I should like, while the subject is vividly present with me, to
tell you more exactly than I have ever yet done, what I knew of
my aunt, Elizabeth Evans. My father, you know, lived in
Warwickshire all my life with him, having finally left
Staffordshire first, and then Derbyshire, six or seven years
before he married my mother. There was hardly any intercourse
between my father's family, resident in Derbyshire and
Staffordshire, and our family--few and far between visits of (to
my childish feelings) strange uncles and aunts and cousins from
my father's far-off native county, and once a journey of my own,
as a little child, with my father and mother, to see my uncle
William, a rich builder, in Staffordshire--but not my uncle and
aunt Samuel, so far as I can recall the dim outline of
things--are what I remember of northerly relations in my
childhood.
But when I was seventeen or more--after my sister was married and
I was mistress of the house--my father took a journey into
Derbyshire, in which, visiting my uncle and aunt Samuel, who were
very poor, and lived in a humble cottage at Wirksworth, he found
my aunt in a very delicate state of health after a serious
illness, and, to do her bodily good, he persuaded her to return
with him, telling her that I should be very, very happy to have
her with me for a few weeks. I was then strongly under the
influence of Evangelical belief, and earnestly endeavoring to
shape this anomalous English-Christian life of ours into some
consistency with the spirit and simple verbal tenor of the New
Testament.
I was delighted to see my aunt. Although I had only heard her
spoken of as a strange person, given to a fanatical vehemence of
exhortation in private as well as public, I believed that we
should find sympathy between us. She was then an old woman--above
sixty--and, I believe, had for a good many years given up
preaching. A tiny little woman, with bright, small dark eyes, and
hair that had been black, I imagine, but was now gray--a pretty
woman in her youth, but of a totally different physical type from
Dinah. The difference--as you will believe--was not simply
physical; no difference is. She was a woman of strong natural
excitability, which, I know, from the description I have heard my
father and half-sister give, prevented her from the exercise of
discretion under the promptings of her zeal. But this vehemence
was now subdued by age and sickness; she was very gentle and
quiet in her manners--very loving--and (what she must have been
from the very first) a truly religious soul, in whom the love of
God and love of man were fused together. There was nothing highly
distinctive in her religious conversation. I had had much
intercourse with pious Dissenters before. The only freshness I
found in our talk, came from the fact that she had been the
greater part of her life a Wesleyan; and though she left the
society when women were no longer allowed to preach, and joined
the new Wesleyans, she retained the character of thought that
belongs to the genuine old Wesleyan. I had never talked with a
Wesleyan before, and we used to have little debates about
predestination, for I was then a strong Calvinist. Here her
superiority came out, and I remember now, with loving admiration,
one thing which at the time I disapproved. It was not strictly a
consequence of her Arminian belief, and at first sight might seem
opposed to it,--yet it came from the spirit of love which clings
to the bad logic of Arminianism. When my uncle came to fetch her,
after she had been with us a fortnight or three weeks, he was
speaking of a deceased minister, once greatly respected, who from
the action of trouble upon him had taken to small tippling,
though otherwise not culpable. "But I hope the good man's in
heaven for all that," said my uncle. "Oh, yes," said my aunt,
with a deep inward groan of joyful conviction, "Mr. A.'s in
heaven--that's sure." This was at the time an offence to my
stern, ascetic, hard views--how beautiful it is to me now!
As to my aunt's conversation, it is a fact that the only two
things of any interest I remember in our lonely sittings and
walks are her telling me one sunny afternoon how she had, with
another pious woman, visited an unhappy girl in prison, stayed
with her all night, and gone with her to execution; and one or
two accounts of supposed miracles in which she believed--among
the rest, the face with the crown of thorns seen in the glass. In
her account of the prison scenes, I remember no word she
uttered--I only remember her tone and manner, and the deep
feeling I had under the recital. Of the girl she knew nothing, I
believe--or told me nothing--but that she was a common coarse
girl, convicted of child-murder. The incident lay in my mind for
years on years, as a dead germ, apparently--till time had placed
in my mind a nidus in which it could fructify; it then turned out
to be the germ of "Adam Bede."
I saw my aunt twice after this. Once I spent a day and night with
my father in the Wirksworth cottage sleeping with my aunt, I
remember. Our interview was less interesting than in the former
time: I think I was less simply devoted to religious ideas. And
once again she came with my uncle to see me--when my father and I
were living at Foleshill; then there was some pain, for I had
given up the form of Christian belief, and was in a crude state
of free-thinking. She stayed about three or four days, I think.
This is all I remember distinctly, as matter I could write down,
of my dear aunt, whom I really loved. You see how she suggested
Dinah; but it is not possible you should see as I do how entirely
her individuality differed from Dinah's. How curious it seemed to
me that people should think Dinah's sermon, prayers and speeches
were copied--when they were written with hot tears, as they
surged up in my own mind!
As to my indebtedness to facts of local and personal history of a
small kind, connected with Staffordshire and Derbyshire--you may
imagine of what kind that is when I tell you that I never
remained in either of those counties more than a few days
together, and of only two such visits have I more than a shadowy,
interrupted recollection. The details which I knew as facts, and
have made use of for my picture, were gathered from such
imperfect allusion and narrative as I heard from my father in his
occasional talk about old times.
As to my aunt's children or grandchildren saying, if they did
say, that Dinah is a good portrait of my aunt--that is the vague,
easily satisfied notion imperfectly instructed people always have
of portraits. It is not surprising that simple men and women
without pretension to enlightened discrimination should think a
generic resemblance constitutes a portrait, when we see the great
public so accustomed to be delighted with misrepresentations of
life and character, which they accept as representations, that
they are scandalized when art makes a nearer approach to truth.
Perhaps I am doing a superfluous thing in writing all this to
you--but I am prompted to do it by the feeling that in future
years "Adam Bede" and all that concerns it may have become a dim
portion of the past, and I may not be able to recall so much of
the truth as I have now told you.
Once more, thanks, dear Sara.
Ever your loving
MARIAN.
It is easy to gather from this letter that whilst the existence of
Marian Evans was calm enough externally, her inner life was full of
stirring events--of the most stirring events, in fact which can
agitate the human soul for it is evident that she had passed along
some quite opposite phases of religious belief. In 1851, after a
visit to the continent, she goes--where all English writers seem to
drift by some natural magic--to London, and fixes her residence there.
It is curious enough that with all her clearness of judgment she works
here for five years, apparently without having perceived the vocation
for which her whole natural and acquired outfit had so remarkably
prepared her. We find her translating Spinoza's _Ethics_; not only
translating but publishing Feuerbach's _Essence of Christianity_ and
Strauss's _Life of Jesus_. She contributes learned essays to the
Westminster Review; it is not until the year 1856, when she is
thirty-six years old that her first slight magazine story is sent to
Blackwood's; and even after his first commendations her timidity and
uncertainty as to whether she could succeed in story-writing are so
great that she almost resolved to give it up. I should regard it as
mournful, if I could think it religious to regard anything as mournful
which has happened and is not revocable, that upon coming to London
Marian Evans fell among a group of persons represented by George Henry
Lewes. If one could have been her spiritual physician at this time one
certainly would have prescribed for her some of those warm influences
which dissipate doubt by exposing it to the fierce elemental heats of
love, of active charity. One would have prescribed for her the very
remedy she herself has so wisely commended in _Janet's Repentance_.
"No wonder the sick room and the lazaretto have so often been a
refuge from the tossings of intellectual doubt--a place of repose
for the worn and wounded spirit. Here is a duty about which all
creeds and philosophers are of one mind; here, at least, the
conscience will not be dogged by adverse theory; here you may
begin to act without settling one preliminary question. To
moisten the sufferer's parched lips through the night-watches, to
bear up the drooping head, to lift the helpless limbs, to divine
the want that can find no utterance beyond the feeble motion of
the hand or beseeching glance of the eye--these are offices that
demand no self-questionings, no casuistry, no assent to
propositions, no weighing of consequences. Within the four walls
where the stare and glare of the world are shut out, and every
voice is subdued--where a human being lies prostrate, thrown on
the tender mercies of his fellow, the moral relation of man to
man is reduced to its utmost clearness and simplicity; bigotry
cannot confuse it, theory cannot pervert it, passion, awed into
quiescence, can neither pollute nor perturb it."
Or one might have prescribed for her America where the knottiest
social and moral problems disappear unaccountably before a certain new
energy of individual growth which is continually conquering new points
of view from which to regard the world.
At the time to which we have now brought her history, Marian Evans
would seem to have been a singularly engaging person. She was small in
stature and her face was what would be called plain here; but she was
widely read, master of several languages, a good talker and listener:
and beyond all, every current of testimony runs towards a certain
intensity and loving fire which pervaded her and which endowed her
with irresistible magnetic attraction for all sensitive souls that
came near her. Her love for home matters, and for the spot of earth
where she had been born, her gentle affection for animals; how the
Bible and Thomas a Kempis were her favorite books, these and a
thousand womanly traits I hope to bring out as we study some of her
greater works,--for with all her reputed reserve I find scarcely any
writer so sincerely communicative and so frankly desirous of sympathy
on the part of her reader as George Eliot. In the next article I shall
ask leave to present you with some pictures of the stage at which
English novel-writing has arrived under the recent hands of Scott,
Thackeray and Dickens when George Eliot is timidly offering her first
manuscript to Blackwood's; and I shall then offer some quotations
from these first three stories--particularly from _Janet's Repentance_
which seems altogether the most important of the three--and shall
attempt to show distinctly what were the main new features of wit, of
humor, of doctrine, and of method which were thus introduced into
literature, especially in connection with similar features which about
this same time were being imparted by Mrs. Browning.
Meantime, let me conclude by asking you to fix your attention for a
moment on this figure of Milly, sweet wife of Amos Barton, going to
bed with her unmended basket of stockings in great fatigue, yet in
great love and trust, and contrast it with that figure of Prometheus,
nailed to the Caucasian rock in pain and hate, which formed the first
object of these studies. What prodigious spiritual distance we have
swept over from the Titan lying down, to unrest, thundering defiance
against Jove's thunder, as if clashing shield against shield, and the
tender-limbed woman whom the simple narrative puts before us in these
words: "Her body was very weary, but her heart was not heavy ...; for
her heart so overflowed with love," &c. Fixing your attention upon
this word "love," and reminding you how, at the close of the last
lecture, we found that the whole movement of the human spirit which we
have traced here as the growth of personality towards the
unknown--towards fellow-man--towards nature,--resulting in music, in
the novel, in science--that this whole movement becomes a unity when
we arrive at the fact that it really imparts a complete change in
man's most ultimate conception of things--a change, namely, from the
conception of Justice as the organic idea of moral order, a conception
which we have seen Aeschylus and Plato vainly working out to the
outrageous conclusions of Prometheus, of the _Republic_; to the
conception of Love as the organic idea of moral order, a conception
which we are just now to see George Eliot working out to the
divinely-satisfactory conclusion of Milly Barton, who conquers with
gentle love a world which proved refractory alike to the justice of
Jove and the defiance of Prometheus; reminding you, I say, of this
concurrent change from feeble personality and justice to strong
personality and love, what an amazing arc of progress we have
traversed in coming from Aeschylus to George Eliot!
And it is, finally, most interesting to find this change receiving
clear expression, for the first time in English literature, in the
works of the two women I have mentioned, Mrs. Browning and George
Eliot. In this very autumn, when we have seen the editor of
_Blackwood's Magazine_ reading the MS. of George Eliot's first story
to Thackeray, Mrs. Browning is sending _Aurora Leigh_ to print; and,
as I shall have frequent occasion to point out, the burden of _Aurora
Leigh_ as well as of George Eliot's whole cyclus of characters is
love.
There is a charming scene in the first Act of Bayard Taylor's _Prince
Deukalion_, which, though not extending to the height we have reached,
yet very dramatically sums up a great number of ideas which converge
towards it. In this scene Gaea, the Earth, mother of men, is
represented as tenderly meditating upon her son, man. Near her stands
a rose-tree, from one bud of which Love is presently to emerge. She
says:
"I change with man,
Mother, not more than partner, of his fate.
Ere he was born I dreamed that he might be,
And through long ages of imperfect life
Waited for him. Then vexed with monstrous shapes,
That spawned and wallowed in primeval ooze,
I lay supine and slept, or dreamed to sleep;
And dreamed, or waking felt as in a dream,
Some touch of hands, some soft delivering help,
And he was there! His faint new voice I heard;
His eye that met the sun, his upright tread,
Thenceforth were mine! And with him came the palm,
The oak, the rose, the swan, the nightingale;
The barren bough hung apples to the sun;
Dry stalks made harvest: breezes in the woods
Then first found music, and the turbid sea
First rolled a crystal breaker to the shore.
His foot was on the mountains, and the wave
Upheld him: over all things huge and coarse
There came the breathing of a regal sway,
Which bent them into beauty. Order new
Followed the march of new necessity,
And what was useless, or unclaimed before,
Took value from the seizure of his hands."
In the midst of like thoughts, a bud on a rose which stands by Gaea
bursts open, and Eros, the antique god of young love, appears from it.