essays, nearly all of which are included in her last book, _Impressions of
Theophrastus Such_. Previous to this, however, she had published in the
first number of the _Fortnightly Review_, issued May 15, 1865, and edited
by Lewes, an article on "The Influence of Rationalism," in review of Mr.
W.H. Lecky's book on that subject. A year after the appearance of _Felix
Holt_ she wrote out her views on the subject of political reform, in the
shape of an "Address to Workingmen by Felix Holt," which appeared in
_Blackwood's Magazine_ for January, 1868. These essays are significant,
because of the light they afford concerning the author's views on religious
and political subjects. The first is a piece of thorough reviewing, and
shows what George Eliot might have done in that direction. She is a
merciless critic, and yet one inclined to appreciate all that is best in an
author. Her sympathies with positivism and with the "scientific method" in
philosophy find expression in the pages of this essay. In it she gives a
most expressive utterance to her ideas about the universality of law and
the influence of tradition. Her point of view is so antagonistic to Mr,
Lecky's that she does not do full justice to his work. His idealism is
repugnant to her, and he does not give prominence enough to please her to
those positivist influences in which she so strongly believed. Her
dissatisfaction with his idealism appears in her very first words.
There is a valuable class of books on great subjects which have
something of the character and functions of good popular lecturing.
They are not original, not subtle, not of close logical texture, not
exquisite either in thought or style; but by virtue of these negatives
they are all the more fit to act on the average intelligence. They have
enough of organizing purpose in them to make their facts illustrative,
and to leave a distinct result in the mind even when most of the facts
are forgotten; and they have enough of vagueness and vacillation in
their theory to win them ready acceptance from a mixed audience. The
vagueness and vacillation are not devices of timidity; they are the
honest result of the writer's own mental character, which adapts him to
be the instructor and the favorite of "the general reader." For the
most part, the general reader of the present day does not exactly know
what distance he goes; he only knows that he does not go "too far." Of
any remarkable thinker, whose writings have excited controversy, he
likes to have it said "that his errors are to be deplored." leaving it
not too certain what those errors are; he is fond of what may be called
disembodied opinions, that float in vapory phrases above all systems of
thought or action; he likes an undefined Christianity which opposes
itself to nothing in particular, an undefined education of the people,
an undefined amelioration of all things: in fact, he likes sound
views--nothing extreme, but something between the excesses of the past
and the excesses of the present. This modern type of the general reader
may be known in conversation by the cordiality with which he assents to
indistinct, blurred statements. Say that black is black, he will shake
his head and hardly think it; say that black is not so very black, he
will reply, "Exactly." He has no hesitation, if you wish it, even to
get up at a public meeting and express his conviction that at times,
and within certain limits, the radii of a circle have a tendency to be
equal; but, on the other hand, he would urge that the spirit of
geometry may be carried a little too far. His only bigotry is a bigotry
against any clearly defined opinion; not in the least based on a
scientific scepticism, but belonging to a lack of coherent thought--a
spongy texture of mind, that gravitates strongly to nothing. The one
thing he is staunch for is the utmost liberty of private haziness.
But precisely these characteristics of the general reader, rendering
him incapable of assimilating ideas unless they are administered in a
highly diluted form, make it a matter of rejoicing that there are
clever, fair-minded men who will write books for him--men very much
above him in knowledge and ability, but not too remote from him in
their habits of thinking, and who can thus prepare for him infusions
of history and science that will leave some solidifying deposit, and
save him from a fatal softening of the intellectual skeleton. Among
such serviceable writers, Mr. Lecky's _History of the Rise and
Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe_ entitles him to a
high place. He has prepared himself for its production by an unusual
amount of well-directed reading; he has chosen his facts and quotations
with much judgment; and he gives proof of those important moral
qualifications, impartiality, seriousness and modesty. This praise is
chiefly applicable to the long chapter on the history of Magic and
Witchcraft, and to the two chapters on the antecedents and history of
Persecution.
A further evidence of her wide culture and reading, and of her large
critical ability, may also be found in the first number of the _Fortnightly
Review_, for which she wrote the first of the "notices of new books" which
it published. This was a review of Mr. Owen Jones's _Grammar of Ornament_.
The author was one of her friends, and the decorator of the rooms in which
her Sunday receptions were held. She praised the book very highly. The
first paragraph of this notice betrays her appreciation of the aesthetic
movement in England, and her sympathy with its objects and spirit. The
moral value of aesthetic influences is characteristically expressed. The
influence of the environment, as she understood it, is here seen. The
largeness of her faith in the moral efficiency of material causes is
nowhere so strongly expressed by her as in the words which follow.
The inventor of movable types, says the venerable Teufelsdröckh, was
disbanding hired armies, cashiering most kings and senates, and
creating a whole new democratic world. Has any one yet said what great
things are being done by the men who are trying to banish ugliness
from our streets and our homes, and to make both the outside and the
inside of our dwellings worthy of a world where there are forests, and
flower-tressed meadows, and the plumage of birds; where the insects
carry lessons of color on their wings, and even the surface of a
stagnant pool will show us the wonders of iridescence and the most
delicate forms of leafage? They, too, are modifying opinions, for they
are modifying men's moods and habits, which are the mothers of
opinions, having quite as much to do with their formation as the
responsible father--Reason. Think of certain hideous manufacturing
towns where the piety is chiefly a belief in copious perdition, and
the pleasure is chiefly gin. The dingy surface of wall pierced by the
ugliest windows, the staring shop-fronts, paper-hangings, carpets,
brass and gilt mouldings, and advertising placards, have an effect
akin to that of malaria; it is easy to understand that with such
surroundings there is more belief in cruelty than in beneficence, and
that the best earthly bliss attainable is the dulling of the external
senses. For it is a fatal mistake to suppose that ugliness which is
taken for beauty will answer all the purposes of beauty; the subtle
relation between all kinds of truth and fitness in our life forbids
that bad taste should ever be harmless to our moral sensibility or our
intellectual discernment; and--more than that--as it is probable that
fine musical harmonies have a sanative influence over our bodily
organization, it is also probable that just coloring and lovely
combinations of lines may be necessary to the complete well-being of
our systems, apart from any conscious delight in them. A savage may
indulge in discordant chuckles and shrieks and gutturals, and think
that they please the gods, but it does not follow that his frame would
not be favorably wrought upon by the vibrations of a grand church
organ. One sees a person capable of choosing the worst style of
wall-paper become suddenly afflicted by its ugliness under an attack of
illness. And if an evil state of blood and lymph usually goes along
with an evil state of mind, who shall say that the ugliness of our
streets, the falsity of our ornamentation, the vulgarity of our
upholstery, have not something to do with those bad tempers which
breed false conclusions?
The address to workingmen which George Eliot put into the mouth of Felix
Holt is a suggestive and valuable piece of political writing. Tradition is
therein presented as a moral and political influence. The spiritual
treasures mankind possesses she says are the products of tradition, and
these must be preserved. This can be done only by keeping the old
institutions and forms until they can be organically supplanted by others.
All the various portions of society are mutually dependent, and the
destruction of any one of them will be to the injury of all. This she says
to workingmen as a reason why they should not antagonize the social orders
above them, whose work is as important as their own. The organs of society
are the various social classes of which it is composed, and society is to
be improved by turning class interests into the functions by which Humanity
is to be developed. The spiritual treasures of the past are only to be
preserved by order and good government; hence all revolutionary methods are
suicidal. Life is to be advanced by giving social influence into the hands
of the wisest. True principles must regulate society, and these George
Eliot would have rest on science and altruism.
Such are some of the ideas of this remarkable essay, one of the most
suggestive and instructive of all she wrote. The emphasis she laid on
retribution, tradition, heredity and duties appears here in all its force.
Perhaps nothing else she wrote so clearly brings out some of the
characteristics of her mind. Her intense distrust of individualism does not
permit her to say a single word of the _rights_ of the laboring classes.
The right of rebellion and revolution is totally disregarded, rather it is
not recognized that any rights whatever exist. The workingman is not to
think of himself or his class, but of society and humanity; he is to become
an altruistic worker for the common good. While this is fine in theory, yet
history indicates that the aristocratic classes have yielded to the broader
social spirit only when they have been compelled to do so. The concessions
must come from above, not from beneath. George Eliot's political
philosophy, if carried into actual life, would keep the proletariate where
they are, and strengthen the social power of the aristocratic classes.
These words may indicate the drift of the essay:
But I come back to this: that, in our old society there are old
institutions, and among them the various distinctions and inherited
advantages of classes, which have shaped themselves along with all the
wonderful slow-growing system of things made up of our laws, our
commerce and our stores of all sorts, whether in material objects, such
as buildings and machinery, or in knowledge, such as scientific thought
and professional skill. Just as in that case I spoke of before, the
irrigation of a country, which must absolutely have its water
distributed or it will bear no crop; these are the old channels, the
old banks and the old pumps, which must be used as they are until new
and better have been prepared, or the structure of the old has been
gradually altered. But it would be fool's work to batter down a pump
only because a better might be made, when you have no machinery ready
for a new one: it would be wicked work, if villages lost their crops by
it. Now the only safe way by which society can be steadily improved and
our worst evils reduced, is not by any attempt to do away directly with
the actually existing class distinctions and advantages, as if
everybody could have the same sort of work or lead the same sort of
life (which none of my hearers are stupid enough to suppose), but by
turning of Class Interests into Class Functions or duties. What I mean
is, that each class should be urged by the surrounding conditions to
perform its particular work under the strong pressure of responsibility
to the nation at large; that our public affairs should be got into a
state in which there should be no impunity for foolish or faithless
conduct. In this way, the public judgment would sift out incapability
and dishonesty from posts of high charge, and even personal ambition
would necessarily become of a worthier sort, since the desires of the
most selfish men must be a good deal shaped by the opinions of those
around them: and for one person to put on a cap and bells, or to go
about dishonest or paltry ways of getting rich that he may spend a vast
sum of money in having more finery than his neighbors, he must be
pretty sure of a crowd who will applaud him. Now changes can only be
good in proportion as they help to bring about this sort of result:
in proportion as they put knowledge in the place of ignorance, and
fellow-feeling in the place of selfishness. In the course of
substitution class distinctions must inevitably change their character,
and represent the varying Duties of men, not their varying Interests.
But this end will not come by impatience. "Day will not break the
sooner because we get up before the twilight." Still less will it come
by mere undoing, or change merely as change. And moreover, if we
believed that it would be unconditionally hastened by our getting the
franchise, we should be what I call superstitious men, believing in
magic, or the production of a result by hocus-pocus. Our getting the
franchise will greatly hasten that good end in proportion only as every
one of us has the knowledge, the foresight, the conscience, that will
make him well-judging and scrupulous in the use of it. The nature of
things in this world has been determined for us beforehand, and in such
a way that no ship can be expected to sail well on a difficult voyage,
and reach the right port, unless it is well-manned: the nature of the
winds and the waves, of the timbers, the sails and the cordage, will
not accommodate itself to drunken, mutinous sailors.
You will not suspect me of wanting to preach any cant to you, or of
joining in the pretence that everything is in a fine way and need not
be made better. What I am striving to keep in our minds is the care,
the precaution, with which we should go about making things better, so
that the public order may not be destroyed, so that no fatal shock may
be given to this society of ours, this living body in which our lives
are bound up. After the Reform Bill of 1832, I was in an election riot,
which showed me clearly, on a small scale, what public disorder must
always be; and I have never forgotten that the riot was brought about
chiefly by the agency of dishonest men who professed to be on the
people's side. Now the danger hanging over change is great, just in
proportion as it tends to produce such disorder by giving any large
number of ignorant men, whose notions of what is good are of a low and
brutal sort, the belief that they have got power into their hands and
may do pretty much as they like. If any one can look round us and say
that he sees no signs of any such danger now, and that our national
condition is running along like a clear broadening stream, safe not to
get choked with mud, I call him a cheerful man; perhaps he does his own
gardening, and seldom takes exercise far away from home. To us who have
no gardens, and often walk abroad, it is plain that we can never get
into a bit of a crowd but we must rub clothes with a set of roughs, who
have the worst vices of the worst rich--who are gamblers, sots,
libertines, knaves, or else mere sensual simpletons and victims. They
are the ugly crop that has sprung up while the stewards have been
sleeping; they are the multiplying brood begotten by parents who have
been left without all teaching save that of a too-craving body, without
all well-being save the fading delusions of drugged beer and gin. They
are the hideous margin of society, at one edge drawing towards it the
undesigning ignorant poor, at the other darkening imperceptibly into
the lowest criminal class. Here is one of the evils which cannot be got
rid of quickly, and against which any of us who have got sense, decency
and instruction have need to watch. That these degraded fellow-men
could really get the mastery in a persistent disobedience to the laws
and in a struggle to subvert order, I do not believe; but wretched
calamities would come from the very beginning of such a struggle, and
the continuance of it would be a civil war, in which the inspiration on
both sides might soon cease to be even a false notion of good, and
might become the direct savage impulse of ferocity. We have all to see
to it that we do not help to rouse what I may call the savage beast in
the breasts of our generation--that we do not help to poison the
nation's blood, and make richer provision for bestiality to come. We
know well enough that oppressors have sinned in this way--that
oppression has notoriously made men mad; and we are determined to
resist oppression. But let us, if possible, show that we can keep sane
in our resistance, and shape our means more and more reasonably towards
the least harmful, and therefore the speediest, attainment of our end.
Let us, I say, show that our spirits are too strong to be driven mad,
but can keep that sober determination which alone gives mastery over
the adaptation of means. And a first guarantee of this sanity will be
to act as if we understood that the fundamental duty of a government is
to preserve order, to enforce obedience of the laws. It has been held
hitherto that a man can be depended on as a guardian of order only when
he has much money and comfort to lose. But a better state of things
would be, that men who had little money and not much comfort should
still be guardians of order, because they had sense to see that
disorder would do no good, and had a heart of justice, pity and
fortitude to keep them from making more misery only because they felt
some misery themselves. There are thousands of artisans who have
already shown this fine spirit, and have endured much with patient
heroism. If such a spirit spread and penetrated us all, we should soon
become the masters of the country in the best sense and to the best
ends. For, the public order being preserved, there can be no government
in future that will not be determined by our insistence on our fair and
practicable demands. It is only by disorder that our demands will be
choked, that we shall find ourselves lost amongst a brutal rabble, with
all the intelligence of the country opposed to us, and see government
in the shape of guns that will sweep us down in the ignoble martyrdom
of fools.
The eighteen essays published as the _Impressions of Theophrastus Such_
purport to have been the work of a bachelor of singular habits and tastes,
who had written a book which proved a failure, and who left this volume to
appear posthumously. He had been in the habit of giving an account to
himself of the characters he met with, and he begins his book by describing
his own weaknesses. He classes himself as one of the blunderers he would
portray, as having the faults and foibles he finds in others. Expressively
the author says, "If the human race has a bad reputation, I perceive that I
cannot escape being compromised." This may be taken as the sentiment of
George Eliot herself; and it is she who really speaks in these words
concerning the satirical criticisms of those she describes:
If I laugh at you, O fellow-men! if I trace with curious interest your
labyrinthine self-delusions, note the inconsistencies in your zealous
adhesions, and smile at your helpless endeavors in a rashly chosen
part, it is not that I feel myself aloof from you: the more intimately
I seem to discern your weaknesses, the stronger to me is the proof that
I share them. How otherwise could I get the discernment?--for even what
we are averse to, what we vow not to entertain, must have shaped or
shadowed itself within us as a possibility before we can think of
exorcising it. No man can know his brother simply as a spectator.
After the second essay Theophrastus disappears, and no further hint is
given that it is he who is the reputed author. This slight fictitious
machinery is too weak to carry the load put upon it. The reader soon feels
that it is George Eliot who is talking, and the opinions put forth, the
sentiments expressed, are recognized as her own. Indeed, it would have been
better, so the reader may probably come to say to himself, if this
attempted disguise had been entirely dispensed with. By the time he has
reached the sixth essay, "Only Temper," the discerning reader, familiar
with George Eliot's books, will be ready to affirm that this is no other
than the author herself speaking very frankly and finely her own
sentiments. In this essay the moral temper of her mind appears, and her
strong inclination to subordinate the individual to the social requirements
of life.
These papers are modelled on those of the great essay-making period in
English literature. Old-fashioned names are adopted, which have a greater
or less significance in connection with the purpose of the essay. The man
with the excitable temper is called Touchwood, while the man who slides
into a deferential acceptance of opinions made for him is Mixtus. This
method of the old essayists seems antiquated, cumbersome and unsuitable to
the subjects discussed. The persons described lose their individuality by
its use, and the reader forgets that they were meant to be creatures of
flesh and blood. For the most part, they are mere abstractions, mere
figures of straw, to be knocked over by the ingenious pen of the author.
Some special fault or sin is given the name of a personality, but it is too
much isolated from actual existence to produce the impression of a living
thing.
These essays much resemble occasional chapters in her novels, and might
have been studies for a new work. They are studies simply, done with a fine
skill and polish, but fragmentary. The large setting of her novels is
needed to give them relief and proportion. They disappoint as they are, for
the satire is too apparent, and we do not see these characters in action,
where their follies would obtain for them a more living interest. They are
studies of individual character, portraying types of social and literary
weakness, such as may have come under George Eliot's observation. They are
careful dissections of motives and conduct, and full of a minute analysis
of the moral and intellectual nature of her characters. There is abundance
of candid criticism, shrewd observation and compressed wisdom of statement.
Occasionally she is at her very best; but she uses many long, cumbersome
sentences, the satire is too harsh and the wisdom too unwieldy. Her
sympathy, love, pathos and pity are not so apparent as in her novels; she
takes less delight in these creations, and evidently created them for
purposes of dissection. She is never so weak in her other writings as in
these essays, so wanting in genius and large-heartedness. She scourges many
of the intellectual follies of the time, the conceit of culture, the pride
of literature, and the narrowness of politics; but in most of the essays
this is all.