To George Eliot will always have to be assigned a prominent place in
the history of the literature of the nineteenth century as a foremost
novelist, poet, and social philosopher.
Mary Ann, or, as she subsequently spelt her Christian name, Marian,
Evans was born at South Farm, a mile from Griff, in the parish of
Calton in Warwickshire, on November 22d, 1819. Her father, the
prototype of Adam Bede, was Robert Evans, of Welsh origin; who started
life as a carpenter, but soon became a land agent in Warwickshire.
This position implies great responsibilities, and demands thorough
business capacities as well as firmness and trustworthiness of
character, in his relations to his employers as well as his
subordinates. He was intrusted with the management of the extensive
estates of five great noblemen and land-owners in the county of
Warwickshire. He was thus a man of considerable importance and power
in the country, and would hold a social position ranking with the
highest professional classes of the neighborhood.
This position of her father gave her the opportunity of gaining
considerable insight into the lives and characters of English people
of every class in the country, and from its neutral height between the
great landlord and the farmer, down to the farm laborer, she could
command the horizon line of all these lives, realize their habits,
their aspirations and sufferings, and command its extent as well as
its limitations. The country, the fields, the garden about Griff
House, where her childhood was spent, as well as the village with its
inhabitants,--with whom, through her mother as well as her father, she
came in contact,--all stimulated her loving and sympathetic
observation and formed that background of experience in the youthful
mind, out of which subsequently rose, with strong spontaneity and
truthful precision of design, the characters and scenes of her novels.
They will ever remain the classical expositions of English provincial
life in literature. The upright strength and pertinacity of her
characters, as well as the insight into practical life and the life of
men, were no doubt derived from her father, and from the intimate
intercourse with him for so many years of the most important formative
period of her life.
Her mother was a housewife of the old-fashioned type, whose health was
always poor, and who died when Marian was about fifteen years of age.
She is supposed to be portrayed in Mrs. Hackit in 'Amos Barton.' She
seems to have been a woman with ready wit, a somewhat sharp tongue, an
undemonstrative but tender-hearted nature. In many respects she seems
also to have been the model for that masterpiece of character-drawing,
Mrs. Poyser. Though Marian had two sisters, her brother Isaac Evans
was her playmate. The youthful relation between brother and sister was
very much like that of Tom Tulliver and Maggie in 'The Mill on the
Floss,'--no doubt the most autobiographical of her novels, as regards
at least the drawing of Maggie's character.
Marian was at first sent to a school at the neighboring Nuneaton; and
at a very early age she taught at Sunday school,--which may have
instilled a magisterial bias into her mind from the very outset. At
the age of twelve she proceeded to a school at Coventry, kept by the
Misses Franklin, which enjoyed considerable reputation in the
neighborhood. She remained in this school for three years; beyond
elementary school duties she devoted much time to English composition,
French and German. Her life was then rather solitary, moved by strong
inner religious convictions, upon which she dwelt with passionate
fervor. Her religious views were at first simply those of the Church
of England, then those of the Low Church, and then became
"anti-supernatural." The second phase was no doubt strongly influenced
by her aunt, Mrs. Elizabeth Evans, the "Derbyshire Methodist," the
prototype of Dinah Morris in 'Adam Bede.' The earnest, almost
lugubrious conception of life which she formed in these times, and
which subsequent years and experiences only intensified, no doubt gave
the keynote to her whole temperament and genius. It produced in her
that supreme development of the idea of duty and compassion for human
suffering which elevates the tone of her writing with a lofty
conception of life, enables her to penetrate into the feelings and
aspirations of all classes, and while it widened the range of her
sympathy, never did so at the cost of genuineness or intensity of
feeling. At the same time this serious keynote, though it was not
opposed to humor,--the growth of which it even favored,--led to some
limitations in the harmonious development of her artistic nature;
notably in that it counteracted the sense for the playful and joyous
side of life. The eternal conflict between Hellenism and Hebraism,
between the vine-wreath and the crown of thorns, was not reconciled by
her, but led to the suppression or defeat of Hellenism. The true, the
joyous spirit of Hellenism, with its ideals of beauty and happiness in
life, never really possessed her soul. In her own words she has put
this eternal dualism:--
"For evermore
With grander resurrection than was feigned
Of Attila's fierce Huns, the soul of Greece
Conquers the bulk of Persia. The maimed form
Of calmly joyous beauty, marble-limbed,
Yet breathing with the thought that shaped its limbs,
Looks mild reproach from out its opened grave
At creeds of terror; and the vine-wreathed god
Fronts the pierced Image with the crown of thorns."
Only in the tragic manifestation of the Greek mind, above all in an
AEschylus, did she find true resonance to the passionate beats of her
God-loving and world-renouncing heart. Yet more and more, as her mind
grew and severed itself from the traditional beliefs of her
childhood,--with which however she ever remained in deepest
sympathy,--did this love of God and renunciation of the world mean the
love of man and the tolerance of weakness, the pity with suffering and
the active effort to help to rectify and to improve. The one element
in Hellenism which she adopted and clung to, and which as a supporting
wall she added to the whole structure of her more Hebraistic beliefs
and ideals, was the worship of Sanity. This worship only intensified
the tolerance of the unsound, the pity for the diseased and distorted
and miserable. And though she never became a professed Positivist, it
was no doubt the response which Comte's philosophy gave to these
cravings that made his views ultimately most congenial to her.
The true and independent development of her mind began when after
the death of her mother she took charge of Griff House for her father;
but especially when in 1841 her father retired from his active duties,
and settled at Foleshill near Coventry. It was here, while taking
lessons in Latin and Greek from Mr. Sheepshanks, and also devoting
herself to music, that she formed the friendship with Mr. and Mrs.
Charles Bray of Coventry and their kinsman Mr. Charles C. Hennell,
the Unitarian philosopher and writer. These people, deeply interested
in philosophy and literature, and important contributors to the
philosophico-religious literature of the day, responded fully to the
mental needs of George Eliot. Out of this intellectual affinity grew a
friendship which lasted through life. They also introduced her to the
philosophical and critical literature of Germany, and it was through
them that she began in 1843 her first literary task, the translation
of David Strauss's 'Life of Jesus,' which had been begun by Miss
Brabant, who became Mrs. Charles Hennell. The task of translating
Strauss's great work, which occupied three years of her life, was
followed by work of the same nature, which, though not as taxing as
the life of Christ, must still have called upon thought and
perseverance to a high degree: it was 'The Essence of Christianity,'
by the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach. These works, which stand
on the border line between philosophy and religion, led her by a
natural development into the domain of pure philosophy; so that the
next more extensive task which she undertook, but to our knowledge
never completed, was a translation of Spinoza's 'Ethics.'
She was now fairly, at the age of twenty-seven, launched in her
literary career; though as yet it was on the side of science and
religion and not of art. The essays which belong to the following
period, together with her editorial occupation, again formed a
transition from the more scientific character of her writing to the
domain of pure literature. And though these works belong to the field
of criticism, it was criticism as applied to pure literature, fiction,
and biography, and thus brought her inherently ponderous and
theoretical mind, by natural stages, from analysis and speculation to
the more imaginative sphere of synthesis and creation. This early
theoretical and scientific direction of her occupation and thought may
have produced that fault in her later writing with which she has often
been reproached,--it may have made her style and diction clumsy and
pedantic. On the other hand, it was a most excellent training for the
future writer of even fiction. For it exercised the mind in gaining
full mastery over thought; in recognizing and defining the nicest and
most delicate shadings of meaning and of expression; in insisting upon
their logical sequence, and thus impressing upon the author the
rudiments of exposition and composition; in extending and enriching
the domain of knowledge and fact; and finally, in producing and
training the force of _intellectual_ sympathy, which sharpens as well
as intensifies insight into life and character, and gives to the mind
that pliancy which directs the feeling heart to beat in sympathy with
all forms of experiences, desires, and passions,--however far the
lives and personalities may be removed from the author who constructs
or describes them.
In 1849 the death of her father threw her into a state of deepest
depression. It was then that her kind friends the Brays took her for a
tour on the Continent, to Italy and Switzerland. She remained at
Geneva in the family of the artist D'Albert for eight months, where
she no doubt found congenial local associations; for the shores of the
Lake of Geneva, haunted by the spirits of Calvin, Rousseau, Voltaire,
Madame de Stael, Gibbon, Byron, and Shelley, seem bound up with
world-stirring thought as no other place in Europe. Upon her return to
England she made her home with the Brays at Rosehill for about a year,
and then accepted the offer of Dr. John Chapman to become sub-editor
of the Westminster Review and to make her home in his family. She
here entered a circle of the most prominent literary men and women of
the day, and among these she became an intimate friend of Herbert
Spencer, John Oxenford, James and Harriet Martineau, George Henry
Lewes, and others. Emerson she had met before at Rosehill. Besides her
arduous sub-editorial work, she contributed several remarkable papers
to the Review. Among these are: 'Carlyle's Life of Sterling' and
'Margaret Fuller' in 1852; 'Women in France: Madame de Table,' 1854;
'Evangelical Teaching: Dr. Cumming,' 1855; 'German Wit: Heinrich
Heine,' 'Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,' 'The Natural History of
German Life,' 1856; 'Worldliness and Otherworldliness: the Poetry of
Young' in 1857.
It was in 1854 that occurred the great event in her life; she joined
George Henry Lewes as his wife, though the latter's wife was still
alive. Lewes was separated from his first wife, though circumstances
made it impossible for him to get a divorce. From that moment George
Eliot remained the most faithful and devoted wife to Lewes and mother
to his children, until his death in 1878. She united her life with
that of Lewes after due and full deliberation, and with a thorough
weighing of consequences and duties. But that she felt the deepest
regret in that her complete union was not in accordance with the
established laws of the society in which she lived, is evident from
all her letters and writings; and though it need not have led to her
marriage with her late husband Mr. Cross, the opportunity afforded of
showing her respect to the established rules of matrimonial life must
certainly have made it easier for her to form a new alliance, after
the death of her first husband.
With Lewes she went to Germany, living for some time at Berlin and
Weimar, while he was writing his 'Life of Goethe' and she was working
at her translation of Spinoza's 'Ethics' and was contributing some
articles on German literature. Upon their return they settled in
London, finally in the Priory, North Bank, in the northwest of the
metropolis, which was for many years a _salon_ of the London literary
world. The Sunday afternoons of this remarkable couple united all the
talent and genius, residents or foreign visitors. One might meet in
one and the same afternoon Charles Darwin, Robert Browning, Tennyson,
Richard Wagner, Joachim the violinist, Huxley, Clifford, Du Maurier,
and Turgenieff. Lewes, the most brilliant and versatile
conversationalist of his day, gave life and freedom to these meetings;
but the intellectual and moral centre always remained George Eliot,
with her soft, sweet voice, her clear intonation, her friendly and
encouraging smile, lighting up as by a contrast the earnestness of her
serious and large features, which resembled those of Savonarola, whose
character she has drawn in such strong lines in 'Romola.' But the
quality of searching sympathy and benignant humor, so remarkable in
her writings, gave the warmth of kindness and cordiality to these
formidably intellectual meetings. The present writer remembers with
grateful piety how, when he was a very young man struggling to put a
crude thought into presentable form before these giants of thought and
letters, she would divine his meaning even in its embryonic
uncouthness of expression, and would give it back to him and to them
in a perfect and faultless garb; so that in admiring and worshiping
the woman, he would be pleased with his own thoughts and would think
well of himself. It is this sympathetic and unselfish helpfulness of
great and noble minds, which gives confidence and increases the
self-esteem of all who come in contact with them. No wonder that one
often saw and heard of a great number of people, young girls or young
men, who by letter or in person sought help and spiritual guidance
from her, and went away strengthened by her sympathy and advice.
Her first attempt at fiction was made when in her thirty-seventh year,
in September 1856. The account of this is best shown in her own words
here given among the extracts from her writings. Her first story was a
short one, called 'The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton.' This was
followed by 'Mr. Gilfil's Love Story' and 'Janet's Repentance,' and
soon there was that remarkable volume called 'Scenes of Clerical
Life.' Lewes and she and the world all realized that she was a true
novelist, and from that moment she directed all her energies to the
production of those works which will ever live, in spite of all
changes of fashions and modes of story-telling, classical specimens of
English fiction. In rapid succession now followed 'Adam Bede' in 1858;
'The Mill on the Floss' in 1860; 'Silas Marner' in 1861; 'Romola' in
1863; 'Felix Holt, the Radical,' in 1866; the poem 'The Spanish Gypsy'
in 1868; 'Jubal and Other Poems' in 1870; 'Middlemarch' in 1872;
'Daniel Deronda' in 1876; and her last work, 'The Impressions of
Theophrastus Such,' which was not published till after the death of
Lewes, which occurred in 1878. She married Mr. Cross in May, 1880. She
died on December 22d, 1880.
To lead to the fuller understanding of George Eliot's works, it was
necessary to sketch in broad outlines the growth of her life and
personality. As a writer she was not only a novelist but also a poet,
and above all a social philosopher. Her ethical bias is so strong,
moreover, that one cannot understand her as a novelist or a poet
unless one has grasped her social philosophy and the all-pervading and
ever-present influence it has upon her mind and writing.
In her delineation of character and depiction of scenes, especially
those of rural and domestic life, truthful rendering is to her the
supreme duty; and one need but open the 'Scenes of Clerical Life,'
'Adam Bede,' 'The Mill on the Floss,' 'Silas Marner,' and
'Middlemarch,' on any page, to realize the fullness of truth with
which she has painted. At the time of their appearance, not only were
the persons and the environment identified with the originals she had
in her mind, but as lasting types they tallied exactly with people and
local life known to each English reader. This truthful rendering was
also conceived by her as a primary duty of the novelist. We would
refer the reader to what, in an essay, she says of the English peasant
in fiction, and would recall her own words in the same essay:--
"A picture of human life, such as a great artist can give,
surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that
attention to what is apart from themselves, _which may be
called the raw material of sentiment_.... Art is the nearest
thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and
extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds
of our personal lot. All the more sacred is the task of the
artist when he undertakes to paint the life of the people.
Falsification here is far more pernicious than in the more
artificial aspects of life."
Another interesting passage is one containing an estimate of Dickens,
in which she considers the Oliver Twists, Joes, and Nancys
terrible and pathetic pictures of London life:--
"And if Dickens had been able to give us their psychological
character, their conception of life, and their emotions, with
the same truth as their idiom and manners, his books would be
_the greatest contribution to art ever made to the awakening
of social sympathies_."
George Eliot might thus be classified as one of the greatest if not
the greatest realist of the analytical or psychological order. But
this would, to our mind, be a one-sided and incomplete estimate of the
chief character in her writing and genius. Truthful rendering of life
and character may have been one of the chief motives to composition,
and a fundamental requisite to the art of her fiction; but it remained
a means to a further end--the ultimate end--of her writing, as it no
doubt was the fundamental stimulus to her imagination and design. And
this end and motive make her an idealist and not a realist in fiction.
The direction in which this idealism goes we have indicated in the
lines we have italicized in the passages we quote from her, and is to
be found in the ethical motive below and beyond all her thought and
composition, the predominance of the social philosophy in her fiction
and poetry, to which we have already referred.
We will dismiss the coarse and caricatured distinction between realism
and idealism, in which the one is supposed to render truthfully
_whatever is_, without any principle of selection or composition;
while the other starts with preconceived notions of the _ought to
be_, be it from the point of view of formal beauty or spiritual
harmony, and proves the facts that are. Art, and the novel above
all,--which deals with life at once so clear and familiar to us, and
so perplexingly manifold and varied as constantly to elude choice and
design,--can neither forego truth nor unity of design.
But in the novelist's attitude towards human life there are two
distinct points of view from which a new classification of novelists
might be made: the position given to ethics, the moral laws in the
presentation of life. The laws of human conduct are so essential to
the relation of man to man, that the fundamental question as to what
position ethics holds in our narrative cannot be ignored. The novelist
must have decided whether he is going to consider its claims in the
primary structure of his novel, and in the creation and development of
characters, or not. Is he going to prepare the groundwork of artistic
labor with a view to ethical design, or pure artistic design? It may
be said that the best work requires both. But still, in so far as the
one is heeded more than the other, will the writer be an idealist or a
realist in this sense.
The idealist will focus his view of the characters, their experiences
and sufferings and surroundings, from a view of moral fitness and
design; the realist will find the design and composition, the harmony
which all art needs, in the characters, in the scenes, in the life
itself, and the inner organic relation of the parts to the whole. The
one leads to the best idealism, the other to the best realism. The one
produces a George Eliot, the other a Guy de Maupassant. This realist
ignores the general fitness of things, the moral law, and says:--"This
character is interesting in itself, this situation is amusing,
curious, striking, or terrible,--they are worth depicting, without any
question as to their relation to social or moral ideals." Guy de
Maupassant takes characters and situations and depicts them with
consummate art; he never troubles himself about general moral fitness,
--we never know what his moral and social ideals are, nor whether he
has any at all. Jane Austen is interested in her characters, in the
tone and range of ideas of the period and the society in which she
lives, the types of life, and she draws them with consummate art; but
though we are left in no doubt in her case as to the good and the bad,
and though the good generally prevails and the bad is defeated, these
are not subordinated to a clear conception of an ideal social order,
without which the characters and the story could not have been
conceived and developed--as is always the case with George Eliot.
Gwendolen Harleth, Felix Holt, Maggie, Dorothea, Lydgate, the life and
surroundings of these figures, all bear a fixed relation to the social
ideals of the author; and it is in this relation that she conceives
and develops them. Nay, it is for the purpose of illustrating and
fixing this that she creates them at all. Strange as it may sound, in
so far Jane Austen might be called a realist and be classed with Guy
de Maupassant; while George Sand, with whom she has so much similarity
of spirit, is by contrast an idealist. It is a difference in the
initial methods of dealing with life in fiction.
It is not enough for George Eliot to present an interesting character,
to follow up its fate and growth, to force the reader into sympathy,
to make him hope for success or fear failure; nor even to show the
struggle with the surroundings, to depict interesting and complex
situations and centres. Her writings always depend upon a primary
postulate, and to this postulate all characters, scenes, and
situations are ultimately subordinated. This postulate is: The ideal
social order as a whole, the establishment of sane and sound social
relations in humanity, the development and progress of human society
towards such an ideal of general human life. All characters and
situations, all scenes of life, whether clerical or provincial,
whether of the present or of the past (and this may here be a grave
fault), are developed and viewed by her in their relation to this
general standard of ideal society; how far they fit into this general
harmony, and failing this, how far they can in her stories be made to
fit more fully; or they are left to a more tragic end which emphasizes
the facts of their unfitness. Herein lies her distinctive character as
a novelist, a point in which her delineation differs from most of the
other great novelists--from a Balzac and a Flaubert, a George Sand, a
Thackeray, and a Dickens, a Turgenieff and an _early_ Tolstoy. I do
not mean to say that these novelists had not a social ideal at the
foundation of their constructive imagination; but it did not play that
essential part in their conception and working out of characters and
plots, it was not ever present in their minds while they were
describing characters, feelings, incidents, and situations, as it
appears to have been with George Eliot. Her philosophical and ethical
bias thus manifests itself, in that there was an idea of general
social fitness and happiness modifying and directing her
representation of individual life and character.
To understand this social ideal of a rational and essentially sane
world, we must conceive her as an expression of the spirit of the age
out of which she grew. And she will thus hold a place not only as a
novelist, but as a pregnant and significant exponent of the thought of
the third quarter of the nineteenth century.
The time in which her mind was formed is marked on the side of
social ethics, in that a broad and powerful humanitarian wave
spread over English life and thought. Negatively it manifested itself
in that it was a period of storm and stress toward the birth of
tolerance--tolerance with all forms of belief and even unbelief. In
the English Church itself, it was the period of clear accentuations of
shades of belief that differed to a very marked degree from one
another. The Church of Rome was brought nearer to the Anglican
believer, and was robbed of its Apocalyptic horrors by a Newman and a
Manning; a definite political act was the Irish Church Act. But an
especial feature of this tolerance was the social recognition of
agnosticism, in its scientific aspect through a Darwin, and in its
more ethical aspect through a Mill, a Herbert Spencer, and a Matthew
Arnold; while divines of the English Church itself, like Stanley,
Maurice, Kingsley, and Jowett, bridged over the gaps between dogmatism
and agnosticism. The repeal of the Test Act (according to which the
signing of the Thirty-nine Articles was a condition for obtaining a
scholarship or fellowship) abolished all disqualifications from
freethinkers at the great universities. Quakers and Jews had before
been admitted to Parliament, and now took prominent and leading
places.
But more positively, the philosophy of Auguste Comte with its English
exponents, especially Mill, impressed the religious feeling of
humanitarianism. There had been a wave of this before, a wave the
commotion of which was felt even in our days. It was the
humanitarianism of Rousseau, under which George Sand stood. But this
differs in a marked manner from that of our friend. With Rousseau it
was _deductive_, based upon the inalienable rights of man, of the
individual,--a deductive sociology. In our times it was essentially
guided by the prevailing spirit and methods of thought of Charles
Darwin, Mill, Herbert Spencer, Huxley, Clifford, and Matthew Arnold,
with the regenerated and refined sense of truth which they have given
to the world. It has thus led to an _inductive_ sociology and
inductive humanitarianism, freed from all romantic character and
admixture, essentially sober and sane, though none the less passionate
and deep-seated. The last wave of Rousseauesque feeling filtered
through German sources to us in Carlyle and Ruskin. But this mode of
thought was foreign to George Eliot. She disliked all forms of
exaggeration.
She has always clear in her mind the sane and sober ideals of a
society based upon the truthful observation and recognition of its
wants and needs. The claims of truth, the claims of charity and
unselfishness, are supreme. To this ideal the individual must
subordinate himself if he wishes to be happy and noble, beloved and
honored; must have "that recognition of something to be lived for
beyond the mere satisfaction of self, which is to the moral life what
the addition of a central ganglion is to animal life."
Pure applied psychology and knowledge of the _coeur humain_, which
have actuated so many great novelists,--the careful and studied
development of an individual life and character as such within its
surroundings,--were not enough to absorb the desires of George
Eliot's efforts in fiction; still less mere striking incidents, and
the engrossing consequences and sequences as they push on in the plot
of a story; but the _coeur humain_ and incidents in life are viewed in
their relation to society as a whole, to social ideals. She is thus an
idealistic and an ethical novelist.
Even in her poetry this bias manifests itself; and here, from an
artistic point of view, the effect is often more disturbing than in
her novels. For in poetry the purely artistic, emotional, and lyrical
aspect is more important and essential; and any general and impersonal
ideal counteracts the reality of the characters, the mood, and the
passion. Thus in her longest and greatest poem, 'The Spanish Gypsy,'
the feelings and expressions put into the mouth of Fedalma and Zarca
are the nineteenth-century thoughts and feelings of a George Eliot,
and lose their immediate truthfulness and convincing power from being
thus expressed by fictitious persons; while the personalities
themselves, their thoughts and feelings, do not strike one with a
sense of reality, because they express views which sound anachronistic
and have not their proper local coloring. In spite of some beautiful
shorter poems, passages, and lines, she fails when criticized as a
lyrical poetess; nor will her poems stand faultless when judged from
the epic point of view. But if there be any justification (which we
hold there is) for didactic poetry,--poetry which calls in artistic
emotion to impress truths and moral laws,--then she will always hold a
prominent place in this sphere. 'Stradivarius' and the 'Positivist
Hymn' will, together with Matthew Arnold's 'Self-Dependence,' rank
among the finest types of didactic poems of our age.
Though at times her ethical bias has obtruded itself out of place, and
may have counteracted her certainty of touch in drawing lifelike
character (as for instance in the construction of Daniel Deronda's
personality), it has, on the whole, not prevented her from giving full
play to her marvelous power of clear and deep insight into life and of
sensuous description.
In studying life she had learned observation in the scientific
inductive school, and had thus acquired, with minuteness of
perception, the clear-sighted and unprejudiced intellectual justice of
vision which enabled her to appreciate fully and to grasp the inner
core of all the characters, motives, and passions which her command
over her thoughts and language and her docile pen enabled her to fix
in so masterly a manner. But these faculties would not have been
enough to lead to her creation of human types, had she not possessed
to that intense and exalted degree the power of feeling which gave the
initial stimulus to her penetration of the human heart and its
motives and passions, and which her intellectual control converted
into all-encompassing and all-pervading sympathy. She was, after all,
what Elizabeth Browning expressed in the pregnant phrase--"a
large-brained woman and a large-hearted man."
Nay, this sympathy was so intense and leading a feature of her genius
that it again serves to establish a distinct general classification of
novelists. Like great actors, great writers of fiction may be
classified, according to their mode of rendering the life they study,
as subjective and objective interpreters. The former are
intellectually so wide and emotionally so responsive, that their great
souls and minds grasp and assimilate, absorb for the time being, all
the different natures which they portray; they thrill with them--they
become them. The objective artists possess more the painter's and
sculptor's attitude of mind; they eliminate self completely during the
period of observation, and enter, through the fullness and delicacy of
their perceptions, into the lives and characters they depict. For the
time they see only the object of their study, and reproduce it with
clear and dispassionate touch. This is the case with Balzac,
Turgenieff, Thackeray, and Dickens. The objective method is the safest
and least likely to produce faults in drawing which make the
characters at times inconsistent and fall out of their parts; but the
subjective method may at times attain depth of insight, and fullness
of passion and veracity, which lies hidden from the dispassionate
draughtsmen and impersonators. The Brontes had this subjective
penetration to the highest degree; but they had not, on the other
hand, the inductive and scientific training of George Eliot, which
sobered down and made more objective, as it made more humorous, the
sympathetic impersonations in her stories. Above all, the purely
emotional subjectivity of George Eliot was counteracted by the passion
for the general ethical and the social ideal which we have already
considered as playing so essential a part in her mind. Upon this we
must take our stand in order to appreciate her leading method of
composition, which can be traced, we venture to believe, through all
her novels.
Starting with a well-defined ideal of social fitness for this world,
the harmony in life towards which all action, effort, and
individuality must tend, the problem which each novel sets itself to
solve is the reconciliation of the conflict arising out of the
unfitness of the leading characters (the "hero" or "heroine," as we
may call them) as measured by this ideal--the want of harmony between
their characters, aspirations, and ambitions, their views of life, and
on the other hand the surroundings in which they live. The Greek
tragedians, Shakespeare, and all great dramatists, have ever dealt
with this central struggle between man and society. But they started
with this fact, and had merely the artistic aim of evoking sympathy
and pity in the audience because of this tragic struggle, the powerful
and perfect representation of which became the final aim of their
artistic endeavor. With George Eliot the process of adaptation, the
resolution of the discord, and if not the establishment of harmony,
then the clear and impressive indication of the best way to its
establishment, is the real motive and end of her writing. There is in
her no great tragic fatalism, which makes the art of the Greek
dramatist so deeply and overwhelmingly tragic. Each one of her leading
characters is at fault, when viewed in the light of the healthy social
ideal. In the exposition of the character the fault will be shown up
strongly; the hero will either be developed into greater social
perfection, or the tragic end will impress upon the reader the disease
and its remedy, the bane and its antidote.
The social failings and shortcomings which stand in the way of this
harmony are grouped by her into two leading faults of a general
nature: the discord between the individual and selfish and the general
and altruistic; between thoughtless social materialism and conformity,
and questioning originality and spiritual revolt; between
conventionality and originality; between common-sense and prophetic
far-sightedness; between the Philistine and the artistic, the humdrum
worker and the world-reformer, the materialist and the dreamer. The
one looks down before him on the ground and ignores the heights beyond
and the clear sky above, and in his heavy-footed advance shoves the
sky-gazer aside and walks over him when he has fallen; the other gazes
at the heights and the stars, and spurns the clod and soil, tripping
over them,--nay, slipping in the mud. They each ignore one another and
the world in which each lives, or they despise each other and their
respective goals and aims.
Now, in all her novels this problem is repeated and a solution is
attempted. Over and over again she presents this situation as the
central point in the composition of her novels, in different layers of
society, in most varied characters. And the understanding of this is
the key to the understanding of George Eliot's works. She either
brings it out in presenting two central figures as the contrasts which
represent either faulty extreme, or one figure as opposed to the
surroundings, or both these means are used to impress the central
fact.
We shall take one pregnant instance to illustrate this: 'Daniel
Deronda' has been estimated and criticized chiefly as a novel in which
the Jewish question has been discussed by her in a dramatic manner.
That it deals powerfully with this question is no doubt true; but the
Jewish question is but a side issue--no doubt appealing to her deep
sympathies and sense of justice; but it is not the central motive to
the story nor the artistic keystone of the novel as constructed. The
central figure in that story is Gwendolen Harleth (who ought properly
to have given her name to the novel). The contrasting figure at the
other extreme is Mordecai the Jew, and Daniel is the intermediary
figure (almost figure-head) between these two extremes. The
personality which, I am sure, set her sympathetic intellect and
imagination throbbing into artistic creation was Gwendolen. As an
ordinary though beautiful young lady of English society (in her rank
what Hetty Sorrel and Rosamond Vincy are in theirs), she is the
clod-born, materialistic, and hopelessly selfish representative of the
unsocial member of a society in which ideas and ideals are unknown,
and in which blind impulse, feebly directed by prejudice and
tradition, petty vanity and greed, at most personal ambition, are the
motives to action, and produce the discord and misery which surround
even those who live in affluence. Her beauty, her position in her
family, her whole education, have kept from her every higher ideal,
all semblance of an ideal, and all altruism and feeling for or with
her fellow-men. Her world in the opening of the story is the most
contracted world of a small self, with a pervading passion out of all
proportion to its extent, in which the desires whirl round and round
this little circle in hideous compression. Now the fundamental problem
of the story is: How can this little, selfish, and materialistic
nature, which only realizes the things before its desiring eyes and
grasping touch, be made large, unselfish, and idealistic, so that it
reaches out beyond and above the world of self into the regions of
great ideas, in which the individual is completely submerged; and that
through this wholesome straining of the heart and of sympathetic
power, through this realization and love of the ideal, it may learn to
love and pity, and think for and in, mankind and all men and women?
And this process of artistic development of character is sensuously
and convincingly represented in this novel. The reader enters
sympathetically into the little soul of that beautiful girl at the
very beginning of the story, and in her he passes through all the
phases, until without any forced hiatus he sees before him at the end
the purified and enlarged Gwendolen, who has learnt her ennobling
lesson in the great school of suffering. It is perhaps the greatest
achievement in her art.
The more definite question is: How can such a girl realize the great
world of ideas? The answer is: It must come through the heart, through
the emotions and not the intellect,--the intellect will be widened and
matured after her personality has been thrilled. She must fall in love
with a man who is the impersonation of an idea, whose whole existence
centres round a great desire far removed from the petty world of self
in which she has lived,--nay, opposed to it, in direct contrast to it.
This impersonation is presented in Daniel Deronda; and the fault in
the book is that George Eliot's theoretical bias has been too strong
for her, and in her eagerness to make him the bearer of an idea to the
central figure of the story she has sacrificed the realistic drawing
of Daniel, who is an impersonation at the cost of flesh and blood.
Given the fact that Daniel must in his personality represent some
unselfish idea, the question was: What actual idea, great in extent
and enough to fill a man's mind and soul, should be chosen? The
difficulty here arose, that if George Eliot had chosen some purely
imaginary topic it would have lacked reality, and would have moved
neither Gwendolen nor the reader into sympathy. If on the other hand
she had taken some stirring question of the day, the question as such
would have engrossed the interest and attention of the reader, and
would no longer have been subordinated to the chief artistic purpose
it has in the story. As it is, to many, the Jewish question as treated
and suggested in the novel has itself engrossed the attention of
readers, and has diverted their minds from the main artistic gist of
the story. But to the ordinary English reader the subject of Jewish
social life and aspirations was sufficiently remote. Nay, so narrow
are the sympathies and the intellectual horizon of many cultivated
Englishmen, that though they can be interested in the lives of gipsies
and farm laborers, they cannot "screw up an interest in those Jews."
To Daniel however it was a real, stirring, and great idea to which he
wished to devote his life. Now, in order that Gwendolen should
_realize_ in herself such a great impersonal idea, she had to fall in
love with the man whose life they filled, and through her heart and
her love for him it would reach her mind and raise her thoughts.
Daniel, again, the man she loves, is contrasted with the narrow and
selfish man, the hardened and crystallized type of another social
world, consuming itself in its own self-love.
All Gwendolen's experiences directly or indirectly tend to bring about
this development of her soul. A striking scene in this sense is her
interview with Klesmer, the genuine and thorough musician devoted to
his art and work. And when she comes out of the final soul's tragedy
we feel that the woman has stood the test of fire, and has realized
the greatness and overwhelming vastness of the spiritual world. G. H.
Lewes, to whom the writer communicated this conception of 'Daniel
Deronda' assured him that he had grasped the central idea which George
Eliot had in her mind, and the actual history in the story's
construction.
Gwendolen's counterpart (and there are many in George Eliot's books)
is Dorothea in 'Middlemarch.' She starts with great and extraordinary
ideas, and must, through life and suffering, realize the moral
justification of the simple and commonplace in life. The contrasting
types illustrating this central point can be found in every work:
Dorothea and Rosamond on the one side,--original, spiritual, striving
as commonplace selfishness,--and Dorothea and Ladislaw as heavy,
serious, intellectual morality, and light, playful, artistic freedom,
on the other; Lydgate with his great reformatory ideas, slowly
enfeebled and annihilated in his Samson-like vigor by the pretty,
selfish, shallow-souled Rosamond of provincial worldliness. Gwendolen
is also contrasted with Mirah. In 'Adam Bede,' again, Dinah and Hetty
present the same contrasts as do Tito Melema and Romola, Esther and
Felix Holt. Maggie Tulliver and her brother Tom, the spirit of revolt
in Maggie and the hard conventionality of respectability in her
brother Tom, are strongly marked types of this kind. Maggie's conflict
with her narrow and commonplace surroundings and their conventional
respectability are typified in the Mill. It is a wonderful touch of
artistic suggestion that she and her brother are finally submerged in
the Mill, carried away by the flood. This novel reflects more
thoroughly the spirit of Greek tragedy than any other work of modern
fiction. The Mill, and the part it plays in the life of the Tulliver
family and in Maggie's sorrows, are like great Fate in the Greek
tragedy. It is an embodiment of the hard and unrelenting tyranny of
the powers that are. Even in 'Silas Marner,' the most artistic and
least doctrinaire of her novels, the moral process of remedying
Silas's social unfitness and misanthropy is the central idea. Space
will not allow us to give further illustrations of this idea in her
novels; but enough has been said to enable the reader to test it and
follow it up for himself.
The two most striking qualities in George Eliot as a writer are her
humor and her sympathy. They are realty connected with one another.
The power of intellectual observation, when coupled with the power of
feeling sympathy, produces humor; the purely intellectual or objective
cast of mind produces wit; while the purely subjective habit of mind
is unable to produce either.
But with all her wide range of sympathy, upon which we have been
dwelling, its limitations can still be discerned. The careful observer
will recognize that the subjective attitude of the woman cannot wholly
be hidden from view. The chief women into whom she projects herself
are after all those that are nearest to herself, and she cannot help
treating them as favorites and bestowing the greater attention upon
them: Daniel only exists as a creation to develop Gwendolen; nay,
Savonarola is really constructed for Romola's spiritual development,
Casaubon for Dorothea, and so on. A still more marked and important
limitation in her sympathies, arising out of her ethical bias, is her
pronounced dislike to all morbid art, all that is fantastic. The
poetry of Byron, the music of Chopin, all forms of morbid sentiment,
are so repulsive to her nature that she cannot treat them with
tolerance or even with humor. Remarks on Esther in 'Felix Holt' bear
this out. Probably this is an autobiographical touch, and having freed
herself from these morbid tendencies in her youth, she could never
look back upon them with tolerance.
Her seriousness and ethical bias may at times also have impaired her
style. Her extensive studies in science and philosophy often make her
ponderous in thought and in expression. The fondness with which she
takes her similes from science is often confusing to the reader who is
unfamiliar with the facts and thoughts that are used as illustrations.
She never quite overcame the temptation to insert what was new and
striking to herself; so that her science and philosophy never reached
that mature stage of mental assimilation in which they manifest
themselves merely in the general fullness of thought, without ever
asserting themselves as science or as philosophy. Still, no writer of
fiction has ever introduced reflections and episodes _in propria
persona_ which are so striking and well worth reading in themselves.
When her imitators attempt this they fail signally, and one need but
compare such passages with those of George Eliot to realize her
greatness as a writer and as a thinker.
To sum up the estimate of George Eliot as a novelist, we would say
that she is the greatest representative of the analytical and
psychological school, fixing with truth and sensuousness the types of
English provincial life; with a final purpose, which she achieved, of
illustrating by them the ideals of social ethics for the wider life of
humanity.
[Illustration: Signature of Charles Waldstein]