Our custom, in these studies, of passing at the earliest possible
moment from the abstract to the concrete, and of verifying theory by
actual experiment, arrives at a sort of beautiful climax and
apotheosis as we proceed from the abstract principles formulated in
the last six lectures, to their exquisite concrete and verification in
George Eliot.
At our last meeting we saw that during a period of time which we fix
to a point by sweeping the mind from the sixteenth century to the
middle of the eighteenth, the growing personality of man sent out
three new processes, which have remarkably changed and enlarged the
whole form of our individual and social structure.
I have found it highly useful in more than one connection to acquire a
clear notion of these three processes by referring them all to a
common physical _concept_ of direction. For example: we may with
profit construct a diagram in which it shall appear that at the
renaissance period mentioned the three great and distinctive new
personal relations which man established for himself were (1) a
relation upward,
unknown (Music)
Personality ---->[**arrow right] Fellow-man. (The Novel)[**arrow up
to "Music"]
[**arrow down from "Personality"]Nature. (Physical Science.)
towards the unknown, (2) a relation on our own level, a relation
towards our equal,--that is towards our fellow man, and (3) a relation
towards our inferior,--in the sense that the world is for man's use,
is made for man,--that is, towards physical nature. We have seen how
from the beginning of man's history these three relations did not
acquire the vividness and energy of personal relations, nor any fixed
or developable existence at all until the period mentioned.
I cannot help expressing earnest regret that the limits of my present
subject have not allowed me to give any development whatever to this
conception of the actual significance of the Renaissance as a
significance which crystallizing into Music, the Novel, and Science,
has left us those as the solid residuum of that movement; and it is
not a mere sentimental generalization but a hard, scientific and
unifiable fact that music is the distinctive form in which man's new
relation to what is above him has expressed itself; the novel is the
distinctive form in which man's new personal relation to his
fellow-man has expressed itself; and science is the distinctive form
in which man's new personal relation to nature has expressed itself.
I am perfectly well aware, for instance, that when one thinks of the
Italian Opera with its banalities and fleshly frenzies; or when one
thinks of the small, low, unmanly sensual lives which so many
musicians have led under our eyes; one may well feel inclined to
dispute this category to which I have assigned music, and to question
whether music does belong to this wholly religious sphere. I long to
be able to remind such questioners of the historic fact that music has
been brought into the church as the mouthpiece of our worship, not by
the sentimental people but by the sternest reformers and the most
untheoretical and hard-handed workers: I long to remind them now it
is the same Luther who would meet his accusers though ten thousand
devils backed them, that cares most assiduously for the hymns of the
church, makes them, sings them: how it is the same Puritan who fights
winter and hunger and the savage, that is noted for his sweet songs,
and must have his periodic opening of the musical avenue up towards
the great God: or, passing far back to the times before music was
music, and so making the case stronger, I long to remind them of a
single line in a letter from Pliny the younger to Trajan in the year
110, which puts before me a dewy morning picture of music and
Christian devotion that haunts my imagination--a line in which Pliny
mentions some people who were in the habit of "meeting on a certain
day before daylight and singing a hymn to Christ as to a God": or how
in the fourth century the very Ambrosian chant which preceded the
Gregorian chant is due to the fact that the good Ambrose, Bishop of
Milan, casting about for solace, collects a number of psalm tunes and
hymns and appoints them to be sung for the express purpose of
consoling his people in their afflictions: and coming down to the
birth of modern music, I long to remind these questioners of the noble
and simple devoutness which Palestrina brings into the church worship
with his music; of the perfect calm creative life of John Sebastian
Bach whose music is so compact of devotion as to have inspired the
well-known declaration that wherever it is played, it makes that place
a church; and finally I long to remind them how essential a part of
every modern church the organ-loft and the choir have come to be--and
in full view of the terrible mistakes which these often make, of the
screechy Italian opera music which one hears floating from this or
that church on a Sunday, of the wholly undevout organ music with
which the unfortunate flippant-minded organist often sends us
forth--to declare that music is yet, as we have seen, a new art, that
we have not really learned the uses of it, much less the scope of it;
that indeed not all of us have even yet acquired the physical capacity
or ear for it,--and that finally we are at the very threshold of those
sweet applications we may hereafter make of that awful and mysterious
power in music to take up our yearnings towards the infinite at the
point where words and all articulate utterance fail, and bear them
onward often to something like a satisfactory nearness to their divine
object.
But all this must be left aside, and we must now pass on to consider
that remarkable writer who for something more than twenty years past
has been chaining the attention of our English world purely by virtue
of her extraordinary endowment as to all three of these relations
which I have here sketched in diagram--these relations to the growing
personality of man to that which is above him, or the unknown--to that
which is in his level, or his fellow-man; and to that which is beneath
him, or nature--which have resulted respectively in music, the novel,
and science.
If I could be allowed to construct a final text and summary of all the
principles which have been announced in the preceding lectures, I
could make none more complete than is furnished me by two English
women who have recently been among us, and who, in the quietest way
have each made an epoch, not only in literature but in life. These two
women are Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot; and although
our studies now lie more immediately with the latter, I shall find a
frequent delight as we go on in comparing her printed words with those
of Mrs. Browning, and in showing through what diverse forms of
personality--so diverse as to be often really complementary to each
other--these two have illustrated the doctrines I have hitherto
expounded.
In beginning to get some clear view of the actual living personality
which I have hitherto designated as George Eliot, one is immediately
struck with the fact that it has enjoyed more of what Jack Falstaff
would call a commodity of good names than falls to the lot of most
mortals. As one rehearses these names it is curious also to reflect
what a different train of associations each one suggests. It is hard
to believe that Marian Evans, Amos Barton (for when the editor of
Blackwood's was corresponding with her about her first unsigned
manuscript, which was entitled, _The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos
Barton_, I find him addressing her as "My dear Amos"), George Eliot,
Mrs. Lewes, and Mrs. Cross are one and the same person. Amid all these
appellations I find myself most strongly attracted towards that of
George Eliot. This was the name which she chose for herself; it was
under this name that she made her great successes; it was by this name
that she endeared herself to all who love great and faithful work; and
surely--if one may paraphrase Poe--the angels call her George Eliot.
Since therefore we are mainly interested in Marian Evans, or Mrs.
Lewes, or Mrs. Cross, just in so far as they bear intimate relations
to George Eliot, I find myself drawn, in placing before you such
sketch as I have been able to make of this remarkable personage, to
begin with some account of the birth of the specific George Eliot, and
having acquired a view of the circumstances attending that event, to
look backward and forward from that as a central point at the origin
and life of Marian Evans on the one hand, and of Mrs. Lewes and Mrs.
Cross on the other.
On a certain night in the autumn of 1856, the editor of _Blackwood's
Magazine_, was seated in an apartment of his own house, reading a
manuscript which he had lately received from London, called _The Sad
Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton_. About 11 o'clock in the evening
Thackeray, who had been staying with him and had been out to dinner,
entered the room, and the editor remarked, "Do you know I think I have
lighted upon a new author who is uncommonly like a first-class
passenger?"
Hereupon he read to Thackeray a passage from the manuscript which he
held in his hand. We are able to identify this passage, and it seems
interesting to reproduce it here, not only as a specimen of the kind
of matter which was particularly striking to the editor of a great
magazine twenty-five years ago, but as about the first tangible
utterance of the real George Eliot. The passage occurs early in the
second chapter of the story. In the first chapter we have had some
description of the old church and the existing society in Shepperton
"twenty-five years ago," which dating from 1856 would show us that
village about the year 1830-31. In the second chapter we are
immediately introduced to the Rev. Amos Barton, and the page or two
which our editor read to Thackeray was this:
Look at him as he winds through the little churchyard! The silver
light that falls aslant on church and tomb, enables you to see
his slim black figure, made all the slimmer by tight pantaloons.
He walks with a quick step, and is now rapping with sharp
decision at the vicarage door. It is opened without delay by the
nurse, cook, and housemaid, all at once--that is to say, by the
robust maid-of-all work, Nanny; and as Mr. Barton hangs up his
hat in the passage, you see that a narrow face of no particular
complexion--even the small-pox that has attacked it seems to have
been of a mongrel, indefinite kind--with features of no
particular shape, and an eye of no particular expression, is
surmounted by a slope of baldness gently rising from brow to
crown. You judge him, rightly, to be about forty. The house is
quiet, for it is half-past ten, and the children have long been
gone to bed. He opens the sitting-room door, but instead of
seeing his wife, as he expected, stitching with the nimblest of
fingers by the light of one candle, he finds her dispensing with
the light of a candle altogether. She is softly pacing up and
down by the red fire-light, holding in her arms little Walter,
the year-old baby, who looks over her shoulder with large
wide-open eyes, while the patient mother pats his back with her
soft hand, and glances with a sigh at the heap of large and small
stockings lying unmended on the table.
She was a lovely woman--Mrs. Amos Barton; a large, fair, gentle
Madonna, with thick, close chestnut curls beside her well rounded
cheeks, and with large, tender, short-sighted eyes. The flowing
line of her tall figure made the limpest dress look graceful, and
her old frayed black silk seemed to repose on her bust and limbs
with a placid elegance and sense of distinction, in strong
contrast with the uneasy sense of being no fit, that seemed to
express itself in the rustling of Mrs. Farquhar's _gros de
Naples_. The caps she wore would have been pronounced, when off
her head, utterly heavy and hideous--for in those days even
fashionable caps were large and floppy; but surmounting her long,
arched neck, and mingling their borders of cheap lace and ribbon
with her chestnut curls, they seemed miracles of successful
millinery. Among strangers she was shy and tremulous as a girl of
fifteen; she blushed crimson if any one appealed to her opinion;
yet that tall, graceful, substantial presence was so imposing in
its mildness, that men spoke to her with an agreeable sensation
of timidity.... I venture to say Mrs. Barton would never have
grown half so angelic if she had married the man you would
perhaps have had in your eye for her--a man with sufficient
income and abundant personal eclat. Besides, Amos was an
affectionate husband, and, in his way, valued his wife as his
best treasure.
* * * * *
"I wish we could do without borrowing money, and yet I don't see
how we can. Poor Fred must have some new shoes; I couldn't let
him go to Mrs. Bond's yesterday because his toes were peeping
out, dear child; and I can't let him walk anywhere except in the
garden. He must have a pair before Sunday. Really, boots and
shoes are the greatest trouble of my life. Everything else one
can turn and turn about, and make old look like new; but there's
no coaxing boots and shoes to look better than they are."
Mrs. Barton was playfully undervaluing her skill in
metamorphosing boots and shoes. She had at that moment on her
feet a pair of slippers which had long ago lived through the
prunella phase of their existence, and were now running a
respectable career as black silk slippers, having been neatly
covered with that material by Mrs. Barton's own neat fingers.
Wonderful fingers those! they were never empty; for if she went
to spend a few hours with a friendly parishioner, out came her
thimble and a piece of calico or muslin, which before she left,
had become a mysterious little garment with all sorts of hemmed
ins and outs. She was even trying to persuade her husband to
leave off tight pantaloons; because if he would wear the ordinary
gun-cases, she knew she could make them so well that no one would
suspect the tailor.
But by this time Mr. Barton has finished his pipe, the candle
begins to burn low, and Mrs. Barton goes to see if Nanny has
succeeded in lulling Walter to sleep. Nanny is that moment
putting him in the little cot by his mother's bedside; the head
with its thin wavelets of brown hair, indents the little pillow;
and a tiny, waxen, dimpled fist hides the rosy lips, for baby is
given to the infantine peccadillo of thumb-sucking. So Nanny
could now join in the short evening prayer, and all go to bed.
Mrs. Barton carried up stairs the remainder of her heap of
stockings, and laid them on a table close to her bedside, where
also she placed a warm shawl, removing her candle, before she put
it out, to a tin socket fixed at the head of her bed. Her body
was weary, but her heart was not heavy, in spite of Mr. Woods the
butcher, and the transitory nature of shoe-leather; for her heart
so overflowed with love, she felt sure she was near a fountain of
love that would care for her husband and babes better than she
could foresee; so she was soon asleep. But about half-past five
o'clock in the morning, if there were any angels watching round
her bed--and angels might be glad of such an office--they saw
Mrs. Barton rise up quietly, careful not to disturb the
slumbering Amos, who was snoring the snore of the just; light her
candle, prop herself upright with the pillows, throw the warm
shawl round her shoulders, and renew her attack on the heap of
undarned stockings. She darned away until she heard Nanny
stirring, and then drowsiness came with the dawn; the candle was
put out, and she sank into a doze. But at nine o'clock she was at
the breakfast-table busy cutting bread and butter for five hungry
mouths, while Nanny, baby on one arm, in rosy cheeks, fat neck,
and night-gown, brought in a jug of hot milk and water.
Although Thackeray was not enthusiastic, the editor maintained his
opinion and wrote the author that the manuscript was "worthy the
honors of print and pay," addressing the author as "My dear Amos."
Considerable correspondence followed in which the editor was free in
venturing criticisms. The author had offered this as the first of a
series to be called "_Scenes from Clerical Life_;" but no others of
the series were yet written and the editor was naturally desirous to
see more of them before printing the first. This appears to have made
the author extremely timid, and for a time there was doubt whether it
was worth while to write the remaining stories. For the author's
encouragement, therefore, it was determined to print the first story
without waiting to see the others; and accordingly in _Blackwood's
Magazine_ for January, 1857, the story of _Amos Barton_ was printed.
This stimulus appears to have had its effect; and after the January
number, each succeeding issue of _Blackwood's Magazine_ contained an
instalment of the series known as _Scenes of Clerical Life_, until it
was concluded in the number for November, 1857; the whole series
embracing the three stories of _Amos Barton_, _Mr. Gilfil's
Love-Story_ and _Janet's Repentance_. It was only while the second of
these--_Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story_--was appearing in the Magazine that
our George Eliot was born; for it was at this time that the editor of
the Magazine was instructed to call the author by that name.
The hold which these three stories immediately took upon all thinking
people was remarkable. In January, 1858, that is two months after the
last instalment of _Janet's Repentance_--I find Charles Dickens
writing this letter:
"MY DEAR LONGFORD--
"Will you--by such roundabout ways and methods as may present
themselves--convey this note of thanks to the author of 'Scenes
of Clerical Life,' whose two first stories I can never say enough
of, I think them so truly admirable. But, if those two volumes or
a part of them, were not written by a woman--then should I begin
to believe that I am a woman myself.
Faithfully Yours Always,