George Eliot's later novels. Yet even in these earlier stories there is to
be found many a clear indication of her thought. In "Amos Barton" she has
especially set forth her sympathy with humble life. This fundamental canon
of her art is presented more distinctly in this story, and dwelt upon more
fully, than in any of her subsequent novels. It would be difficult to
discover any special teaching in "Mr. Gilfil's Love Story;" and this is
perhaps the only production of George Eliot's pen which has not some
distinct object beyond the telling of the story itself. The religious motif
is strong in _Janet's Repentance_, and not to be mistaken by any attentive
reader who now for the first time takes up the story. The value of religion
as a reforming force is plainly inculcated, as well as that the main and
only value of that force is altruistic. It presents a fine picture of the
Evangelical movement and its work, though mainly on its humanitarian side.
Its deeper spirit of devotion, its loftier religious ideal, its craving
after a more intimate realization of the divine presence, is not portrayed.
The real purport of the story is contained in its closing words, where the
reader is told that the true memorial left behind him by Edgar Tryan is to
be found in a life saved to all noble thing's by his efforts.
It is Janet Dempster, rescued from self-despair, strengthened with
divine hopes, and now looking back on years of purity and helpful
labor. The man who has left such a memorial behind him must have been
one whose heart beat with true compassion, and whose lips were moved by
fervent faith.
These _Scenes of Clerical Life_ surpass all George Eliot's later novels in
one respect--their pathos. _Adam Bede_ comes nearer them in this particular
than any of the later works, but even that novel does not equal them in
their power to lay hold of feeling and sympathy and in moving the reader to
tears. They differ greatly in this respect from another short story,
written only a few years later, entitled "Brother Jacob." This story has
more of light banter in it than any other novel of George Eliot's, and less
of tenderness and pathos. It is but another lesson on her great theme of
_retribution_. The author says in the last sentence of the story that "we
see in it an admirable instance of the unexpected forms in which the great
Nemesis hides herself." The central thought of the story is, that even in
the lives of the most ordinary persons, and in the case of even the
smallest departures from the right, there is a power of retribution at work
bringing us an unfailing punishment for the evil we do.
The literary excellences of the _Scenes from Clerical Life_ are many. They
are simple, charming stories, full of life, and delightful in tone. Their
humor is rare and effective, never coarse, but racy and touching. Their
tenderness of tone lays warm hold upon the reader's sympathies and brings
him closer to the throbbing hearts of his fellow-men. There is a pure
idyllic loveliness and homelikeness about these stories that is exquisite.
They all evidently grew out of the tender memories and associations of
George Eliot's girlhood.
In _Adam Bede_ the author's purpose is concentrated on character and the
moral unfoldment of the lives she describes, while the thorough dramatic
unity is lacking which such a work demands. It is a delightful picture of
country life, and for idyllic loveliness is scarcely equalled, never
surpassed, in English literature. The charm of the narrative is only
rivalled by the deep human interest the characters have for us. This
exquisite picture of rural life is not merely a piece of fine painting; but
the deepest problems, the largest human interests, ever appear as a
perpetual background of spiritual reality, giving a sublimity to the whole
that truly dignifies it. The thoughtful reader soon finds this inweaving of
a larger purpose adding greatly to the idyllic loveliness of these scenes.
The moral tone is clear and earnest, and the religious element gives a
charm and nobility to this delightful picture of rustic simplicity.
_Adam Bede_ has probably delighted a larger number of her readers than any
other of George Eliot's books, and even a majority of her critics prefer it
to any other. It at once arrests and fixes the attention of the reader. The
first chapter has an immediate interest in its wonderful picture of Adam,
and its most vivid description of the workshop. The second chapter, with
its account of Dinah Morris and her preaching, leaves no possibility of
doubt about the genius and power of the book. The reader is brought at once
face to face with scenes and persons that act as enchantment on him; and
this complete absorption of interest never flags to the end. The elements
of this fascination, which is in itself so simple, natural and human, have
been pointed out by various critics. They are to be found in the
homeliness, pathos and naturalness of the whole story from beginning to
end. Little as the critics have noted it, however, much of this fascination
comes of the high and pure moral tone of the story, its grasp on the higher
motives and interests of life, and its undertone of yearning after a
religious motive and ideal adequate to all the problems of human destiny.
This religious motive is indeed more than a yearning, for it is a fixed and
self-contained confidence in altruism, expressed in sympathy and feeling
and pathos most tender and passionate. This novel is full of an eager
desire to realize to men their need of each other, and of longing to show
them how much better and happier the world would be if we were more
sympathetic and had more of fellow-feeling. Life is full of suffering, and
this can be lessened only as we help and love each other, only as we can
make our feelings so truly tender as to feel the sorrows of others as our
own, causing us to live for the good of those who suffer. It is said of
Adam Bede that--
He had too little fellow-feeling with the weakness that errs in spite
of foreseen consequences. Without this fellow-feeling, how are we to
get enough patience and charity toward our stumbling, falling
companions in the long and changeful journey? And there is but one way
in which a strong determined soul can learn it--by getting his
heart-strings bound round the weak and erring, so that he must share
not only the outward consequence of their error but their inward
suffering.
This compassion for human suffering is conspicuous throughout, and it is
regarded as the most effective means of binding men together in common
sympathy and helpfulness. Sorrow is regarded as the true means of man's
elevation, as that purifying agent which is indispensable to his true
development. This teaching is fully depicted in the chapter headed "The
Hidden Dread," and in which Hetty's flight is described. We are told in
that chapter that this looks like a very bright world on the surface, but
that as we look closer within man's nature we find sorrow and pain untold.
What a glad world this looks like, as one drives or rides along the
valleys and over the hills! I have often thought so when, in foreign
countries, where the fields and woods have looked to me like our
English Loamshire: the rich land tilled with just as much care, the
woods rolling down the gentle slopes to the green meadows--I have come
on something by the roadside which has reminded me that I am not in
Loamshire--an image of a great agony--the agony of the Cross. It has
stood, perhaps, by the clustering apple-blossoms, or in the broad
sunshine by the cornfield, or at a turning by the wood where a clear
brook was gurgling below; and surely, if there came a traveller to this
world who knew nothing of the story of man's life upon it, this image
of agony would seem to him strangely out of place in the midst of this
joyous nature. He would not know that hidden behind the apple-blossoms,
or among the golden corn, or under the shrouding boughs of the wood,
there might be a human heart beating heavily with anguish--perhaps
a young blooming girl, not knowing where to turn for refuge from
swift-advancing shame; understanding no more of this life of ours than
a foolish lost lamb, wandering farther and farther in the nightfall on
the lonely heath, yet tasting the bitterest of life's bitterness. Such
things are sometimes hidden among the sunny fields and behind the
blossoming orchards; and the sound of the gurgling brook, if you came
close to one spot behind a small bush, would be mingled for your ear
with a despairing human sob. No wonder man's religion has much sorrow
in it; no wonder he needs a Suffering God.
The remedy for this sorrow, even in the pages of _Adam Bede_, is not the
atoning love of Christ or the blessedness of a divine forgiveness, but the
altruistic compassion of man for man. There is, however, a, deeper
recognition in this novel of Christian belief than in any other by George
Eliot. The prayer and sermon of Dinah Morris have a truly Christian tone
and thought. This is not the case with the teachings of Savonarola, who is
always much more an altruist than a Christian, and into whose mouth
Christian phrases are put, while it is very evident the Christian spirit in
its wholeness was not put into his heart. Sorrow and suffering are regarded
in _Adam Bede_ as the means of baptism into a larger life of sympathy, as
the means of purification from selfishness and individual aims. Along with
this teaching goes the cognate one, that feeling is the true test of the
religious life. A feeling that draws us close to others in helpfulness is
worth more than knowledge, culture and refinement of taste.
The doctrine of retribution is presented as distinctly and positively in
_Adam Bede_ as in any subsequent book George Eliot wrote. It is given the
form of distinct statement, and it is developed fully in the working out of
the plot. Parson Irwine speaks the thought of the author in these words:
"There is no sort of wrong deed of which a man can bear the punishment
alone; you can't isolate yourself, and say that the evil which is in
you shall not spread. Men's lives are as thoroughly blended with each
other as the air they breathe; evil spreads as necessarily as disease.
I know, I feel the terrible extent of suffering this sin of Arthur's
has caused to others; but so does every sin cause suffering to others
besides those who commit it."
The tendency of selfishness and wrong to develop misery is fully unfolded.
The terrible law of moral cause and effect is made apparent throughout the
whole work. The folly of Arthur and the vanity of Hetty work them terrible
consequences of evil and bitterness. Many others are made to suffer with
them. The fatal Nemesis is unmasked in these revelations of human nature.
If the critics are right in pronouncing _Adam Bede_ artistically defective,
it is not difficult to see that there is still less of unity in _The Mill
on the Floss_. Unconnected and unnecessary scenes and persons abound, while
the Tulliver and Dodson families, and their stupidities, are described at a
tedious length. Yet the picture of child-life given here compensates for
all we might complain of in other directions. Maggie is an immortal child,
wonderfully drawn, out of the very heart of nature herself. Her joy in
life, her doubts and fears, her conflicts with self, are delineated with a
master's hand, and justify--such is their faithfulness to child-life--the
supposition that this is George Eliot's own childhood, so delicate and
penetrating is the insight of this description, Swinburne has justly said
that "no man or woman, outside the order of poets, has ever written of
children with such adorable fidelity of affection as the spiritual mother
of Totty, Eppie and of Lillo." Nor have the poets surpassed her in
truthfulness to child-life and intuitive insight into child-nature. The
child Maggie is unsurpassed, not as an ideal being, but as a living child
that plays in the dirt, tears her frocks, and clips her hair in an hour of
childish anger.
In this novel we first come distinctly upon another element in the writings
of George Eliot, and this is a yearning after a fuller, larger life. It
does not appear as distinctly developed in _Adam Bede_, where there is more
of poise and repose. Maggie represents the restless spirit of the
nineteenth century, intense dissatisfaction with self, and a profoundly
human passion for something higher and diviner. A passionate restlessness
and a profound spiritual hunger are united in this novel to an eager desire
for a deeper and fuller life, and for a satisfactory answer to the soul's
spiritual thirst. The spiritual repose of Dinah, who has found all the
religious cravings of her nature satisfied in Methodism, is abandoned for
the inward yearning of Maggie, whose passionate search for spiritual truth
ends in disaster.
No other of George Eliot's books has been so severely criticised as this
one, except _Daniel Deronda_, and mainly because of Maggie. The apparent
fall of the heroine, and the crude tragedy of the ending, have been
regarded as serious defects. The moral tone and purpose have been severely
condemned. In his essays on foul and fair fiction, Ruskin puts _The Mill on
the Floss_ into that class of novels which describe life's blotches, burrs
and pimples, and calls it "the most striking instance extant of this study
of cutaneous disease." He says the personages are picked up from behind
the counter and out of the gutter, and he finds "there is not a single
person in the book of the smallest importance to anybody in the world but
themselves, or whose qualities deserved so much as a line of printer's
type in their description." To the same effect is Swinburne's criticism
of Maggie's relations to Stephen Guest. He calls it "the hideous
transformation by which Maggie is debased." He says that most of George
Eliot's admirers would regard this as "the highest and the purest and the
fullest example of her magnificent and matchless powers. The first two
thirds of the book suffice to compose perhaps the very noblest of tragic as
well as of humorous prose idyls in the language; comprising one of the
sweetest as well as saddest and tenderest, as well as subtlest examples of
dramatic analysis--a study in that kind as soft and true as Rousseau's, as
keen and true as Browning's, as full as either's of the fine and bitter
sweetness of a pungent and fiery fidelity. But who can forget the horror of
inward collapse, the sickness of spiritual re-action, the reluctant,
incredulous rage of disenchantment and disgust, with which he came upon the
thrice-unhappy third part? The two first volumes have all the intensity and
all the perfection of George Sand's best work, tempered by all the simple
purity and interfused with all the stainless pathos of Mrs. Gaskell's; they
carry such affluent weight of thought, and shine with such warm radiance of
humor, as invigorates and illuminates the work of no other famous woman;
they have the fiery clarity of crystal or of lightning; they go near to
prove a higher claim and attest a clearer right on the part of their author
than that of George Sand herself to the crowning crown of praise conferred
on her by the hand of a woman ever greater and more glorious than either in
her sovereign gift of lyric genius, to the salutation given as by an angel
indeed from heaven, of 'large-brained woman and large-hearted man.'" In the
momentary lapse of Maggie, Swinburne finds a fatal defect, which no
subsequent repentance atones for. He says that "here is the patent flaw,
here too plainly is the flagrant blemish, which defaces and degrades the
very crown and flower of George Eliot's wonderful and most noble work; no
rent or splash on the raiment, but a cancer in the very bosom, a gangrene
in the very flesh. It is a radical and mortal plague-spot, corrosive and
incurable."
Such criticism has little if any value, because there is no point of
sympathy between the critic and his author. That real life contains such
errors as Maggie's cannot be doubted, and George Eliot wished to paint no
ideal scenes or heroines. To portray a passionate, eager, yearning nature,
full of poetry, longing for a diviner spiritual life, surrounded by dull
and unpoetic conditions and persons, was her purpose. That the hunger of
such a person for the expression of her inward cravings for joy, music and
beauty should lead her astray and make a sudden lapse possible, is not to
be doubted. The fault of the critics is in supposing that this lapse from
moral conduct was that of a physical depravity. Maggie's passion grew
wholly out of that inward yearning for a fuller life which made all her
difficulties. It was not physical passion but spiritual craving; and in the
purpose of the novelist she was as pure after as before.
The cause of what must be regarded as the great defect in _The Mill on the
Floss_ is not that George Eliot chose to paint life in a diseased state,
but that she had not the power to make her characters act what they
themselves were. While the delightful inward portraiture of Maggie is in
process all are charmed with her, her soul is as pure and sweet as a rose
new-blown; but when the time arrives for her to act as well as to meditate
and to dream, she is not made equal to herself. Through all her books this
is true, that George Eliot can describe a soul, but she cannot make her men
and women act quite up to the facts of daily life. In this way Dinah and
Adam are not equal to themselves, and settle down to a prosaic life such as
is not in keeping with that larger action of which they were capable.
George Eliot's characters are greater than their deeds; their inward life
is truer and more rounded than their outward life is pure and noble.
_The Mill on the Floss_ fully develops George Eliot's conception of the
value of self-renunciation in the life of the individual, and gives a new
emphasis to her ideas about the importance of the spiritual life as an
element in true culture. It has been said that she intended to indicate
the nature of physiological attraction between men and women, and how
large an influence it has; but whether that was an aim of hers or not,
she undoubtedly did attempt to indicate how altogether important is
renunciation to a life of true development, how difficult it is to attain,
and that it is the vital result of all human endeavor. She surrounded a
tender, sensitive, musical and poetic soul, one quick to catch the tone of
a higher spiritual faith, with the common conditions of ordinary social
life, to show how such an "environment" cripples and retards a soul full of
aspiration and capable of the best things. Maggie saw the way to the light,
but the way was hard, beset with difficulties individual and social, and
she could neither overcome herself nor the world. She was taken suddenly
away, and the novel comes to a hasty conclusion, because the author desired
to indicate the causes of spiritual danger to ardent souls, and not to
inculcate a formula for their relief. Maggie had learned how difficult it
is for the individual to make for himself a new way in life, how benumbing
are the conditions of ordinary human existence; and through her death we
are to learn that in such difficulties as hers there is no remedy for the
individual. Only through the mediation of death could Maggie be reconciled
to those she had offended; death alone could heal the social wounds she had
made, and restore her as an accepted and ennobled member of the corporate
existence of humanity. This seems to be the idea underlying the hurried
conclusion of this novel, that the path of renunciation once truly entered
on, brings necessarily such difficulties as only death can overcome; and
death does overcome them when those we have loved and those we have helped,
forget what seem to them our wrong deeds in the loving memories which
follow the dead. Over the grave men forget all that separated them from
others, and the living are reconciled to those who can offend them no more.
All that was good and pure and loving is then made to appear, and memory
glorifies the one who in life was neglected or hated. Through death Maggie
was restored to her brother, and over her grave came perfect reconciliation
with those others from whom she had been alienated. That renunciation may
lead to cruel martyrdoms is what George Eliot means; but she would say it
has its lofty recompense in that restoration which death brings, when the
individual becomes a part of the spiritual influence which surrounds and
guides us all. For those who can accept such a conclusion as this the unity
of the novel may seem complete.
The poetry of Maggie's nature found itself constantly dragged down to
conditions of vulgar prose by the life about her. That life was prosy and
hard because those ideal aims which come from a recognition of the past and
its traditions were absent from it. Maggie tried to overcome them by
renunciation, but by renunciation which did not rest on any genuine sorrow
and pain. At last these came, and the real meaning of renunciation was made
clear to her. Her bitter sorrow taught her the great lesson which George
Eliot ever strives to inculcate, that what is hard, sorrowful and painful
in the world should move us to more and more of compassion and help for our
fellows who also find life sad and burdensome. At the last Maggie learned
this greatest of all lessons which life can give us.
She sat quite still far on into the night, with no impulse to, change
her attitude, without active force enough even for the mental act of
prayer--only waiting for the light that would surely come again. It
came with the memories that no passion could long quench: the long past
came back to her, and with it the fountains of self-renouncing pity and
affection, of faithfulness and resolve. The words that were marked by
the quiet hand in the little old book that she had long ago learned by
heart, rushed even to her lips, and found a vent for themselves in a
low murmur that was quite lost in the loud driving of the rain against
the window, and the loud moan and roar of the wind: "I have received
the Cross, I have received it from Thy hand; I will bear it, and bear
it till death, as Thou hast laid it upon me."
But soon other words rose that could find no utterance but in a sob:
"Forgive me, Stephen. It will pass away. You will come back to her."
She took up the letter, held it to the candle, and let it burn slowly
on the hearth. To-morrow she would write to him the last word of
parting.
"I will bear it, and bear it till death... But how long it will be
before death comes! I am so young, so healthy. How shall I have
patience and strength? Am I to struggle and fall, and repent again?
Has life other trials as hard for me still?" With that cry of
self-despair Maggie fell on her knees against the table, and buried
her sorrow-stricken face. Her soul went out to the Unseen Pity that
would be with her to the end. Surely there was something being taught
her by this experience of great need, and she must be learning a secret
of human tenderness and long-suffering that the less erring could
hardly know. "O God, if my life is to be long, let me live to bless and
comfort--"
Then the flood came, and death. Maggie could repent, she could acquire the
true spirit of renunciation, she could even give herself to a life of
altruism; but death only could restore her to the world. Death, says George
Eliot, is the great reconciler.
_Silas Marner_ is the only one of these earlier novels in which there is a
continuous unity of purpose and action. Its several parts are thoroughly
wrought into each other, the aim of the narrative is adhered to throughout,
and there are no superfluous incidents. The plot is simple, cause and
effect flow on steadily to the end in the unfoldment of character and
action, and the design of the author is easily grasped. One of her critics,
himself a novelist of a high order, has said that in its unity of purpose
and dramatic expression _Silas Marner_ is more nearly a masterpiece than
any other of George Eliot's novels; "it has more of that simple, rounded,
consummate aspect, that absence of loose ends and gaping issues, which
marks a classical work." [Footnote: Henry James, Jr.] In this novel, too,
her humor flows out with a richer fulness, a racier delight and a more
sparkling variety of expression than in any other book of hers, not
excepting _Adam Bede_. She has here reached the very height of her
qualities as a humorist, for in _Silas Marner_ her humor is constantly
genial and delightful.