aid, new deeds are to be done, new memories created, fresher traditions
woven into feeling and hope. National memories are to be superseded by the
spirit of brotherhood, for, as the race advances, nations are brought
closer to each other, have more in common, and development is made of
world-wide traditions. Theophrastus Such, in the last of his essays, tells
us that "it is impossible to arrest the tendencies of things towards the
quicker or slower fusion of races."
The environment of her characters George Eliot makes of very great
importance. She dwells upon the natural scenery which they love, but
especially does she magnify the importance of the social environment, and
the perpetual influence it has upon the whole of life. Mr. James Sully has
clearly interpreted her thought on this subject, and pointed out its
engrossing interest for her.
"A character divorced from its surroundings is an abstraction. A
personality is only a concrete living whole, when we attach it by a network
of organic filaments to its particular environment, physical and social.
Our author evidently chooses her surroundings with strict regard to her
characters. She paints nature less in its own beauty than in its special
aspect and significance for those whom she sets in its midst. 'The bushy
hedgerows,' 'the pool in the corner of the field where the grasses were
dank,' 'the sudden slope of the old marl-pit, making a red background for
the burdock'--these things are touched caressingly and lingered over
because they are so much to the 'midland-bred souls' whose history is here
recorded; so much because of cumulative recollection reaching back to the
time when they 'toddled among' them, or perhaps 'learnt them by heart
standing between their father's knees while he drove leisurely.' And what
applies to the natural environment applies still more to those narrower
surroundings which men construct for themselves, and which form their daily
shelter, their work-shop, their place of social influence. The human
interest which our author sheds about the mill, the carpenter's shop, the
dairy, the village church, and even the stiff, uninviting conventicle,
shows that she looks on these as having a living continuity with the people
whom she sets among them. Their artistic value is but a reflection of all
that they mean to those for whom they have made the nearer and habitually
enclosing world." The larger influence in the environment of any person,
according to George Eliot, is that which arises from tradition. Cut off
from the sustenance given by tradition, the person loses the motives, the
supports of his life. This is well shown in the case of Silas Marner, who
had fled from his early home and all his life held dear. George Eliot
describes the effect of such a change of environment.
Even people whose lives have been made various by learning, sometimes
find it hard to keep a fast hold on their habitual views of life, on
their faith in the Invisible--nay, on the sense that their past joys
and sorrows are a real experience, when they are suddenly transported
to a new land, where the beings around them know nothing of their
history, and share none of their ideas--where their mother earth shows
another lap, and human life has other forms than those on which their
souls have been nourished. Minds that have been unhinged from their old
faith and love, have perhaps sought this Lethean influence of exile, in
which the past becomes dreamy because its symbols have all vanished,
and the present too is dreamy because it is linked with no memories.
[Footnote: Chapter II.]
She delights to return again and again to the influences produced upon us
by the environment of childhood. In _The Mill on the Floss_ she tells us
how dear the earth becomes by such associations.
We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood
in it,--if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again
every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat
lisping to ourselves on the grass--the same hips and haws on the autumn
hedgerows--the same redbreasts that we used to call "God's birds,"
because they did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth
that sweet monotony where everything is known, and _loved_ because it
is known?
The wood I walk in on this mild May day, with the young yellow-brown
foliage of the oaks between me and the blue sky, the white
star-flowers, and the blue-eyed speedwell, and the ground-ivy at
my feet--what grove of tropic palms, what strange ferns or splendid
broad-petalled blossoms, could ever thrill such deep and delicate
fibres within me as this home-scene? These familiar flowers, these
well-remembered bird-notes, this sky with its fitful brightness,
these furrowed and grassy fields, each with a sort of personality given
to it by the capricious hedgerows--such things as these are the mother
tongue of our imagination, the language that is laden with all the
subtle inextricable associations the fleeting hours of our childhood
left behind them. Our delight in the sunshine on the deep-bladed grass
to-day might be no more than the faint perception of wearied souls,
if it were not for the sunshine and the grass in the far-off years,
which still live in us, and transform our perception into love.
[Footnote: Chapter V.]
In the backward glance of _Theophrastus Such_ this anchorage of the life in
familiar associations is described as a source of our faith in the
spiritual, even when all the childhood thoughts about those associations
cannot be retained.
The illusions that began for us when we were less acquainted with evil
have not lost their value when we discern them to be illusions. They
feed the ideal better, and in loving them still, we strengthen, the
precious habit of loving something not visibly, tangibly existent, but
a spiritual product of our visible, tangible selves.
In the evolution philosophy she found the reconciliation between Locke and
Kant which she so earnestly desired to discover in girlhood. The old school
of experimentalists did not satisfy her with their philosophy; she saw
that the dictum that all knowledge is the result of sensation was not
satisfactory, that it was shallow and untrue. On the other hand, the
intellectual intuition of Schelling was not acceptable, nor even Kant's
categories of the mind. She wished to know why the mind instinctively
throws all experiences and thoughts under certain forms, and why it must
think under certain general methods. She found what to her was a perfectly
satisfactory answer to these questions in the theory of evolution as
developed by Darwin and Spencer. Through the aid of these men she found the
reconciliation between Locke and Kant, and discovered that both were wrong
and both right. So familiar has this reconciliation become, and so wide is
its acceptance, that no more than a mere hint of its meaning will be needed
here. This philosophy asserts, with Locke, that all knowledge begins in
sensation and experience; but with Kant, it affirms that knowledge passes
beyond experience and becomes intuitional. It differs from Kant as to the
source of the intuitions, pronouncing them the results of experience built
up into legitimate factors of the mind by heredity. Experience is inherited
and becomes intuitions. The intuitions are affirmed to be reliable, and, to
a certain extent, sure indications of truth. They are the results, to use
the phrase adopted by Lewes, of "organized experience;" experience verified
in the most effective manner in the organism which it creates and modifies.
According to this philosophy, man must trust the results of experience, but
he can by no means be certain that those results correspond with actuality.
They are actual for him, because it is impossible for him to go beyond
their range. Within the little round created by "organized experience,"
which is also Lewes's definition of science, man may trust his knowledge,
because it is consistent with itself; but beyond that strict limit he can
obtain no knowledge, and even knows that what is without it does not
correspond with what is within it. In truth, man knows only the relative,
not the absolute; he must rely on experience, not on creative reason.
George Eliot would have us believe that the sources of life are not inward,
but outward; not dependent on the deep affirmations of individual reason,
or on the soul's inherent capacity to see what is true, but on the effects
of environment and the results of social experience. Man is not related to
an infinite world of reason and spiritual truth, but only to a world of
universal law, hereditary conditions and social traditions. Invariable law,
heredity, feeling, tradition; these words indicate the trend of George
Eliot's mind, and the narrow limitations of her philosophy. Man is not only
the product of nature, but, according to this theory, nature limits his
moral capacity and the range of his mental activity. Environment is
regarded as all-powerful, and the material world as the _source_ of such
truth as we can know. In her powerful presentation of this philosophy of
life George Eliot indicates her great genius and her profound insight. At
the same time, her work is limited, her genius cramped, and her imagination
crippled, by a philosophy so narrow and a creed so inexpansive.
XI.
RELIGIOUS TENDENCIES.
As a great literary creator, George Eliot holds a singular position in
reference to religious beliefs. To most literary artists religion is a
vital part of life, which enters as a profound element into their teachings
or into their interpretations of character and incident. Religion deeply
affects the writings of Tennyson, Browning and Ruskin; its problems, its
hopes, its elements of mystery and infinity touch all their pages. In an
equal degree, though with a further departure from accredited beliefs, and
with a greater effect from philosophical or humanitarian influences, has it
wrought itself into the genius of Goethe, Carlyle and Hugo. Even the pages
of Voltaire, Shelley and Heine have been touched by its magic influence;
their words glow with its great interests, and bloom into beauty through
its inspiration. None of these is more affected by religion than George
Eliot has been; nor does it form a greater element in their writings than
in hers.
What is singular about George Eliot's position is, that she both affirms
and denies; she is deeply religious and yet rejects all religious
doctrines. No writer of the century has given religion a more important
relation to human interests or made it a larger element in his creative
work; and yet no other literary artist has so completely rejected all
positive belief in God and immortality. In her books she depicts every
phase of religious belief and life, and with sympathy and appreciation. A
very large proportion of her characters are clergymen or other religious
persons, who are described with accuracy and sympathy. Her own faith, the
theory of religion she accepts, is not given to any of her characters. What
she believes, appears only in her comments, and in the general effect which
life produces on the persons she describes. She believed Christianity is
subjectively true, that it is a fit expression of the inner nature and of
the spiritual wants of the soul. She did not propagate the pantheism of
Spinoza or the theism of Francis Newman, because she did not regard them as
so near the truth as the Christianity of Paul. As intellectual theories
they may have been preferable to her, but from the outlook of feeling which
she ever occupied, Paul was the truer teacher, and especially because his
teachings are linked with the spiritual desires and outpourings of many
generations. The spontaneous movements of the human mind, which have taken
possession of vast numbers of people through long periods of time, have a
depth of meaning which the speculations of no individual theorizer can ever
possess. Especially did she regard Christianity as a pure and noble
expression of the soul's inner wants and aspirations. It is an objective
realization of feeling and sentiment, it gives purpose and meaning to man's
cravings for a diviner life, it links generation to generation in a
continued series of beautiful traditions and noble inspirations. Her
intellectual view of the subject was expressed to a friend in these words:
Deism seems to me the most incoherent of all systems, but to
Christianity I feel no objection but its want of evidence.
She also expressed more sympathy with the simple faith of the multitude
than with the intellectual speculations of philosophers and theologians;
and again, she said that she felt more sympathy with than divergence from
the narrowest and least cultivated believer in Christianity. As a vehicle
of the accumulated hopes and traditions of the world's feeling and sorrow
she appreciated Christianity, saw its beauty, felt deeply in sympathy with
its spirit of renunciation, accepted its ideal of a divine life. She
learned from Feuerbach that religion, that Christianity, gives fit
expression to the emotional life and spiritual aspirations of man, and that
what it finds within in no degree corresponds with that which surrounds man
without.
Barren and lifeless as this view must seem to most persons, it was a source
of great confidence and inspiration to George Eliot. It enabled her to
appreciate the religious experiences of men, to portray most accurately and
sympathetically a great variety of religious believers, and to give this
side of life its place and proportion. At the same time, it was a personal
satisfaction to her to be able to keep in unbroken sympathy with the
religious experiences of her childhood and youth while intellectually
unable to accept the beliefs on which these experiences rested. More than
this, she believed that religion and spirituality of life are necessary
elements of human existence, that man can never cast them off, and that man
will lead a happy and harmonious life only when they have a true and
fitting expression in his culture and civilization. She maintained, with
Sara Hennell, that we may retain the religious sentiments in all their glow
and in all their depth of influence, at the same time that the doctrines of
theology and all those conceptions of nature and man on which they rest are
rejected; that we may have a disposition of the heart akin to that of the
prophets and saints of religion, while we intellectually cast aside all
which gave meaning to their faith and devotion. According to George Eliot,
religion rests upon feeling and the relations of man to humanity, as well
as upon his irreversible relations to the universe. In _The Mill on the
Floss_ she has given a definition of it, in speaking of Maggie's want of
that knowledge of the irreversible laws within and without her, which,
governing the habits, becomes morality, and developing the feelings of
submission and dependence, becomes religion. [Footnote: Book IV.,
chapter III.]
It is the human side of religion which interests George Eliot, its
influence morally, its sympathetic impulse, its power to comfort and
console. Its supernatural elements seem to have little influence over her
mind, at least only so far as they serve the moral aims of life. It is
humanity which attracts her mind, inspires her ideal hopes, kindles her
enthusiasms. Religion, apart from human encouragement and elevation, the
suppression of human sin and sorrow, and the increase of human sympathy and
joy, has little attraction for her. She takes no ground of opposition to
the beliefs of others, expresses no contempt for any form of belief in God;
but she measures all beliefs by their moral influence and their power to
enkindle the enthusiasm of humanity.
The pantheistic theism defended by Lewes in his book on Comte, in 1853,
seems to have been also accepted by George Eliot. We are told that her mind
long wavered between the two, though pantheism was less acceptable than
theism, on account of its moral indifference. It was undoubtedly the moral
bearings of the subject which all the time had the greatest weight with
her, and probably Kant's position had not a little effect on her opinions.
She came, at least, to find final satisfaction in agnosticism, to believe
that all intellectual speculations on the subject are in vain. At the same
time, her moral convictions grew stronger, and she believed in the power of
moral activity to work out a solution of life when no other can be found.
At this point she stood with Kant rather than with Comte, in accepting the
moral nature as a true guide. She very zealously believed with Fichte in a
moral order of the world, approving of the truth which underlies the words
of Fichte's English disciple, Matthew Arnold, when he discourses of "the
Eternal, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness." Her positive
convictions and beliefs on the subject lie in this direction, and she
firmly accepted the idea of a moral order and purpose. So much she thought
we can know and rely on; beyond this she believed we can know nothing. Her
later convictions on this subject have been expressed in a graphic manner
by one of her friends. "I remember how," says this person, "at Cambridge,
I walked with her once in the Fellows' Garden, of Trinity, on an evening
of rainy May; and she, stirred somewhat beyond her wont, and taking as her
text the three words which have been used so often as the inspiring
trumpet-calls of man,--the words _God, Immortality, Duty_,--pronounced,
with terrible emphasis, how inconceivable was the _first_, how unbelievable
the _second_, and yet how peremptory and absolute the _third_. Never,
perhaps, have sterner accents affirmed the sovereignty of impersonal and
unrecompensed law. I listened, and night fell; her grave, majestic
countenance turned towards me like a sibyl's in the gloom; it was as though
she withdrew from my grasp, one by one, the two scrolls of promise, and
left me the third scroll only, awful with inevitable fates." [Footnote:
F.W.H. Myers in The Century Magazine for November, 1881.] All her later
writings, at least, confirm this testimony to her assertion of the
inconceivableness of God, and her open denial of faith in theism. She
cannot have gone so far as to assert the non-existence of God, affirming
only that she could not conceive of such a being as actually existing. She
could not believe in a personal God, but Lewes's conception of a dynamic
life was doubtless acceptable.
With as much emphasis she pronounced immortality unbelievable. She early
accepted the theory of Charles Bray and Sara Hennell, that we live
hereafter only in the life of the race. The moral bearings of the subject
here also were most effective over her mind, for she felt that what we
ought most of all to consider is our relations to our fellow-men, and that
another world can have little real effect upon our present living. In her
_Westminster Review_ article on "Evangelical Teaching" as presented in
Young's _Night Thoughts_, she criticises the following declaration:--
"Who tells me he denies his soul immortal,
What'er his boast, has told me he's a knave.
His duty 'tis to love himself alone,
Nor care though mankind perish, if he smiles."
Her comments on these lines of Young's are full of interest, in view of her
subsequent teachings, and they open an insight into her tendencies of mind
very helpful to those who would understand her fully. Her interest in all
that is human, her craving for a more perfect development of human sympathy
and co-operation, are very clearly to be seen.
We may admit that if the better part of virtue consists, as Young
appears to think, in contempt for mortal joys, in "meditation of our
own decease," and in "applause" of God in the style of a congratulatory
address to Her Majesty--all which has small relation to the well-being
of mankind on this earth--the motive to it must be gathered from
something that lies quite outside the sphere of human sympathy. But,
for certain other elements of virtue, which are of more obvious
importance to untheological minds,--a delicate sense of our neighbor's
rights, an active participation in the joys and sorrows of our
fellow-men, a magnanimous acceptance of privation or suffering for
ourselves when it is the condition of good to others,--in a word, the
extension and intensification of our sympathetic nature,--we think it
of some importance to contend that they have no more direct relation
to the belief in a future state than the interchange of gases in the
lungs has to the plurality of worlds. Nay, to us it is conceivable
that in some minds the deep pathos lying in the thought of human
mortality--that we are here for a little while and then vanish away,
that this earthly life is all that is given to our loved ones and to
our many suffering fellow-men--lies nearer the fountains of moral
emotion than the conception of extended existence. And surely it ought
to be a welcome fact, if the thought of _mortality_, as well as of
immortality, be favorable to virtue. Do writers of sermons and
religious novels prefer that we should be vicious in order that there
may be a more evident political and social necessity for printed
sermons and clerical fictions? Because learned gentlemen are
theological, are we to have no more simple honesty and good-will? We
can imagine that the proprietors of a patent water-supply have a dread
of common springs; but, for our own part, we think there cannot be too
great security against a lack of fresh water or of pure morality. To us
it is a matter of unmixed rejoicing that this latter necessary of
healthful life is independent of theological ink, and that its
evolution is insured in the interaction of human souls as certainly as
the evolution of science or art, with which, indeed, it is but a twin
ray, melting into them with undefinable limits.
The considerations here presented are very effective ones, and quite as
truthful as effective. There are human supports for morality of the most
important and far-reaching character, and such as are outside of any
theological considerations. We ought, as George Eliot so well says, to
rejoice that the reasons for being moral are manifold, that sympathy with
others, as well as the central fires of personality, or the craving to be
in harmony with the Eternal, is able to conduce to a righteous conduct. Her
objections to Young's narrow and selfish defence of immortality are well
presented and powerful, but they do not touch such high considerations as
those offered by Kant. The craving for personal freedom and perfection is
as strong and as helpful to the race as sympathy for others and yearning to
lift up the weak and fallen. When the sense of personality is gone, man
loses much of his character; and personality rests on a deep spiritual
foundation which does not mean egotism merely, but which does mean for the
majority a conviction of a continued existence. The tendency of the present
time is to dwell less upon the theological and more upon the human motives
to conduct; but it is to be doubted if the highest phases of morality can
be retained without belief in God and a future life. The common virtues,
the sympathetic motives to conduct, the spirit of helpfulness, may be
retained intact, and even increased in power and efficiency, by those
motives George Eliot presents; but the loftier virtues of personal heroism
and devotion to truth in the face of martyrdom of one form or another, the
saintly craving for purity and holiness, and the sturdy spirit of liberty
which will suffer no bonds to exist, can be had in their full development
only with belief that God calls us to seek for perfect harmony with
himself. Kant's view that a divine law within, the living word of God,
calls ever to us as personal beings to attain the perfection of our natures
in the perfection of the race, and in conformity to the eternal law of
righteousness, is far nobler and truer than that which George Eliot
accepted.