Before _Scenes from Clerical Life_ had ceased to run, in the latter
part of the year 1857, George Eliot had already begun a novel more
complete in form than any of the three tales which composed that
series. Early in 1858, she made a visit to the Continent, and it was
from Munich that a considerable portion of the MS. of her new book was
sent to her publisher, Mr. Blackwood. This was _Adam Bede_, which she
completed by the end of October, 1858.
It was brought out immediately in book form; George Eliot seemed
desirous of putting the public to a speedier test than could be
secured by running the story through successive numbers of the
magazine, as usual; although the enthusiastic editor declared himself
very willing to enrich the pages of _Blackwood's_ with it. It was
therefore printed in January, 1859.
I have already cited a letter from Marian Evans to Miss Henschel, in which
she mentions the only two matters of fact connected in the most shadowy way
as originals with the plot of _Adam Bede_. One of these is that in her
girlhood, she had met an aunt of hers about sixty years old, who had in
early life been herself a preacher. To this extent, and this only, is there
any original for our beautiful snow-drop--Dinah Morris, in _Silas Marner_.
Again, in the same letter, George Eliot mentions that this same aunt had
told her of once spending a night in prison to comfort a poor girl who had
murdered her own child, and that this incident lay in her mind for many
years, until it became the germ of _Adam Bede_.
These are certainly but shadowy connections; yet, probably, the
greatest works are built upon quite as filmy a relation to any actual
precedent facts. A rather pretty story is told of Mrs. Carlyle, which,
perhaps, very well illustrates this filmy relation. It is told that
one evening she gave to Dickens a subject for a novel which she had
indeed worked out up to the second volume, the whole subject
consisting of a weaving together of such insignificant observations as
any one must make of what goes on at houses across the street. For
example,--Mrs. Carlyle observed of a house nearly opposite them that
one day the blinds or curtains would be up or down; the next day a
figure in a given costume would appear at the window, or a cab would
drive, hastily or otherwise, to the door, a visitor would be admitted
or rejected, etc; such bits of circumstances she had managed to
connect with human characters in a subtle way which is said to have
given Dickens great delight. She never lived, however, to finish her
novel, thus begun.
This publication of _Adam Bede_, placed George Eliot decisively at the
head of English novel-writers, with only Dickens for second, even; and
thus enables us at this point fairly to do what the ages always do in
order to get that notoriously clear view of things which comes with
time, and time only, that is to brush away all small circumstances and
cloudy non-essentials of time so as to bring before our minds the
whole course of English fiction, from its beginning to the stage at
which it is now pending with _Adam Bede_, as if it concerned but four
names and two periods, to wit:
RICHARDSON, } middle 18th century
FIELDING. }
and
DICKENS, } middle 19th century.
GEORGE ELIOT. }
Now it was shown in the last lecture how distinctly the moral purpose
of the English fiction represented by this upper group was announced,
though we were obliged to record a mournful failure in realizing that
announcement. _Adam Bede_ gives us the firmest support for a first and
most notable difference between these two periods of English fiction,
that while the former professes morality yet fails beyond description,
the latter executes its moral purpose to a practical degree of
beneficence beyond its wildest hopes. Without now specifying the
subtle revolutions which lie in _Adam Bede_, a single more tangible
example will be sufficient to bring this entire difference before you.
If I ask you to recall how it is less than fifty years ago that
Charles Dickens was writing of the debtors' prisons with all the
terrible earnest of one who had lived with his own father and mother
in those unspeakable dens; if I recall to you what marvelous haste for
proverbially slow England the reform thus initiated took upon itself,
how it flew from this to that prison, from this to that statute, from
this to that country, until now not only is no such thing as
imprisonment for debt known to any of Dickens's readers, but with the
customary momentum of such generous impulses in society, the whole
movement in favor of debtors is clearly going too far and is beginning
to oppress the creditor with part of the injustice it formerly meted
out to the debtor; if, I say, I thus briefly recall to you this single
instance of moral purpose carried into perfect practice, I typify a
great and characteristic distinction between these two schools. For in
point of fact what one may call an organic impracticability lay at the
core of the moral scheme of Richardson and Fielding.
I think all reasoning and experience show that if you confront a man
day by day with nothing but a picture of his own unworthiness, the
final effect is, not to stimulate, but to paralyze his moral energy.
The picture of the man becomes the head of a Gorgon. Now this was
precisely what this early English fiction professed to do. It
professed to show man exactly as he is; but although this profession
included the good man as well as the bad man, and although there was
some endeavor to relieve the picture with tints of goodness here and
there, the final result was--and I fearlessly point any doubter to the
net outcome from _Pamela_ and _Clarissa Harlowe_ down to _Humphrey
Clinker_--the final result was such a portrayal as must make any man
sit down before the picture in a miserable deep of contempt for
himself and his fellows, out of which many spirits cannot climb at
all, and none can climb clean.
On the other hand, the work of Dickens I have just referred to is a
fair specimen of the way in which the later school of English fiction,
while glozing no evil, showed man, not how bad he might be, but how
good he might be; and thus, instead of paralyzing the moral energy,
stimulated it to the most beneficent practical reform. I think it is
Robert Browning who has declared that a man is as good as his best;
and there is the subtlest connection between the right to measure a
man's moral stature by the highest thing that he has done, rather than
the lowest, on the one hand, and that new and beautiful inspiration
which comes into one's life as one contemplates more and more
instances of the best in human behavior, as these are given by a
literature which thus lifts one up from day to day with the
declaration that however commonplace a man may be, he yet has within
himself the highest capabilities of what we have agreed to call the
russet-coated epic. The George Eliot and Dickens school, in fact, do
but expand the text of the Master when He urges His disciples: "Be ye
perfect as I am perfect."
Let me now suggest a second difference between the two schools which
involves an interesting coincidence and now specially concerns us. As
between Richardson and Fielding, it has been well said (by whom I
cannot now remember) that Fielding tells you the time of day, whilst
Richardson shows you how the watch is made. As indicating Fielding's
method of conducting the action rather by concrete dialogue and event,
than by those long analytic discussions of character in which
Richardson would fill whole pages with minute descriptions of the
changing emotions of Clarissa upon reading a certain letter from
Lovelace, pursuing the emotion as it were tear by tear,
_lachrymatim_,--this characterization happily enough contrasts the
analytic strength of Richardson with the synthetic strength of
Fielding.
Now a strikingly similar contrast obtains as between George Eliot and
Charles Dickens. Every one will recognize as soon as it is mentioned
the microscopic analysis of character throughout George Eliot as
compared with the rapid cartoon-strokes by which Dickens brings out
his figures. But the antithesis cannot be left here as between George
Eliot and Dickens; for it is the marvel of the former's art that,
though so cool and analytic, it nevertheless sets before us perfect
living flesh-and blood people by fusing the whole analytic process
with a synthetic fire of the true poet's human sympathy.
And here we come upon a farther difference between George Eliot and
Dickens of which we shall have many and beautiful examples in the
works we have to study. This is a large, poetic tolerance of times and
things which, though worthy of condemnation, nevertheless appeal to
our sympathy because they once were closely bound with our
fellow-men's daily life. For example, George Eliot writes often and
lovingly about the England of the days before the Reform Bill, the
careless, picturesque country-squire England; not because she likes
it, or thinks it better than the England of the present, but with much
the same feeling with which a woman looks at the ragged, hob-nailed
shoes of her boy who is gone--a boy who doubtless was often rude and
disobedient and exasperating to the last degree, but who was her boy.
A keen insight into this remarkable combination of the poetic
tolerance with the sternness of scientific accuracy possessed by this
remarkable woman--the most remarkable of all writers in this respect,
we should say, except Shakspeare--is offered us in the opening lines
of the first chapter of her first story, _Amos Barton_. (I love to
look at this wonderful faculty in its germ). The chapter begins:
"Shepperton Church was a very different looking building
five-and-twenty years ago.... Now there is a wide span of slated roof
flanking the old steeple; the windows are tall and symmetrical; the
outer doors are resplendent with oak graining, the inner doors
reverentially noiseless with a garment of red baize;" and we have a
minute description of the church as it is. Then we have this turn in
the next paragraph, altogether wonderful for a George Eliot who has
been translating Strauss and Feuerbach, studying physics, Comtism and
the like among the London agnostics, a fervent disciple of progress, a
frequent contributor to the _Westminster Review_; "Immense
improvement! says the well-regulated mind, which unintermittingly
rejoices in the new police ... the penny-post, and all guaranties of
human advancement, and has no moments when conservative reforming
intellect takes a nap, while imagination does a little Toryism by the
sly, revelling in regret that dear old brown, crumbling, picturesque
inefficiency is everywhere giving place to spick-and-span,
new-painted, new-varnished efficiency, which will yield endless
diagrams, plans, elevations and sections, but alas! no picture. Mine,
I fear is not a well-regulated mind: it has an occasional tenderness
for old abuses; it lingers with a certain fondness over the days of
nasal clerks and top-booted parsons, and has a sigh for the departed
shades of vulgar errors." And it is worth while, if even for an aside,
to notice in the same passage how this immense projection of herself
out of herself into what we may fairly call her antipodes, is not only
a matter of no strain, but from the very beginning is accompanied by
that eye-twinkle between the lines which makes much of the very
ruggedest writing of George Eliot's like a Virginia fence from between
whose rails peep wild roses and morning-glories.
This is in the next paragraph where after thus recalling the outside
of Shepperton church, she exclaims: "Then inside what dear old
quaintnesses! which I began to look at with delight even when I was so
crude a member of the congregation that my nurse found it necessary to
provide for the reinforcement of my devotional patience by smuggling
bread and butter into the sacred edifice." Or, a few lines before, a
still more characteristic twinkle of the eye which in a flash carries
our thoughts all the way from evolution to pure fun, when she
describes the organ-player of the new Shepperton church as a
rent-collector "differentiated by force of circumstances into an
organist." Apropos of this use of the current scientific term
"differentiation," it is worth while noting, as we pass, an instance
of the extreme vagueness and caprice of current modern criticism.
When George Eliot's _Daniel Deronda_ was printed in 1876, one of the
most complacent English reviews criticized her expression "dynamic
power of" a woman's glance, which occurs in her first picture of
Gwendolen Harleth, as an inappropriate use of scientific phraseology;
and was immediately followed by a chorus of small voices discussing
the matter with much minute learning, rather as evidence of George
Eliot's decline from the proper artistic style. But here, as you have
just seen, in the very first chapter of her first story, written
twenty years before, scientific "differentiation" is made to work very
effectively; and a few pages further on we have an even more striking
instance in this passage: "This allusion to brandy-and-water suggested
to Miss Gibbs the introduction of the liquor decanters now that the
tea was cleared away; for in bucolic society five-and-twenty-years
ago, the human animal of the male sex was understood to be perpetually
athirst, and 'something to drink' was as necessary a 'condition of
thought' as Time and Space." Other such happy uses of scientific
phrases occur indeed throughout the whole of these first three
stories, and form an integral part of that ever-brooding humor which
fills with a quiet light all the darkest stories of George Eliot.
But now, on the other hand, it is in strong contrast that we find her
co-laborer Dickens, always growing furious (as his biographer
describes), when the ante-reform days are mentioned, those days of
rotten boroughs, etc., when, as Lord John Russell said, "a ruined
mound sent two representatives to Parliament, three niches in a stone
wall sent three representatives to parliament, and a park where no
houses were to be seen sent two representatives to Parliament." While
George Eliot is indulging in the tender recollections of
picturesqueness, etc., just given, Dickens is writing savage versions
of the old ballad, _The Fine Old English Gentleman_, in which he
fiercely satirizes the old Tory England:
"I will sing you a new ballad" (he cries), "and I'll warrant it
first-rate,
Of the days of that old gentleman who had that old estate,
The good old laws were garnished well with gibbets, whips and chains,
With fine old English penalties and fine old English pains;
With rebel heads and seas of blood once hot in rebel veins:
For all these things were requisite to guard the rich old gains
Of the fine old English Tory times;
Soon may they come again!
The good old times for cutting throats that cried out in their need,
The good old times for hunting men who held their father's creed,
The good old times when William Pitt, as all good men agreed,
Came down direct from Paradise at more than railroad speed;
Oh, the fine old English Tory times,
When will they come again!
In those rare days the press was seldom known to snarl or bark,
But sweetly sang of men in power like any tuneful lark;
Grave judges, too, to all their evil deeds were in the dark;
And not a man in twenty score knew how to make his mark.
Oh, the fine old English Tory times,
Soon may they come again!"
In a word, the difference between Dickens' and George Eliot's powers
is here typified: Dickens tends toward the satiric or destructive view
of the old times; George Eliot, with an even more burning intolerance
of the essential evil, takes, on the other hand, the loving or
constructive view. It is for this reason that George Eliot's work, as
a whole, is so much finer than some of Dickens'. The great artist
never can work in haste, never in malice, never in even the sub-acid
satiric mood of Thackeray; in love, and love only, can great work,
work that not only pulls down, but builds, be done; it is love, and
love only, that is truly constructive in art.
And here it seems profitable to contrast George Eliot's peculiar
endowment as shown in these first stories, with that of Thackeray.
Thackeray was accustomed to lament that "since the author of _Tom
Jones_ was buried, no writer of fiction among us has been permitted to
depict to his utmost powers a man.... Society will not tolerate the
natural in art." Under this yearning of Thackeray's after the supposed
freedom of Fielding's time, lie at once a short-coming of love, a
limitation of view and an actual fallacy of logic, which always kept
Thackeray's work below the highest, and which formed the chief reason
why I have been unable to place him here, along with Dickens and
George Eliot. This short-coming and limitation still exist in our
literature and criticism to such an extent that I can do no better
service than by asking you to examine them. And I think I can
illustrate the whole in the shortest manner by some considerations
drawn from that familiar wonder of our times, the daily newspaper.
Consider the printed matter which is brought daily to your breakfast
table. The theory of the daily paper is that it is the history of the
world for one day; and let me here at once connect this illustration
with the general argument by saying that Thackeray and his school,
when they speak of drawing a man as he is--of the natural, etc., in
art--would mean drawing a man as he appears in such a history as the
daily newspaper gives us. But let us test this history: let us
examine, for instance, the telegraphic column in the morning journal.
I have made a faithful transcript on the morning of this writing of
every item in the news summary, involving the moral relation of man
to man; the result is as follows: one item concerning the
assassination of the Czar; the recent war with the Boers in Africa;
the quarrel between Turkey and Greece; the rebellion in Armenia; the
trouble about Candahar; of a workman in a lumber-camp in Michigan, who
shot and killed his wife, twenty-two years old, yesterday; of the
confession of a man just taken from the West Virginia penitentiary, to
having murdered an old man in Michigan, three years ago; of the
suicide of Mrs. Scott at Williamstown, Mississippi; of the killing of
King by Clark in a fight in Logan county, Kentucky, on Sunday; of how,
about 10 o'clock last night, a certain John Cram was called to the
door of his house, near Chicago, and shot dead by William Seymour; of
how young Mohr, thirteen years of age, died at the Charity Hospital,
in Jersey City, yesterday, from the effects of a beating by his
father; of how young Clasby was arrested at Richmond, Virginia, for
stealing letters out of the mail bag; of how the miners of the
Connellsville, Pennsylvania, coke regions, the journeyman bakers of
Montreal, Canada, the rubber-workers of New Brunswick, New Jersey, and
the Journeyman Tailors' Union in Cincinnati, are all about to strike;
and finally, of how James Tolen, an insane wife-murderer, committed
suicide in Minnesota, yesterday, by choking himself with a twisted
sheet. These are all the items involving the moral relations of man to
man contained in the history of the world for Tuesday, March 22d,
1881, as given by a journal noted for the extent and accuracy of its
daily collection.
Now suppose a picture were drawn of the moral condition of the United
States from these data: how nearly would it represent the facts? This
so-called "history of the world for one day," if you closely examine
it, turns out to be, you observe, only a history of the world's crimes
for one day. The world's virtues do not appear. It is true that
Patrick Kelly murdered his wife yesterday; but then how many Kellys
who came home, tired from work, and found the wife drunk and the
children crying for bread, instead of murdering the whole family, with
a rugged sigh drew the beastly woman's form into one corner, fumbled
about the poor, dirty cupboard in another for crusts of bread, fed the
crying youngsters after some rude fashion, and finally lay down with
dumb heaviness to sleep off the evil of that day. It is true that
Jones, the bank clerk, was yesterday exposed in a series of
defalcations; but how many thousands of bank clerks on that same day
resisted the strongest temptations to false entries and the
allurements of private stock speculations. It is true that yesterday
Mrs. Lighthead eloped with the music-teacher, leaving six children and
a desolate husband; but how many thousands of Mrs. Heavyhearts spent
the same day in nursing some drunken husband, who had long ago
forfeited all love; how many Milly Bartons were darning six children's
stockings at five o'clock of that morning; nay, what untold millions
of faithful women made this same day a sort of paradise for husband
and children. And finally, you have but to consider a moment that if
it lay within the power of the diligent collector of items for the
Associated Press despatches to gather together the virtuous, rather
than the criminal actions of mankind, the virtuous would so far exceed
the criminal as that no journal would find columns enough to put them
in, so as to put a wholly different complexion upon matters. Now the
use of this newspaper illustration in my present argument is this: I
complain that Thackeray, and the Fielding school, in professing to
paint men as they _are_, really paint men only as they _appear_ in
some such necessarily one-sided representations as the newspaper
history just described. And it is perfectly characteristic of the
inherent weakness of Thackeray that he should so utterly fail to see
the true significance underlying society's repudiation of his proposed
natural picture. The least that such a repudiation _could_ mean, would
be that even if the picture were good in Fielding's time, it is bad
now. It is beautiful, therefore, remembering Thackeray's great
influence at the time when _Scenes from Clerical Life_ were written,
to find a woman, George Eliot, departing utterly out of that mood of
hate or even of acidulous satire in which Thackeray so often worked,
and in which, one may add, the world is seldom benefited, however
skillful the work may be, departing from all that, deftly painting for
us these pathetic Milly Bartons, and Mr. Gilfils, and Janet Dempsters,
and Rev. Tryans, and arranging the whole into a picture which becomes
epic because it is filled with the struggles of human personalities,
dressed in whatever russet garb of clothing or of circumstances.
Those who were at my first lecture on George Eliot will remember that
we found the editor of _Blackwood's Magazine_ on a certain autumn
night in 1856, reading part of the MS. of _Amos Barton_, in his
drawing-room to Thackeray, and remarking to Thackeray, who had just
come in late from dinner, that he had come upon a new author who
seemed uncommonly like a first-class passenger; it is significantly
related that Thackeray said nothing, and evinced no further interest
in it than civilly to say, sometime afterward, that he would have
liked to hear more of it. In the light of the contrast I have just
drawn, Thackeray's failure to be impressed seems natural enough, and
becomes indeed all the more impressive, when we compare it with the
enthusiastic praise which Charles Dickens lavished upon this same work
in the letter which you will remember I read from him.
And here I come upon a further contrast between George Eliot and
Dickens which I should be glad now to bring out as clearly appearing
in these first three _Scenes from Clerical Life_ before _Adam Bede_ was
written.
This is her exquisite modernness in that intense feeling for
personality, which I developed with so much care in my first six
lectures, and her exquisite scientific precision in placing the
personalities or characters of her works before the reader.
All the world knows how Dickens puts a personality on his canvas: he always
gives us a vividly descriptive line of facial curve, of dress, of form, of
gesture and the like, which distinguishes a given character. Whenever we
see this line we know the character so well that we are perfectly content
that two rings for the eyes, a spot for the nose and a blur for the body
may represent the rest; and we accept always with joy the rich mirthfulness
or pathetic matter with which Dickens manages to invest such hastily drawn
figures. George Eliot's principle and method are completely opposite; at
the time of her first stories which we are now considering they were
unique; and the quietness with which she made a real epoch in all
character-description is simply characteristic of the quietness of all her
work. She showed for the first time that without approaching dangerously
near to caricature as Dickens was often obliged to do, a loveable creature
of actual flesh and blood could be drawn in a novel with all the advantage
of completeness derivable from microscopic analysis, scientific precision,
and moral intent; and with absolutely none of the disadvantages, such as
coldness, deadness and the like, which had caused all sorts of
meretricious arts to be adopted by novelists in order to save the
naturalness of a character.
A couple of brief expressions from _Janet's Repentance_, the third of
_Scenes from Clerical Life_ show how intensely George Eliot felt upon
this matter. At the end of Chapter X of that remarkable story, for
instance, she says: "Our subtlest analysis of schools and sects must
miss the essential truth unless it be lit up by the love that sees in
all forms of human thought and work the life-and-death struggles of
separate human beings." And again in Chapter XXII: "Emotion, I fear,
is obstinately irrational: it insists on caring for individuals; it
absolutely refuses to adopt the quantitative view of human anguish,
and to admit that thirteen happy lives are a set-off against twelve
miserable lives," leaving "a clear balance on the side of
satisfaction.... One must be a great philosopher," she adds,
sardonically, "to have emerged into the serene air of pure intellect
in which it is evident that individuals really exist for no other
purpose than that abstractions may be drawn from them:" (which is
dangerously near, by the way, to a complete formula of the Emersonian
doctrine which I had occasion to quote in my last lecture.) She
continues: "And so it comes to pass that for the man who knows
sympathy because he has known sorrow, that old, old saying, about the
joy of angels over the repentant sinner out-weighing their joy over
the ninety-nine just, has a meaning that does not jar with the
language of his own heart. It only tells him that for angels too there
is a transcendent value in human pain which refuses to be settled by
equations; ... that for angels too the misery of one casts so
tremendous a shadow as to eclipse the bliss of ninety-nine." The
beautiful personality who suggests this remark is Janet Dempster, the
heroine of _Janet's Repentance_; a tall, grand, beautiful girl who has
married the witty Lawyer Dempster, and who, after a bitter married
life of some years in which Dempster finally begins amusing himself by
beating her, has come to share the customary wine decanter at table,
and thus by insensible degrees to acquire the habit of taking wine
against trouble. Presently a terrible catastrophe occurs; she is
thrust out of doors barefooted at midnight, half clad, by her brutal
husband, and told never to return. Finding lodgement with a friend
next day, a whirlwind of necessity for complete spiritual
re-adjustment shakes her. "She was sick," says George Eliot, "of that
barren exhortation, 'Do right and keep a clear conscience and God will
reward you, etc.' She wanted strength to do right;" and at this point
the thought of Tryan, an unorthodox clergyman who had made a great
stir in the village and whom she had been taught to despise, occurs to
her. "She had often heard Mr. Tryan laughed at for being fond of great
sinners; she began to see a new meaning in those words; he would
perhaps understand her helplessness. If she could pour out her heart
to him!" Then here we have this keen glimpse into some curious
relations of personality. "The impulse to confession almost always
requires the presence of a fresh ear and a fresh heart; and in our
moments of spiritual need the man to whom we have no tie but our
common nature seems nearer to us than mother, brother or friend. Our
daily, familiar life is but a hiding of ourselves from each other
behind a screen of trivial words and deeds; and those who sit with us
at the same hearth are often the farthest off from the deep human soul
within us, full of unspoken evil and unacted good." Nor can I ever
read the pathetic scene in which Janet secures peace for her spirit
and a practicable working theory for the rest of her active life,
without somehow being reminded of the second scene in Mrs. Browning's
_Drama of Exile_, prodigiously different as that is from this in all
external setting:--the scene where the figures of Adam and Eve are
discovered at the extremity of the sword-glare, flying from Eden, and
Adam begins:
"Pausing a moment on the outer edge,
Where the supernal sword-glare cuts in light
The dark exterior desert,--hast thou strength
Beloved, to look behind us to the gate?
_Eve_--Have I not strength to look up to thy face?"
This story of _Janet's Repentance_ offers us, by the way, a strong
note of modernness as between George Eliot and Shakspeare. Shakspeare
has never drawn, so far as I know, a repentance of any sort. Surely,
in the whole range of our life, no phenomenon can take more powerful
hold upon the attention of the thinker than that of a human spirit
suddenly, of its own free-will, turning the whole current of its love
and desire from a certain direction into a direction entirely
opposite; so that from a small spiteful creature, enamored with all
ugliness, we have a large, generous spirit, filled with the love of
true love. In looking upon such a sight one seems to be startlingly
near to the essential mystery of personality--to that hidden fountain
of power not preceded, power not conditioned, which probably gives man
his only real conception of Divine power, or power acting for itself.
It would be wonderful that the subtleties of human passion
comprehended in the situation of repentance had not attracted
Shakspeare's imagination, if one did not remember that the developing
personality of man was then only coming into literature. The only
apparent change of character of this sort in Shakspeare which I
recall is that of the young king Henry V. leaving Falstaff and his
other gross companions for the steadier matters of war and government;
but the soliloquy of Prince Hal in the very first act of King Henry
IV. precludes all idea of repentance here, by showing that at the
outset his heart is not in the jolly pranks, but that he is
calculatingly ambitious from the beginning; and his whole apparent
dissipation is but a scheme to enhance his future glory. In the first
act of Henry IV. (first part), when the plot is made to rob the
carriers, at the end of Scene II., _exeunt_ all but Prince Hal, who
soliloquizes thus:
"I know you all, and will awhile uphold
The unyoked humor of your idleness:
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wondered at
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapors that did seem to strangle him.
... So when this loose behaviour I throw off
And pay the debt I never promised,
By how much better than my word I am,
By so much shall I falsify men's hopes;
And, like bright metal on a sullen ground,
My reformation, glittering o'er my fault,
Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes
Than that which had no foil to set it off.
I'll so offend to make offense a skill,
Redeeming time when men think least I will."
Here the stream of his love is from the beginning and always towards
ambition; there is never any turn at all, and Prince Hal's assumption
of the grace _reformation_, as applied to such a career of deliberate
acting, is merely a piece of naive complacency.
Let us now go further and say that with this reverence for personality
as to the ultimate important fact of human existence, George Eliot
wonderfully escapes certain complexities due to the difference between
what a man is, really, and what he seems to be to his fellows. Perhaps
I may most easily specify these complexities by asking you to recall
the scene in one of Dr. Holmes' _Breakfast-Table_ series, where the
Professor laboriously expounds to the young man called John that there
are really three of him, to wit: John, as he appears to his neighbors;
John, as he appears to himself; and John, as he really is.
In George Eliot's _Theophrastus Such_, one finds explicit mention of
the trouble that had been caused to her by two of these: "With all
possible study of myself," she says in the first chapter ... "I am
obliged to recognize that while there are secrets in one unguessed by
others, these others have certain items of knowledge about the extent
of my powers and the figure I make with them which, in turn, are
secrets unguessed by me.... Thus ... O fellow-men! if I trace with
curious interest your labyrinthine self-delusions ... it is not that I
feel myself aloof from you: the more intimately I seem to discern your
weaknesses the stronger to me is the proof I share them.... No man can
know his brother simply as a spectator. Dear blunderers, I am one of
you."
Perhaps nothing less than this underlying reverence for all manner of
personality could have produced this first chapter of _Adam Bede_.
"With this drop of ink," she says at starting, "I will show you the
roomy work-shop of Mr. Jonathan Burge, carpenter and builder in the
village of Hayslope, as it appeared on the 18th of June, in the year
of our Lord 1799." I can never read this opening of the famous
carpenter's shop without indulging myself for a moment in the wish
that this same marvellous eye might have dwelt upon a certain
carpenter's shop I wot of, on some 18th of June, in the year of our
Lord 25. What would we not give for such a picture of the work-shop of
that master-builder and of the central figure in it as is here given
us of the old English room ringing with the song of _Adam Bede_.
Perhaps we could come upon no clearer proof of that modernness of
personality which I have been advocating than this very fact of our
complete ignorance as to the physical person of Christ. One asks one's
self, how comes it never to have occurred to St. Matthew, nor St.
Mark, nor St. Luke, nor St. John to tell us what manner of man this
was--what stature, what complexion, what color of eye and hair, what
shape of hand and foot. A natural instinct arising at the very outset
of the descriptive effort would have caused a modern to acquaint us
with these and many like particulars.
It is advancing upon the same line of thought to note that, here, in
this opening of _Adam Bede_, not only are the men marked off and
differentiated for our physical eye, but the very first personality
described is that of a dog, and this is subtly done: "On a heap of
soft shavings a rough gray shepherd-dog had made himself a pleasant
bed, and was lying with his nose between his fore-paws, occasionally
wrinkling his brows to cast a glance at the tallest of the five
workmen, who was carving a shield in the centre of a wooden
mantel-piece." This dog is our friend Gyp, who emerges on several
occasions through _Adam Bede_. Gyp is only one of a number of genuine
creations in animal character which show the modernness of George
Eliot and Charles Dickens, and make them especially dear. How, indeed,
could society get along without that famous cock in _Adam Bede_, who,
as George Eliot records, was accustomed to crow as if the sun was
rising on purpose to hear him! And I wish here to place upon the roll
of fame, also, a certain cock who entered literature about this time
in a series of delicious papers called _Shy Neighborhoods_. In these
Charles Dickens gave some account, among many other notable but
unnoted things, of several families of fowls in which he had become,
as it were, intimate during his walks about outlying London. One of
these was a reduced family of Bantams whom he was accustomed to find
crowding together in the side entry of a pawnbroker's shop. Another
was a family of Dorkings, who regularly spent their evenings in
somewhat riotous company at a certain tavern near the Haymarket, and
seldom went to bed before two in the morning.
My particular immortal, however, was a member of the following family:
I quote from Dickens here:--"But the family I am best acquainted with
reside in the densest parts of Bethnal-Green. Their abstraction from
the objects amongst which they live, or rather their conviction that
those objects have all come into existence into express subservience
to fowls has so enchanted me that I have made them the subject of many
journeys at divers hours.... The leading lady" is "an aged personage
afflicted with a paucity of feather and visibility of quills that give
her the appearance of a bundle of office pens. When a railway
goods-van that would crush an elephant comes round the corner, tearing
over these fowls, they emerge unharmed from under the horses perfectly
satisfied that the whole rush was a passing property in the air which
may have left something to eat behind it. They look upon old shoes,
wrecks of kettles and saucepans, and fragments of bonnets as a kind of
meteoric discharge for fowls to peck at.... Gaslight comes quite as
natural to them as any other light; and I have more than a suspicion
that in the minds of the two lords, the early public-house at the
corner has superseded the sun. They always begin to crow when the
public-house shutters begin to be taken down: and they salute the
Pot-boy when he appears to perform that duty as if he were Phoebus
in person." And alongside these two cocks I must place a hen whom I
find teaching a wise and beautiful lesson to the last man in the world
you would suspect as accessible to influences from any such direction.
This was Thomas Carlyle. Among his just-published _Reminiscences_ I
find the following entry from the earlier dyspeptic times, which seems
impossible when we remember the well-known story--true, as I
know--how, after Thomas Carlyle and his wife had settled at Chelsea,
London, and the crowing of the neighborhood cocks had long kept him in
martyrdom, Mrs. Carlyle planned and carried out the most brilliant
campaign of her life, in the course of which she succeeded in
purchasing or otherwise suppressing every cock within hearing
distance. But this entry is long before.
"Another morning, what was wholesome and better, happening to notice,
as I stood looking out on the bit of green under my bedroom window, a
trim and rather pretty hen actively paddling about and picking up what
food might be discoverable, 'See,' I said to myself; "look, thou fool!
Here is a two-legged creature with scarcely half a thimbleful of poor
brains; thou call'st thyself a man with nobody knows how much brain,
and reason dwelling in it; and behold how the one _life_ is regulated
and how the other! In God's name concentrate, collect whatever of
reason thou hast, and direct it on the one thing needful.' Irving,
when we did get into intimate dialogue, was affectionate to me as
ever, and had always to the end a great deal of sense and insight
into things about him, but he could not much help me; how could
anybody but myself? By degrees I was doing so, taking counsel of that
_symbolic_ Hen."
In George Eliot all the domestic animals are true neighbors and are
brought within the Master's exhortation: "Thou shalt love thy neighbor
as thyself," by the tenderness and deep humor with which she treats
them. This same Gyp, who is honored with first place among the
characters described in the carpenter's shop, is continually doing
something charming throughout _Adam Bede_. In _Janet's Repentance_
dear old Mr. Jerome comes down the road on his roan mare, "shaking the
bridle and tickling her flank with the whip as usual, though there was
a perfect mutual understanding that she was not to quicken her pace;"
and everywhere I find those touches of true sympathy with the dumb
brutes, such as only earnest souls or great geniuses are capable of.
Somehow--I cannot now remember how--a picture was fastened upon my
mind in childhood, which I always recall with pleasure: it is the
figure of man emerging from the dark of barbarism attended by his
friends the horse, the cow, the chicken and the dog. George Eliot's
animal-painting brings always this picture before me.
In April, 1860, appeared George Eliot's second great novel, _The Mill
on the Floss_. This book, in some respects otherwise her greatest
work, possesses a quite extraordinary interest for us now in the
circumstance that a large number of traits in the description of the
heroine, Maggie Tulliver, are unquestionably traits of George Eliot
herself, and the autobiographic character of the book has been avowed
by her best friends. I propose, therefore, in the next lecture, to
read some passages from _The Mill on the Floss_, in which I may have
the pleasure of letting this great soul speak for herself with little
comment from me, except that I wish to compare the figure of Maggie
Tulliver, specially, with that of Aurora Leigh, in the light of the
remarkable development of womanhood, both in real life and in fiction,
which arrays itself before us when we think only of what we may call
the Victorian women; that is, of the queen herself, Sister Dora,
Florence Nightingale, Ida in Tennyson's _Princess_, Jane Eyre,
Charlotte Bronte and her sisters, Mrs. Browning, with her Eve and
Catarina and Aurora Leigh, and George Eliot, with her creations. I
shall thus make a much more extensive study of _The Mill on the Floss_
than of either of the four works which preceded it. It is hard to
leave Adam Bede, and Dinah Morris and Bartle Massey, and Mrs. Poyser,
but I must select; and I have thought this particularly profitable
because no criticism that I have yet seen of George Eliot does the
least justice to the enormous, the simply unique equipment with which
she comes into English fiction, or in the least prepares the reader
for those extraordinary revolutions which she has wrought with such
demure quietness that unless pointed out by some diligent professional
student, no ordinary observer would be apt to notice them. Above all
have I done this because it is my deep conviction that we can find
more religion in George Eliot's words than she herself dreamed she was
putting there, and a clearer faith for us than she ever formulated for
herself; a strange and solemn result, but one not without parallel;
for Mrs. Browning's words of Lucretius in _The Vision of Poets_ partly
apply here:
"Lucretius, nobler than his mood!
Who dropped his plummet down the broad
Deep Universe, and said 'No God',
Finding no bottom! He denied
Divinely the divine, and died
Chief-poet on the Tiber-side
By grace of God! His face is stern
As one compelled, in spite of scorn,
To teach a truth he could not learn."