of men on each other, are the effects of conduct wrought out in the
individual. George Eliot believes in "the orderly sequence by which the
seed brings forth a crop after its kind." All evil is injurious to man,
destructive of the integrity of his life. She teaches the doctrine of
Nemesis with as much conviction, thoroughness and eloquence as the old
Greek dramatists, making sin to be punished, and wrong-doing to be
destructive. Sometimes she presents this doctrine with all the stern,
unpitying vigor of an Aeschylus, as a dire effect of wrong that comes upon
men with an unrelenting mercilessness. In _Janet's Repentance_ she says,--
Nemesis is lame, but she is of colossal stature, like the gods; and
sometimes, while her sword is not yet unsheathed, she stretches out her
huge left arm and grasps her victim. The mighty hand is invisible, but
the victim totters under the dire clutch.
Her doctrine of Nemesis resembles that of the old Greeks more than that of
the modern optimists and theists. Hers is not the idealistic conception of
compensation, which measures out an exact proportion of punishment for
every sin, and of happiness for every virtuous action. Wrong-doing injures
others as well as those who commit the evil deed, and moral effects reach
far beyond those who set them in operation. Very explicitly is this fact
presented in _The Mill on the Floss_.
So deeply inherent is it in this life of ours that men have to suffer
for each other's sins, so inevitably diffusive is human suffering, that
even justice makes its victims, and we can conceive no retribution that
does not spread beyond its mark in pulsations of unmerited pain.
In _Adam Bede_, Parson Irwine says to Arthur,--
Consequences are unpitying. Our deeds carry their terrible consequences
quite apart from any fluctuations that went before--consequences that
are hardly ever confined to ourselves.
Yet wrong-doing does not go unpunished, for the law of moral cause and
effect ever holds good. This is the teaching of the first chapter of _Felix
Holt_.
There is seldom any wrong-doing which does not carry along with it some
downfall of blindly climbing hopes, some hard entail of suffering, some
quickly satiated desire that survives, with the life in death of old
paralytic vice, to see itself cursed by its woeful progeny--some tragic
mark of kinship in the one brief life to the far-stretching life that
went before, and to the life that is to come after, such as has raised
the pity and terror of men ever since they began to discern between
will and destiny. But these things are often unknown to the world, for
there is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that make
human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying
existence. There are glances of hatred that stab and raise no cry of
murder; robberies that leave man or woman forever beggared of peace and
joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer--committed to no sound except that
of low moans in the night, seen in no writing except that made on the
face by the slow months of suppressed anguish and early morning tears.
Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into
no human ear.
In the same novel we are told, that--
To the end of men's struggles a penalty will remain for those who sink
from the ranks of the heroes into the crowd for whom the heroes fight
and die.
The same teaching is to be found in the motto of _Daniel Deronda_, where we
are bidden to fear the evil tendencies of our own souls.
Let thy chief terror be of thine own soul:
There, 'mid the throng of hurrying desires
That trample o'er the dead to seize their spoil,
Lurks vengeance, footless, irresistible
As exhalations laden with slow death,
And o'er the fairest troop of captured joys
Breathes pallid pestilence.
The manner in which George Eliot believes Nemesis works out her results has
already been indicated. Her effects do not appear in any outward and
palpable results, necessarily; her method is often unknown to men, hidden
even from the keenest eyes. Evil causes produce evil results, that is all;
and these are shown in the most subtle and secret results of what life is.
One of her methods is indicated in _Adam Bede_.
Nemesis can seldom forge a sword for herself out of our consciences--
out of the suffering we feel in the suffering we may have caused; there
is rarely metal enough there to make an effective weapon. Our moral
sense learns the manners of good society, and smiles when others smile;
but when some rude person gives rough names to our actions, she is apt
to take part against us.
_The Mill on the Floss_ reflects this thought.
Retribution may come from any voice; the hardest, crudest most imbruted
urchin at the street-corner can inflict it.
More effective still is that punishment which comes of our own inward sense
of wrong-doing. George Eliot makes Parson Irwine say that "the inward
suffering is the worst form of Nemesis." This is well illustrated in the
experience of Gwendolen, who, after the death of her husband at Geneva, is
anxious to leave that place.
For what place, though it were the flowery vale of Enna, may not the
inward sense turn into a circle of punishment where the flowers are no
better than a crop of flame-tongues burning the soles of our feet?
Even before this, Gwendolen had come to realize the dire effects of selfish
conduct in that dread and bitterness of spirit which subdued her and mocked
all her hopes and joys.
Passion is of the nature of seed, and finds nourishment within, tending
to a predominance which determines all currents toward itself, and
makes the whole life its tributary. And the intensest form of hatred is
that rooted in fear, which compels to silence and drives vehemence into
a constructive vindictiveness, an imaginary annihilation of the
deserted object, something like the hidden rites of vengeance with
which the persecuted have made a dark vent for their rage, and soothed
their suffering into dumbness. Such hidden rites went on in the
secrecy of Gwendolen's mind, but not with soothing effect--rather with
the effect of a struggling terror. Side by side with the dread of her
husband had grown the self-dread which urged her to flee from the
pursuing images wrought by her pent-up impulse. The vision of her past
wrong-doing, and what it had brought on her, came with a pale ghastly
illumination over every imagined deed that was a rash effort at
freedom, such as she had made in her marriage. [Footnote: Chapter LIV.]
The way in which wrong-doing affects us to our hurt is suggested also in
_Romola_, where its results upon the inward life are explicitly revealed.
Under every guilty secret there is hidden a brood of guilty wishes,
whose unwholesome infecting life is cherished by the darkness. The
contaminating effect of deeds lies less in the commission than in
the consequent adjustment of our desires--the enlistment of our
self-interest on the side of falsity; as, on the other hand, the
purifying effect of public confession springs from the fact that by it
the hope in lies is forever swept away, and the soul recovers the noble
attitude of simplicity.
In the same novel the effect of wrong-doing is regarded as an inward and
subduing fear of the consequences of our conduct. This dread so commonly
felt, and made a most effective motive by all religions, George Eliot
regards as the soul's testimony to the great law of retribution. Experience
that moral causes produce moral effects, as that law is every day taught
us, takes hold of feeling, and becomes a nameless dread of the avenging
powers.
Having once begun to explain away Baldassarre's claim, Tito's thought
showed itself as active as a virulent acid, eating its rapid way
through all the tissues of sentiment. His mind was destitute of that
dread which has been erroneously decried as if it were nothing higher
than a man's animal care for his own skin; that awe of the divine
Nemesis which was felt by religious pagans, and, though it took a more
positive form under Christianity, is still felt by the mass of mankind
simply as a vague fear at anything which is called wrong-doing. Such
terror of the unseen is so far above mere sensual cowardice that it
will annihilate that cowardice: it is the initial recognition of a
moral law restraining desire, and checks the hard bold scrutiny of
imperfect thought into obligations which can never be proved to have
any sanctity in the absence of feeling. "It is good," sing the old
Eumenides, in Aeschylus, "that fear should sit as the guardian of the
soul, forcing it into wisdom--good that men should carry a threatening
shadow in their hearts under the full sunshine; else how shall they
learn to revere the light?" That guardianship may become needless; but
only when all outward law has become needless--only when duty and love
have united in one stream and made a common force. [Footnote: Chapter
XI.]
Another form in which Nemesis punishes us is described in the essay on "A
Half-Breed" in _The Impressions of Theophrastus Such_. Mixtus was a man
with noble aims, but he was fascinated by Scintilla, and realized none of
his ideals. He was captivated by her prettiness, liveliness and music, and
then he was captured on his worldly side. She did not believe in "notions"
and reforms, and he succumbed to her wishes. As a result, his life was
crippled, he was always unsatisfied with himself. Of this form of
retribution George Eliot says,--
An early deep-seated love to which we become faithless has its
unfailing Nemesis, if only in that division of soul which narrows all
newer joys by the intrusion of regret and the established presentiment
of change. I refer not merely to the love of a person, but to the love
of ideas, practical beliefs and social habits. And faithlessness here
means not a gradual conversion dependent on enlarged knowledge, but a
yielding to seductive circumstance; not a conviction that the original
choice was a mistake, but a subjection to incidents that flatter a
growing desire. In this sort of love it is the forsaker who has the
melancholy lot; for an abandoned belief may be more effectively
vengeful than Dido. The child of a wandering tribe, caught young and
trained to polite life, if he feels a hereditary yearning, can run away
to the old wilds and get his nature into tune. But there is no such
recovery possible to the man who remembers what he once believed
without being convinced that he was in error, who feels within him
unsatisfied stirrings toward old beloved habits and intimacies from
which he has far receded without conscious justification or unwavering
sense of superior attractiveness in the new. This involuntary renegade
has his character hopelessly jangled and out of tune. He is like an
organ with its stops in the lawless condition of obtruding themselves
without method, so that hearers are amazed by the most unexpected
transitions--the trumpet breaking in on the flute, and the oboe
confounding both.
With a strong and eloquent energy, George Eliot teaches the natural
consequences of conduct. Every feeling, thought and deed has its effect,
comes to fruition. Desire modifies life, shapes our destiny, moulds us into
the image of its own nature. Actions become habits, become controlling
elements in our lives, and tend to work out their own legitimate results.
The whole of George Eliot's doctrine of retribution is, that human causes,
as much as any other, lead to their appropriate effects. Her frequent use
of the word _Nemesis_ indicates the idea she had of the inevitableness of
moral consequences, that a force once set in motion can never be recalled
in its effects, which make a permanent modification of human life in its
present and in its past. It was not the old doctrine of fate which she
presented, not any arbitrary inflictment from supernatural powers. The
inevitableness of moral consequences influenced her as a solemn and fearful
reality which man must strictly regard if he would find true manhood.
The doctrine of retribution is very clearly taught by George Eliot in her
comments. With a still greater distinctness it is taught in the development
of her characters. As we follow the careers of Hetty, Maggie, Tito,
Fedalma, Lydgate and Gwendolen we see how wonderful was George Eliot's
insight into the moral issues of life. Not only with these, but with all
her characters, we see a righteous moral unfoldment of character into its
effects. There is no compromise with evil in her pages; all selfishness,
wrong and crime comes to its proper results. The vanity and selfishness of
Hetty leads to what terrible crime and shame for her, and what misery for
others! Tito's selfishness and want of resolute purpose carries him
inevitably downward to a hideous end. What is so plain in the case of these
characters is as true, though not so palpable, in that of many others in
her books. Dorothea's conduct is clearly shown to develop into consequences
(as did Lydgate's) which were the natural results of what she thought, did
and was. Maggie's misery was the product of her conduct, the legitimate
outcome of it.
George Eliot goes beyond the conduct of any one person and its results, and
attempts to show how it is affected by the person's environment. It was
Maggie's family, education, social standing and personal qualities of mind
and heart which helped to determine for her the consequences of her
conduct. It was Dorothea's education and social environment which largely
helped to shape her career and to leave her bereaved of the largest
possibilities of which her life was capable. Gwendolen's life was largely
determined by her early training and by her social surroundings. Yet with
all these, life has its necessary issues, and Nemesis plays its part.
Retribution is for all; it is ever stern, just and inevitable. Just,
however, only in the sense that wrong-doing cannot escape its own effects,
but not just in the sense that the guiltless must often share the fate
of the guilty. Wrong-doing drags down to destruction many an innocent
person. It is to be said of George Eliot, however, that she never presents
any of her characters as doomed utterly by the past. However strong the
memories of the ages lay upon them, they are capable of self-direction.
Not one of her characters is wholly the victim of his environment. There
is no hint in _Middlemarch_ that Dorothea was not capable of heroism and
self-consecration. Her environment gave a wrong direction to her moral
purpose; but that purpose remained, and the moral nobleness of her mind was
not destroyed. Still, it is largely true, that in her books the individual
is sacrificed to his social environment. He is to renounce his own
personality for the sake of the race. Consequently his fate is linked with
that of others, and he must suffer from other men's deeds.
With all its limitations and defects, George Eliot's teaching concerning
the moral effects of conduct is wholesome and healthy. It rests on a solid
foundation of experience and scientific evidence. Her books are full of
moral stimulus and strengthening, because of the profound conviction with
which she has presented her conception of moral cause and effect. With her,
we must believe that moral sequences are as inevitable as the physical.
It would be very unjust to George Eliot to suppose that she left man in the
hands of a relentless moral order which manifests no tenderness and which
is incapable of pity and mercy. She did not believe in an Infinite Father,
full of love and forgiveness; that faith was not for her. Yet she did
believe in a providence which can assuage man's sorrows and deal tenderly
with his wrong-doing. While nature is stern and the moral sequences of life
unbending, man may be sympathetic and helpful. Man is to be the providence
of man; humanity is to be his tender forgiving Friend. A substitute so
poor for the old faith would seem to have little power of moral renovation
or sympathetic impulse in it; but it quickened George Eliot's mind with
enthusiasm and ardor. The "enthusiasm of humanity" filled her whole soul,
was a luminous hope in her heart and an inspiring purpose to her mind.
With Goethe and Carlyle she found in work for humanity the substitute
for all faith and the cure for all doubt. Faust finds for his life a
purpose, and for the universe a solution, when he comes to labor for the
practical improvement of humanity. This was George Eliot's own conclusion,
that it is enough for us to see the world about us made a little better
and more orderly by our efforts. All her noblest characters find in
altruism a substitute for religion, and they find there a moral anchorage.
She says very plainly in _Middlemarch_, that every doctrine is capable of
"eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct
fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men." To the same effect is her
saying in _Romola_, that "with the sinking of the high human trust the
dignity of life sinks too; we cease to believe in our own better self,
since that also is a part of the common nature which is degraded in
our thought; and all the finer impulses of the soul are dulled." In
_Janet's Repentance_ she has finely presented this faith in sympathetic
humanitarianism, showing how Janet found peace in the sick-room where all
had been doubt and trial before.
Day after day, with only short intervals of rest, Janet kept her place
in that sad chamber. No wonder the sick-room and the lazaretto have so
often been a refuge from the tossings of intellectual doubt--a place of
repose for the worn and wounded spirit. Here is a duty about which all
creeds and all philosophies are at one:--here, at least, the conscience
will not be dogged by doubt--the benign impulse will not be checked by
adverse theory: here you may begin to act without settling one
preliminary question. To moisten the sufferer's parched lips through
the long night-watches, to bear up the drooping head, to lift the
helpless limbs, to divine the want that can find no utterance beyond
the feeble motion of the hand or beseeching glance of the eye--these
are offices that demand no self-questionings, no casuistry, no assent
to propositions, no weighing of consequences. Within the four walls
where the stir and glare of the world are shut out, and every voice is
subdued,--where a human being lies prostrate, thrown on the tender
mercies of his fellow,--the moral relation of man to man is reduced to
its utmost clearness and simplicity: bigotry cannot confuse it, theory
cannot pervert it, passion, awed into quiescence, can neither pollute
nor perturb it. As we bend over the sick-bed all the forces of our
nature rush towards the channels of pity, of patience and of love, and
sweep down the miserable choking drift of our quarrels, our debates,
our would-be wisdom, and our clamorous, selfish desires. This blessing
of serene freedom from the importunities of opinion lies in all simple,
direct acts of mercy, and is one source of that sweet calm which is
often felt by the watcher in the sick-room, even when the duties there
are of a hard and terrible kind. [Footnote: Chapter XXIV.]
The basis of such sympathetic helpfulness she finds in the common sorrows
and trials of the world. All find life hard, pain comes to all, none are to
be found unacquainted with sorrow. These common experiences draw men
together in sympathy, unite them in a common purpose of assuagement and
help. The sorrow of Adam Bede made him more gentle and patient with his
brother.
It was part of that growing tenderness which came from the sorrow at
work within him. For Adam, though you see him quite master of himself,
working hard and delighting in his work after his inborn inalienable
nature, had not outlived his sorrow--had not felt it slip from him as a
temporary burden, and leave him the same man again. Do any of us? God
forbid! It would be a poor result of all our anguish and our wrestling
if we won nothing but our old selves at the end of it--if we could
return to the same blind loves, the same self-confident blame, the same
light thoughts of human suffering, the same frivolous gossip over
blighted human lives, the same feeble sense of that Unknown toward
which we have sent forth irrepressible cries in our loneliness. Let us
rather be thankful that our sorrow lives in us as an indestructible
force, only changing its form, as forces do, and passing from pain into
sympathy--the one poor word which includes all our best insight and our
best love. Not that this transformation of pain into sympathy had
completely taken place in Adam yet; there was still a great remnant of
pain, which he felt would subsist as long as _her_ pain was not a
memory, but an existing thing, which he must think of as renewed with
the light of every morning. But we get accustomed to mental as well as
bodily pain, without, for all that, losing our sensibility to it; it
becomes a habit of our lives, and we cease to imagine a condition of
perfect ease as possible for us. Desire is chastened into submission;
and we are contented with our day when we are able to bear our grief in
silence, and act as if we were not suffering. For it is at such periods
that the sense of our lives having visible and invisible relations
beyond any of which either our present or prospective self is the
centre, grows like a muscle that we are obliged to lean on and exert.
Armgart finds that "true vision comes only with sorrow." Sorrow and
suffering create a sympathy which sends us to the relief of others. "Pain
must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into
compassion," we are told in _Middlemarch_. In the trying hours of Maggie
Tulliver's life she came to know--
that new sense which is the gift of sorrow--that susceptibility to the
bare offices of humanity which raises them into a bond of loving
fellowship.
Again, she learns that "more helpful than all wisdom is one draught of
simple human pity that will not forsake us." Man is in this way brought to
live for man, to suffer in his sufferings, to be mercifully tender and
pitiful with him in his temptations and trials. Sympathy builds up the
moral life, gives an ethical meaning to man's existence. Thus humanity
becomes a providence to man, and it is made easier for him to bear his
sufferings and to be comforted in his sorrows. Nemesis is stern, but man is
pitiful; retribution is inexorable, but humanity is sympathetic. Nature
never relents, and there is no God who can so forgive us our sins as to
remove their legitimate effects; but man can comfort us with his love, and
humanity can teach us to overcome retribution by righteous conduct.
All idealistic rights are to be laid aside, according to her theory, all
personal claims and motives are to be renounced. In the duties we owe to
others, life is to find its rightful expression. In _Janet's Repentance_
she says,--
The idea of duty, that recognition of something to be lived for beyond
the mere satisfaction of self, is to the moral life what the addition
of a great central ganglion is to animal life. No man can begin to
mould himself on a faith or an idea without rising to a higher order
of experience: a principle of subordination, of self-mastery, has
been introduced into his nature; he is no longer a mere bundle of
impressions, desires and impulses.
To live for self, George Eliot seems to regard as immoral; self is to be
ignored except in so far as it can be made to serve humanity. As rights are
individual they are repudiated, and the demand for them is regarded as
revolutionary and destructive.
That man is a moral being because he is a social being she carries to its
farthest extreme in some of her teachings, as when she makes public opinion
the great motive power to social improvement. Felix Holt pronounces public
opinion--the ruling belief in society about what is right and what is
wrong, what is honorable and what is shameful--to be the greatest power
under heaven. In the "Address to Working Men, by Felix Holt," published in
_Blackwood's Magazine_, Felix is made to say to his fellows,--