It will be the duty of the more serious criticism of another generation
in some degree to revive the reputation of George Eliot as an abiding
literary force--a reputation which the taste of the hour is rather
disposed to reduce. Five-and-twenty years ago the tendency was towards
excessive praise: many judges, of trained literary insight, proclaimed
her as the greatest genius of the age, one of the brightest stars of
English literature, nay, said some of them, quite losing control of
their speech--a modern Shakespeare, and so forth. Some cooler heads
looked grave, but none save the inveterate cynics ventured to mock; and
the great public, as usual, thought it best to follow the lead of so
many men and so many women of the higher culture. The inevitable
reaction ensued: when, not only were the grave shortcomings of George
Eliot ruthlessly condemned, but her noble aim and superb qualities were
blindly ignored.
The taste in popular romance sways hither and thither in sudden
revulsion, like the taste in hats or in frocks, or the verdict of
manhood suffrage. This or that type becomes suddenly the rage, this or
that mannerism is voted an offence, as quickly as fashion runs after a
new tint, or boycotts an obsolete sleeve. Journalism and all the other
forces of the hour stimulate these caprices and carry away the masses
by their volubility and noise. It is the business of serious
criticism, keeping a cooler head, to correct these fervid impulses of
the day--whilst excited audiences in the amphitheatre raise or depress
the fatal thumb, awarding life or death to the combatants in the great
arena.
The business of criticism is to _judge_--to judge upon the whole
evidence, after hearing counsel on both sides with equal attention,
after weighing every shred of argument and every word that any witness
has to offer, and after patient study of every aspect of the case, to
deliver a complete and reasoned estimate of the whole matter at issue.
The true critic is not a mere juryman, who has nothing to do but to
pronounce a bare verdict of "guilty" or "not guilty." He is a judge of
the supreme court of equity, who may find, in some intricate story
unravelled at his bar, a dozen errors in law and as many mistakes of
fact, and yet may give substantial relief or may decree onerous
penalties. It is easy enough to detect faulty, easy enough to insist
on merits: the thing wanted to guide the public is the cool,
compensated, equitable judgment that is not seduced by any conspicuous
charm, and is not irritated by any incorrigible defect, but which,
missing no point of merit and none of failure, finally and resolutely
strikes the just balance.
This just balance, with all its intricate adjustments of compensation
and equivalence, is peculiarly needed in the case of George Eliot, and
at the same time is unusually difficult. George Eliot was most
conspicuous as an artist, as a worker in the sphere of imagination and
creation. At the same time, she had very rare powers and a really
unusual learning quite outside of imaginative art. And these
reflective powers and such stores of knowledge are often antagonistic
to creative art, and undoubtedly were so not seldom with her. If
Aristotle himself had written a dull psychological tragedy, we might
read it for his sake, but we should not forgive him, and we ought not
to forgive him. And if Shakespeare himself had written the _Novum
Organum_ or the _Principia_, we should not have had _Hamlet_ and _Lear_
as we now know them. There is no compensation between philosophy and
poetry. No profundity, no learning, can give beauty to verses which
lack the divine fire. If George Eliot's fame has to be based solely on
her great powers and endowments, her art would not be worth much.
However, it is not so: she was an artist, with true artistic gifts.
Her philosophic power and her scientific attainments often ennoble
these gifts: yet it is too often evident that they seriously mar and
embarrass them.
Turn it the other way. Until nearly the age of forty, George Eliot was
known only as a critical and philosophical writer. And in reading, in
logical acumen, and in breadth of view, she was the equal of the first
minds of her time. But no one of her contemporaries, eminent in
philosophy and science, approached her, however remotely, in artistic
gifts; and no one of them even attempted to invest ethical and social
ideas with high imagination and beautiful ideals. Thus, George Eliot
was of a far higher mental plane than any contemporary who has used
imaginative prose as an art, and she was also a far greater artist than
any contemporary philosopher. It is quite certain that learning and
wisdom may be lodged in the same brain with the highest poetry, as
Lucretius, Virgil, Dante, Milton, and Goethe may prove. And men of
original power have not seldom used imaginative art with signal success
to convey the ideas with which they were charged; for this has been
done by Cervantes, Rabelais, Swift, Rousseau, Byron, Shelley, and
Goethe.
It is therefore legitimate and natural that a powerful and teeming mind
should resort to art as its medium, and also that an artist of high
aims should be a systematic thinker and an omnivorous student. The
combination is very rare and success is singularly difficult. To fail
in art is to lose all and to end in utter failure. And to carry
ethical purpose and erudition into art is indeed a perilous
undertaking, wherein but one or two of the greatest have wholly
succeeded. The problem with George Eliot is to judge how far she has
succeeded in the all but impossible task. That her success is far from
complete is but too obvious. That she has had many incidental
successes is also obvious. Her work is not sufficiently spontaneous,
not easy or simple, not buoyant enough. But it has great nobility,
rare distinction. It may not live as perfect art; but it should not
perish as ambitious failures perish.
If George Eliot were not a writer of romance, she was nothing at all in
the front ranks of Victorian literature. With all her powers of mind,
her mastery of language, her immense stores of knowledge and supreme
culture, she gave to the world nothing of great mark, acknowledged and
known as hers, except her famous romances; for, as we shall presently
see, we cannot count any of the poems as of great mark. But, as a
writer of romance, George Eliot differs essentially and for the worse
from all the other great writers of romance in her own or preceding
generations. Most certainly she was not a born romancer; she had no
spontaneous gift of telling stories, no irrepressible genius that way.
Now all the great romancers have been born to it, as Robinson Crusoe
was born to the sea, or as Turner was born to paint. Though Scott
published novels late, he had begun _Waverley_ at thirty-four; his
earlier works are romantic ballads and metrical romances; and from
boyhood, at home and abroad, he was ever filled with some tale of
adventure and character. Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth "lisped" in
novelettes, as Pope said he "lisped in numbers." Though Charlotte
Brontë published so little, she wrote stories incessantly from
childhood. Lytton, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, invented tales as
part of their daily lives, and from the earliest age. But George Eliot
was thirty-nine when her first tales were published, and she was forty
before she was known to the public as a novelist at all. And so little
was novel-writing her natural gift, that her most intimate friends
never suspected her power, nor did she herself altogether enjoy the
exercise of her art. To the last her periods of mental gestation were
long, painful, and unhopeful. Parturition was a dangerous crisis, and
the long-expected infant was reared with misgivings and a superfluity
of coddling. The romances of George Eliot came like some _enfant de
miracle_, born late in the mother's life, at the cost of infinite pain,
much anxiety, and amidst the wondering trepidation of expectant circles
of friends.
Even in her best books we never quite get over the sense of almost
painful elaboration, of a powerful mind having rich gifts striving to
produce some rare music with an unfamiliar and uncongenial instrument.
It reminds us of Beethoven evolving his majestic sonatas on an untuned
and dilapidated old piano, the defects of which he could not himself
hear. The conventional critic in _The Vicar of Wakefield_ is told to
say that "the picture would have been better if the artist had taken
more pains." With George Eliot too often we are made to feel that the
picture would have been, at any rate, more enjoyable if the artist had
taken less pains. To study her more ambitious tales is like an attempt
to master some new system of psychology. The metaphysical power, the
originality of conception, the long brooding over anomalies and
objections--these are all there: but the rapid improvisation and easy
invention are not there. Such qualities would indeed be wholly out of
place in philosophy, but they are the essence of romance. In romance
we want to feel that the piece is only brought to an end by time and
our human powers of listening; that there is "plenty more where these
come from"; that the story-teller enjoys telling stories for their own
sake, and would go on with the tales, though the audience were reduced
to a child, an idiot, and a deaf man.
This explains the paradox that the most popular, and most certainly the
most praised of George Eliot's works, are the simpler and the shorter.
Every one enjoys the _Scenes of Clerical Life_, short stories of a
hundred pages each, with simple plots and a few characters in everyday
life. I have no doubt myself that _Silas Marner_ comes nearer to being
a great success than any of the more elaborate books. Yet _Silas
Marner_ is about one-fifth part of the length of _Middlemarch_; and its
plot, _mise-en-scène_, and incidents are simplicity itself. There is
no science, no book-learning, and but few ethical problems in it from
beginning to end; and it all goes in one small volume, for the tale
concerns but the neighbours of one quiet village. Yet the quaint and
idyllic charm of the piece, the perfection of tone and keeping, the
harmony of the landscape, the pure, deep humanity of it, all make it a
true and exquisite work of high art.
Modern English (and I am one of those who hold that the best modern
English is as good as any in our literature) has few pieces of
description more gem-like in its crystalline facets than the opening
chapter that tells of the pale, uncanny weaver of Raveloe in his stone
cottage by the deserted pit. Some of us can remember such house
weavers in such lonesome cottages on the Northern moors, and have heard
the unfamiliar rattle of the loom in a half-ruinous homestead. How
perfect is that vignette of Raveloe--"a village where many of the old
echoes lingered, undrowned by new voices"--with its "strange lingering
echoes of the old demon-worship among the grey-haired peasantry"! The
entire picture of the village and its village life a hundred years ago,
is finished with the musical and reserved note of poetry, such as we
are taught to love in Wordsworth and Tennyson. And for quiet humour
modern literature has few happier scenes than the fireside at the
"Rainbow," with Macey and Winthrop, the butcher and the farrier, over
their pipes and their hot potations, and the quarrel about "seeing
ghos'es," about smelling them!
Within this most graceful and refined picture of rural life there is a
dominant ethical motive which she herself describes as its aim, "to set
in a strong light the remedial influences of pure, natural, human
relations." This aim is perfectly worked out: it is a right and
healthy conception, not too subtle, not too common:--to put it in
simpler words than hers, it is how a lonely, crabbed, ill-used old man
is humanised by the love of a faithful and affectionate child. The
form is poetic: the moral is both just and noble: the characters are
living, and the story is original, natural, and dramatic. The only
thing, indeed, which _Silas Marner_ wants to make it a really great
romance is more ease, more rapidity, more "go." The melody runs so
uniformly in minor keys, the sense of care, meditation, and
introspection is so apparent in every line, the amount of serious
thought lavished by the writer and required of the reader is so
continuous, that we are not carried away, we are not excited, inspired,
and thrilled as we are by _Jane Eyre_ or _Esmond_. We enjoy a
beautiful book with a fine moral, set in exquisite prose, with
consummate literary resources, full of fine thoughts, true, ennobling
thoughts, and with no weak side at all, unless it be the sense of being
over-wrought, like a picture which has been stippled over in every
surface.
A clever French woman said of George Eliot's conversation--_elle
s'écoute quand elle parle_! Just so, as we read on we seem to see how
she held up each sentence into the light as it fell from her pen,
scrutinised it to see if some rarer phrase might not be compacted, some
subtler thought excogitated. Of all the more important tales, _Silas
Marner_ is that wherein we least feel this excessive thoughtfulness.
And thus it is the best. Perhaps other born romancers would have
thrown into it more life, energy, jollity, or passion. Thackeray would
have made the weaver a serio-comic hermit: Dickens would have made
Eppie a sentimental angel; Charlotte Brontë would have curdled our
blood; Trollope might have made more of Nancy's courting. But no one
of them could have given us a more lofty lesson "of the remedial
influences of pure, natural, human relations." The only doubt is,
whether a novel is the medium for such lessons. On this, opinions are,
and will remain, divided. The lesson and the art ought both to be
faultless.
When we ask for a romance fully developed and more than a graceful
vignette, _Adam Bede_ must be regarded as the principal, and with the
wider public it is always the typical, work of George Eliot. She said
herself that it seemed to her "impossible that she should ever write
anything so good and true again":--and herein she was no doubt right.
It is the only one of her works in prose or verse which we feel to be
inevitable, spontaneous, written out of the abundance of enjoyment and
experience. It is of all her books the heartiest, the wittiest, the
most cheerful, or rather the least desponding. In that book it may be
that she exhausted herself and her own resources of observation as an
eye-witness. She wrote fine things in other veins, in different
scenes, and she conceived other characters and new situations. But for
all practical purposes _Adam Bede_ was the typical romance, which
everything she had thought or known impelled her to write, in which she
told the best of what she had seen and the most important of what she
had to say. Had she never written anything but _Adam Bede_, she would
have had a special place of her own in English romance:--and I am not
sure that anything else which she produced very materially raised,
enlarged, or qualified that place.
_The Mill on the Floss_ must always be very interesting to all who knew
George Eliot and loved her work, if for no other reason, for its
autobiographic and personal touches and its revelation of yearnings and
misgivings hardly suspected in life. There are scenes and minor
characters in it which hold their own against _Adam Bede_, but as a
whole it is not so strong or so rich in colour, and it can hardly be
said to occupy new ground. It has not the pathos of _Amos Barton_, nor
the exquisite style of _Silas Marner_, nor the breadth and constructive
merit of _Adam Bede_. And except to the chosen band of Eliotists, it
is not likely to retain any permanent popularity. It is a book to
study for those who have special interest in George Eliot as woman, as
teacher, and as artist--but for my own part I find it rather a book to
reflect upon than a book to read and to re-read.
With respect to _Romola_, though we must all agree with Mr. Oscar
Browning that it is "replete with learning," "weighed with knowledge in
every page," exquisite in art, and so forth, it is really impossible to
call it with him "the best historical novel ever written." Even in
exact reproduction of another age, it cannot compare with _Esmond_, and
how immeasurably as romance is it beneath the fire and movement of a
dozen historical romances that one could name! The beauty of the
Florentine pictures, the enormous care, thought, and reading, lavished
on the story, the variety of literary resource--all make it a most
memorable work, a work almost _sui generis_, a book which every student
of Italy, every lover of Florence must mark, learn, and inwardly
digest. But to call it a complete success is to go too far. The task
was too great. To frame in a complex background of historical
erudition an ethical problem of even greater complexity and
subtlety--this was a task which might have sorely tried even greater
powers than hers--a task in which Goethe and Scott might have
succeeded, but which Goethe and Scott were too truly the born artists
to attempt without ample care, and too busy with many things to devote
to it the required labour.
_Romola_ is certainly a wonderful monument of literary accomplishments;
but it remains a _tour de force_, too elaborate, too laboured, too
intricate, too erudite. As the French say, it has _trop de choses_, it
is too long, too full, over-costumed, too studiously mounted on the
stage. We sometimes see nowadays "a Shakespearean revival," with
scenery studied by eminent artists on the spot, costumes
archaeologically accurate, real armour, "properties" from famous
collections, a _mise-en-scène_ of lavish splendour and indefatigable
research--and then we ask, how can "Hamlet" or "Lear" live up to such
learning, and why is "Romeo" such a melancholy devil? Few men enjoyed
the earlier portions of _Romola_ more than I did. _Italianissimo_ and
_Florentissimo_ as I was, it was an intense treat. But, though I have
read and re-read _Romola_ from time to time, it has always been in
sections. I have never read it straight through at one time; and to
this hour, I am not quite clear about all the ramifications of the plot
and the various cross-purposes of the persons. Could any one say this
about _Quentin Durward_ or _Ivanhoe_, or of the _Last Days of Pompeii_,
or of _Esmond_ or even of _Hypatia_ or _Westward Ho!_
_Romola_, we know, tried its author most cruelly in composition, nor
need we wonder at this. "I began it,", she said, "a young woman--I
finished it an old woman." "It ploughed into her," said her husband,
"more than any of her other books." And, in my opinion, it marks the
decline of her genius. I cannot count any of the later books as equal
to her earlier works. Her great period of production reaches at most
over the six years 1858-1863 (aetat. 39-45), in which she produced
_Scenes of Clerical Life_ (1858), _Adam Bede_ (1859), _The Mill on the
Floss_ (1860), _Silas Marner_ (1861), and _Romola_ (1863). If we
measure by strict success in the highest art, this period should not be
extended beyond the four years which closed with _Silas Marner_.
_Romola_ is an ambitious, beautiful, altogether noble essay to fly
skyward like Icarus, whose ingenious mechanism was melted by the
sunlight in mid-career. And I cannot count any of the later pieces,
prose or verse, as anything but inferior to _Romola_. They have great
beauties, fine passages, subtle characters, and high conceptions--but
they are the artificial products of a brain that showed symptoms of
exhaustion, of a great writer who was striving after impossible tasks
without freedom and without enjoyment.
I cannot at all agree with those admirers of George Eliot's genius who
believe that it grew continuously in power, who even assure us that it
reached its zenith in _Daniel Deronda_. What can they mean? _Daniel
Deronda_, as usual, shows brilliant literary skill in many passages,
and its insight into modern Hebraism is a psychological problem. But
with all its merits and even beauties, _Daniel Deronda_ has the fatal
defect of unpleasant characters who are neither beautiful nor
interesting, terrible situations which bore rather than terrify us, a
plot which is at once preposterous and wearisome. As to
_Middlemarch_--George Eliot's longest, most crowded, and ethically most
elaborated romance--with all its subtlety, its humour, its variety, and
its sardonic insight into provincial Philistinism, it becomes at last
tedious and disagreeable by reason of the interminable maunderings of
tedious men and women, and the slow and reiterated dissection of
disagreeable anatomies. At this moment I cannot, after twenty years,
recall the indefinite, lingering plot, or the precise relations to each
other of the curiously uninteresting families, who talk scandal and
fuss about in Middlemarch town.
In _Felix Holt_ I was naturally much interested, having read it in
manuscript, and advised upon the point of law, as appears from her
published letters in the _Life_ by J. Cross. There are two or three
lines--the lawyers' "opinion on the case"--which she asked me to
sketch; and I remember telling her when she inserted these lines in the
book, that I should always be able to say that I had written at least a
sentence which was embodied in English literature. _Felix Holt_
contains some fine characters and scenes, but it cannot be regarded as
equal to _Adam Bede_ and _Silas Marner_. We will not speak of
_Theophrastus Such_, 1879, written just before her death. It was the
work of a woman physically and intellectually exhausted. I feel a
certain guilty sense of disappointment when I think of the book, for I
possibly had some hand in causing it to be written. I had sent her a
long letter pointing out that our literature, with all its wealth of
achievement in every known sphere, was still deficient in one form of
composition in which the French stood paramount and alone. That was
what they called _Pensées_--moral and philosophical reflections in the
form of epigrams or rather aphorisms. I thought, and I still think,
that this form of composition was peculiarly suited to her genius, at
least in her prime. It was not in her prime when she painfully evolved
the sour affectations set forth in _Theophrastus_.
A word or two must be said about the _Poems_. They have poetic
subjects, ideas, similes: they are full of poetic yearning, crowded
with poetic imagery; they have everything poetry needs, except poetry.
They have not the poet's hall-mark. They are imitation poems, like the
forged "ancient masters" they concoct at Florence, or the Tanagra
statuettes they make in Germany. With all her consummate literary
gifts and tastes, George Eliot never managed to write a poem, and never
could be brought to see that the verses she wrote were not poems. It
was an exaggeration of the defect that mars her prose; and her verses
throw great light on her prose. They are over-laboured; the conception
overpowers the form; they are too intensely anxious to be recognised as
poems. We see not so much poetic passion, as a passionate yearning
after poetic passion. We have--not the inevitable, incalculable,
inimitable phrase of real poetry--but the slowly distilled, calculated,
and imitated effort to reach the spontaneous.
It is melancholy indeed to have to admit this, after such labour, such
noble conceptions, such mastery over language: but it is the truth.
And it explains much of kindred failure in her prose work. Great
imagination, noble conceptions, mastery over language can do much, but
they cannot make a poet. Nothing can, but being a poet. Nor can these
gifts make a great romancer or poet in prose. Nothing can, but being
born to romance, being a prose poet. As the Gospel has it--"Which of
you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?" George
Eliot had not sufficiently meditated on this scripture. She too often
supposed that by taking thought--by enormous pains, profound thought,
by putting this thought in exquisite and noble words--she might produce
an immortal romance, an immortal poem.
And yet let us never forget that the _Spanish Gypsy_ is a very grand
conception, that it has some noble scenes, and here and there some
stately lines--even some beautiful passages, could we forget the
artificial alliteration and the tuneless discords to which the poet's
ear seems utterly insensible. The opening lines seem to promise well
and have much of mellow thought, in spite of five hissing sibilants in
the very first verse--
[Transcriber's note: In the original book, the letters in the poem
fragments under discussion were bolded. Here, they are delineated with
slashes (/).]
'Ti/s/ the warm /S/outh, where Europe /s/pread/s/ her land/s/.
Like fretted leaflets, breathing on the deep:
And then comes in the fourth line an awful cacophony of
alliteration--and an alliteration in "c."
A /C/alm earth-goddess /c/rowned with /c/orn and vines.
Then we have a really pretty but artificial line--an alliteration in
"m."
On the /M/id Sea that /m/oans with /m/e/m/ories.