"Not glad, as the low-loving herd,
Of self in other still preferred,"
I must here beg you to observe the quite incalculable advance in the
ideal of love here presented by Emerson, and the ideal which was
thought to be the crown and boast of the classic novel a hundred years
ago, and which is still pointed to with exultation by thoughtless
people. This ideal, by universal voice was held to have been
consummated by Fielding in his character of Squire Allworthy, in the
famous novel, _Tom Jones_. And here it is: we have a dramatic
presentation of Squire Allworthy early on a May morning, pacing the
terrace before his mansion which commanded a noble stretch of country,
and then Fielding glows thus: "In the full blaze of his majesty up
rose the sun, than which one object alone in this lower creation could
be more glorious, and that Mr. Allworthy himself presented--a human
being replete with benevolence, meditating in what manner he might
render himself most acceptable to his Creator by doing most good to
his creatures." Here Mr. Allworthy's benevolence has for its object to
render himself most acceptable to his Creator; his love, in other
words, is only another term for increasing his account in the Bank of
Heaven; a perfect example, in short, of that love of the low-loving
herd which is self in other still preferred.
But now let me once more turn the tube and gain another radiant
arrangement of these kaleidoscopic elements, beauty and love and the
like. In Emerson's poem called "Beauty," which must be distinguished
from the "Ode to Beauty," the relation between love and beauty takes
this turn: "Seyd," he says, "chased beauty
"Everywhere,
In flame, in storm, in clouds of air.
He smote the lake to feed his eye
With the beryl beam of the broken wave;
He flung in pebbles well to hear
The moment's music which they gave.
Oft pealed for him a lofty tone
From nodding pole and belting zone.
He heard a voice none else could hear
From centred and from errant sphere.
The quaking earth did quake in rhyme,
Seas ebbed and flowed in epic chime,
In dens of passion, pits of woe,
He saw strong Eros struggling through,
To sum the doubt and solve the curse
And beam to the bounds of the universe.
While thus to love he gave his days
In loyal worship, scorning praise,"
(where, you observe, love is substituted for beauty, as that to which
he gave his days, in the most naive _assumption_ that the one involved
the other.)
"While thus to love he gave his days
In loyal worship, scorning praise,
How spread their lures for him in vain
Thieving ambition and paltering gain!
He thought it happier to be dead,
To die for Beauty,--than live for bread."
George Eliot has somewhere called this word love a word-of-all-work.
If with another turn I add to these testimonies one from Swedenborg,
in which this same love--which we have just seen to be beauty--which
beauty we just before saw to be truth--is now identified with
_wisdom_: we prove the justice of George Eliot's phrase. In Section X
of his work on the Divine Providence Swedenborg says: "The good of
love is not good any further than it is united to the truth of wisdom;
and the truth of wisdom is not truth any further than it is united to
the good of love;" and he continues in section XIII: "Now because
truth is from good, as wisdom is from love, therefore both taken
together are called love or good; for love in its form is wisdom, and
good in its form is truth."
And finally does not David practically confirm this view where, in
Psalm CXIX. he involves the love of the law of God with wisdom in the
verse: "I understand more than the ancients because I keep thy
precepts?"
But I grieve that there is no time to call more witnesses; for I love
to assemble these lofty spirits and hear them speak upon one topic. Is
it not clear that in the minds of these serious thinkers truth,
beauty, wisdom, goodness, love, appear as if they were but orators of
one and the same essential God?
And if this be true cannot one say with authority to the young
artist,--whether working in stone, in color, in tones or in
character-forms of the novel: so far from dreading that your moral
purpose will interfere with your beautiful creation, go forward in the
clear conviction that unless you are suffused--soul and body, one
might say--with that moral purpose which finds its largest expression
in love--that is, the love of all things in their proper
relation--unless you are suffused with this love do not dare to meddle
with beauty, unless you are suffused with beauty, do not dare to
meddle with love, unless you are suffused with truth, do not dare to
meddle with goodness,--in a word, unless you are suffused with beauty,
truth, wisdom, goodness _and_ love, abandon the hope that the ages
will accept you as an artist.
Of course I leave out of view here all that field of artistic activity
which is merely neutral, which is--not immoral but--merely _un_moral.
The situations in Scott's novels for instance do not in general put us
upon any moral question as between man and man. Or when our own Mr.
Way paints his luminous bunches of grapes, one of which will feed the
palates of a thousand souls though it is never eaten, and thus shows
us how Art repeats the miracle of the loaves and fishes, feeding the
multitude and leaving more of the original provision than was at
first; we have most delightful unmoral art. This is not only
legitimate, but I think among the most beneficent energies of art; it
rests our hearts, it gives us holiday from the Eternal Debate, it
re-creates us for all work.
But now secondly, as to the influence of moral purpose in art: we have
been in the habit, as you will remember, of passing at the earliest
possible moment from abstract discussion to the concrete instance; and
if we now follow that course and inquire,--not whether moral purpose
_may_ interfere with artistic creation,--but whether moral purpose
_has_ interfered with artistic creation, as matter of fact, in the
works of those whom the ages have set in the highest heaven of art, we
get a verdict which seems to leave little room for question. At the
beginning we are met with the fact that the greatest work has always
gone hand in hand with the most fervent moral purpose. For example,
the most poetical poetry of which we know anything is that of the
author of Job, and of David and his fellow psalm-writers. I have used
the expression "most poetical" here with design; for regarded as pure
literature these poems in this particular of poeticalness, of pure
spirituality, lift themselves into a plane not reached by any others.
A single fact in proof of this exceeding poeticalness will suffice: it
is the fact that these poems alone, of all ever written, bear
translation from one language into another without hurt. Surely this
can be said of no other poetic work. If we strike away all allowances
of amateurishness and good fellowship and judge with the
uncompromising truth of the pious artist; how pitiful is Homer as he
appears in even Pope's English; or how subtly does the simplicity of
Dante sink into childishness even with Mr. Longfellow interpreting; or
how tedious and flat fall the cultured sentences of Goethe even in
Taylor's version, which has by many been declared the most successful
translation ever made, not only of _Faust_ but of any foreign poem;
nay, how completely the charm of Chaucer exhales away even when
redacted merely from an older dialect into a later one, by hands so
skillful as those of Dryden and Wordsworth.
Now, it is words and their associations which are untranslatable, not
ideas; there is no _idea_, whether originating in a Hebrew, Greek or
other mind, which cannot be adequately produced as idea in English
words; the reason why Shakspeare and Dante are practically
untranslatable is that recognizing how every word means more than
itself to its native users,--how every word is like the bright head of
a comet drawing behind it a less luminous train of vague associations
which are associations only to those who have used such words from
infancy,--Shakspeare and Dante, I say, have used this fact, and have
constructed poems which necessarily mean more to native hearers than
they can possibly mean to any foreign ear.
But this Hebrew poetry which I have mentioned is so purely composed of
ideas which are universal, essential, fundamental to the personality
of man, instantly recognizable by every soul of every race,--that they
remain absolutely great, absolutely artistic, in whatever language
they are couched.
For example: if one climbs up for a moment out of that vagueness with
which Biblical expressions, for various reasons, are apt to fall upon
many ears, so that one may consider the clean and virgin quality of
ideas clarified from all factitious charm of word and of
association,--what could be more nearly perfect as pure literature
than this:
"The entrance of Thy words giveth light;
it giveth understanding unto the simple.
I opened my mouth and panted;
for I longed for Thy commandments.
Deliver me from the oppression of man:
so will I keep Thy precepts.
Order my steps in Thy word,
and let not any iniquity have dominion over me.
Make Thy face to shine upon Thy servant;
and teach me Thy statutes.
Rivers of waters run down my eyes
because they kept not Thy law."
Or this:
"I will lift up mine eyes to the hills
whence cometh my help.
My help cometh from the Lord
which made heaven and earth.
The Lord is thy keeper: the Lord is thy shade
upon thy right hand.
The sun shall not smite thee by day,
nor the moon by night.
The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil:
He shall preserve thy soul.
The Lord shall preserve thy going out
and thy coming in from this time forth
even for evermore."
Or this, of Isaiah's:
"Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened and the ears of the
deaf unstopped.
Then the lame shall leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb
_shall_ sing: for in the wilderness shall waters break out, and
streams in the desert. And the parched ground shall become a
pool, and the thirsty land springs of water.
In the habitations of dragons where each lay shall be grass with
reeds and rushes.... No lion shall be there, nor any ravenous
beast shall go up thereon, it shall not be found there; but the
redeemed shall walk there;
And the ransomed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion with
songs of everlasting joy upon their heads: they shall obtain joy
and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away."
Or this, from the author of _Job_:
"Surely there is a vein for the silver and a place for gold where
they fine it....
As for the earth, out of it cometh bread: and under it is turned
up as it were fire.
But where shall wisdom be found?
And where is the place of understanding?
... The depth saith, it is not in me: and the sea saith, it is
not with me.
... Destruction and death say, we have heard the fame thereof
with our ears; God understandeth the ways thereof and he knoweth
the place thereof. For he looketh to the ends of the earth, and
seeth under the _whole_ heaven;
... When He made a decree for the rain and a way for the
lightning of the thunder:
Then did He see it and declare it;
He prepared it, yea, and searched it out.
And unto man He said: "Behold the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom;
and to depart from evil is understanding."
Here it is apparent enough that the moral purpose with which these
writers were beyond all question surcharged, instead of interfering
with the artistic value of their product, has spiritualized the art of
it into an intensity which burns away all limitations of language and
sets their poems as indestructible monuments in the hearts of the
whole human race.
If we descend to the next rank of poetry I have only to ask you to
observe how, in Shakspeare, just as the moral purpose becomes loftier
the artistic creations become lovelier. Compare, for example, the
forgiveness and reconciliation group of plays as they have been
called, _Winter's Tale_, _Henry VIII_, and _The Tempest_, (which must
have been written late in Shakspeare's life when the moral beauty of
large forgiveness seems to have taken full possession of his fancy,
and when the moral purpose of displaying that beauty to his fellow-men
seemed to have reigned over his creative energy): compare, I say,
these plays with earlier ones, and it seems to me that all the main
creations are more distinctly artistic, more spiritually beautiful,
lifted up into a plane of holy ravishment which is far above that of
all the earlier plays. Think of the dignity and endless womanly
patience of Hermione, of the heavenly freshness and morning quality of
Perdita, of the captivating roguery of Autolycus, in _Winter's Tale_;
of the colossal forgiveness of Queen Katherine in _Henry VIII_, of the
equally colossal pardon of Prospero, of the dewy innocence of Miranda,
of the gracious and graceful ministrations of Ariel, of the
grotesqueries of Caliban and Trinculo, of the play of ever-fresh
delights and surprises which make the drama of _The Tempest_ a lone
and music-haunted island among dramas! Everywhere in these latter
plays I seem to feel the brooding of a certain sanctity which breathes
out of the larger moral purpose of the period.
Leaving these illustrations, for which time fails, it seems to me that
we have fairly made out our case against these objections if, after
this review of the connection between moral purpose and artistic
creation we advance thirdly to the fact--of which these objectors seem
profoundly oblivious--that the English novel at its very beginning
announces itself as the vehicle of moral purposes. You will remember
that when discussing Richardson and Fielding, the first English
novelists, I was at pains to show how carefully they sheltered their
works behind the claim of this very didacticism. Everywhere in
_Pamela_, _Clarissa Harlowe_, _Tom Jones_, in the preface, sometimes
in the very title-page, it is ostentatiously set up that the object of
the book is to improve men's _moral_ condition by setting before them
plain examples of vice and virtue.
Passing by, therefore, the absurdity of the statement that the proper
office of the novelist is to amuse, and that when George Eliot
pretended to do more, and to instruct, she necessarily failed to do
either; it is almost as odd to find that the very objectors who urge
the injurious effect of George Eliot's moral purpose upon her work are
people who swear by Richardson and Fielding, utterly forgetting that
if moral purpose is a detriment to _Daniel Deronda_, it is simply
destruction to _Clarissa Harlowe_ and _Tom Jones_.
And lastly upon this point, when I think of the crude and hasty
criticism which confines this moral purpose in _Daniel Deronda_ to the
pushing forward of Deronda's so-called religious patriotism in
endeavoring to re-establish his people in the ancient seat of the
Hebrews,--a view which I call crude and hasty because it completely
loses sight of the much more prominent and important moral purpose of
the book, namely, the setting forth of Gwendolen Harleth's repentance;
when, I say, I hear these critics not only assume that Deronda's
mission is _the_ moral purpose of this book, but even belittle that by
declaring that George Eliot's enthusiasm for the rehabilitation of the
Jews must have been due to a chance personal acquaintance of hers with
some fervid Jew who led her off into these chimerical fancies; and
when, I find this tone prevailing not only with the Philistines, but
among a great part of George Eliot's otherwise friends and lovers:
then I am in a state of amazement which precludes anything like
critical judgment on my part. As for me, no Jew--not even the poorest
shambling clothes-dealer in Harrison street--but startles me
effectually out of this work-a-day world: when I look upon the face
of a Jew, I seem to receive a message which has come under the whole
sea of time from the further shore of it: this wandering person, who
without a home in any nation has yet made a literature which is at
home in every nation, carries me in one direction to my mysterious
brethren, the cavemen and the lake dwellers, in the other direction to
the carpenter of Bethlehem, climax of our race. And now, to gather
together these people from the four ends of the earth, to rehabilitate
them in their thousand-fold consecrated home after so many ages of
wandering, to re-make them into a homologous nation at once the newest
and the oldest upon the earth, to endow the 19th Century with that
prodigious momentum which all the old Jewish fervor and spirituality
and tenacity would acquire in the backward spring from such long ages
of restraint and oppression, and with the mighty accumulation of
cosmopolitan experiences; the bare suggestion would seem enough to
stir the blood of the most ungentle Gentile.
But I must hasten to complete the account of George Eliot's personal
existence which we suspended at the point where she had come to London
in 1851.
She had been persuaded to this step by Dr. Chapman, who was at that
time editor of the _Westminster Review_, and who asked her to come and
help him to conduct that publication. At this time she must have been
one of the most captivating companions imaginable. She knew French,
German and Italian, and had besides a good knowledge of Latin, Greek,
Russian and Hebrew. She was a really good player of the piano, and had
some proficiency on the organ; she had already mixed in some of the
best society of London, for, in 1841, her father had moved to
Foleshill, near Coventry, and here she quickly became intimate in the
household of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Bray, where she met such people as
Emerson, George Combe, Mr. Froude, and many other noted ones of the
literary circles which the Brays delighted in drawing about them; her
mind had been enlarged by the treasures of the Continent which she
visited with her life-long friends, the Brays, in 1849, after the
death of her father, remaining at Geneva after the Brays returned to
England; she had all that homely love which comes with the successful
administration of breakfast, dinner and supper, for her sisters and
brothers had all married, and she lived alone with her father after
his removal to Coventry in 1841, and kept his house for him from that
time until his death, not only with great daughterly devotion but, it
is said, with great success as a domestic manager; besides thus
knowing the mysteries of good coffee and good bread she was widely
versed in theology, philosophy and the movements of modern science:
all of which equipment was permeated with a certain intensity which
struck every one who came near her. With this endowment she came to
London in 1851, as I have said, by Dr. Chapman's invitation, and took
up her residence at Dr. Chapman's house. Here she immediately began to
meet George H. Lewes, Carlyle, Mill and Herbert Spencer. Of her
relations to Lewes it seems to me discussion is not now possible. It
is known that Lewes' wife had once left him, that he had generously
condoned the offense and received her again, and that in a year she
again eloped; the laws of England make such a condonation preclude
divorce; Lewes was thus prevented from legally marrying again by a
technicality of the law which converted his own generosity into a
penalty; under these circumstances George Eliot, moved surely by pure
love, took up her residence with him, and according to universal
account, not only was a faithful wife to him for twenty years until
his death, but was a devoted mother to his children. That her failure
to go through the form of marriage was not due to any contempt for
that form, as has sometimes been absurdly alleged, is conclusively
shown by the fact that when she married Mr. Cross, a year and a half
after Lewes' death, the ceremony was performed according to the
regular rites of the Church of England.
The most congenial of George Eliot's acquaintances during these early days
at the Chapman's in London was Mr. Herbert Spencer. For a long time indeed
the story went the rounds that Mr. Spencer had been George Eliot's tutor;
but you easily observe that when she met him at this time in London she was
already thirty-one years old, long past her days of tutorship. The story
however has authoritatively been denied by Mr. Spencer himself. That George
Eliot took pleasure in his philosophy, that she was especially conversant
with his _Principles of Psychology_, and that they were mutually-admiring
and mutually-profitable friends, seems clear enough; but I cannot help
regarding it a serious mistake to suppose that her novels were largely
determined by Mr. Spencer's theory of evolution, as I find asserted by a
recent critic who ends an article with the declaration that "the writings
of George Eliot must be regarded, I think, as one of the earliest triumphs
of the Spencerian method of studying personal character and the laws of
social life."
This seems to me so far from being true that many of George Eliot's
characters appear like living objections to the theory of evolution.
How could you, according to this theory, evolve the moral stoutness
and sobriety of Adam Bede, for example, from _his_ precedent
conditions, to wit, his drunken father and querulous mother? How
could you evolve the intensity and intellectual alertness of Maggie
Tulliver from _her_ precedent conditions, to wit, a flaccid mother,
and a father wooden by nature and sodden by misfortune? Though surely
influenced by circumstances her characters everywhere seem to flout
evolution in the face.
But the most pleasant feature connected with the intercourse of George
Eliot and Herbert Spencer is that it appears to have been Mr. Spencer
who first influenced her to write novels instead of heavy essays in
_The Westminster_. It is most instructive to note that this was done
with much difficulty. Only after long resistance, after careful
thought, and indeed after actual trial was George Eliot persuaded that
her gift lay in fiction and not in philosophy; for it was pending the
argument about the matter that she quietly wrote _Scenes from Clerical
Life_ and caused them to be published with all the precaution of
anonymousness, by way of actual test.
As to her personal habits I have gleaned that her manuscript was
wonderfully beautiful and perfect, a delight to the printers, without
blot or erasure, every letter carefully formed; that she read the
Bible every day and that one of her favorite books was Thomas a Kempis
on _The Imitation of Christ_; that she took no knowledge at
secondhand; that she had a great grasp of business, that she worked
slowly and with infinite pains, meditating long over her subject
before beginning; that she was intensely sensitive to criticism; that
she believed herself a poet in opposition to the almost unanimous
verdict of criticism which had pronounced _The Spanish Gypsy_,
_Agatha_ and _The Legend of Jubal_ as failing in the gift of song,
though highly poetic; that the very best society in London--that is to
say in the world--was to be found at her Sunday afternoon receptions
at the Priory, Regent's Park, where she and Mr. Lewes lived so long;
and that she rarely left her own home except when tempted by a fine
painting or some unusually good performance of music.
I have given here a list of complete works, with dates of publication,
as far as I have been able to gather. I believe this is nearly
complete.
Translation of Strauss' _Leben Jesu_, 1846; contributions to
Westminster Review, from about 1850, during several years; translation
of Feuerbach's _Essence of Christianity_, 1854; _Scenes of Clerical
Life_, Blackwood's Magazine, 1857,--book-form 1858; _Adam Bede_, 1859;
_The Mill on the Floss_, 1860; _The Lifted Veil_, Blackwood's
Magazine, 1860; _Silas Marner_, 1861; _Romola_, Cornhill Magazine,
book-form, 1863; _Felix Holt_, 1866; _The Spanish Gypsy_, 1868:
_Address to Workmen_, Blackwood's Magazine, 1868; _Agatha_, 1869; _How
Lisa loved the king_, Blackwood's Magazine, 1869; _Middlemarch_, 1871;
_The Legend of Jubal_, 1874; _Daniel Deronda_, 1876; The _Impressions
of Theophrastus Such_, 1879; and said to have left a translation of
_Spinoza's Ethics_, not yet published.
As the mind runs along these brief phrases in which I have with a
purposed brevity endeavored to flash the whole woman before you, and
as you supplement that view with this rapid summary of her literary
product,--the details of fact seem to bring out the extraordinary
nature of this woman's endowment in such a way that to add any general
eulogium would be necessarily to weaken the picture. There is but one
fact remaining so strong and high as not to be liable to this
objection, which seems to me so characteristic that I cannot do better
than close this study with it. During all her later life the central
and organic idea which gave unity to her existence was a burning love
for her fellow-men. I have somewhere seen that in conversation she
once said to a friend: "What I look to is a time when the impulse to
help our fellows shall be as immediate and as irresistible as that
which I feel to grasp something firm if I am falling," and the
narrator of this speech adds that at the end of it she grasped the
mantel-piece as if actually saving herself from a fall, with an
intensity which made the gesture most eloquent.
You will observe that of the two commandments in which the Master
summed up all duty and happiness--namely, to love the Lord with all
our heart, and to love our neighbor as ourself, George Eliot's whole
life and work were devoted to the exposition of the latter. She has
been blamed for devoting so little attention to the former; as for me,
I am too heartily grateful for the stimulus of human love which
radiates from all her works to feel any sense of lack or regret. This,
after all--the general stimulus along the line of one's whole
nature--is the only true benefit of contact with the great. More than
this is hurtful. Now a days, you do not want an author to tell you how
many times a day to pray, to prescribe how many inches wide shall be
the hem of your garment. This the Master never did; too well He knew
the growth of personality which _would_ settle these matters, each for
itself; too well He knew the subtle hurt of all such violations of
modern individualism; and after our many glimpses of the heartiness
with which George Eliot recognized the fact and function of human
personality one may easily expect that she never attempted to teach
the world with a rule and square, but desired only to embody in living
forms those prodigious generalizations in which the Master's
philosophy, considered purely as a philosophy, surely excelled all
other systems.
In fine, if I try to sum up the whole work of this great and beautiful
spirit which has just left us in the light of all the various views I
have presented in these lectures, where we have been tracing the
growth of human personality from Aeschylus, through Plato, Socrates,
the contemporary Greek mind, through the Renaissance, Shakspeare,
Richardson and Fielding, down to Dickens, and our author, I find all
the numerous threads of thought which have been put before you
gathered into one, if I say that George Eliot shows man what he may
be, in terms of what he is.
* * * * *
Standard Works of Fiction,