not because the higher life calls upon you to renounce them. The higher
life begins for us, my daughter, when we renounce our own will to bow
before a Divine law. That seems hard to you. It is the portal of
wisdom, and freedom, and blessedness. And the symbol of it hangs before
you. That wisdom is the religion of the cross. And you stand aloof from
it; you are a pagan; you have been taught to say, 'I am as the wise men
who lived before the time when the Jew of Nazareth was crucified.' And
that is your wisdom! To be as the dead whose eyes are closed, and whose
ear is deaf to the work of God that has been since their time. What has
your dead wisdom done for you, my daughter? It has left you without a
heart for the neighbors among whom you dwell, without care for the
great work by which Florence is to be regenerated and the world made
holy; it has left you without a share in the Divine life which quenches
the sense of suffering self in the ardors of an ever-growing love. And
now, when the sword has pierced your soul, you say, 'I will go away; I
cannot bear my sorrow.' And you think nothing of the sorrow and the
wrong that are within the walls of the city where you dwell; you would
leave your place empty, when it ought to be filled with your pity and
your labor. If there is wickedness in the streets, your steps should
shine with the light of purity; if there is a cry of anguish, you, my
daughter, because you know the meaning of the cry, should be there to
still it. My beloved daughter, sorrow has come to teach you a new
worship; the sign of it hangs before you."
This teaching of renunciation is no less distinctly presented in _The Mill
on the Floss_, the chief ethical aim of which is its inculcation. It is
also there associated with the Catholic form of its expression, through
Maggie's reading of _The Imitation of Christ_, a book which was George
Eliot's constant companion, and was found by her bedside after her death.
It was the spirit of that book which attracted George Eliot, not its
doctrines. Its lofty spirit of submission and renunciation she admired; and
she believed that altruism can be made real only through tradition, only as
associated with past heroisms and strivings and ideals. As an embodiment of
man's craving for perfect union with humanity, for full and joyous
submission to his lot, the old forms of faith are sacred. They carry the
hopes of ages; they are a pictured poem of man's inward strivings. To break
away from these memories is to forsake one's home, is to repudiate one's
mother. We cannot intellectually accept them, we cannot assent to the
dogmas associated with them; but the forms are the spontaneous expressions
of the heart, while the dogmas are an after-thought of the inquiring
intellect. The real meaning of the cross of Christ is self-sacrifice for
humanity's sake; that was its inspiration, that has ever been its true
import. It was this view of the subject which made George Eliot so
continuously associate her new teachings with the old expressions of faith.
In altruism she believes is to be found the hope of the world, the cure of
every private pain and grief. Altruism means living for and in the race, as
a willing member of the social organic life of humanity, as desiring not
one's own good but the welfare of others. That doctrine she applies to
Maggie's case. This young girl was dissatisfied with her life, out of
harmony with her surroundings, and could not accept the theories of life
given her.
She wanted some explanation of this hard, real life; the
unhappy-looking father, seated at the dull breakfast-table; the
childish, bewildered mother; the little sordid tasks that filled the
hours, or the more oppressive emptiness of weary, joyless leisure; the
need of some tender, demonstrative love; the cruel sense that Tom
didn't mind what she thought or felt, and that they were no longer
playfellows together; the privation of all pleasant things that had
come to _her_ more than to others--she wanted some key that would
enable her to understand, and in understanding endure, the heavy weight
that had fallen on her young heart. If she had been taught "real
learning and wisdom, such as great men knew," she thought she should
have held the secrets of life; if she had only books, that she might
learn for herself what wise men knew! Saints and martyrs had never
interested Maggie so much as sages and poets. She know little of saints
and martyrs, and had gathered, as a general result of her teaching,
that they were a temporary provision against the spread of Catholicism,
and had all died at Smithfield.
Into the darkness of Maggie's life a light suddenly comes in the shape of
the immortal book of Thomas à Kempis. Why that book; why along such a way
should the light come? The answer is, that George Eliot meant to teach
certain ideas. It is this fact which justifies her reader in taking these
scenes of her novels, these words spoken in the interludes, as genuine
reflections and transcripts of her own mind. Maggie turns over a parcel of
books brought her by Bob Jakin, to find little in them--
but _Thomas à Kempis_. The name had come across her in her reading, and
she felt the satisfaction, which every one knows, of getting some ideas
to attach to a name that strays solitary in the memory. She took up the
little old clumsy book with some curiosity; it had the corners turned
down in many places, and some hand, now forever quiet, had made at
certain passages strong pen-and-ink marks, long since browned by time.
Maggie turned from leaf to leaf, and read where the quiet hand pointed.
"Know that the love of thyself doth hurt thee more than anything in the
world.... If thou seekest this or that, and wouldst be here or there to
enjoy thy own will and pleasure, thou shalt never be quiet nor free
from care; for in everything somewhat will be wanting, and in every
place there will be some that will cross thee.... Both above and below,
which way soever thou dost turn thee, everywhere thou shalt find the
cross; and everywhere of necessity thou must have patience, if thou
wilt have inward peace, and enjoy an everlasting crown.... If thou
desire to mount unto this height, thou must set out courageously, and
lay the axe to the root, that thou mayest pluck up and destroy that
hidden inordinate inclination to thyself, and unto all private and
earthly good. On this sin, that a man inordinately loveth himself,
almost all dependeth, whatsoever is thoroughly to be overcome; which
evil being once overcome and subdued, there will presently ensue great
peace and tranquillity.... It is but little thou sufferest in
comparison of them that have suffered so much, were so strongly
tempted, so grievously afflicted, so many ways tried and exercised.
Thou oughtest therefore to call to mind the more heavy sufferings of
others, that thou mayest the easier bear thy little adversities. And if
they seem not little unto thee, beware lest thy impatience be the cause
thereof.... Blessed are those ears that receive the whispers of the
divine voice, and listen not to the whisperings of the world. Blessed
are those ears which hearken not unto the voice which soundeth
outwardly, but unto the Truth which teacheth inwardly."
A strange thrill of awe passed through Maggie while she read, as if she
had been wakened in the night by a strain of solemn music, telling of
beings whose souls had been astir while hers was in stupor. She went on
from one brown mark to another, where the quiet hand seemed to point,
hardly conscious that she was reading--seeming rather to listen while a
low voice said,--
"Why dost thou here gaze about, since this is not the place of thy
rest? In heaven ought to be thy dwelling, and all earthly things are to
be looked on as they forward thy journey thither. All things pass away,
and thou together with them. Beware thou cleave not unto them lest thou
be entangled and perish.... If a man should give all his substance, yet
it is as nothing. And if he should do great penances, yet are they but
little. And if he should attain to all knowledge, he is yet far off.
And if he should be of great virtue and very fervent devotion, yet is
there much wanting; to wit, one thing which is most necessary for him.
What is that? That having left all, he leave himself, and go wholly out
of himself, and retain nothing of self-love.... I have often said unto
thee, and now again I say the same. Forsake thyself, resign thyself,
and thou shalt enjoy much inward peace.... Then shall all vain
imaginations, evil perturbations and superfluous cares fly away; then
shall immoderate fear leave thee, and inordinate love shall die."
Maggie drew a long breath and pushed her heavy hair back, as if to see
a sudden vision more clearly. Here, then, was a secret of life that
would enable her to renounce all other secrets--here was a sublime
height to be reached without the help of outward things--here was
insight, and strength, and conquest, to be won by means entirely within
her own soul, where a supreme Teacher was waiting to be heard. It
flashed through her like the suddenly apprehended solution of a
problem, that all the miseries of her young life had come from fixing
her heart on her own pleasure, as if that were the central necessity of
the universe; and for the first time she saw the possibility of
shifting the position from which she looked at the gratification of her
own desires, of taking her stand out of herself, and looking at her own
life as an insignificant part of a divinely guided whole. She read on
and on in the old book, devouring eagerly the dialogues with the
invisible Teacher, the pattern of sorrow, the source of all strength;
returning to it after she had been called away, and reading until the
sun went down behind the willows. With all the hurry of an imagination
that could never rest in the present, she sat in the deepening twilight
forming plans of self-humiliation and entire devotedness, and, in the
ardor of first discovery, renunciation seemed to her the entrance into
that satisfaction which she had so long been craving in vain. She had
not perceived--how could she until she had lived longer?--the inmost
truth of the old monk's outpourings, that renunciation remains sorrow,
though a sorrow borne willingly. Maggie was still panting for
happiness, and was in ecstasy because she had found the key to it.
She knew nothing of doctrines and systems--of mysticism or quietism;
but this voice out of the far-off middle ages was the direct
communication of a human soul's belief and experience, and came to
Maggie as an unquestioned message. I suppose that is the reason why the
small, old-fashioned book, for which you need only pay sixpence at a
book-stall, works miracles to this day, turning bitter waters into
sweetness, while expensive sermons and treatises, newly issued, leave
all things as they were before. It was written down by a hand that
waited for the heart's promptings; it is the chronicle of a solitary
hidden anguish, struggle, trust and triumph,--not written on velvet
cushions to teach endurance to those who are treading with bleeding
feet on the stones. And so it remains to all time a lasting record of
human needs and human consolations; the voice of a brother who, ages
ago, felt, and suffered, and renounced,--in the cloister, perhaps, with
serge gown and tonsured head, with much chanting and long fasts, and
with a fashion of speech different from ours,--but under the same
silent, far-off heavens, and with the same passionate desires, the same
strivings, the same failures, the same weariness. [Footnote: The Mill
on the Floss, Book IV., chapter III.]
Life now has a meaning for Maggie, its secret has been in some measure
opened. Only by bitter experiences does she at last learn the full meaning
of that word; but all her after-life is told for us in order that the depth
and breadth and height of that meaning may be unfolded. Very soon Maggie is
heard saying,
"Our life is determined for us--and it makes the mind very free when we
give up wishing, and only think of bearing what is laid upon us, and
doing what is given us to do."
It is George Eliot who really speaks these words; hers is the thought which
inspires them.
Yet Maggie has not learned to give up wishing; and the sorrow, the tragedy
of her life comes in consequence. She is pledged in love to Philip, the son
of the bitter enemy of her family, and is attracted to Stephen, the lover
of her cousin Lucy. A long contest is fought out in her life between
attraction and duty; between individual preferences and moral obligations.
The struggle is hard, as when Stephen avows his love, and she replies,--
"Oh, it is difficult--life is very difficult. It seems right to me
sometimes that we should follow our strongest feeling; but, then, such
feelings continually come across the ties that all our former life has
made for us--the ties that have made others dependent on us--and would
cut them in two. If life were quite easy and simple, as it might have
been in Paradise, and we could always see that one being first toward
whom--I mean, if life did not make duties for us before love comes,
love would be a sign two people ought to belong to each other. But I
see--I feel that it is not so now; there are things we must renounce in
life; some of us must resign love. Many things are difficult and dark
to me, but I see one thing quite clearly--that I must not, cannot seek
my own happiness by sacrificing others. Love is natural; but surely
pity, and faithfulness and memory are natural too. And they would live
in me still and punish me if I did not obey them. I should be haunted
by the suffering I had caused. Our love would be poisoned."
Against her will she elopes with Stephen, or her departure with him is so
understood; but us soon as she realizes what she has done, her better
nature asserts itself, and she refuses to go on. Stephen pleads that the
natural law which has drawn them together is greater than every other
obligation; but Maggie replies,--
"If we judged in that way, there would be a warrant for all treachery
and cruelty. We should justify breaking the most sacred ties that can
ever be formed on earth."
He then asks what is outward faithfulness and constancy without love.
Maggie pleads the better spirit.
"That seems right--at first; but when I look further, I'm sure it is
not right. Faithfulness and constancy mean something else besides doing
what is easiest and pleasantest to ourselves. They mean renouncing
whatever is opposed to the reliance others have in us--whatever would
cause misery to those whom the course of our lives has made dependent
on us. If we--if I had been better, nobler, those claims would have
been so strongly present with me--I should have felt them pressing on
my heart so continually, just as they do now in the moments when my
conscience is awake, that the opposite feeling would never have grown
in me as it has done: it would have been quenched at once. I should
have prayed for help so earnestly--I should have rushed away as we rush
from hideous danger. I feel no excuse for myself--none. I should never
have failed toward Lucy and Philip as I have done, if I had not been
weak, selfish and hard--able to think of their pain without a pain to
myself that would have destroyed all temptation. Oh. what is Lucy
feeling now? She believed in me--she loved me--she was so good to me!
Think of her!"
She can see no good for herself which is apart from the good of others, no
joy which is the means of pain to those she holds dear. The past has made
ties and; memories which no present love or future joy can take away; she
must be true to past obligations as well as present inclinations.
"There are memories and affections, and longing after perfect goodness,
that have such a strong hold on me, they would never quit me for long;
they would come back and be pain to me--repentance. I couldn't live in
peace if I put the shadow of a wilful sin between myself and God. I
have caused sorrow already--I know--I feel it; but I have never
deliberately consented to it; I have never said, 'They shall suffer
that I may have joy.'"
And again, she says,--
"We can't choose happiness either for ourselves or for another; we
can't tell where that will lie. We can only choose whether we will
indulge ourselves in the present moment, or whether we will renounce
that, for the sake of obeying the divine voice within us--for the sake
of being true to all the motives that sanctify our lives. I know this
belief is hard; it has slipped away from me again and again; but I have
felt that if I let it go forever I should have no light through the
darkness of this life."
In these remarkable passages from _Romola_ and _The Mill on the Floss_,
George Eliot presented her own theory of life. One of her friends, in
giving an account of her moral influence, speaks of "the impression she
produced, that one of the greatest duties of life was that of resignation.
Nothing was more impressive as exhibiting the power of feelings to survive
the convictions which gave them birth, than the earnestness with which she
dwelt, on this as the great and real remedy for all the ills of life. On
one occasion she appeared to apply it to herself in speaking of the short
space of life that lay before her, and the large amount of achievement
that must be laid aside as impossible to compress into it--and the sad,
gentle tones in which the word _resignation_ was uttered, still vibrate on
the ear." [Footnote: Contemporary Review, February, 1881.] Not only
renunciation but resignation was by her held to be a prime requisite of a
truly moral life. Man must renounce many things for the sake of humanity,
but he must also resign himself to endure many things because the universe
is under the dominion of invariable laws. Much of pain and sorrow must come
to us which can in no way be avoided. A true resignation and renunciation
will enable us to turn pain and sorrow into the means of a higher life. In
_Adam Bede_ she says that "deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called
a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state." She teaches
that man can attain true unity with the race only through renunciation,
and renunciation always means suffering. Self-sacrifice means hardship,
struggle and sorrow; but the true end of life can only be attained when
self is renounced for that higher good which comes through devotion to
humanity. Her noblest characters, Maggie Tulliver, Romola, Jubal, Fedalma,
Armgart, attain peace only when they have found their lives taken up in the
good of others. To her the highest happiness consists in being loyal to
duty, and it "often brings so much pain with it that we can only tell it
from pain by its being what we would choose before everything else, because
our souls see it is good."
George Eliot's religion is without God, without immortality, without a
transcendent spiritual aim and duty. It consists in a humble submission to
the invariable laws of the universe, a profound love of humanity, a
glorification of feeling and affection, and a renunciation of personal and
selfish desires for an altruistic devotion to the good of the race. Piety
without God, renunciation without immortality, mysticism without the
supernatural, everywhere finds eloquent presentation in her pages. Offering
that which she believes satisfies the spiritual wants of man, she yet
rejects all the legitimate objects of spiritual desire. Even when her
characters hold to the most fervent faith, and use with the greatest
enthusiasm the old expressions of piety, it is the human elements in that
faith which are made to appear most prominently. We are told that no
radiant angel came across the gloom with a clear message for Romola in her
moment of direst distress and need. Then we are told that many such see no
angels; and we are made to realize that angelic voices are to George Eliot
the voices of her fellows.
In those times, as now, there were human beings who never saw angels or
heard perfectly clear messages. Such truth as came to them was brought
confusedly in the voices and deeds of men not at all like the seraphs
of unfailing wing and piercing vision--men who believed falsities as
well as truths, and did the wrong as well as the right. The helping
hands stretched out to them were the hands of men who stumbled and
often saw dimly, so that these beings unvisited by angels had no other
choice than to grasp that stumbling guidance along the path of reliance
and action which is the path of life, or else to pause in loneliness
and disbelief, which is no path, but the arrest of inaction and death.
The same thought is expressed in _Silas Marner_, that man is to expect no
help and consolation except from his fellow-man.
In old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led
them away from the city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels
now. But yet men are led away from threatening destruction: a hand is
put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and
bright land, so that they look no more backward; and the hand may he a
little child's.
Even more explicit in its rejection of all sources of help, except the
human, is the motto to "The Lifted Veil."
Give me no light, great Heaven, but such as turns
To energy of human fellowship;
No powers beyond the growing heritage
That makes completer manhood.
The purpose of this story is to show that supernatural knowledge is a curse
to man. The narrator of the story is gifted with the power of divining even
the most secret thoughts of those about him, and of beholding coming
events. This knowledge brings him only evil and sorrow. His spiritual
insight did not save him from folly, and he is led to say,--
"There is no short cut, no patent tram-road to wisdom. After all the
centuries of invention, the soul's path lies through the thorny
wilderness, which must be still trodden in solitude, with bleeding
feet, with sobs for help, as it was trodden by them of old time."
He also discourses of the gain which it is to man that the future is hidden
from his knowledge,
"So absolute is our soul's need of something hidden and uncertain for
the maintenance of that doubt and hope and effort which are the breath
of its life, that if the whole future were laid bare to us beyond
to-day, the interest of all mankind would be bent on the hours that
lie between; we should pant after the uncertainties of our one morning
and our one afternoon; we should rush fiercely to the exchange for
our last possibility of speculation, of success, of disappointment;
we should have a glut of political prophets foretelling a crisis or
a no-crisis within the only twenty-four hours left open to prophecy.
Conceive the condition of the human mind if all propositions whatsoever
were self-evident except one, which was to become self-evident at
the close of a summer's day, but in the mean time might be the subject
of question, of hypothesis, of debate. Art and philosophy, literature
and science, would fasten like bees on that one proposition that had
the honey of probability in it, and be the more eager because their
enjoyment would end with sunset. Our impulses, our spiritual
activities, no more adjust themselves to the idea of their future
reality than the beating of our heart, or the irritability of our
muscles."
All is hidden from man that does not grow out of human experience, and
it is better so. Such is George Eliot's method of dealing with our craving
for a higher wisdom and a direct revelation. Such wisdom and such
revelation are not to be had, and they would not help man if he had them.
The mystery of existence rouses his curiosity, stimulates his powers,
develops art, religion, sympathy, and all that is best in human life. In
her presentations of the men and women most affected by religious motives
she adheres to this theory, and represents them as impelled, not by the
sense of God's presence, but by purely human considerations. She makes
Dorothea Brooke say,--
"I have always been thinking of the different ways in which
Christianity is taught, and whenever I find one way that makes it a
wider blessing than any other, I cling to that as the truest--I mean
that which takes in the most good of all kinds, and brings in the most
people as sharers in it."
Of the same character is the belief which comforts Dorothea, and takes the
place to her of prayer.
"That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know
what it is and cannot do what we would, we are a part of the divine
power against evil--widening the skirts of light and making the
struggle with darkness narrower."
Mr. Tryan, in _Janet's Repentance_, is a most ardent disciple of
Evangelicalism, and accepts all its doctrines; but George Eliot contrives
to show throughout the book, that all the value of his work and religion
consisted in the humanitarian spirit of renunciation he awakened.
George Eliot does not entirely avoid the supernatural, but she treats it as
unexplainable. Instances of her use of it are to be found in Adam Bede's
experience while at work on his father's coffin, in the visions of
Savonarola, and in Mordecai's strange faith in a coming successor to his
own faith and work. For Adam Bede's experience there is no explanation
given, nor for that curious power manifest in the "Lifted Veil." On the
other hand, the spiritual power of Savonarola and Mordecai have their
explanation, in George Eliot's philosophy, in that intuition which is
inherited insight. In her treatment of such themes she manifests her
appreciation of the great mystery which surrounds man's existence, but she
shows no faith in a spiritual world which impinges on the material, and
ever manifests itself in gleams and fore-tokenings.