The Ideal.
It was thought that with George Eliot the Novel-with-a-Purpose had really
come to be an adequate instrument for the regeneration of humanity. It
was understood that Passion only survived to point a moral or provide the
materials of an awful tale, while Duty, Kinship, Faith, were so far
paramount as to govern Destiny and mould the world. A vague, decided
flavour of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity was felt to pervade the
moral universe, a chill but seemly halo of Golden Age was seen to play
soberly about things in general. And it was with confidence anticipated
that those perfect days were on the march when men and women would
propose--(from the austerest motives)--by the aid of scientific
terminology.
The Real.
To the Sceptic--(an apostate, and an undoubted male)--another view was
preferable. He held that George Eliot had carried what he called the
'Death's-Head Style' of art a trifle too far. He read her books in much
the same spirit and to much the same purpose that he went to the
gymnasium and diverted himself with parallel bars. He detested her
technology; her sententiousness revolted while it amused him; and when
she put away her puppets and talked of them learnedly and with
understanding--instead of letting them explain themselves, as several
great novelists have been content to do--he recalled how Wisdom crieth
out in the street and no man regardeth her, and perceived that in this
case the fault was Wisdom's own. He accepted with the humility of
ignorance, and something of the learner's gratitude, her woman generally,
from Romola down to Mrs. Pullet. But his sense of sex was strong enough
to make him deny the possibility in any stage of being of nearly all the
governesses in revolt it pleased her to put forward as men; for with very
few exceptions he knew they were heroes of the divided skirt. To him
Deronda was an incarnation of woman's rights; Tito an 'improper female in
breeches'; Silas Marner a good, perplexed old maid, of the kind of whom
it is said that they have 'had a disappointment.' And Lydgate alone had
aught of the true male principle about him.
Appreciations.
Epigrams are at best half-truths that look like whole ones. Here is a
handful about George Eliot. It has been said of her books--('on several
occasions')--that 'it is doubtful whether they are novels disguised as
treatises, or treatises disguised as novels'; that, 'while less romantic
than Euclid's Elements, they are on the whole a great deal less improving
reading'; and that 'they seem to have been dictated to a plain woman of
genius by the ghost of David Hume.' Herself, too, has been variously
described: as 'An Apotheosis of Pupil-Teachery'; as 'George Sand _plus_
Science and _minus_ Sex'; as 'Pallas with prejudices and a corset'; as
'the fruit of a caprice of Apollo for the Differential Calculus.' The
comparison of her admirable talent to 'not the imperial violin but the
grand ducal violoncello' seems suggestive and is not unkind.