represents woman's literature more illustriously and more obviously. In
her, quite apart from the magnificent gifts of nature, we see the
influence of sorrow as a determining impulse to write, and the abiding
consciousness of the womanly point of view as the subject matter of her
writings. In vain has she chosen the mask of a man: the features of a
woman are everywhere visible. Since Goethe no one has been able to say
with so much truth, "My writings are my confessions." Her biography
lies there, presented, indeed, in a fragmentary shape and under wayward
disguises, but nevertheless giving to the motley groups the strong and
uumistakable charm of reality. Her grandmother, by whom she was brought
up, disgusted at her not being a boy, resolved to remedy the misfortune
as far as possible by educating her like a boy. We may say of this, as
of all the other irregularities of her strange and exceptional life,
that whatever unhappiness and error may be traceable thereto, its
influence on her writings has been beneficial, by giving a greater
range to her experience. It may be selfish to rejoice over the malady
which secretes a pearl, but the possessor of the pearl may at least
congratulate himself that at any rate the pearl has been produced; and
so of the unhappiness of genius. Certainly few women have had such
profound and varied experience as George Sand; none have turned it to
more account. Her writings contain many passages that her warmest
admirers would wish unwritten; but although severe criticism may detect
the weak places, the severest criticism must conclude with the
admission of her standing among the highest minds of literature. In the
matter of eloquence, she surpasses everything France has yet produced.
There has been no style at once so large, so harmonious, so expressive,
and so unaffected: like a light shining through an alabaster vase, the
ideas shine through her diction; while as regards rhythmic melody of
phrase, it is a style such as Beethoven might have written had he
uttered in words the melodious passion that was in him. But deeper than
all eloquence, grander than all grandeur of phrase, is that forlorn
splendor of a life of passionate experience painted in her works. There
is no man so wise but he may learn from them, for they are the
utterances of a soul in pain, a soul that has been tried. No man could
have written her books, for no man could have had her experience, even
with a genius equal to her own. The philosopher may smile sometimes at
her philosophy, for _that_ is only the reflex of some man whose ideas
she has adopted; the critic may smile sometimes--at her failure in
delineating men; but both philosopher and critic must perceive that
those writings of hers are _original_ and genuine, are transcripts of
experience, and as such fulfil the primary condition of all literature.
This clear, intellectual apprehension of what woman can effect in
literature, had much to do with George Eliot's own success. Yet it is
doubtful if she was so true, in some directions, to the instincts of her
sex as was George Sand, Mrs. Browning or Charlotte Brontë. Hers was in
large measure an intellect without sex; and though she was a woman in all
the instincts of her heart, yet intellectually she occupied the human
rather than the woman's point of view. With a marvellous insight into the
heart of woman, and great skill in portraying womanly natures, she had a
man's way, the logical and impersonal manner, of viewing, the greater
problems of human existence. Charlotte Brontë more truly represents the
woman's way of viewing life; the trustful way of one educated in the
conventional views of religion. She has given a corrector interpretation of
the meaning of love to woman than George Eliot has been able to present,
and simply because she thought and lived more nearly as other women think
and live. Hers was the genius of spontaneous insight and emotion, that
vibrated to every experience and was moved by every sentiment. Life played
upon her heart like the wind upon an Aescolian harp, and she reflected its
every movement of joy and sorrow. George Eliot studied life, probed into
it, cut it in pieces, constructed a theory of it, and then told us what it
means. In this she was unlike other women who have made a deep impression
on literature. Mrs. Browning had nearly as much culture, was as thoughtful
as she, but more genuinely feminine at the heart-core. Love she painted in
a purer and happier fashion than that adopted by George Eliot, and she had
the warmer impulses of a woman's tenderness. Her account of life is the
truer, because it is the more ideal; and this may be said for Charlotte
Brontë also. George Eliot had the larger intellect, the keener mind, was a
profounder thinker; but her realism held her back from that instinctive
conception of life which realizes its larger ideal meanings. It is not
enough to see what is; man desires to know what ought to be. The poet is
the seer, the one who apprehends, who has that finer eye for facts by which
he is able to behold what the facts give promise of. This ideal vision Mrs.
Browning had, and in so far she was the superior of George Eliot. The same
may be said for George Sand, who, with all her wildness and impurity, was a
woman through and through. She was all heart, all impulse, lived in her
instincts and emotions. She had the abandon, enthusiasm and spontaneity
which George Eliot lacked. If the one represents the head, the other
expresses the heart of woman. George Eliot, as a woman, thought, reasoned,
philosophized; George Sand felt, gave every emotion reign, lived out all
her impulses. What the one lacks the other had; where one was weak the
other was strong. With somewhat of George Sand's idealism and emotional
zeal for wider and freer life, George Eliot would have been a greater
writer. Could she have moulded Dorothea with what is best in Consuelo, she
would have been the rival of the greatest literary artists among men. Yet,
with her limitations, it must be said that George Eliot is the superior of
all other women in her literary accomplishments. If others are her
superiors in some directions, in the totality of her powers she surpasses
all. Even as an interpreter of woman's nature and the feminine side of
life, she does not fail to keep well ahead of the best of feminine writers.
She is more thoroughly the master of her powers, is more self-centred,
looks out upon human experience more calmly and with a more penetrating
gaze. Foremost of the half-dozen women who during the present century have
sought to interpret the feminine side of life, she has done much for her
sex. Daring more than others, she has given a greater promise than any
other of what woman is to accomplish when her nature blossoms out into all
its possibilities.
The chief rule for novel-writing laid down by George Eliot in these essays
is, that the novel shall be the result of experience and true to nature.
She emphasizes the importance of this condition, and says that the novelist
is bound to use actual experience as his material, and that alone, or else
keep silent. Weak and silly novels are the result of an effort to break
away from this rule; but the writer who ventures to disregard it never can
be other than silly or weak. Novelists, she says, may either portray
experience outwardly through observation, or inwardly through sentiment, or
through a combination of both.
Observation without sentiment usually leads to humor or satire;
sentiment without observation to rhetoric and long-drawn lachrymosity.
The extreme fault of the one is flippant superficiality, that of the
other is what is called sickly sentimentality.
All true literature, she says, is based on fact, describes life as it is
lived by men and women, touches and is fragrant with reality. This cardinal
principle of literary art she has defined and illustrated in her own strong
and expressive manner in this _Review_ article.
All poetry, all fiction, all comedy, all _belles-lettres_, even to the
playful caprices of fancy, are but the expression of experiences and
emotions; and these expressions are the avenues through which we reach
the sacred _adytum_ of humanity, and learn better to understand our
fellows and ourselves. In proportion as these expressions are the forms
of universal truths, of facts common to all nations or appreciable by
all intellects, the literature which sets them forth is permanently good
and true. Hence the universality and immortality of Homer, Shakspere,
Cervantes, Moliere. But in proportion as these expressions are the forms
of individual, peculiar truths, such as fleeting fashions or
idiosyncrasies, the literature is ephemeral. Hence tragedy never grows
old, for it arises from elemental experience; but comedy soon ages, for
it arises from peculiarities. Nevertheless, even idiosyncrasies are
valuable as side glances; they are aberrations that bring the natural
orbit into more prominent distinctness.
It follows from what has been said, that literature, being essentially
the expression of experience and emotion--of what we have seen, felt
and thought--that only _that_ literature is effective, and to be prized
accordingly, which has _reality for its basis_ (needless to say that
emotion is as real as the three-per-cents), _and effective in
proportion to the depth and breadth of that basis_.
In writing? of the authors of _Jane Eyre_ and _Mary Barton_, she shows how
important to her mind it is that the novel should have its basis in actual
experience, and that it should be an expression of reality.
They have both given imaginative expression to actual experience--they
have not invented, but reproduced; they have preferred the truth, such
as their own experience testified, to the vague, false, conventional
notions current in circulating libraries. Whatever of weakness may be
pointed out in their works will, we are positive, be mostly in those
parts where experience is deserted, and the supposed requirements of
fiction have been listened to; whatever has really affected the public
mind is, we are equally, certain, the transcript of some actual
incident, character or emotion. Note, moreover, that beyond this basis
of actuality these writers have the further advantage of deep feeling
united to keen observation.
Especially severe is her condemnation of the tendency to introduce only
fashionable or learned people into novels. She says the silly novelists
rarely make us acquainted with "any other than very lofty and fashionable
society," and very often the authors know nothing of such society except
from the reading of other such novels.
It is true that we are constantly struck with the want of
verisimilitude in their representations of the high society in which
they seem to live; but then they betray no closer acquaintance with
any other form of life. If their peers and peeresses are improbable,
their literary men, tradespeople and cottagers are impossible; and
their intellect seems to have the peculiar impartiality of reproducing
both what they _have_ seen and heard, and what they have _not_ seen
and heard, with equal faithfulness.
What is simple, natural, unaffected, she pleads for as the true material of
fiction. How she would apply this idea may be seen in her condemnation of a
novelist who devoted her pages to a defence of Evangelicalism. This writer
is "tame and feeble" because she attempts to depict a form of society with
which she is not familiar. That the common phases of religious life are
capable of affording the richest material for the novelist, George Eliot
has abundantly shown, and what she says of their value in this discussion
of "Silly Novelists" is of great interest in view of her own success in
this kind of portraiture. What she suggested as a fine field for the
novelist was to be the one she herself was so well to occupy. Her success
proved how clearly she comprehended the nature of novel-writing, and how
well she understood the character of the material with which the best
results can be attained.
It is less excusable in an Evangelical novelist than any other,
gratuitously to seek her subjects among titles and carriages. The real
drama of Evangelicalism--and it has abundance of fine drama for any one
who has genius enough to discern and reproduce it--lies among the
middle and lower classes; and are not Evangelical opinions understood
to give an especial interest in the weak things of the earth, rather
than in the mighty? Why, then, cannot our Evangelical novelists show
us the operation of their religious views among people (there really
are many such in the world) who keep no carriage, "not so much as a
brass-bound gig," who even manage to eat their dinner without a silver
fork, and in whose mouths the authoress's questionable English would be
strictly consistent? Why can we not have pictures of religious life
among the industrial classes in England as interesting as Mrs. Stowe's
pictures of religious life among the negroes?
Was this question a prophecy? It indicates that the writer's attention
had already been directed to the richness of this material for the purposes
of the novelist. After reading these words we see why she took up the
common life of the English village as she had herself been familiar with
it from childhood. In order to be true to her own conception of the novel,
there was no other field she could occupy. That she understood the
picturesqueness of this form of life no reader of her novels will doubt,
or that she saw and understood its capacities for artistic delineation.
The opening paragraphs of her _Westminster Review_ article on the "Natural
History of German Life" afford further evidence of her insight and
wisdom on this subject. They also afford evidence of her hatred of the
conventional and the artificial in art, literature and life. The spirit of
imitation and mannerism common to the eighteenth century was in every way
repugnant to her. She could have had only contempt for the literary art of
a Pope or a Boileau. The nature of her realism, and the conception she had
of its importance, may be understood from these paragraphs, for in them she
has unfolded her theory more clearly than in anything else she has written,
and with that genius for sympathetic description which is so marked in her
novels.
How little the real characteristics of the working-classes are known to
those who are outside them, how little their natural history has been
studied, is sufficiently disclosed by our art as well as by our
political and social theories. Where, in our picture exhibitions, shall
we find a group of true peasantry? What English artist even attempts to
rival in truthfulness such studies of popular life as the pictures of
Teniers or the ragged boys of Murillo? Even one of the greatest
painters of the pre-eminently realistic school, while in his picture of
"The Hireling Shepherd" he gave us a landscape of marvellous
truthfulness, placed a pair of peasants in the foreground who were not
much more real than the idyllic swains and damsels of our chimney
ornaments. Only a total absence of acquaintance and sympathy with our
peasantry could give a moment's popularity to such a picture as "Cross
Purposes," where we have a peasant girl who looks as if she knew
L.E.L.'s poems by heart, and English rustics whose costumes seem to
indicate that they are meant for ploughmen with exotic features that
remind us of a handsome _primo tenore_. Rather than such cockney
sentimentality as this as an education for the taste and sympathies, we
prefer the most crapulous group of boors that Teniers ever painted. But
even those among our painters who aim at giving the rustic type of
features, who are far above the effeminate feebleness of the "Keepsake"
style, treat their subjects under the influence of traditions and
prepossessions rather than of direct observation. The notion that
peasants are joyous, that the typical moment to represent a man in a
smock-frock is when he is cracking a joke and showing a row of sound
teeth, that cottage matrons are usually buxom, and village children
necessarily rosy and merry, are prejudices difficult to dislodge from
the artistic mind, which looks for its subjects into literature instead
of life. The painter is still under the influence of idyllic
literature, which has always expressed the imagination of the
cultivated and town-bred, rather than the truth of rustic life. Idyllic
ploughmen are jocund when they drive their team afield; idyllic
shepherds make bashful love under hawthorn bushes; idyllic villagers
dance in the chequered shade, and refresh themselves, not immoderately,
with spicy nut-brown ale. But no one who has seen much of actual
ploughmen thinks them jocund; no one who is well acquainted with the
English peasantry can pronounce them merry. The slow gaze, in which no
sense of beauty beams, no humor twinkles,-the slow utterance and the
heavy slouching walk, remind one rather of that melancholy animal, the
camel, than of the sturdy countryman with striped stockings, red waist
coat and hat aside, who represents the traditional English peasant.
Observe a company of haymakers, when you see them at a distance,
tossing up the forkfuls of hay in the golden light, while the wagon
creeps--slowly with its increasing burthen over the meadow, and the
bright green space which tells of work done gets larger and larger, you
pronounce the scene "smiling," and you think that these companions in
labor must be as bright and cheerful as the picture to which they give
animation. Approach nearer, and you will certainly find that haymaking
time is a time of joking, especially it there are women among the
laborers; but the coarse laugh that bursts out every now and then, and
expresses the triumphant taunt, is as far as possible from your idyllic
conception of idyllic merriment. That delicious effervescence of the
mind which we call fun has no equivalent for the northern peasant,
except tipsy revelry; the only realm of fancy and imagination for the
English clown exists at the bottom of the third quart-pot.
The conventional countryman of the stage, who picks up pocket books and
never looks into them, and who is too simple even to know that honesty
has its opposite, represents the still lingering mistake that an
unintelligible dialect is a guarantee for ingenuousness, and that
slouching shoulders indicate an upright disposition. It is quite true
that a thresher is likely to be innocent of any adroit arithmetical
cheating, but he is not the less likely to carry home his master's corn
in his shoes and pocket; a reaper is not given to writing begging
letters, but he is quite capable of cajoling the dairy-maid into
filling his small-beer bottle with ale. The selfish instincts are not
subdued by the sight of buttercups, nor is integrity in the least
established by that classic rural occupation, sheep-washing. To make
men moral, something more is requisite than to turn them out to grass.
Opera peasants, whose unreality excites Mr. Ruskin's indignation, are
surely too frank an idealization to be misleading; and since popular
chorus is one of the most effective elements of the opera, we can
hardly object to lyric rustics in elegant laced bodices and picturesque
motley, unless we are prepared to advocate a chorus of colliers in
their pit costume, or a ballet of charwomen and stocking-weavers. But
our social novels profess to represent the people as they are, and the
unreality of their representations is a grave evil. The greatest
benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet or novelist, is
the extension of our sympathies. Appeals founded on generalizations
and statistics require a sympathy ready-made, a moral sentiment already
in activity; but a picture of human life such as a great artist can
give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention
to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material
of moral sentiment. When Scott takes us into Luckie Mucklebackit's
cottage, or tells the story of The Two Drovers,--when Wordsworth
sings to us the reverie of Poor Susan,--when Kingsley shows us Alton
Locke gazing yearningly over the gate which leads from the highway
into the first wood he ever saw,--when Harnung paints a group of
chimney-sweepers,--more is done towards linking the higher classes
with the lower, towards obliterating the vulgarity of exclusiveness,
than by hundreds of sermons and philosophical dissertations. Art is the
nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and
extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our
personal lot. All the more sacred is the task of the artist when he
undertakes to paint the life of the people. Falsification here is far
more pernicious than in the more artificial aspects of life. It is not
so very serious that we should have false ideas about evanescent
fashions--about the manners and conversation of beaux and duchesses;
but it _is_ serious that our sympathy with the perennial joys and
struggles, the toil, the tragedy and the humor in the life of our more
heavily laden fellow-men,--should be perverted, and turned towards a
false object instead of the true one.
This perversion is not the less fatal because the misrepresentation
which gives rise to it has what the artist considers a moral end. The
thing for mankind to know is, not what are the motives and influences
which the moralist thinks _ought_ to act on the laborer or the artisan,
but what are the motives and influences which do act on him. We want to
be taught to feel, not for the heroic artisan or the sentimental
peasant, but for the peasant in all his coarse apathy, and the artisan
in all his suspicious selfishness.
We have one great novelist who is gifted with the utmost power of
rendering the external traits of our town population; and if he could
give us their psychological character--their conceptions of life, and
their emotions--with the same truth as their idiom and manners, his
books would be the greatest contribution art has ever made to the
awakening of social sympathies. But while he can copy Mrs. Plornish's
colloquial style with the delicate accuracy of a sun-picture, while
there is the same startling inspiration in his description of the
gestures and phrases of "Boots," as in the speeches of Shakspere's mobs
or numskulls, he scarcely ever passes from the humorous and external to
the emotional and tragic, without becoming as transcendent in his
unreality as he was a moment before in his artistic truthfulness. But
for the precious salt of his humor, which compels him to reproduce
external traits that serve, in some degree, as a corrective to his
frequently false psychology, his preternaturally virtuous poor children
and artisans, his melodramatic bootmen and courtesans, would be as
noxious as Eugene Sue's idealized proletaires in encouraging the
miserable fallacy that high morality and refined sentiment can grow
out of harsh social relations, ignorance and want; or that the
working-classes are in a condition to enter at once into a millennial
state of _altruism_, wherein every one is caring for every one else,
and no one for himself.
If we need a true conception of the popular character to guide our
sympathies rightly, we need it equally to check our theories, and
direct us in their application. The tendency created by the splendid
conquests of modern generalization, to believe that all social
questions are merged in economical science, and that the relations of
men to their neighbors may be settled by algebraic equations,--the
dream that the uncultured classes are prepared for a condition which
appeals principally to their moral sensibilities,--the aristocratic
dilettantism which attempts to restore the "good old times" by a sort
of idyllic masquerading, and to grow feudal fidelity and veneration as
we grow prize turnips, by an artificial system of culture,--none of
these diverging mistakes can co-exist with a real knowledge of the
people, with a thorough study of their habits, their ideas, their
motives. The landholder, the clergyman, the mill-owner, the mining
agent, have each an opportunity for making precious observations on
different sections of the working-class, but unfortunately their
experience is too often not registered at all, or its results are too
scattered to be available as a source of information and stimulus to
the public mind generally. If any man of sufficient moral and
intellectual breadth, whose observations would not be vitiated by a
foregone conclusion, or by a professional point of view, would devote
himself to studying the natural history of our social classes,
especially of the small shop-keepers, artisans and peasantry,--the
degree in which they are influenced by local conditions, their maxims
and habits, the points of view from which they regard their religious
teachers, and the degree in which they are influenced by religious
doctrines, the interaction of the various classes on each other, and
what are the tendencies in their position towards disintegration or
towards development,--and if, after all this study, he would give us
the result of his observations in a book well nourished with specific
facts, his work would be a valuable aid to the social and political
reformer.