Providence has bin pleased to make great halteration in the
pasture of our affairs. We were yesterday three kiple chined by
the grease of God in the holy bands of matter-money."
(The novel winds up with a general marriage of pretty much all
parties concerned, mistress, maid, master and man); "and I now
subscribe myself Loyd, at your sarvice." Here she of course
describes the wedding. "As for Madam Lashmiheygo, you nose her
picklearities--her head to be sure was fantastical; and her
spouse had wrapped her with a long ... clock from the land of the
selvedges.... Your humble servant had on a plain pea-green tabby
sack, with my runnela cap, ruff toupee, and side-curls. They said
I was the very moral of Lady Rickmanstone but not so pale--that
may well be, for her ladyship is my elder by seven good years or
more. Now, Mrs. Mary, our satiety is to suppurate; and we are
coming home"--which irresistibly reminds us of the later Mrs.
Malaprop's famous explanation in _The Rivals_:--"I was putrefied
with astonishment."--"Present my compliments to Mrs. Gwillim, and
I hope she and I will live upon dissent terms of civility. Being
by God's blessing removed to a higher spear you'll excuse my
being familiar with the lower sarvints of the family, but as I
trust you will behave respectful and keep a proper distance you
may always depend on the good will and protection of
Yours,
W. LOYD."
To these I have now only to add the name of Lawrence Sterne, whose
_Tristram Shandy_ appeared in 1759, in order to complete a group of
novel writers whose moral outcome is much the same, and who are still
reputed in all current manuals as the classic founders of English
fiction. I need give no characterization of Sterne's book, which is
probably best known of all the three. Every one recalls the Chinese
puzzle of humor in _Tristram Shandy_, which pops something grotesque
or indecent at us in every crook. As to its morality, I know good
people who love the book; but to me, when you sum it all up, its
teaching is that a man may spend his life in low, brutish, inane
pursuits, and may have a good many little private sins on his
conscience, but will, nevertheless, be perfectly sure of heaven if he
can have retained the ability to weep a maudlin tear over a tale of
distress; or, in short, that a somewhat irritable state of the
lachrymal glands will be cheerfully accepted by the Deity as a
substitute for saving grace or a life of self-sacrifice. As I have
said, these four writers still maintain their position as the classic
novelists, and their moral influence is still copiously extolled; but
I cannot help believing that much of this praise is simply well
meaning ignorance. I protest that I can read none of these books
without feeling as if my soul had been in the rain, draggled, muddy,
miserable. In other words, they play upon life as upon a violin
without a bridge, in the deliberate endeavor to get the most
depressing tones possible from the instrument. This is done under
pretext of showing us vice.
In fine, and this is the characterization I shall use in contrasting
this group with that much sweeter group led by George Eliot, the
distinctive feature of these first novelists is to show men with
microscopic detail how bad men may be. I shall presently illustrate
with the George Eliot group how much larger the mission of the novel
is than this; meantime, I cannot leave this matter without recording,
in the plainest terms, that, for far deeper reasons than those which
Roger Bacon gave for sweeping away the works of Aristotle, if I had my
way with these classic books I would blot them from the face of the
earth. One who studies the tortuous behaviors of men in history soon
ceases to wonder at any human inconsistency; but, so far as I _can_
marvel, I _do_ daily that we regulate by law the sale of gunpowder,
the storage of nitro-glycerine, the administration of poison--all of
which can hurt but our bodies--but are absolutely careless of these
things--so-called classic books, which wind their infinite
insidiousnesses about the souls of our young children, and either
strangle them or cover them with unremovable slime under our very
eyes, working in a security of fame and so-called classicism that is
more effectual for this purpose than the security of the dark. Of this
terror it is the sweetest souls who know most.
In the beginning of _Aurora Leigh_, Mrs. Browning speaks this matter
so well that I must clinch my opinion with her words. Aurora Leigh
says, recalling her own youthful experience:
"Sublimest danger, over which none weep,
When any young wayfaring soul goes forth
Alone, unconscious of the perilous road,
The day-sun dazzling in his limpid eyes,
To thrust his own way, he an alien, through
The world of books! Ah, you!--you think it fine,
You clap hands--'A fair day!'--you cheer him on
As if the worst could happen, were to rest
Too long beside a fountain. Yet behold,
Behold!--the world of books is still the world;
And worldlings in it are less merciful
And more puissant. For the wicked there
Are winged like angels. Every knife that strikes
Is edged from elemental fire to assail
Our spiritual life. The beautiful seems right
By force of beauty, and the feeble wrong
Because of weakness....
... In the book-world, true,
There's no lack, neither, of God's saints and kings...
True, many a prophet teaches in the roads ...
But stay--who judges?...
... The child there? Would you leave
That child to wander in a battle-field
And push his innocent smile against the guns?
Or even in the catacombs--his torch
Grown ragged in the fluttering air, and all
The dark a-mutter round him? not a child!"
But to return to our sketch of English fiction, it is now delightful
to find a snow-drop springing from this muck of the classics. In the
year 1766 appeared Goldsmith's _Vicar of Wakefield_.
One likes to recall the impression which the purity of this charming
book made upon the German Goethe. Fifty years after Goethe had read
it--or rather after Herder read to him a translation of the _Vicar of
Wakefield_ while he was a law-student at Strasburg--the old poet
mentions in one of his letters to Zelter the strong and healthy
influence of this story upon him, just at the critical point of his
mental development; and yesterday while reading the just published
_Reminiscences of Thomas Carlyle_ I found a pleasant pendant to this
testimony of Goethe's in favor of Goldsmith's novel in an entry of the
rugged old man in which he describes the far outlook and new wisdom
which he managed to conquer from Goethe's _Wilhelm Meister_, after
many repulsions.
"Schiller done, I began _Wilhelm Meister_, a task I liked perhaps
rather better, too scanty as my knowledge of the element, and
even of the language, still was. Two years before I had at
length, after some repulsion, got into the heart of _Wilhelm
Meister_, and eagerly read it through; my sally out, after
finishing, along the vacant streets of Edinburgh, a windless,
Scotch-misty morning, is still vivid to me. 'Grand, serenely,
harmoniously built together, far-seeing, wise and true. Where,
for many years, or in my whole life before, have I read such a
book?' Which I was now, really in part as a kind of duty,
conscientiously translating for my countrymen, if they would read
it--as a select few of them have ever since kept doing."
Of the difference between the moral effect of Goldsmith's _Vicar of
Wakefield_ and the classical works just mentioned I need not waste
your time in speaking. No great work in the English novel appears
until we reach Scott whose _Waverley_ astonished the world in 1814;
and during the intervening period from this book to the _Vicar of
Wakefield_ perhaps there are no works notable enough to be mentioned
in so rapid a sketch as this unless it be the society novels of Miss
Burney, _Evelina_ and _Cecilia_, the dark and romantic stories of Mrs.
Radcliffe, the _Caleb Williams_ of William Godwin--with which he
believed he was making an epoch because it was a novel without love as
a motive--Miss Edgeworth's moral tales and the quiet and elegant
narratives of Jane Austen.
But I cannot help mentioning here a book which occurs during this
period, and which attaches itself by the oddest imaginable ties to
what was said in a previous lecture, of The Novel, as the true
meeting-ground where the poetic imagination and the scientific
imagination come together and incorporate themselves. Now, to make the
true novel--the work which takes all the miscellaneous products of
scientific observation and carries them up into a higher plane and
incarnates them into the characters (as we call them) of a book, and
makes them living flesh and blood like ourselves--to effect this,
there must be a true incorporation and merger of the scientific and
poetic faculties into one: it is not sufficient if they work side by
side like two horses abreast, they must work like a man and wife with
one soul; or to change the figure, their union must not be mechanical,
it must be chemical, producing a thing better than either alone; or
to change the figure again, the union must be like that which Browning
has noticed as existing among the ingredients of a musical chord,
when, as he says, out of three tones, we make not a fourth, but a
star.
Now the book I mean shows us the scientific faculty, and the poetic
faculty--and no weak faculties either--working along together, _not_
merged, _not_ chemically united, _not_ lighting up matter like a
star,--with the result, as seems to me, of producing the very drollest
earnest book in our language. It is _The Loves of the Plants_, by Dr.
Erasmus Darwin, grandfather, I believe, to our own grave and patient
Charles Darwin. _The Loves of the Plants_ is practically a series of
little novels in which the heroes and heroines belong to the vegetable
world. Linnaeus had announced the sexuality of plants, and so had made
this idea a principle of classification, the one-stamen class,
_Monandria_, two stamen class, _Diandria_, etc., etc. Now all this the
diligent and truly loving Doctor framed into poetry, and poetry which
so far as technical execution goes is quite as good as the very best
of the Pope school which it follows. Here are a few specimens of the
poem:
"Descend, ye hovering sylphs! aerial quires,
And sweep with little hands your silver lyres;
With fairy footsteps print your grassy rings,
Ye Gnomes! accordant to the tinkling strings:
While in soft notes I tune to oaten reed
Gay hopes, and amorous sorrows of the mead;--
From giant Oaks, that wave their branches dark,
To the dwarf Moss that clings upon their bark,
What Beaux and Beauties crowd the gaudy groves,
And woo and win their vegetable Loves.
* * * * *
"First the tall Canna lifts his curled brow
Erect to heaven, and plights his nuptial vow;
The virtuous pair, in milder regions born,
Dread the rude blast of Autumn's icy morn;
Round the chill fair he folds his crimson vest,
And clasps the timorous beauty to his breast!"
Here, however, a serious case presents itself; in _Canna_ there was
one stamen to one pistil, and this was comfortable; but in the next
flower he happened to reach--the _Genista_ or Wild Broom--there were
ten stamens to one pistil; that is, ten lovers to one lady; but the
intrepid Doctor carries it through, all the same, managing the whole
point simply by airy swiftness of treatment:
"Sweet blooms Genista[A] in the myrtle shade,
And ten fond brothers woo the haughty maid."
But sometimes our botanist comes within a mere ace of beautiful
poetry, as for example:
"When o'er the cultured lawns and dreary wastes,
Retiring Autumn flings her howling blasts,
Bends in tumultuous waves the struggling woods,
And showers their leafy honors on the floods;
In withering heaps collects the flowery spoil;
And each chill insect sinks beneath the soil:
Quick flies fair Tulipa the loud alarms,
And folds her infant closer in her arms;
In some lone cave, secure pavilion, lies,
And waits the courtship of serener skies."
This book has what it calls Interludes between the parts, in which the
Bookseller and the Poet discuss various points arising in it; and its
oddity is all the more increased when one finds here a number of the
most just, incisive, right-minded and large views not only upon the
mechanism of poetry, but upon its essence and its relations to other
arts.[B]
[Footnote A: Genista, or _Planta Genista_, origin of "Plantagenet,"
from the original name-giver's habit of wearing a tuft of his native
heath or broom in his bonnet.]
[Footnote B: Carlyle's opinion of the book is given with a comical
grimness in his Reminiscences _a propos_ of the younger Erasmus
Darwin, who used much to visit the Carlyles after they settled in
London: "Erasmus Darwin, a most diverse kind of mortal, came to seek
us out very soon ('had heard of Carlyle in Germany,' &c.), and
continues ever since to be a quiet home-friend, honestly attached;
though his visits latterly have been rarer and rarer, health so poor,
I so occupied, etc., etc. He had something of original and
sarcastically ingenious in him; one of the sincerest, naturally
honest, and most modest of men; elder brother of Charles Darwin (the
famed Darwin on Species of these days), to whom I rather prefer him
for intellect, had not his health quite doomed him to silence and
patient idleness--grandsons, both, of the first famed Erasmus
('Botanic Garden,' etc.), who also seems to have gone upon 'species'
questions, '_omnia ex conchis_' (all from oysters), being a dictum of
his (even a stamp he sealed with still extant), as this present
Erasmus once told me, many long years before this of Darwin on Species
came up among us. Wonderful to me, as indicating the capricious
stupidity of mankind: never could read a page of it, or waste the
least thought upon it."]
Nor need I dwell upon Scott's novels, which stretch from 1814 to 1831,
which we have all known from our childhood as among the most hale and
strengthening waters in which the young soul ever bathed. They discuss
no moral problems, they place us in no relation towards our fellow
that can be called moral at all, they belong to that part of us which
is youthful, undebating, wholly unmoral--though not immoral--they are
simply always young, always healthy, always miraculous. And I can only
give now a hasty additional flavor of these Scott days by reminding
you of the bare names of Thomas Hope, Lockhart, Theodore Hook, Mrs.
Trollope, Mrs. Gore and Miss Mitford. It seems always comfortable in
a confusion of this kind to have some easily-remembered formula which
may present us a considerable number of important facts in portable
shape. Now the special group of writers which I wish to contrast with
the classic group, consisting of Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson, Mrs.
Browning, Charlotte Bronte, and George Eliot, are at work between 1837
and 1857; and for the purpose of giving you a convenient skeleton or
set of vertebrae, containing some main facts affecting the English
novel of the nineteenth century, I have arranged this simple table
which proceeds by steps of ten years up to the period mentioned.
For example: since these all end in seven; beginning with the year
1807, it seems easy to remember that that is the date of Charles and
Mary Lamb's _Tales from Shakspeare_; skipping ten years to 1817, in
this year _Blackwood's Magazine_ is established, a momentous event in
fiction generally and particularly as to George Eliot's; advancing ten
years, in 1827, Bulwer's _Pelham_ appears, and also the very
stimulating _Specimens of German Romance_, which Thomas Carlyle
edited; in 1837 the adorable _Pickwick_ strolls into fiction; in 1847
Thackeray prints _Vanity Fair_, Charlotte Bronte gives us _Jane Eyre_,
and Tennyson _The Princess_; and finally, in 1857, as we have seen,
George Eliot's _Scenes of Clerical Life_ are printed, while so closely
upon it in the previous year as to be fairly considered contemporary,
comes Mrs. Browning's _Aurora Leigh_.
Now I do not know any more vivid way of bringing before you the
precise work which English fiction is doing at the time George Eliot
sets in, than by asking you to run your eye along the last four dates
here given, 1827, 1837, 1847, 1857. Here, in 1827, advances a
well-dressed man, bows a fine bow, and falls to preaching his gospel:
"My friends, under whatever circumstances a man may be placed, he has
it always in his power to be a gentleman;" and Bulwer's gentleman is
always given as a very manful and Christian being. I am well aware of
the modern tendency to disparage Bulwer, as a slight creature; but
with the fresh recollection of his books as they fell upon my own
boyhood, I cannot recall a single one which did not leave, as a last
residuum, the picture in some sort of the chivalrous gentleman
impressed upon my heart. I cheerfully admit that he sometimes came
dangerously near snobbery, and that he was uncivil and undignified and
many other bad things in the _New Timon_ and the Tennyson quarrel; and
I concede that it must be difficult for us--you and me, who are so
superior and who have no faults of our own--to look upon these
failings with patience; and yet I cannot help remembering that every
novel of Bulwer's is skilfully written and entertaining, and that
there is not an ignoble thought or impure stimulus in the whole range
of his works.
But, advancing, here, in 1837, comes on a preacher who takes up the
slums and raggedest miseries of London and plumps them boldly down in
the parlors of high life; and, like the boy in the fairy tale whose
fiddle compelled every hearer to dance in spite of himself, presently
has a great train of people following him, ready to do his bidding in
earnestly reforming the prisons, the schools, the workhouses, and the
like, what time the entire train are roaring with the genialest of
laughter at the comical and grotesque figures which this peculiar
Dickens has fished up out of the London mud.
But again: here, in 1847, we have Thackeray exposing shame and high
vulgarity and minute wickedness, while Charlotte Bronte and Tennyson,
with the widest difference in method, are for the first time
expounding the doctrine of co-equal sovereignty as between man and
woman, and bringing up the historic conception of the personality of
woman to a plane in all respects level with, though properly
differentiated from, that of man. It is curious to see the depth of
Charlotte Bronte's adoration for Thackeray, the intense, high-pitched
woman for the somewhat slack, and as I always think, somewhat
low-pitched satirist; and perhaps the essential utterance of
Thackeray, as well as the fervent tone which I beg you to observe is
now being acquired by the English novel, the awful consciousness of
its power and its mission, may be very sufficiently gathered from some
of Charlotte Bronte's words about Thackeray which occur in the Preface
to the second edition of her _Jane Eyre_:
"There is a man in our own days whose words are not framed to
tickle delicate ears; who, to my thinking, comes before the great
ones of society much as the son of Imlah came before the throned
kings of Judah and Israel; and who speaks truth as deep, with a
power as prophet-like and as vital--a mien as dauntless and as
daring. Is the satirist of _Vanity Fair_ admired in high places?
I cannot tell; but I think if some of those amongst whom he hurls
the Greek-fire of his sarcasm, and over whom he flashes the
levin-brand of his denunciation, were to take his warnings in
time, they or their seed might yet escape a fatal Ramoth-Gilead.
"Why have I alluded to this man? I have alluded to him, reader,
because I think I see in him an intellect profounder and more
unique than his contemporaries have yet recognized; because I
regard him as the first social regenerator of the day: as the
very master of that working corps who would restore to rectitude
the warped system of things."
Now, into this field of beneficent activity which _The Novel_ has
created, comes in 1857 George Eliot: comes with no more noise than
that of a snow-flake falling on snow, yet--as I have said, and as I
wish now to show with some detail--comes as an epoch-maker, both by
virtue of the peculiar mission she undertakes and of the method in
which she carries it out.
What then is that peculiar mission?
In the very first of these stories, _Amos Barton_, she announces it
quite explicitly, though it cannot be supposed at all consciously.
Before quoting the passage, in order that you may at once take the
full significance of it, let me remind you of a certain old and
grievous situation as between genius and the commonplace person. For a
long time every most pious thinker must have found one of the
mysteries most trying to his faith to be the strange and apparently
unjustifiable partiality of God's spiritual gifts as between man and
man.
For example, we have a genius (say) once in a hundred years; but this
hundred years represents three generations of the whole world; that is
to say, here are three thousand million commonplace people to one
genius.
Now, with all the force of this really inconceivable numerical
majority, the cry arises, How monstrous! Here are three thousand
millions of people to eat, sleep, die, and rot into oblivion, and but
one man is to have such faculty as may conquer death, win fame, and
live beyond the worms!
Now, no one feels this inequality so keenly as the great genius
himself. I find in Shakspeare, in Beethoven, in others, often an
outcrop of feeling which shows that the genius cringes under this load
of favoritism, as if he should cry in his lonesome moments, _Dear
Lord, why hast thou provided so much for me, and so little for yonder
multitude?_ In plain fact, it seems as if there was never such a
problem as this: what shall we do about these three thousand millions
of common men as against the one uncommon man, to save the goodness
of God from seeming like the blind caprice of a Roman Emperor!
It is precisely here that George Eliot comes to the rescue; and though
she does not solve the problem--no one expects to do that--at any rate
she seems to me to make it tolerable, and to take it out of that class
of questions which one shuts back for fear of nightmare and insanity.
Emerson has treated this matter partially and from a sort of
side-light. "But," he exclaims in the end of his essay on _The Uses of
Great Men_, "_great men_,--the word is injurious. Is there caste? Is
there fate? What becomes of the promise to virtue?... Why are the
masses, from the dawn of history down, food for knives and powder? The
idea dignifies a few leaders, ... and they make war and death sacred;
but what for the wretches whom they hire and kill? The cheapness of
man is everyday's tragedy." And more to this purport. But nothing
could be more unsatisfactory than Emerson's solution of the problem.
He unhesitatingly announces on one page that the wrong is to be
righted by giving every man a chance in the future, in (say) different
worlds; every man is to have his turn at being a genius; until "there
are no common men." But two pages farther on this elaborate scheme of
redress is completely swept away by the announcement that after all
the individual is nothing, the quality is what abides, and so falls
away in that singular delusion of his, that personality is to die away
into the first cause.
On the other hand, if you will permit me to quote a few pathetic words
which I find in Carlyle's _Reminiscences_, in the nature of a sigh and
aspiration, and breathed blessing all in one upon his wife and her
ministrations to him during that singular period of his life when he
suddenly left London and buried himself in his wild Scotch farm of
Craigenputtoch, I shall be able to show you how Carlyle, most
unconsciously, dreams toward a far more satisfactory end of this
matter than Emerson's, and then how George Eliot actually brings
Carlyle's dream to definite form, and at last partial fulfilment in
the very beginning of her work. Carlyle is speaking of the rugged
trials and apparent impossibilities of living at Craigenputtoch when
he and his Jeanie went there, and how bravely and quietly she faced
and overcame the poverty, the ugliness, the almost squalor, which was
their condition for a long time. "Poverty and mean obstruction
continued," he says, "to preside over it, but were transformed by
human valor of various sorts into a kind of victory and royalty.
Something of high and great dwelt in it, though nothing could be
smaller and lower than many of the details. How blessed might poor
mortals be in the straitest circumstances, if only their wisdom and
fidelity to Heaven and to one another were _adequately_ great! It
looks to me now like a kind of humble russet-coated _epic_, that seven
years' settlement at Craigenputtoch, very poor in this world's goods,
but not without an intrinsic dignity greater and more important than
then appeared; thanks very mainly to her, and her faculties and
magnanimities, without whom it had not been possible."
And now, let us hear the words in which George Eliot begins to preach
the "russet-coated epic" of everyday life and of commonplace people.
The Rev. Amos Barton, whose sad fortunes I have undertaken to
relate, was, you perceive, in no respect an ideal or exceptional
character; and perhaps I am doing a bold thing to bespeak your
sympathy on behalf of a man who was so very far from
remarkable,--a man whose virtues were not heroic, and who had no
undetected crime within his breast; who had not the slightest
mystery hanging about him, but was palpably and unmistakably
commonplace; who was not even in love, but had had that
complaint favorably many years ago. "An utterly uninteresting
character!" I think I hear a lady reader exclaim--Mrs.
Farthingale, for example, who prefers the ideal in fiction; to
whom tragedy means ermine tippets, adultery, and murder; and
comedy, the adventures of some personage who is quite a
"character."
But, my dear madam, it is so very large a majority of your
fellow-countrymen that are of this insignificant stamp. At least
eighty out of a hundred of your adult male fellow-Britons
returned in the last census are neither extraordinarily wicked,
nor extraordinarily wise; their eyes are neither deep and liquid
with sentiment, nor sparkling with suppressed witticisms; they
have probably had no hair-breadth escapes or thrilling
adventures; their brains are certainly not pregnant with genius,
and their passions have not manifested themselves at all after
the fashion of a volcano. They are simply men of complexions more
or less muddy, whose conversation is more or less bald and
disjointed. Yet these commonplace people--many of them--bear a
conscience, and have felt the sublime prompting to do the painful
right; they have their unspoken sorrows and their sacred joys;
their hearts have perhaps gone out towards their first-born, and
they have mourned over the irreclaimable dead. Nay, is there not
a pathos in their very insignificance--in our comparison of their
dim and narrow existence with the glorious possibilities of that
human nature which they share.
Depend upon it, you would gain unspeakably if you would learn
with me to see some of the poetry and the pathos, the tragedy and
the comedy, lying in the experience of a human soul that looks
out through dull gray eyes, and that speaks in a voice of quite
ordinary tone. In that case, I should have no fear of your not
caring to know what further befell the Rev. Amos Barton, or of
your thinking the homely details I have to tell at all beneath
your attention. As it is, you can, if you please, decline to
pursue my story further; and you will easily find reading more to
your taste, since I learn from the newspapers that many
remarkable novels, full of striking situations, thrilling
incidents, and eloquent writing, have appeared only within the
last season.
Let us now pass on to _Adam Bede_, _The Mill on the Floss_, and the rest of
George Eliot's works in historic order, and see with what delicious fun,
what play of wit, what ever-abiding and depth-illuminating humor, what
creative genius, what manifold forms of living flesh and blood, George
Eliot preached the possibility of such moral greatness on the part of every
most commonplace man and woman as completely reduces to a level the
apparent inequality in the matter of genius, and so illustrated the
universal "russet-coated epic."