great sets of
facts which had hitherto lain in that cheerful chaos of general
knowledge which has been called general ignorance. The excitement
was immense. Evolution, development, heredity, adaptation, variety,
survival, natural selection, were so many patent pass-keys that were to
open every chamber.
George Eliot’s novels, as they were the imaginative application of
this great influx of new ideas, so they fitted in with the moods
which those ideas had called up. “My function,” she said (iii. 330),
“is that of the æsthetic, not the doctrinal teacher—the rousing of
the nobler emotions which make mankind desire the social right, not
the prescribing of special measures, concerning which the artistic
mind, however strongly moved by social sympathy, is often not the
best judge.” Her influence in this direction over serious and
impressionable minds was great indeed. The spirit of her art exactly
harmonised with the new thoughts that were shaking the world of her
contemporaries. Other artists had drawn their pictures with a strong
ethical background, but she gave a finer color and a more spacious air
to her ethics, by showing the individual passions and emotions of her
characters, their adventures and their fortunes, as evolving themselves
from long series of antecedent causes, and bound up with many widely
operating forces and distant events. Here, too, we find ourselves
in the full stream of evolution, hereditary, survival, and fixed
inexorable law.
This scientific quality of her work may be considered to have stood in
the way of her own aim. That the nobler emotions roused by her writings
tend to “make mankind desire the social right,” is not to be doubted;
that we are not sure that she imparts peculiar energy to the desire.
What she kindles is not a very strenuous, aggressive, and operative
desire. The sense of the iron limitations that are set to improvement
in present and future by inexorable forces of the past, is stronger in
her than any intrepid resolution to press on to whatever improvement
may chance to be within reach if we only make the attempt. In energy,
in inspiration, in the kindling of living faith in social effort,
George Sand, not to speak of Mazzini, takes a far higher place.
It was certainly not the business of an artist to form judgments in
the sphere of practical politics, but George Eliot was far too humane
a nature not to be deeply moved by momentous events as they passed.
Yet her observations, at any rate after 1848, seldom show that energy
of sympathy of which we have been speaking, and these observations
illustrate our point. We can hardly think that anything was ever said
about the great civil war in America, so curiously far-fetched as the
following reflection:—“My best consolation is that an example on so
tremendous a scale of the need for the education of mankind through
the affections and sentiments, as a basis for true development, will
have a strong influence on all thinkers, and be a check to the arid
narrow antagonism which in some quarters is held to be the only form of
liberal thought” (ii. 335).
In 1848, as we have said, she felt the hopes of the hour in all their
fulness. To a friend she writes (i. 179):—”You and Carlyle (have you
seen his article in last week’s _Examiner_?) are the only two people
who feel just as I would have them—who can glory in what is actually
great and beautiful without putting forth any cold reservations
and incredulities to save their credit for wisdom. I am all the
more delighted with your enthusiasm because I didn’t expect it. I
feared that you lacked revolutionary ardor. But no—you are just as
_sans-culottish_ and rash as I would have you. You are not one of those
sages whose reason keeps so tight a rein on their emotions that they
are too constantly occupied in calculating consequences to rejoice
in any great manifestation of the forces that underlie our everyday
existence.
“I thought we had fallen on such evil days that we were to see no
really great movement—that ours was what St. Simon calls a purely
critical epoch, not at all an organic one; but I begin to be glad of
my date. I would consent, however, to have a year clipt off my life
for the sake of witnessing such a scene as that of the men of the
barricades bowing to the image of Christ, ‘who first taught fraternity
to men.’ One trembles to look into every fresh newspaper lest there
should be something to mar the picture; but hitherto even the scoffing
newspaper critics have been compelled into a tone of genuine respect
for the French people and the Provisional Government. Lamartine can
act a poem if he cannot write one of the very first order. I hope that
beautiful face given to him in the pictorial newspaper is really his:
it is worthy of an aureole. I have little patience with people who can
find time to pity Louis Philippe and his moustachioed sons. Certainly
our decayed monarchs should be pensioned off: we should have a hospital
for them, or a sort of zoological garden, where these worn-out humbugs
may be preserved. It is but justice that we should keep them, since we
have spoiled them for any honest trade. Let them sit on soft cushions,
and have their dinner regularly, but, for heaven’s sake, preserve me
from sentimentalizing over a pampered old man when the earth has its
millions of unfed souls and bodies. Surely he is not so Ahab-like as to
wish that the revolution had been deferred till his son’s days: and I
think the shades of the Stuarts would have some reason to complain if
the Bourbons, who are so little better than they, had been allowed to
reign much longer.”
The hopes of ’48 were not very accurately fulfilled, and in George
Eliot they never came to life again. Yet in social things we may be
sure that undying hope is the secret of vision.
There is a passage in Coleridge’s _Friend_ which seems to represent the
outcome of George Eliot’s teaching on most, and not the worst, of her
readers:—“The tangle of delusions,” says Coleridge, “which stifled and
distorted the growing tree of our well-being has been torn away; the
parasite weeds that fed on its very roots have been plucked up with a
salutary violence. To us there remain only quiet duties, the constant
care, the gradual improvement, the cautious and unhazardous labors of
the industrious though contented gardener—to prune, to strengthen, to
engraft, and one by one to remove from its leaves and fresh shoots the
slug and the caterpillar.” Coleridge goes further than George Eliot,
when he adds the exhortation—“Far be it from us to undervalue with
light and senseless detraction the conscientious hardihood of our
predecessors, or even to condemn in them that vehemence to which the
blessings it won for us leave us now neither temptation nor pretext.”
George Eliot disliked vehemence more and more as her work advanced.
The word “crudity,” so frequently on her lips, stood for all that
was objectionable and distasteful. The conservatism of an artistic
moral nature was shocked by the seeming peril to which priceless
moral elements of human character were exposed by the energumens of
progress. Their impatient hopes for the present appeared to her rather
unscientific; their disregard of the past, very irreverent and impious.
Mill had the same feeling when he disgusted his father by standing
up for Wordsworth, on the ground that Wordsworth was helping to keep
alive in human nature elements which utilitarians and innovators would
need when their present and particular work was done. Mill, being free
from the exaltations that make the artist, kept a truer balance. His
famous pair of essays on Bentham and Coleridge were published (for
the first time, so far as our generation was concerned) in the same
year as _Adam Bede_, and I can vividly remember how the “Coleridge”
first awoke in many of us, who were then youths at Oxford, that sense
of truth having many mansions, and that desire and power of sympathy
with the past, with the positive bases of the social fabric, and with
the value of Permanence in States, which form the reputable side of
all conservatisms. This sentiment and conviction never took richer
or more mature form than in the best work of George Eliot, and her
stories lighted up with a fervid glow the truths that minds of another
type had just brought to the surface. It was this that made her a
great moral force at that epoch, especially for all who were capable
by intellectual training of standing at her point of view. We even, as
I have said, tried hard to love her poetry, but the effort has ended
less in love than in a very distant homage to the majestic in intention
and the sonorous in execution. In fiction, too, as the years go by,
we begin to crave more fancy, illusion, enchantment, than the quality
of her genius allowed. But the loftiness of her character is abiding,
and it passes nobly through the ordeal of an honest biography. “For
the lessons,” says the fine critic already quoted, “most imperatively
needed by the mass of men, the lessons of deliberate kindness, of
careful truth, of unwavering endeavor,—for these plain themes one could
not ask a more convincing teacher than she whom we are commemorating
now. 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.” As a wise,
benignant soul George Eliot will still remain for all right-judging men
and women.—_Macmillan’s Magazine._