George Eliot was a woman who wrote full-grown novels for men.
Other women have done and are doing notable work in prose fiction—Jane
Austen, George Sand, Charlotte Brontë, Mrs. Stowe, Margaret Deland,
Edith Wharton, Katharine Fullerton Gerould, Mrs. Humphry Ward—the list
might easily be extended, but it would delay us from the purpose of
this chapter. Let me rather make a general salute to all the sisterhood
who have risen above the indignity of being called “authoresses,” and,
without pursuing perilous comparisons, go directly to the subject in hand.
What was it that enabled George Eliot to enter the field of the English
novel at a time when Dickens and Thackeray were at the height of their
fame, and win a place in the same class with them?
It was certainly not the hide-and-seek of the sex of the new writer
under a pseudonym. You remember, opinions were divided on this
question. Carlyle and Thackeray thought that the author of _Scenes of
Clerical Life_ was a man. Dickens was sure that it was a woman. But a
mystification of this kind has no interest apart from the primary value
of the works of the unidentified writer in question. Nor does it last
long as an advertisement, unless the following books excel the first;
and, in that case, the secret is sure to be soon discovered.
George Eliot’s success and distinction as a novelist were due to three
things: first, the preliminary and rather obvious advantage of having
genius; second, a method of thinking and writing which is commonly
(though perhaps arrogantly) called masculine; third, a quickness of
insight into certain things, a warmth of sympathy for suffering, and
an instinct of sacrifice which we still regard (we hope rightly) as
feminine. A man for logic, a woman for feeling, a genius for creative
power—that was a great alliance. But the womanhood kept the priority
without which it would not only have died out, but also have endangered,
in dying, the other qualities. Dickens was right when he said of certain
touches in the work of this pseudonymous writer: “If they originated with
no woman, I believe that no man ever before had the art of making himself
mentally so like a woman since the world began.”
George Eliot’s profile resembled Savonarola’s. He was one of her heroes.
But she was not his brother. She was his sister in the spirit.
Her essential femininity was the reason why the drawing of her women
surpassed the drawing of her men. It was more intimate, more revealing,
more convincing. She knew women better. She painted them of many types
and classes—from the peasant maid to the well-born lady, from the selfish
white cat to the generous white swan-sister; from the narrow-minded
Rosamund to the deep-hearted, broad-minded Romola; all types, I think,
but one—the lewdly carnal Circe. In all her books, with perhaps a single
exception, it is a woman who stands out most clearly from the carefully
studied and often complex background as the figure of interest. And even
in that one it is the slight form of Eppie, the golden-hearted girl who
was sent to save old Silas Marner from melancholy madness, that shines
brightest in the picture.
The finest of her women—finest not in the sense of being faultless, but
of having in them most of that wonderful sacrificial quality which Goethe
called _das ewig Weibliche_—were those upon whose spiritual portraits
George Eliot spent her most loving care and her most graphic skill.
She shows them almost always in the revealing light of love. But she
does not dwell meticulously on the symptoms or the course of the merely
physical attraction. She knows that it is there; she confesses that
it is potent. But it seems to her, (as indeed it really is,) far more
uniform and less interesting than the meaning of love in the _soul_ of a
woman as daughter, sister, sweetheart, wife. Were it not for that inward
significance there would be little to differentiate the physical act from
the mating of the lower animals—an affair so common and casual that it
merits less attention than some writers give it. But in the inner life of
thought and emotion, in a woman’s intellectual and moral nature,—there
love has its mystery and its power, there it brings deepest joy or
sharpest sorrow, there it strengthens or maims.
It is because George Eliot knows this and reveals it with extraordinary
clearness that her books have an especial value. Other qualities they
have, of course, and very high qualities. But this is their proper and
peculiar excellence, and the source, if I mistake not, of their strongest
appeal to sanely thinking men.
_The Man Who Understood Woman_ is the title of a recent clever
trivial story. But of course such a man is a myth, an impostor, or a
self-deluder. He makes a preposterous claim.
Thackeray and Dickens, for example, made no such pretension. Some
of their women are admirably drawn; they are very lovable, or very
despicable, as the case may be; but they are not completely convincing.
Thackeray comes nearer than Dickens, and George Meredith, I think, much
nearer than either of the others. But in George Eliot we feel that we
are listening to one who does understand. Her women, in their different
types, reveal something of that thinking, willing, feeling other-half of
humanity with whom man makes the journey of life. They do not cover all
the possibilities of variation in the feminine, for these are infinite,
but they are real women, and so they have an interest for real men.
* * * * *
Let us take it for granted that we know enough of the details of George
Eliot’s life to enable us to understand and appreciate certain things
in her novels. Such biographical knowledge is illuminating in the study
of the works of any writer. The author of a book is not an algebraic
quantity nor a strange monster, but a human being with certain features
and a certain life-history.
But, after all, the promotion of literary analysis is not the object of
these chapters. Plain reading, and the pleasure of it, is what I have in
mind. For that cause I love most of George Eliot’s novels, and am ready
to maintain that they are worthy to be loved. And so, even if my “taken
for granted” a few lines above should not be altogether accurate in these
days of ignorant contempt of all that is “Victorian,” I may still go
ahead to speak of her books as they are in themselves: strong, fine,
rewarding pieces of English fiction: that is what they would remain, no
matter who had written them.
It must be admitted at once that they are not adapted to readers who
like to be spared the trouble of thinking while they read. They do not
belong to the class of massage-fiction, Turkish-bath novels. They require
a certain amount of intellectual exercise; and for this they return, it
seems to me, an adequate recompense in the pleasurable sense of quickened
mental activity and vigour.
But this admission must not be taken to imply that they are obscure,
intricate, enigmatical, “tough reading,” like the later books of George
Meredith and Henry James, in which a minimum of meaning is hidden in a
maximum of obfuscated verbiage, and the reader is invited to a tedious
game of hunt-the-slipper. On the contrary, George Eliot at her best is a
very clear writer—decidedly not shallow, nor superficial, nor hasty,—like
the running comment which is supposed to illuminate the scenes in a
moving-picture show,—but intentionally lucid and perspicuous. Having
a story to tell, she takes pains to tell it so that you can follow it,
not only in its outward, but also in its inward movement. Having certain
characters to depict (and almost always mixed characters of good and evil
mingled and conflicting as in real life), she is careful to draw them so
that you shall feel their reality and take an interest in their strifes
and adventures.
They are distinctly persons, capable of making their own choice
between the worse and the better reason, and thereafter influenced by
the consequences of that choice, which, if repeated, becomes a habit
of moral victory or defeat. They are not puppets in, the hands of an
inscrutable Fate, like most of the figures in the books of the modern
Russian novelists and their imitators. What do I care for the ever-so
realistically painted marionettes in the fiction of Messrs. Gawky,
Popoff, Dropoff, and Slumpoff? What interest have I in the minute
articulations of the dingy automatons of Mijnheer Couperus, or the
dismal, despicable figures who are pulled through the pages of Mr. Samuel
Butler’s _The Way of All Flesh_? A claim on compassion they might
have if they were alive. But being, by the avowal of their creators,
nothing more than imaginary bundles of sensation, helpless playthings of
irresistible hereditary impulse and entangling destiny, their story and
their fate leave me cold. What does it matter what becomes of them? They
can neither be saved nor damned. They can only be drifted. There is no
more human interest in them than there is in the predestined saints and
foredoomed sinners of a certain type of Calvinistic theology.
But this is not George Eliot’s view of life. It is not to her “a tale
told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.” Within
the fixed circle of its stern natural and moral laws there is a hidden
field of conflict where the soul is free to discern and choose its own
cause, and to fight for it or betray it. However small that field may
be, while it exists life has a meaning, and personalities are real,
and the results of their striving or surrendering, though rarely seen
complete or final, are worth following and thinking about. Thus George
Eliot’s people—at least the majority of them—have the human touch which
justifies narrative and comment. We follow the fortunes of Dinah Morris
and of Maggie Tulliver, of Romola, and of Dorothea Brooke—yes, and of
Hetty Sorrel and Rosamund Vincy—precisely because we feel that they are
real women and that the turning of their ways will reveal the secret of
their hearts.
It is a mistake to think (as a recent admirable essay of Professor
W. L. Cross seems to imply) that the books of George Eliot are
characteristically novels of argument or propaganda. Once only, or
perhaps twice, she yielded to that temptation and spoiled her story. But
for the rest she kept clear of the snare of _Tendenz_.
Purpose-novels, like advertisements, belong in the temporary department.
As certain goods and wares go out of date, and the often eloquent
announcements that commended them suddenly disappear; even so the
“burning questions” of the hour and age burn out, and the solutions
of them presented in the form of fiction fall down with the other
ashes. They have served their purpose, well or ill, and their transient
importance is ended. What endures, if anything, is the human story
vividly told, the human characters graphically depicted. These have a
permanent value. These belong to literature. Here I would place _Adam
Bede_ and _Silas Marner_ and _The Mill on the Floss_ and _Middlemarch_,
because they deal with problems which never grow old; but not _Robert
Elsmere_, because it deals chiefly with a defunct controversy in Biblical
criticism.
George Eliot was thirty-eight years old when she made the amazing
discovery that she was by nature, not what she had thought herself, a
philosophical essayist and a translator of arid German treatises against
revealed religion, but something very different—a novelist of human
souls, and especially of the souls of women. It was the noteworthy
success of her three long short stories, _Amos Barton_, _Mr. Gilfil’s
Love Story_, and _Janet’s Repentance_, printed in _Blackwood’s Magazine_
in 1857, that revealed her to herself and to the world.
“Depend upon it, [she says to her imaginary reader in the first of these
stories,] you would gain unspeakably if you would learn with me to see
something of the poetry and the pathos, the tragedy and the comedy, lying
in the experience of the human soul that looks out through dull gray eyes
and speaks in a voice of quite ordinary tones.”
It was the interior drama of human life that attracted her interest and
moved her heart with pity and fear, laughter and love. She found it for
the most part in what we should call mediocre surroundings and on rather
a humble and obscure stage. But what she found was not mediocre. It was
the same discovery that Wordsworth made:
“A grandeur in the beatings of the heart.”
By this I do not mean to say that a close study of the humanness of human
nature, a searching contemplation of character, an acute and penetrating
psychological analysis is all that there is in her novels. This is
her predominant interest, beyond a doubt. She belongs to the school
of Hawthorne, Henry James, Thomas Hardy—realists or romancers of the
interior life. But she has other interests; and there are other things to
reward us in the reading of her books.
There is, first of all, an admirable skill in the setting of her
stories. No other novelist has described English midland landscape,
towns, and hamlets, better than she. No other writer has given the rich,
history-saturated scenery of Florence as well.
She is careful also not to exclude from her stage that messenger of
relief and contrast whom George Meredith calls “the comic spirit.”
Shakespeare’s clowns, wonderful as some of them are, seem at times like
supernumeraries. They come in to make a “diversion.” But George Eliot’s
rustic wits and conscious or unconscious humourists belong to the story.
Mrs. Poyser and Bartle Massey, Mrs. Glegg and Mrs. Tulliver and Bob
Jakin, could not be spared.
And then, her stories are really stories. They have action. They move;
though sometimes, it must be confessed, they move slowly. Not only do the
characters develop, one way or the other, but the plot also develops.
Sometimes it is very simple, as in _Silas Marner_; sometimes it is
extremely complicated, as in _Middlemarch_, where three love-stories are
braided together. One thing it never is—theatrical. Yet at times it
moves into an intense scene, like the trial of Hetty Sorrel or the death
of Tito Melema, in which the very essence of tragedy is concentrated.
From the success of _Scenes of Clerical Life_ George Eliot went on
steadily with her work in fiction, never turning aside, never pausing
even, except when her health compelled, or when she needed time to fill
her mind and heart with a new subject. She did not write rapidly, nor are
her books easy to read in a hurry.
It was an extraordinary series: _Adam Bede_ in 1859, _The Mill on the
Floss_ in 1860, _Silas Marner_ in 1861, _Romola_ in 1863, _Felix Holt,
the Radical_ in 1866, _Middlemarch_ in 1871, _Daniel Deronda_ in 1876; no
padding, no “seconds,” each book apparently more successful, certainly
more famous, than its predecessor. How could one woman produce so much
closely wrought, finely finished work? Of what sturdy mental race were
the serious readers who welcomed it and found delight in it?
Mr. Oscar Browning of Cambridge said that _Daniel Deronda_ was the
climax, “the sun and glory of George Eliot’s art.” From that academic
judgment I venture to dissent. It is a great book, no doubt, the work
of a powerful intellect. But to me it was at the first reading, and
is still, a tiresome book. Tediousness, which is a totally different
thing from seriousness, is the unpardonable defect in a novel. It may
be my own fault, but Deronda seems to me something of a prig. Now a man
may be a prig without sin, but he ought not to take up too much room.
Deronda takes up too much room. And Gwendolen Harleth, who dressed by
preference in sea-green, seems to me to have a soul of the same colour—a
psychological mermaid. She is unconvincing. I cannot love her. The vivid
little Jewess, Mirah, is the only character with charm in the book.
_Middlemarch_ is noteworthy for its extraordinary richness of human
observation and the unexcelled truthfulness of some of its portraits.
Mr. Isaac Casaubon is the living image of the gray-minded scholar and
gentleman,—as delicately drawn as one of Miss Cecelia Beaux’ portraits of
aged, learned, wrinkled men. Rosamund Vincy is the typical “daughter of
the horse-leech” in respectable clothes and surroundings. Dorothea Brooke
is one of George Eliot’s finest sacrificial heroines:
“A perfect woman, nobly plann’d.”
The book, as a whole, seems to me to have the defect of superabundance.
There is too much of it. It is like one of the late William Frith’s large
canvases, “The Derby Day,” or “The Railway Station.” It is constructed
with skill, and full of rich material, but it does not compose. You
cannot see the people for the crowd. Yet there is hardly a corner of the
story in which you will not find something worth while.
_Felix Holt, the Radical_ is marred, at least for me, by a fault of
another kind. It is a novel of problem, of purpose. I do not care for
problem-novels, unless the problem is alive, and even then I do not care
very much for political economy in that form. It is too easy for the
author to prove any proposition by attaching it to a noble character,
or to disprove any theory by giving it an unworthy advocate. English
radicalism of 1832 has quite passed away, or gone into the Coalition
Cabinet. All that saves _Felix Holt_ now (as it seems to me, who read
novels primarily for pleasure) is the lovely figure of Esther Lyon, and
her old father, a preacher who really was good.
Following the path still backward, we come to something altogether
different. _Romola_ is a historical romance on the grand scale. In the
central background is the heroic figure of Savonarola, saintly but
not impeccable; in the middle distance, a crowd of Renaissance people
immersed in the rich and bloody turmoil of that age; in the foreground,
the sharp contrast of two epic personalities—Tito Melema, the incarnation
of smooth, easy-going selfishness which never refuses a pleasure nor
accepts a duty; and Romola, the splendid embodiment of pure love in
self-surrendering womanhood. The shameful end of Tito, swept away by the
flooded river Arno and finally choked to death by the father whom he had
disowned and wronged, has in it the sombre tone of Fate. But the end of
the book is not defeat; it is triumph. Romola, victor through selfless
courage and patience, saves and protects the deserted mistress and
children of her faithless husband. In the epilogue we see her like _Notre
Dame de Secours_, throned in mercy and crowned with compassion.
Listen to her as she talks to Tito’s son in the loggia looking over
Florence to the heights beyond Fiesole.
“‘What is it, Lillo?’ said Romola, pulling his hair back from his brow.
Lillo was a handsome lad, but his features were turning out to be more
massive and less regular than his father’s. The blood of the Tuscan
peasant was in his veins.
“‘Mamma Romola, what am I to be?’ he said, well contented that there was
a prospect of talking till it would be too late to con _Spirto gentil_
any longer.
“‘What should you like to be, Lillo? You might be a scholar. My father
was a scholar, you know, and taught me a great deal. That is the reason
why I can teach you.’
“‘Yes,’ said Lillo, rather hesitatingly. ‘But he is old and blind in the
picture. Did he get a great deal of glory?’
“‘Not much, Lillo. The world was not always very kind to him, and he
saw meaner men than himself put into higher places, because they could
flatter and say what was false. And then his dear son thought it right to
leave him and become a monk; and after that, my father, being blind and
lonely, felt unable to do the things that would have made his learning of
greater use to men, so that he might still have lived in his works after
he was in his grave.’
“‘I should not like that sort of life,’ said Lillo. ‘I should like
to be something that would make me a great man, and very happy
besides—something that would not hinder me from having a good deal of
pleasure.’
“‘That is not easy, my Lillo. It is only a poor sort of happiness that
could ever come by caring very much about our own narrow pleasures. We
can only have the highest happiness, such as goes along with being a
great man, by having wide thoughts, and feeling for the rest of the world
as well as ourselves; and this sort of happiness often brings so much
pain with it, that we can only tell it from pain by its being what we
would choose before everything else, because our souls see it is good.
There are so many things wrong and difficult in the world, that no man
can be great—he can hardly keep himself from wickedness—unless he gives
up thinking much about pleasure or rewards, and gets strength to endure
what is hard and painful. My father had the greatness that belongs to
integrity; he chose poverty and obscurity rather than falsehood. And
there was Fra Girolamo—you know why I keep to-morrow sacred: _he_ had the
greatness which belongs to a life spent in struggling against powerful
wrong, and in trying to raise men to the highest deeds they are capable
of. And so, my Lillo, if you mean to act nobly and seek to know the
best things God has put within reach of men, you must learn to fix your
mind on that end, and not on what will happen to you because of it. And
remember, if you were to choose something lower, and make it the rule of
your life to seek your own pleasure and escape from what is disagreeable,
calamity might 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, and
that may well make a man say, “It would have been better for me if I had
never been born.” I will tell you something, Lillo.’
“Romola paused for a moment. She had taken Lillo’s cheeks between her
hands, and his young eyes were meeting hers.
“‘There was a man to whom I was very near, so that I could see a great
deal of his life, who made almost every one fond of him, for he was
young, and clever, and beautiful, and his manners to all were gentle and
kind. I believe, when I first knew him, he never thought of anything
cruel or base. But because he tried to slip away from everything that was
unpleasant, and cared for nothing else so much as his own safety, he came
at last to commit some of the basest deeds—such as make men infamous. He
denied his father, and left him to misery; he betrayed every trust that
was reposed in him, that he might keep himself safe and get rich and
prosperous. Yet calamity overtook him.’
“Again Romola paused. Her voice was unsteady, and Lillo was looking up at
her with awed wonder.
“‘Another time, my Lillo—I will tell you another time. See, there are
our old Piero di Cosimo and Nello coming up the Borgo Pinti, bringing us
their flowers. Let us go and wave our hands to them, that they may know
we see them.’”
Hardly one of George Eliot’s stories has a conventional “happy
ending.” Yet they leave us not depressed, but strengthened to endure
and invigorated to endeavour. In this they differ absolutely from the
pessimistic novels of the present hour, which not only leave a bad taste
in the mouth, but also a sense of futility in the heart.
Let me turn now to her first two novels, which still seem to me her best.
Bear in mind, I am not formulating academic theories, nor pronouncing _ex
cathedrâ_ judgments, but simply recording for the consideration of other
readers certain personal observations and reactions.
_Adam Bede_ is a novel of rustic tragedy in which some of the characters
are drawn directly from memory. Adam is a partial portrait of George
Eliot’s father, and Dinah Morris a sketch of her aunt, a Methodist
woman preacher. There is plenty of comic relief in the story, admirably
done. Take the tongue duel between Bartle Massey, the sharp-spoken,
kind-hearted bachelor school-master, and Mrs. Poyser, the humorous,
pungent, motherly wife of the old farmer.
“‘What!’ said Bartle, with an air of disgust. ‘Was there a woman
concerned? Then I give you up, Adam.’
“‘But it’s a woman you’n spoke well on, Bartle,’ said Mr. Poyser. ‘Come,
now, you canna draw back; you said once as women wouldna ha’ been a bad
invention if they’d all been like Dinah.’
“‘I meant her voice, man—I meant her voice, that was all,’ said Bartle.
‘I can bear to hear her speak without wanting to put wool in my ears. As
for other things, I dare say she’s like the rest o’ the women—thinks two
and two ’ull come to make five, if she cries and bothers enough about it.’
“‘Ay, ay!’ said Mrs. Poyser; ‘one ’ud think, an’ hear some folks talk, as
the men war ’cute enough to count the corns in a bag o’ wheat wi’ only
smelling at it. They can see through a barn door, _they_ can. Perhaps
that’s the reason they can see so little o’ this side on’t.’
“‘Ah!’ said Bartle, sneeringly, ‘the women are quick enough—they’re
quick enough. They know the rights of a story before they hear it, and
can tell a man what his thoughts are before he knows ’em himself.’
“‘Like enough,’ said Mrs. Poyser; ‘for the men are mostly so slow, their
thoughts overrun ’em, an’ they can only catch ’em by the tail. I can
count a stocking-top while a man’s getting’s tongue ready; an’ when he
outs wi’ his speech at last, there’s little broth to be made on’t. It’s
your dead chicks take the longest hatchin’. Howiver, I’m not denyin’ the
women are foolish: God Almighty made ’em to match the men.’
“‘Match!’ said Bartle; ‘ay, as vinegar matches one’s teeth. If a man says
a word, his wife’ll match it with a contradiction; if he’s a mind for hot
meat, his wife’ll match it with cold bacon; if he laughs, she’ll match
him with whimpering. She’s such a match as the horsefly is to th’ horse:
she’s got the right venom to sting him with—the right venom to sting him
with.’
“‘What dost say to that?’ said Mr. Poyser, throwing himself back and
looking merrily at his wife.
“‘Say!’ answered Mrs. Poyser, with dangerous fire kindling in her eye;
‘why, _I say as some folks’ tongues are like the clocks as run on
strikin’, not to tell you the time o’ the day, but because there’s summat
wrong i’ their own inside_.’ ...”
The plot, as in Scott’s _Heart of Midlothian_, turns on a case of
seduction and child murder, and the contrast between Effie and Jeannie
Deans has its parallel in the stronger contrast between Hetty Sorrel and
Dinah Morris. Hetty looked as if she were “made of roses”; but she was,
in Mrs. Poyser’s phrase, “no better nor a cherry wi’ a hard stone inside
it.” Dinah’s human beauty of face and voice was the true reflection of
her inward life which
“cast a beam on the outward shape,
The unpolluted temple of the mind,
And turned it by degrees to the soul’s essence.”
The crisis of the book comes in the prison, where Dinah wrestles for the
soul of Hetty—a scene as passionate and moving as any in fiction. Dinah
triumphs, not by her own might, but by the sheer power and beauty of the
Christian faith and love which she embodies.
In George Eliot’s novels you will find some passages of stinging
and well-merited satire on the semi-pagan, conventional religion of
middle-class orthodoxy in England of the nineteenth century—“proud
respectability in a gig of unfashionable build; worldliness without
side-dishes”—read the chapter on “A Variation of Protestantism Unknown
to Bossuet,” in _The Mill on the Floss_. But you will not find a single
page or paragraph that would draw or drive the reader away from real
Christianity. On the contrary, she has expressed the very secret of its
appeal to the human heart through the words and conduct of some of her
best characters. They do not argue; they utter and show the meaning
of religion. On me the effect of her books is a deepened sense of the
inevitable need of Christ and his gospel to sustain and nourish the high
morality of courage and compassion, patience, and hope, which she so
faithfully teaches.
The truth is, George Eliot lived in the afterglow of Christian faith.
Rare souls are capable of doing that. But mankind at large needs the
sunrise.
_The Mill on the Floss_ is partly an autobiographic romance. Maggie
Tulliver’s character resembles George Eliot in her youth. The contrast
between the practical and the ideal, the conflict between love and duty
in the heart of a girl, belong to those _problematische Naturen_, as
Goethe called them, which may taste keen joys but cannot escape sharp
sorrows. The centre of the story lies in Maggie’s strong devotion to
her father and to her brother Tom—a person not altogether unlike the
“elder brother” in the parable—in strife with her love for Philip, the
son of the family enemy. Tom ruthlessly commands his sister to choose
between breaking with him and giving up her lover. Maggie, after a bitter
struggle, chooses her brother. Would a real woman do that? Yes, I have
known some very real women who have done it, in one case with a tragic
result.
The original title of this book (and the right one) was _Sister Maggie_.
Yet we can see why George Eliot chose the other name. The little river
Floss, so tranquil in its regular tidal flow, yet capable of such fierce
and sudden outbreaks, runs through the book from beginning to end. It is
a mysterious type of the ineluctable power of Nature in man’s mortal
drama.
In the last chapter, when the flood comes, and the erring sister who
loved her brother so tenderly, rescues him who loved her so cruelly from
the ruined mill, the frail skiff which carries them clasped heart to
heart, reconciled in that revealing moment, goes down in the senseless
irresistible rush of waters.
It is not a “bad ending.” The sister’s love triumphs. Such a close was
inevitable for such a story. But it is not a conclusion. It cries out for
immortality.
* * * * *
On the art of George Eliot judgments have differed. Mr. Oscar Browning,
a respectable authority, thinks highly of it. Mr. W. C. Brownell, a far
better critic, indeed one of the very best, thinks less favourably of
it, says that it is too intellectual; that the development and conduct
of her characters are too logical and consistent; that the element of
surprize, which is always present in life, is lacking in her people.
“Our attention,” he writes, “is so concentrated on what they think that
we hardly know how they feel, or whether ... they feel at all.” This
criticism does not seem to me altogether just. Certainly there is no lack
of surprize in Maggie Tulliver’s temporary infatuation with the handsome,
light-minded Stephen Guest, or in Dorothea Brooke’s marriage to that
heady young butterfly, Will Ladislaw. These things certainly were not
arrived at by logical consistency. Nor can one lay his hand on his heart
and say that there is no feeling in the chapter where the fugitive Romola
comes as Madonna to the mountain village, stricken by pestilence, or in
the passage where Dinah Morris strives for Hetty’s soul in prison.
George Eliot herself tells us the purpose of her art—it is _verity_.
“It is for this rare, precious quality of truthfulness that I delight in
many Dutch paintings, which lofty-minded people despise.... All honour
and reverence to the divine beauty of form! Let us cultivate it to the
utmost in men, women, and children—in our gardens and in our homes.
But let us love that other beauty, too, which lies in no secret of
proportion, but in the secret of deep human sympathy.”
It is Rembrandt, then, rather than Titian, who is her chosen painter.
But she does not often attain his marvellous _chiaroscuro_.
Her style is clear and almost always firm in drawing, though deficient
in colour. It is full of meaning, almost over-scrupulous in defining
precisely what she wishes to express. Here and there it flashes into
a wise saying, a sparkling epigram. At other times, especially in her
later books, it spreads out and becomes too diffuse, too slow, like Sir
Walter Scott’s. But it never repels by vulgar smartness, nor perplexes
by vagueness and artificial obscurity. It serves her purpose well—to
convey the results of her scrutiny of the inner life and her loving
observation of the outer life in its humblest forms. In these respects it
is admirable and satisfying. And it is her own—she does not imitate, nor
write according to a theory.
Her general view of human nature is not essentially different from that
expressed in a passage which I quoted from Thackeray in the previous
chapter. We are none of us “irreproachable characters.” We are “mixed
human beings.” Therefore she wishes to tell her stories “in such a way
as to call forth tolerant judgment, pity, and sympathy.”
* * * * *
As I began so let me end this chapter—with a word on women. For myself,
I think it wise and prudent to maintain with Plutarch that _virtue_ in
man and woman is one and the same. Yet there is a difference between the
feminine and the masculine virtues. This opinion Plutarch sets forth and
illustrates in his brief histories, and George Eliot in her novels. But
of the virtues of women she gives more and finer examples.