majority--possessed of much wisdom and virtue, would not tolerate the
bad practices, the commercial lying and swindling, the poisonous
adulteration of goods, the retail cheating and the political bribery
which are carried on boldly in the midst of us. A majority has the
power of creating a public opinion. We could groan and his-s before we
had the franchise: if we had groaned and hissed in the right place, if
we had discerned better between good and evil, if the multitude of us
artisans and factory hands and miners and laborers of all sorts had
been skilful, faithful, well-judging, industrious, sober--and I don't
see how there can be wisdom and virtue anywhere without these
qualities--we should have made an audience that would have shamed the
other classes out of their share in the national vices. We should have
had better members of Parliament, better religious teachers, honester
tradesmen, fewer foolish demagogues, less impudence in infamous and
brutal men; and we should not have had among us the abomination of men
calling themselves religious while living in splendor on ill-gotten
gains. I say it is not possible for any society in which there is a
very large body of wise and virtuous men to be as vicious as our
society is--to have as low a standard of right and wrong, to have so
much belief in falsehood, or to have so degrading, barbarous a notion
of what pleasure is, or of what justly raises a man above his fellows.
Therefore let us have done with this nonsense about our being much
better than the rest of our countrymen, or the pretence that that was a
reason why we ought to have such an extension of the franchise as has
been given to us.
The essay on "Moral Swindlers," in _Theophrastus Such_, clearly indicates
George Eliot's point of view in ethics. She makes those moral traits which
are social of greater importance than those which are personal. She
complains that a man who is chaste and of a clean personal conduct is
regarded as a moral man when his business habits are not good. To her, his
relations to his fellows in all the social and business affairs of life are
of higher importance than his personal habits or his family relations. She
rebels against that deep moral instinct of the race which identifies
morality with personal character, and is indignant that the altruism she so
much believed in is not everywhere made identical with ethics. To her, the
person is nothing; the individual is thought of only as a member of a
community. She forgot that any large and noble moral life for a people must
rest upon personal character, upon a pure and healthy state of the moral
nature in individuals. Nations cannot be moral, but persons can. Public
corruption has its foundation in personal corruption. The nation cannot
have a noble moral life unless the individuals of which it is composed are
pure in character and noble in conduct. She complains that sexual purity is
made identical with morality, while business integrity is not. Every social
and moral bond we have, she says, "is a debt; the right lies in the payment
of that debt; _it can lie nowhere else_." It is a debt owed, not to God,
but to humanity; it is therefore to be paid, not by personal holiness, but
by human sympathy and devotion.
The higher social morality, that which inspires nations with great and
heroic purposes, George Eliot believes is mainly due, as she says in the
essay on "The Modern Hep, Hep, Hep!" "to the divine gift of a memory which
inspires the moments with a past, a present and a future, and gives the
sense of corporate existence that raises man above the otherwise more
respectable and innocent brute." The memories of the past lie mainly in the
direction of national movements, and hence the higher moral life of the
present must be associated with national memories. The glorious
commonplaces of historic teaching, as well as of moral inspiration, are to
be found in the fact "that the preservation of national memories is an
element and a means of national greatness, that their revival is a sign of
reviving nationality, and that every heroic defender, every patriotic
restorer, has been inspired by such memories and has made them his
watchword." To reject such memories, such social influences, she regards as
"a blinding superstition," and says that the moral visions of a nation are
an effective bond which must be accepted by all its members. Two of her
most characteristic books are written to inculcate this teaching. In _The
Spanish Gypsy_ we learn that there is no moral strength and purpose for a
man like Don Silva, who repudiates his country, its memories and its
religion. The main purpose of _Daniel Deronda_ is to show how binding and
inspiring is the vision of moral truth and life which comes from
association even with the national memories of an outcast and alien people.
She wished to see individuals helped and good done in the present. She
makes Theophrastus Such, in the essay on "Looking Backward," speak her own
mind.
"All reverence and gratitude for the worthy dead on whose labors we
have entered, all care for the future generations whose lot we are
preparing; but some affection and fairness for those who are doing the
actual work of the world, some attempt to regard them with the same
freedom from ill-temper, whether on private or public grounds, as we
may hope will be felt by those who will call us ancient! Otherwise, the
looking before and after, which is our grand human privilege, is in
danger of turning to a sort of other-worldliness, breeding a more
illogical indifference or bitterness than was ever bred by the
ascetic's contemplation of heaven."
Again, she says that "the action by which we can do the best for future
ages is of the sort which has a certain beneficence and grace for
contemporaries." And this was not merely the teaching of her books, it was
the practice of her life. Miss Edith Simcox has made it clear that she was
zealously anxious to help men and women by personal effort. She tells us
that "George Eliot's sympathies went out more readily towards enthusiasm
for the discharge of duties than for the assertion of rights. It belonged
to the positive basis of her character to identify herself more with what
people wished to do themselves than with what they thought somebody else
ought to do for them. Her indignation was vehement enough against dishonest
or malicious oppression, but the instinct to make allowance for the other
side made her a bad hater in politics, and there may easily have been some
personal sympathy in her description of Deronda's difficulty about the
choice of a career. She was not an inviting auditor for those somewhat
pachydermatous philanthropists who dwell complacently upon 'cases' and
statistics which represent appalling depths of individual suffering. Her
imagination realized these facts with a vividness that was physically
unbearable, and unless she could give substantial help, she avoided the
fruitless agitation. At the same time, her interest in all rational good
works was of the warmest, and she was inclined to exaggerate rather than
undervalue the merits of their promoters, with one qualification only.
'Help the millions, by all means,' she has written; 'I only want people not
to scorn the narrower effect.' Charity that did not begin at home repelled
her as much as she was attracted by the unpretentious kindness which
overlooked no near opportunity; and perhaps we should not be far wrong in
guessing that she thought for most people the scrupulous discharge of all
present and unavoidable duties was nearly occupation enough. Not every one
was called to the high but difficult vocation of setting the world to
rights. But on the other hand, it must be remembered that her standard of
exactingness was 'high, and some of the things that in her eyes it was
merely culpable to leave undone might be counted by others among virtues of
supererogation. Indeed, it is within the limits of possibility that a
philanthropist wrapped in over-much conscious virtue might imagine her cold
to the objects proposed, when she only failed to see uncommon merit in
their pursuit. No one, however, could recognize with more generous fervor,
more delighted admiration, any genuine unobtrusive devotion in either
friends or strangers, whether it were spent in making life easier to
individuals, or in mending the conditions among which the masses live and
labor.' This writer gives us further insight into George Eliot's character
when we are told that 'she came as a very angel of consolation to those
persons of sufficiently impartial mind to find comfort in the hint that the
world might be less to blame than they were as to those points on which
they found themselves in chronic disagreement with it. But she had nothing
welcome for those whose idea of consolation is the promise of a _deus ex
machina_ by whose help they may gather grapes of thorns and figs of
thistles. She thought there was much needed doing in the world, and
criticism of our neighbors and the natural order might wait at all events
until the critic's own character and conduct were free from blame.' She had
faith in ordinary lives, and these she earnestly desired to help and
encourage. Those who themselves struggle with difficulties are best
capable, she thought, of helping others out of theirs. In _Daniel Deronda_
she said, 'Our guides, we pretend, must be sinless; as if those were not
often the best teachers who only yesterday got corrected for their
mistakes.'"
George Eliot's interest in the present amelioration of human conditions was
strengthened by her faith in the future of the race. She expected no rapid
improvement, no revolutionizing development; but she believed the past of
mankind justifies faith in a gradual attainment of perfect conditions. This
conviction was expressed when she said,--
What I look to is a time when the impulse to help our fellows shall be
as immediate and irresistible as that which I feel to grasp something
firm if I am falling.
She saw too much evil and suffering to be an optimist; she could not see
that all things are good or tending towards what is good. Yet her faith in
the final outcome was earnest, and she looked to a slow and painful
progress as the result of human struggles. When called an optimist, she
responded, "I will not answer to the name of optimist, but if you like to
invent Meliorist, I will not say you call me out of my name." She trusted
in that gradual development which science points out as the probable result
of the survival of the fittest in human life. In "A Minor Prophet" she has
presented her conception of human advancement, and tenderly expressed her
sympathy with all humble, imperfect lives.
Bitterly
I feel that every change upon this earth
Is bought with sacrifice. My yearnings fail
To reach that high apocalyptic mount
Which shows in bird's-eye view a perfect world,
Or enter warmly into other joys
Than those of faulty, struggling human kind,
That strain upon my soul's too perfect wing
Ends in ignoble floundering: I fall
Into short-sighted pity for the men
Who, living in those perfect future times,
Will not know half the dear imperfect things
That move my smiles and tears--will never know
The fine old incongruities that raise
My friendly laugh; the innocent conceits
That like a needless eyeglass or black patch
Give those who wear them harmless happiness;
The twists and cracks in our poor earthenware,
That touch me to more conscious fellowship
(I am not myself the finest Parian)
With my coevals. So poor Colin Clout,
To whom raw onions give prospective zest,
Consoling hours of dampest wintry work,
Could hardly fancy any regal joys
Quite unimpregnate with the onion's scent:
Perhaps his highest hopes are not all clear
Of waftings from that energetic bulb:
'Tis well that onion is not heresy.
Speaking in parable, I am Colin Clout.
A clinging flavor penetrates ray life--
My onion is imperfectness: I cleave
To nature's blunders, evanescent types
Which sages banish from Utopia.
"Not worship beauty?" say you. Patience, friend!
I worship in the temple with the rest;
But by my hearth I keep a sacred nook
For gnomes and dwarfs, duck-footed waddling elves
Who stitched and hammered for the weary man
In days of old. And in that piety
I clothe ungainly forms inherited
From toiling generations, daily bent
At desk, or plough, or loom, or in the mine,
In pioneering labors for the world.
Nay, I am apt, when floundering confused
From too rash flight, to grasp at paradox,
And pity future men who will not know
A keen experience with pity blent,
The pathos exquisite of lovely minds
Hid in harsh forms--not penetrating them
Like fire divine within a common bush
Which glows transfigured by the heavenly guest,
So that men put their shoes off; but encaged
Like a sweet child within some thick-walled cell,
Who leaps and fails to hold the window-bars;
But having shown a little dimpled hand,
Is visited thenceforth by tender hearts
Whose eyes keep watch about the prison walls.
A foolish, nay, a wicked paradox!
For purest pity is the eye of love,
Melting at sight of sorrow; and to grieve
Because it sees no sorrow, shows a love
Warped from its truer nature, turned to love
Of merest habit, like the miser's greed.
But I am Colin still: my prejudice
Is for the flavor of my daily food.
Not that I doubt the world is growing still,
As once it grew from chaos and from night;
Or have a soul too shrunken for the hope
Which dawned in human breasts, a double morn,
With earliest watchings of the rising light
Chasing the darkness; and through many an age
Has raised the vision of a future time
That stands an angel, with a face all mild,
Spearing the demon. I, too, rest in faith
That man's perfection is the crowning flower
Towards which the urgent sap in life's great tree
Is pressing--seen in puny blossoms now,
But in the world's great morrows to expand
With broadest petal and with deepest glow.
With no disgust toward the crude and wretched life man everywhere lives
to-day, but with pity and tenderness for all sorrow, suffering and
struggle, she yet believed that the world is being shaped to a glorious
and a mighty destiny. This faith finds full and clear expression in the
concluding lines of the poem just quoted.
The faith that life on earth is being shaped
To glorious ends, that order, justice, love,
Mean man's completeness, mean effect as sure
As roundness in the dewdrop--that great faith
Is but the rushing and expanding stream
Of thought, of feeling, fed by all the past.
Our finest hope is finest memory,
As they who love in age think youth is blest
Because it has a life to fill with love.
Full souls are double mirrors, making still
An endless vista of fair things before
Repeating things behind: so faith is strong
Only when we are strong, shrinks when we shrink.
It comes when music stirs us, and the chords
Moving on some grand climax shake our souls
With influx new that makes new energies.
It comes in swellings of the heart and tears
That rise at noble and at gentle deeds--
At labors of the master-artist's hand
Which, trembling, touches to a finer end,
Trembling before an image seen within.
It comes in moments of heroic love,
Unjealous joy in love not made for us--
In conscious triumph of the good within,
Making us worship goodness that rebukes.
Even our failures are a prophecy,
Even our yearnings and our bitter tears
After that fair and true we cannot grasp;
As patriots who seem to die in vain
Make liberty more sacred by their pangs,
Presentiment of better things on earth
Sweeps in with every force that stirs our souls
To admiration, self-renouncing love,
Or thoughts, like light, that bind the world in one:
Sweeps like the sense of vastness, when at night
We hear the roll and dash of waves that break
Nearer and nearer with the rushing tide,
Which rises to the level of the cliff
Because the wide Atlantic roils behind,
Throbbing respondent to the far-off orbs.
George Eliot did all that could be done to make the morality she taught
commendable and inspiring. In her own direct teachings, and in the
development of her characters and her plots, she has done much to make it
acceptable. Her strong insistence on the social basis of morality is to be
admired, and the truth presented is one of great importance. Even more
important is her teaching of the stern nature of retribution, that every
thought, word and deed has its effect. There is need of such teaching, and
it can be appropriated into the thought and life of the time with great
promise of good. Yet the outcome of George Eliot's morality was rather
depressing than otherwise. While she was no pessimist, yet she made her
readers feel that life was pessimistic in its main tendencies. She makes on
the minds of very many of her readers the impression that life has not very
much light in it. This comes from the whole cast of her mind, and still
more because the light of true ideal hopes was absent from her thought. A
stern, ascetic view of life appears throughout her pages, one of the
results of the new morality and the humanitarian gospel of altruism.
Unbending, unpitiful, does the universe seem to be when the idea of law and
Nemesis is so strongly presented, and with no relief from it in the theory
of man's free will. Not less depressing to the moral nature is an
unrelieved view of the universe under the omnipotent law of cause and
effect, which is not lighted by any vision of God and a spiritual order
interpenetrating the material. Her teaching too often takes the tone of
repression; it is hard and exacting. She devotes many pages to showing the
effects of the law of retribution; she gives comparatively few to the
correlative law that good always has its reward. Renunciation is presented
as a moral force, and as duty of supreme importance; life is to be
repressed for the sake of humanity. The spontaneous tendencies of the mind
and heart, the importance of giving a free and healthy development to human
nature, is not regarded. Her morality is justly to be criticised for its
ascetic and pessimistic tendencies.
XIII.
EARLIER NOVELS.
The first four novels written by George Eliot form a group by themselves;
and while all similar to each other in their main characteristics, are in
important respects different from her later works. This group includes
_Clerical Scenes, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss_ and _Silas Marner_.
With these may also be classed "Brother Jacob." They are all alike novels
of memory, and they deal mainly with common life. Her own life and the
surroundings of her childhood, the memories and associations and
suggestions of her early life, are drawn upon. The simple surroundings and
ideas of the midland village are seldom strayed away from, and most of the
characters are farmers and their laborers, artisans or clergymen. _The Mill
on the Floss_ offers a partial exception to this statement, for in that
book we touch upon the border of a different form of society, but we
scarcely enter into it, and the leading characters are from the same class
as those in the other books of this group. "Mr. Gilfil's Love Story" alone
enters wholly within the circle of aristocratic society. There is more of
the realism of actual life in these novels than in her later ones, greater
spontaneity and insight, a deeper sympathy and a more tender pathos. They
came more out of her heart and sympathies, are more impassioned and
pathetic.
Throughout the _Scenes of Clerical Life_ are descriptions of actual scenes
and incidents known to George Eliot in her girlhood. Mrs. Hackit is a
portrait of her own mother. In the first chapter of "Amos Barton,"
Shepperton Church is that at Chilvers Colon, which she attended throughout
her childhood. It is from memory, and with an accurate pen, she describes--
Shepperton Church as it was in the old days with its outer court of
rough stucco, its red-tiled roof, its heterogeneous windows patched
with desultory bits of painted glass, and its little flight of steps
with their wooden rail running up the outer wall, and leading to the
school-children's gallery. Then inside, what dear old quaintnesses!
which I began to look at with delight, even when I was so crude a
member of the congregation that my nurse found it necessary to
provide for the reinforcement of my devotional patience by smuggling
bread-and-butter into the sacred edifice. There was the chancel,
guarded by two little cherubims looking uncomfortably squeezed between
arch and wall, and adorned with the escutcheons of the Oldinport
family, which showed me inexhaustible possibilities of meaning in their
blood-red hands, their death's-heads and cross-bones, their leopards'
paws and Maltese crosses. There were inscriptions on the panels of the
singing-gallery, telling of benefactions to the poor of Shepperton,
with an involuted elegance of capitals and final flourishes which my
alphabetic erudition traced with ever-new delight. No benches in those
days; but huge roomy pews, round which devout churchgoers sat during
"lessons," trying to look everywhere else than into each others' eyes.
No low partitions allowing you, with a dreary absence of contrast and
mystery, to see everything at all moments; but tall dark panels, under
whose shadow I sank with a sense of retirement through the Litany, only
to feel with more intensity my burst into the conspicuousness of public
life when I was made to stand up on the seat during the psalms or the
singing.
Not only is this description of Shepperton Church accurate in every
particular, but a subject of neighborhood gossip is made the basis of the
story of "Amos Barton." When George Eliot was about a dozen years old a
strange lady appeared at the Cotou parsonage, and became a subject of much
discussion on the part of the parishioners. Much pity was felt for the wife
of the curate, an intimate friend of Marian Evans's mother, whose poverty,
seven children and poor health made her burdens far from easy. She died not
long after, and her grave may be seen at Chilvers Coton. The Knebley Church
of "Mr. Gilfil's Love Story" is located only a short distance from Chilvers
Coton, and is the chancel of the collegiate church founded by Sir Thomas de
Astley in the time of Edward III. Its spire was very high, and served as a
landmark to travellers through the forest of Arden, and was called "The
lanthorn of Arden." The spire fell in the year 1600, but was rebuilt later.
The present church was repaired by the patron of George Eliot's father, Sir
Roger Newdigate. She describes it in the first chapter of "Mr. Gilfil's
Love Story" as--
a wonderful little church, with a checkered pavement which had once
rung to the iron tread of military monks, with coats of arms in
clusters on the lofty roof, marble warriors and their wives without
noses occupying a large proportion of the area, and the twelve apostles
with their heads very much on one side, holding didactic ribbons,
painted in fresco on the walls.
A delightful lane, overshadowed with noble trees, that ran by Griff House,
the birthplace of George Eliot, led to the lodge of Arbury Hall, the home
of Sir Roger Newdigate. Arbury Hall was situated in the midst of a fine old
forest, and it was originally a large quadrangular brick house. Sir Roger
rebuilt it, acting as his own architect, and made it into a modern dwelling
of the commodious gothic Order. This house and its owner appear in "Mr.
Gilfil's Love Story" as Cheverel Manor and Sir Christopher Cheverel. In the
fourth chapter the reader is told that,--
For the next ten years Sir Christopher was occupied with the
architectural metamorphosis of his old family mansion, thus
anticipating through the prompting of his individual taste that general
re-action from the insipid imitation of the Palladian style towards a
restoration of the Gothic, which marked the close of the eighteenth
century. This was the object he had set his heart on, with a singleness
of determination which was regarded with not a little contempt by his
fox-hunting neighbors.... "An obstinate, crotchety man," said his
neighbors. But I, who have seen Cheverel Manor as he bequeathed it to
his heirs, rather attribute that unswerving architectural purpose of
his, conceived and carried out through long years of systematic
personal exertion, to something of the fervor of genius.
In this story an incident in the life of Sir Roger Newdigate may have been
made use of by George Eliot. He was childless, and adopted a cottager's
child he and his wife heard singing at its father's door one day. They
educated the child, who proved to have a fine voice and a passionate love
of music.