by one circumstance. The 'prelude' invites us to remember Saint
Theresa. Her passionate nature, we are told, demanded a consecration
of life to some object of unselfish devotion. She found it in the
reform of a religious order. But there are many modern Theresas who,
with equally noble aspirations, can find no worthy object for their
energies. They have found 'no coherent social faith and order,' no
sufficient guidance for their ardent souls. And thus we have now and
then a Saint Theresa, 'foundress of nothing, whose loving heart-beats
and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed
among hindrances instead of centring in some long recognisable deed.'
This, then, is the keynote of 'Middlemarch.' We are to have one more
variation on the theme already treated in various form; and Dorothea
Brooke is to be the Saint Theresa with lofty aspirations to pass
through a searching ordeal, and, if she fails in outward results,
yet to win additional nobility from failure. And yet, if this be the
design, it almost seems as if the book were intended for elaborate
irony. Dorothea starts with some admirable, though not very novel,
aspirations of the social kind with a desire to improve drainage and
provide better cottages for the poor. She meets a consummate pedant,
who is piteously ridiculed for his petty and hide-bound intellect, and
immediately takes him to be her hero and guide to lofty endeavour.
She fancies, as we are told, that her spiritual difficulties will be
solved by the help of a little Latin and Greek. 'Perhaps even Hebrew
might be necessary—at least the alphabet and a few roots—in order to
arrive at the core of things and judge soundly on the social duties of
the Christian.' She marries Mr. Casaubon, and of course is speedily
undeceived. But curiously enough, the process of enlightenment seems
to be very partial. Her faith in her husband receives its death-blow
as soon as she finds out—not that he is a wretched pedant, but that he
is a pedant of the wrong kind. Will Ladislaw points out to her that
Mr. Casaubon is throwing away his labour because he does not know
German, and is therefore only abreast of poor old Jacob Bryant in the
last century, instead of being a worthy contemporary of Professor Max
Müller. Surely Dorothea's error is almost as deep as ever. Casaubon is
a wretched being because he has neither heart nor brains—not because
his reading has been confined to the wrong set of books. Surely a man
may be a prig and a pedant, though he is familiar with the very last
researches of German professors. The latest theories about comparative
mythology may be familiar to a man with a soul comparable only to a
dry pea in a bladder. If Casaubon had been all that Dorothea fancied,
if his knowledge had been thoroughly up to the mark, we should still
have pitied her for her not knowing the difference between a man and a
stick. Unluckily, she never seems to find out that in this stupendous
blunder, and not in the pardonable ignorance as to the true value of
his literary labours, is the real source of her misfortune. In fact,
she hardly seems to grow wiser even at the end; for when poor Casaubon
is as dead as his writings, she takes up with a young gentleman who
appears to have some good feeling, but is conspicuously unworthy of
the affections of a Saint Theresa. Had 'Middlemarch' been intended
for a cutting satire upon the aspirations of young ladies who wish
to learn Latin and Greek when they ought to be nursing babies and
supporting hospitals, these developments of affairs would have been
in perfect congruity with the design. As it is, we are left with the
feeling that aspirations of this kind scarcely deserve a better fate
than they meet, and that Dorothea was all the better for getting the
romantic aspirations out of her head. Have not the commonplace people
the best of the argument?
It would be very untrue to say that the later books show any defect
of general power. I do not think, for example, that there are many
passages in modern fiction so vigorous as the description of poor
Lydgate, whose higher aspirations are dashed with a comparatively
vulgar desire for worldly success, gradually engulfed by the selfish
persistence of his wife, like a swimmer sucked down by an octopus.
On the contrary, the picture is so forcible and so life-like that
one reads it with a sense of actual bitterness. And as in 'Daniel
Deronda,' though I am ready to confess that Mordecai and Daniel are
to my mind intolerable bores, I hold the story of Grandecourt and
Gwendolen to be, though not a pleasant, a singularly powerful study.
And it may certainly be said both of 'Romola' and of 'Middlemarch'
that they have some merits of so high an order that the defects upon
which I have dwelt are felt as blemishes, not as fatal errors. If
there is some misunderstanding of the limits of her own powers, or
some misconception of true artistic conditions, nobody can read them
without the sense of having been in contact with a comprehensive and
vigorous intellect, with high feeling and keen powers of observation.
Only one cannot help regretting the loss of that early charm. In
reading 'Adam Bede,' we feel first the magic, and afterwards we
recognise the power which it implies. In 'Middlemarch' we feel the
power, but we ask in vain for the charm. Some such change passes over
any great mind which goes through a genuine process of development.
It is not surprising that the reflective powers should become more
predominant in later years; that reasoning should to some extent take
the place of intuitive perception; and that experience of life should
give a sterner and sadder tone to the implied criticism of human
nature. We are prepared to find less spontaneity, less freshness of
interest in the little incidents of life, and we are not surprised
that a mind so reflective and richly stored should try to get beyond
the charmed circle of its early successes and to give us a picture of
wider and less picturesque aspects of human life. But this does not
seem to account sufficiently for the presence of something jarring and
depressing in the later work.
Without going into the question fully, one thing may be said: the
modern Theresa, whether she is called Dorothea, or Maggie, or Dinah,
or Janet, is the central figure in the world of George Eliot's
imagination. We are to be brought to sympathise with the noble
aspirations of a loving and unselfish spirit, conscious that it cannot
receive any full satisfaction within the commonplace conditions of
this prosaic world. How women are to find a worthier sphere of action
than the mere suckling of babes and chronicling of small beer is a
question for the Social Science Associations. Some people answer it
by proposing to give women votes or degrees, and others would tell
us that such problems can only be answered by reverting to Saint
Theresa's method. The solution in terms of actual conduct lies beyond
the proper province of the novelist. She has done all that she can do
if she has revealed the intrinsic beauty of such a character, and its
proper function in life. She should make us fall in love with Romola
and Maggie, and convert us to the belief that they are the true salt
of the earth.
Up to a certain point her success is complete, and it is won by high
moral feeling and quick sympathy with true nobility of character.
We pay willing homage to these pure and lofty feminine types, and
we may get some measure of the success by comparing them with other
dissatisfied heroines whose aspirations are by no means so lofty or
so compatible with delicate moral sentiment. But the triumph has its
limits. In the sweet old-world country life a Janet or a Dinah can
find some sort of satisfaction from an evangelical preacher, or within
the limits of the Methodist church. If the thoughts and ways of her
circle are narrow, it is in harmony with itself, and we may feel its
beauty without asking awkward questions. But as soon as Maggie has
left her quiet fields and reached even such a centre of civilisation
as St. Ogg's, there is a jar and a discord. 'Romola' is in presence of
a great spiritual disturbance where the highest aspirations are doomed
to the saddest failure; and when we get to 'Middlemarch' we feel
that the charm has somehow vanished. Even in the early period, Mrs.
Poyser's bright common-sense has some advantages over Dinah Morris's
high-wrought sentiment. And in 'Middlemarch' we feel more decidedly
that high aspirations are doubtful qualifications; that the ambitious
young devotee of science has to compound with the quarrelling world,
and the brilliant young Dorothea to submit to a decided clipping
of her wings. Is it worth while to have a lofty nature in such
surroundings? The very bitterness with which the triumph of the lower
characters is set forth seems to betray a kind of misgiving. And it
is the presence of this feeling, as well as the absence of the old
picturesque scenery, that gives a tone of melancholy to the later
books. Some readers are disposed to sneer, and to look upon the heroes
and heroines as male and female prigs, who are ridiculous if they
persist and contemptible when they fail. Others are disposed to infer
that the philosophy which they represent is radically unsatisfactory.
And some may say that, after all, the picture is true, however sad,
and that, in all ages, people who try to lift their heads above
the crowd must lay their account with martyrdom and be content to
be uncomfortable. The moral, accepted by George Eliot herself, is
indicated at the end of 'Middlemarch.' A new Theresa, she tells us,
will not have the old opportunity any more than a new Antigone
would 'spend heroic piety in daring all for the sake of a brother's
funeral; the medium in which these ardent deeds took shape is for ever
gone.' There will be many Dorotheas, and some of them doomed to worse
sacrifices than the Dorothea of 'Middlemarch,' and we must be content
to think that her influence spent itself through many invisible
channels, but was not the less potent because unseen.
Perhaps that is not a very satisfactory conclusion. I cannot here ask
why it should not have been more satisfactory. We must admit that
there is something rather depressing in the thought of these anonymous
Dorotheas feeling about vaguely for some worthy outlet of their
energies, taking up with a man of science and discovering him to be an
effete pedant, wishing ardently to reform the world, but quite unable
to specify the steps to be taken, and condescending to put up with
a very commonplace life in a vague hope that somehow or other they
will do some good. Undoubtedly we must admit that, wherever the fault
lies, our Theresas have some difficulty in fully manifesting their
excellence. But with all their faults, we feel that they embody the
imperfect influence of a nature so lofty in its sentiment, so wide in
its sympathies, and so keen in its perceptions, that we may wait long
before it will be adequately replaced. The imperfections belong in
great measure to a time of vast revolutions in thought which produce
artistic discords as well as philosophic anarchy. Lower minds escape
the difficulty because they are lower; and even to be fully sensitive
to the deepest searchings of heart of the time is to possess a high
claim on our respect. At lowest, however we may differ from George
Eliot's teaching on many points, we feel her to be one who, in the
midst of great perplexities, has brought great intellectual powers
to setting before us a lofty moral ideal, and, in spite of manifest
shortcomings, has shown certain aspects of a vanishing social phase
with a power and delicacy unsurpassed in her own sphere.
_AUTOBIOGRAPHY_
Nobody ever wrote a dull autobiography. If one may make such a bull,
the very dulness would be interesting. The autobiographer has _ex
officio_ two qualifications of supreme importance in all literary
work. He is writing about a topic in which he is keenly interested,
and about a topic upon which he is the highest living authority. It
may be reckoned, too, as a special felicity that an autobiography,
alone of all books, may be more valuable in proportion to the amount
of misrepresentation which it contains. We do not wonder when a man
gives a false character to his neighbour, but it is always curious to
see how a man contrives to present a false testimonial to himself.
It is pleasant to be admitted behind the scenes and trace the growth
of that singular phantom which, like the Spectre of the Brocken, is
the man's own shadow cast upon the coloured and distorting mists of
memory. Autobiography for these reasons is so generally interesting,
that I have frequently thought with the admirable Benvenuto Cellini
that it should be considered as a duty by all eminent men; and,
indeed, by men not eminent. As every sensible man is exhorted to
make his will, he should also be bound to leave to his descendants
some account of his experience of life. The dullest of us would in
spite of themselves say something profoundly interesting, if only
by explaining how they came to be so dull—a circumstance which is
sometimes in great need of explanation. On reflection, however, we
must admit that autobiography done under compulsion would be in danger
of losing the essential charm of spontaneity. The true autobiography
is written by one who feels an irresistible longing for confidential
expansion; who is forced by his innate constitution to unbosom himself
to the public of the kind of matter generally reserved for our closest
intimacy. Confessions dictated by a sense of duty, like many records
of religious experience, have rarely the peculiar attractiveness of
those which are prompted by the simple longing for human sympathy.
Nothing, indeed, in all literature is more impressive than some of
the writings in which great men have laid bare to us the working
of their souls in the severest spiritual crises. But the solemnity
and the loftiness of purpose generally remove such work to a rather
different category. Augustine's 'Confessions' is an impassioned
meditation upon great religious and philosophical questions which
only condescends at intervals to autobiographical detail. Few books,
to descend a little in the scale, are more interesting, whether to
the fellow-believer or to the psychological observer, than Bunyan's
'Grace Abounding.' We follow this real pilgrim through a labyrinth
of strange scruples invented by a quick brain placed for the time
at the service of a self-torturing impulse, and peopled by the
phantoms created by a poetical imagination under stress of profound
excitement. Incidentally we learn to know and to love the writer, and
certainly not the less because the spiritual fermentation reveals no
morbid affectation. We give him credit for exposing the trial and the
victory simply and solely for the reason which he alleges; that is
to say, because he really thinks that his experience offers useful
lessons to his fellow-creatures. He is no attitudiniser, proud at the
bottom of his heart of the sensibility which he professes to lament,
nor a sanctimonious sentimentalist stimulating a false emotion for
purposes of ostentation. He is as simple, honest, and soundhearted
as he is tender and impassioned. But these very merits deprive the
book of some autobiographical interest. It never enters his head that
anybody will care about John Bunyan the tinker, or the details of
his tinkering. He who painted the scenes in Vanity Fair could have
drawn a vivid picture of Elstow and Bedford, of Puritanical preachers
and Cromwellian soldiers, and the judges and gaolers under Charles
II. Here and there, in scattered passages of his works, he gives us
graphic anecdotes in passing which set the scene before us vividly as
a bit of Pepys's diaries. The incidents connected with his commitment
to prison are described with a dramatic force capable of exciting the
envy of a practised reporter. But we see only enough to tantalise us
with the possibilities. He tells us so little of his early life that
his biographers cannot make up their minds as to whether he was, as
Southey calls him, a 'blackguard,' or a few degrees above or below
that zero-point of the scale of merit. Lord Macaulay takes it for
granted that he was in the Parliamentary, and Mr. Froude thinks it
almost proved that he was in the Royalist army. He tells us nothing of
the death of the first wife, whose love seems to have raised him from
blackguardism; nor of his marriage to the second wife, who stood up
for him so bravely before the judges, and was his faithful companion
to the end of his pilgrimage. The book is therefore a profoundly
interesting account of one phase in the development of the character
of our great prose-poet; but hardly an autobiography. The narrative
was worth writing, because his own heart, like his allegorical
Mansoul, had been the scene of one incident in the everlasting
struggle between the powers of light and darkness, not because the
scene had any independent interest of its own.
In this one may be disposed to say Bunyan judged rightly. The wisest
man, it is said, is he who realises most clearly the narrow limits of
human knowledge; the greatest should be penetrated with the strongest
conviction of his own insignificance. The higher we rise above the
average mass of mankind, the more clearly we should see our own
incapacity for acting the part of Providence. The village squire who
does not really believe in anything invisible from his own steeple,
may fancy that he is of real importance to the world, for the world
for him means his village. 'P. P. clerk of this parish' thought that
all future generations would be interested in the fact that he had
smoothed the dog's-ears in the great Bible. A genuine statesman who
knows something of the forces by which the world is governed should
have seen through the humbug of history. He should have learnt the
fable of the fly and the chariot wheel, and be aware that what are
called his achievements are really the events upon which, through some
accident of position, he has been allowed to inscribe his name. One
stage in a nation's life gets itself labelled Cromwell, and another
William Pitt; but perhaps Pitt and Cromwell were really of little more
importance than some contemporary P. P. This doctrine, however, is
considered, I know not why, to be immoral, and to smack of fatalism,
cynicism, jealousy of great men, and other objectionable tendencies.
We are in a tacit conspiracy to flatter conspicuous men at the expense
of their fellow-workers, and he is the most generous and appreciative
who can heap the greatest number of superlatives upon growing
reputations, and add a stone to the gigantic pile of eulogy under
which the historical proportions of some great figures are pretty well
buried. We must not complain, therefore, if we flatter the vanity
which seems to be the most essential ingredient in the composition of
a model biographer. A man who expects that future generations will be
profoundly interested in the state of his interior seems to be drawing
a heavy bill upon posterity. And yet it is generally honoured. We are
flattered perhaps by this exhibition of confidence. We are touched
by the demand for sympathy. There is something pathetic in this
belief that we shall be moved by the record of past sufferings and
aspirations as there is in a child's confidence that you will enter
into its little fears and hopes. And perhaps vanity is so universal a
weakness, and, in spite of good moralising, it so strongly resembles
a virtue in some of its embodiments, that we cannot find it in our
hearts to be angry with it. We can understand it too thoroughly.
And then we make an ingenious compromise with our consciences. Our
interest in Pepys's avowals of his own foibles, for example, is partly
due to the fact that whilst we are secretly conscious of at least
the germs of similar failings, the consciousness does not bring any
sense of shame, because we set down the confession to the account
of poor Pepys himself. The man who, like Goldsmith, is so running
over with jealousy that he is forced to avow it openly, seems to
be a sort of excuse to us for cherishing a less abundant stock of
similar sentiment. This is one occult source of pleasure in reading
autobiography. We have a delicate shade of conscious superiority in
listening to the vicarious confession. 'I am sometimes troubled,'
said Boswell, 'by a disposition to stinginess.' 'So am I,' replied
Johnson, 'but I do not tell it.' That is our attitude in regard to the
autobiographer. After all, we say to ourselves, this distinguished
person is such a one as we are; and even more so, for he cannot keep
it to himself. The conclusion is not quite fair, it may be, when
applied to the case of a diarist like Pepys, who, poor man, meant only
to confide his thoughts to his note-books. But it applies more or
less to every genuine autobiographer—to every man, that is, who has
deliberately written down a history of his own feelings and thoughts
for the benefit of posterity.
The prince of all autobiographers in this full sense of the word—the
man who represents the genuine type in its fullest realisation—is
undoubtedly Rousseau. The 'Confessions' may certainly be regarded
as not only one of the most remarkable, but as in parts one of the
most repulsive, books ever written. Yet, one must add, it is also
one of the most fascinating. Rousseau starts by declaring that he
is undertaking a task which has had no precedent, and will have no
imitators—the task of showing a man in all the truth of nature,
and that man himself. How far he is perfectly sincere in this, or
in the declaration which immediately follows, that no one of his
readers will be able to pronounce himself a better man than Jean
Jacques Rousseau, is a question hardly to be answered. The avowal is
at any rate characteristic of the true autobiographer. It reflects
the subtle vanity which, taking now the guise of perfect sincerity,
and now that of deep humility, encourages us to colour as highly as
possible both our vices and our virtues as equally entitling us to the
sympathies of mankind: that strange and Protean sensibility which we
are puzzled to classify either as an excessive craving for admiration,
or a mere morbid desire for self-abasement. Certainly in Rousseau
it sometimes shows itself in a shamelessness which it is very hard
to forgive unless we will admit the ambiguous and well-worn plea of
partial insanity. The pleasure—always, it must be granted, a very
questionable one—of recognising our own failings in our superiors,
passes too often into sheer disgust or shuddering horror at the
spectacle of genius grovelling in the mire. But Rousseau represents
an abnormal development of all the qualities of his class; and this,
the ugliest amongst the autobiographic instincts, is hardly developed
out of proportion to the rest. And, therefore, if we cannot quite
forgive, we are not altogether alienated. We read, for example, one
of those amazing confessions of contemptible meanness which makes
us wonder that human fingers could commit them to paper: the story
of his casting the blame of a petty theft upon an innocent girl, to
her probable ruin; of his desertion of his friend lying in a fit on
the pavement of a strange town; of the more grievous crime of his
abandonment of his own children to the foundling hospital. How can
any interest survive in the narrator except that kind of interest
which a physiologist takes in some ghastly disease? It would be a
libel upon ourselves to suppose that we see the reflections of our
own hearts in such narratives, or that we can in any degree take them
as an indirect flattery to our own superiority. Such an emotion may
conceivably be present in some other passages. When, for example, we
read how, on the death of a dear friend, Rousseau confesses to one
who loved them both that he derived some pleasure from the reflection
that he should inherit an excellent black coat, he may perhaps be
giving to us the sort of satisfaction which we derive from a keen
maxim of Rochefoucauld. We recognise the truth—painful though it may
be in itself—that some strand of mean and selfish feeling may be
interwoven with genuine regret; and we may reconcile ourselves by
interpreting it as a proof that some of the sentiments for which we
have blushed are not inconsistent with real kindness of heart. We may
smile still more harmlessly at the quaint avowal of absurdity when
Rousseau decides that he will test the probability of his future fate
by throwing a stone at a tree trunk. A hit is to mean salvation, and
a miss, damnation. He chooses a very big trunk very close to him,
succeeds in hitting it, and sets his mind at rest. We may congratulate
ourselves without malice on this proof that men of genius may indulge
in very grotesque follies. A student of human nature may be grateful
for a frank avowal now and then of the 'fears of the brave and follies
of the wise.' But how can we justify ourselves in point of taste—to
say nothing of morality—at not shrinking back from the more hideous
avowals of downright depravity contained in this strange record
which is to convince us that none amongst the sons of men can claim
superiority to Rousseau?