gives the impression of being unfinished in execution and desultory in
purpose. Yet there is in it much of fine feeling, pure sentiment, lively
satire and apt wisdom. Sometimes the thought is labored; but there is a
wealth of clear-cut conviction, strong thoughts and rich experience. There
is force in the arguments, richness of ideas throughout, and a wonderful
aptness of allusion and illustration. Her culture and learning are
everywhere apparent in the fine perception of the most exact analogies and
in the ease with which she brings science to the support of morals. Those
of her admirers who come closest to her spirit, thoroughly appreciate her
ideas, and delight in them, will read this book with satisfaction, and feel
thankful that she wrote it. No one who would know the mind of George Eliot
can afford to overlook it.
When George Eliot writes on subjects involving a moral purpose or ideal,
she is always wise and interesting. When, however, she attempts to satirize
some weakness or laugh at some folly, she is not always successful. Rich as
may be the satire and the wit of her novels, both are often heavy and dull
in her essays.
The greater number of essays in this volume are devoted to the analysis of
special types of character, but a few are given to moral problems. These
latter are of the more interest and value, and they present some new
discussions of those problems with which George Eliot was so much
fascinated. Her earnest faith in altruism, realism, tradition, natural
retribution and the social value of morality, is as distinct here as in her
novels or poems. In the essay on "False Testimonials" she gives a good
realistic definition of imagination, which she says is "always based on a
keen vision, a keen consciousness of what is, and carries the store of
definite knowledge as material for the construction of its inward visions."
She is no realist, however, in the sense of confining poetry merely to a
photographic picture of outward nature. She accepts Dante as a genuine
realist, for "he is at once the most precise and homely in his reproduction
of actual objects, and the most soaringly at large in his imaginative
combinations." She would have faithfulness to facts, but no limitation of
vision; she would have the imagings exact and legitimate, but she would
give our moral and intellectual insights no narrow bounds. Her realism is
well defined when she criticises one of those persons who take mere fancy
for imagination, to whom all facts are unworthy of recognition.
In at least two of these essays, those on "Debasing the Moral Currency" and
"The Modern Hep, Hep, Hep!" she has newly expressed herself concerning
tradition. In the first she protests against the too-common custom of
satirizing what is noble and venerable. Our need of faith in the higher
things of life is very great, and that faith is to be established only
through our regard for what has been given us by those who have gone before
us. Whatever lowers our trust in the results of human efforts is
corrupting, for it breaks down our faith in the true sources of human
authority. "This is what I call debasing the moral currency," she says;
"lowering the value of every inspiring fact and tradition so that it will
command less and less of the spiritual products, the generous motives which
sustain the charm and elevation of our social existence--the something
besides bread by which man saves his soul alive." With her conception of
tradition, as the legitimate source of the moral and spiritual life in man,
and as the influence which builds up all which is truest and purest in our
civilization, she can endure to see no contempt put upon its products. This
essay, more perhaps than anything else she wrote, gives an insight into her
conception of the higher life and her total lack of faith in any idealistic
sources of human motive or inspiration. Contempt for the traditional, with
her, implies contempt for the spiritual and moral. To destroy the
traditional is revolutionary, dangerous and immoral. She cannot reject
tradition in the name of higher wisdom, in the name of higher truth and
authority. It gone, and all is gone; hence her fear of all iconoclastic and
revolutionary methods. So she would keep whole and pure the national
memories of every people. In the last essay of the book she says, "The
preservation of national memories is an element and a means of national
greatness, and their revival a sign of reviving nationality." It is "the
divine gift of memory" as it expresses itself in the life and purposes of a
people, "which inspires the moments with a past, a present and a future,
and gives the sense of corporate existence that raises man above the
brutes." All which lowers the influence or the sacredness of this memory is
debasing. The corrupting of this memory "is the impoverishment that
threatens our posterity;" and this "new famine, a meagre fiend, with lewd
grin and clumsy hoof, is breathing a moral mildew over the harvest of our
human sentiments." That eager yearning of the nineteenth century for truth
and reality, for something more than traditions and national memories,
which displays itself in reforms and revolutions of every kind, had little
of George Eliot's sympathy. Yet this spirit is stronger even than
tradition, and creates for us a new world and a higher life.
Throughout these essays it is the social side of morality which is praised
and commended. What will increase the altruistic spirit, what will widen
sympathy and helpfulness, is regarded as truly ethical in its import. Ideal
aims are brought to the level of present needs and the possibilities of
human nature as it now exists.
Wide-reaching motives, blessed and glorious as they are, and of the
highest sacramental virtue, have their dangers, like all else that
touches the mixed life of the earth. They are archangels with awful
brow and flaming sword, summoning and encouraging us to do the right
and the divinely heroic, and we feel a beneficent tremor in their
presence; but to learn what it is they summon us to do, we have to
consider the mortals we are elbowing, who are of our own stature and
our own appetites.... On the whole, and in the vast majority of
instances, 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.
A sour father may reform prisons, but considered in his sourness he
does harm.
In another essay, that entitled "Only Temper," the social side of morality
is again presented. Especially does it appear in that on "Moral Swindlers."
"Let us refuse to accept as moral," says George Eliot, "any political
leader who should allow his conduct in relation to great issues to be
determined by egoistic passion, and boldly say that he would be less
immoral even though he were as lax in his personal habits as Sir Robert
Walpole, if at the same time his sense of the public welfare were supreme
in his mind, quelling all pettier impulses beneath a magnanimous
impartiality." George Eliot is almost without exception sound and just in
her moral judgments, but here her theories have made her overlook the true
conditions of a moral life.
Seeing that Morality and Morals under their _alias_ of Ethics are the
subject of voluminous discussion, and their true basis a pressing
matter of dispute--seeing that the most famous book ever written on
Ethics, and forming a chief study in our colleges, allies ethical with
political science, or that which treats of the constitution and
prosperity of States, one might expect that educated men would find
reason to avoid a perversion of language which lends itself' to no
wider view of life than that of village gossips. Yet I find even
respectable historians of our own and of foreign countries, after
showing that a king was treacherous, rapacious, and ready to sanction
gross breaches in the administration of justice, end by praising him
for his pure moral character, by which one must suppose them to mean
that he was not lewd nor debauched, not the European twin of the
typical Indian potentate whom Macaulay describes as passing his life in
chewing bang and fondling dancing-girls. And since we are sometimes
told of such maleficent kings that they were religious, we arrive at
the curious result that the most serious wide-reaching duties of man
lie quite outside both Morality and Religion--the one of these
consisting in not keeping mistresses (and perhaps not drinking too
much), and the other in certain ritual and spiritual transactions with
God which can be carried on equally well side by side with the basest
conduct toward men. With such a classification as this, it is no
wonder, considering the strong re-action of language on thought, that
many minds, dizzy with indigestion of recent science and philosophy,
are fain to seek for the grounds of social duty; and without
entertaining any private intention of committing a perjury which would
ruin an innocent man, or seeking gain by supplying bad preserved meats
to our navy, feel themselves speculatively obliged to inquire why they
should not do so, and are inclined to measure their intellectual
subtlety by their dissatisfaction with all answers to this "Why?"
It would be quite impossible for George Eliot to write an essay without
some fresh thought or some new suggestion. To those who admire her genius
and are in sympathy with her teachings this volume will have a special
interest. Its few essays which touch upon moral or speculative subjects are
of the utmost value as interpretations of her life and thought.
All her essays, the later as the earlier, are mainly of interest as aids to
an understanding of her philosophy. Nothing is worthless which helps us
clearly to comprehend an original mind.
XIX.
THE ANALYTIC METHOD.
George Eliot's literary method was that of Fielding and Thackeray, both of
whom evidently influenced her manner. Their realism, and especially their
method of comment and moral observation, she made her own. She had little
sympathy with the romanticism of Scott or the idealism of Dickens. Her
moral aims, her intense faith in altruism, kept her from making her art a
mere process of photographing nature. Nature always had a moral meaning to
her, a meaning in reference to man's happiness and health of soul; and that
moral bearing of all human experiences gave dignity and purpose to her art.
It was the method of Scott to present the romantic, picturesque and poetic
side of life. He was not untrue to nature, but he cared more for beauty and
sentiment than for fact. He sometimes perverted the historic incidents he
made use of, but he caught the spirit of the time with which he was dealing
with absolute fidelity. In this capacity for historic interpretation he
surpassed George Eliot, who had not his instinctive insight into the past.
Scott had no theory about the past, no philosophy of history was known to
him; but above all novelists he had the power to see by the light of other
days, and to make the dead times live again. Not George Eliot and not
Thackeray was his rival in this historic insight and poetic power of
interpretation; and his superior success was due not only to his peculiar
genius but also to his romanticism. Scott failed where George Eliot
succeeded, in giving an intellectual interpretation of life. With certain
social and moral tendencies he was clearly at home. On its side of
adventure and social impulse and craving for a wider life, as a single
instance of his power, he was a true interpreter of the age of Elizabeth.
Its deeper spirit, its intellectual movements, he did not, and could not,
bring within the range of his story. It was here George Eliot was superior,
as is abundantly shown in _Romola_. The thoughtful aspects of Florentine
life she truthfully presented; but its more romantic elements it needed a
Scott to make living and real. In _The Spanish Gypsy_ there is very little
of genuine interpretation. Certain local features may be accurate, but the
spirit of the time is not there; the characters are not such as that age
and country developed. Scott, with all his romanticism, would have
introduced _reality_ into such an historic picture.
Within her own lines of power George Eliot is much greater than Scott, who
could not have written _Adam Bede_ or _Middlemarch_, or brought out what is
best in those works. Adventure was necessary to Scott; he could not have
transfigured the plain and homely with beauty as George Eliot has done.
Where she is at her best, as in the simple scenes of _Silas Marner_, there
is a charm, pathos and sympathy in her work which must endear it to all
hearts. That peculiar power Scott did not have; yet it would be most
difficult to decide which is the truer to nature. Genuine art, it is true,
has its foundation in the realities of human experience: but those
realities are not always best interpreted by the methods of realism. In his
own province Scott was truer to nature than George Eliot was in the same
field, as may be seen at once by comparing _The Spanish Gypsy_ with
_Ivanhoe_, or any of Scott's novels dealing with the mediaeval and feudal
ages, he took the past into himself, caught its spirit, reflected it in
its wholeness. In this he was a genuine realist, and all the more faithful
to reality because he did not accept realism as a theory.
In comparing George Eliot with Dickens, it must first of all be noted that
each is the superior of the other in his own special province. Dickens has
more imagination; he appeals to more universal sentiments, touches a wider
circle of experiences, captivates his readers with a resistless interest
and tenderness of spirit. His characters are unreal, mere caricatures
often, mere puppets. Yet he had an imagination of marvellous power, so that
his characters appeared to his own mind as if real, and he describes them
as if they actually stood before him, making them intensely real to his
readers. Many of his persons never lived, never could have lived; yet they
are types or certain traits of character made living and brought out into a
distinctive existence. What those traits of character are he makes all the
more apparent by this method.
Dickens had not a fine literary taste, he had no clear insight into some of
the purer human sentiments, he was grossly untrue and false in many of his
pictures. Yet all in all, with his many faults, it is to be said that his
idealism, which was not of a high type, made him a true interpreter of
life. If his characters are less faithfully drawn than George Eliot's, his
insight into some of the sentiments and emotions was truer. His pictures
may be false in some particulars, but he has given them the true spirit
with which they should be animated.
In thoughtful fidelity to the facts of life, George Eliot surpasses Scott
or Dickens. Scott by his insight, Dickens by his imagination, were able to
do what she could not; but they put little thought into their work. They
did not think about what life meant; she did. They worked instinctively,
she thoughtfully. Her characters are more often to be met with than theirs;
and there is a freshness, a wholesomeness, about them theirs do not have.
She is more simple and refined than Fielding, more elevated in tone of
thought, there is a deeper and a richer purpose in her work. None of the
cynicism and hardness of Thackeray appear in her pages. She is fresher,
more genuine, more poetic than he, with more of humanity.
In her essay on "The Natural History of German Life" she said of Dickens
that he was "gifted with the utmost power of rendering the external traits
of our town population." City life Dickens and Thackeray most truly
photographed in all its features of snobbishness and selfishness. Its
better side, its nobler sentiments, its humanity, they did not succeed
in so well; not so well as George Eliot did, and simply because they did
not so much sympathize with it. Country life they did not understand, and
could not have sketched. Where George Eliot best succeeded they would have
failed. Her real advance upon Dickens and Thackeray, however, lay in
another direction. She says in the essay just quoted, speaking of Diekens's
portraitures of town populations, that "if he could give us their
psychological character--their conception of life and their emotions--with
the same truth as their idiom and manners, his books would be the greatest
contribution art has ever made to the awakening of social sympathies."
In the two directions here indicated lay her superiority over other
novelists,--her humanitarian sympathies and her psychologic insight. In
reality, she did not contribute anything new to the realism of literary
art. All which can be said for faithfulness to nature in art and poetry has
been said by Ruskin, and George Eliot was early a reader of his books. Her
predecessors, especially Thackeray, opened the way in the application of
the realistic principles in its newer spirit. The enlargement of realism,
however, was carried on to a much greater extent by the pre-Raphaelites in
painting and poetry, and George Eliot was influenced by them as well. Their
principle of loyal fidelity to the time and circumstances depicted was her
own, at least in theory.
It was in another direction her chief characteristic lay, that of
describing "psychologic character." Here she was no imitator, but she made
a way of her own, and developed a new method. The method of science she
applied to literature. Science has adopted the method of analysis, of
inductive inquiry, of search in all the facts of nature for the laws which
underlie them. So magnificent have been the results obtained by this
process in the study of the material world, that it has been applied with
the hope of securing the same thorough investigation of the phenomena
presented by history, ethics and religion. Even here the method has
justified itself, and has in recent years opened up new and valuable
results, giving to the world an enriched conception of the life of man.
The speculative mind has been stimulated to fresh activity, and new
philosophies, of vast and imposing proportions, have been the result. The
studies of Charles Darwin, and the elaboration of the theory of evolution,
have given a marvellous incentive to the new method, resulting in its
wide-spread application to all the questions of nature and life.
A method so productive in all directions must have its effect on
literature. What claims the attention of all thinking men cannot long
be kept out of poetry and art. In painting and in music it has been
largely developed in the direction of a more intimate and sympathetic
interpretation of nature and man. In literature the new method has been
mainly brought into application hitherto in the form of photographic
studies of human life. To describe what is, to make a true word-picture,
has been the chief aim. With George Eliot began a wider use of the new
method and its application in a more sympathetic spirit to the deeper
problems of the mind and heart. She was not content to paint the surface of
nature, to give photographic sketches of the outside of human life, but she
wished to realize every subtle fact and every most secret impulse. An
admirer of the Dutch school in painting, and of Jane Austen as a novelist,
she was not content with their results and methods, wishing to interpret
the spirit as well as the letter of nature and life.
In literature, the new method as developed in recent years consists in an
application of psychology to all the problems of man's nature. George
Eliot's intimate association with the leaders of the scientific movement in
England, naturally turned her mind into sympathy with their work, and made
her desirous of doing in literature what they were doing in science. In the
special department of physiological psychology, no one did more than George
Henry Lewes, and her whole heart went out in genuine appreciation of his
work. He studied the mind as a function of the brain, as being developed
with the body, as the result of inherited conditions, as intimately
dependent on its environment. Here was a new conception of man, which
regarded him as the last product of nature, considered as an organic whole.
This conception George Eliot everywhere applied in her studies of life and
character. She studied man as the product of his environment, not as a
being who exists above circumstances and material conditions. "In the eyes
of the psychologist," says Mr. James Sully, "the works of George Eliot must
always possess a high value by reason of their large scientific insight
into character and life." This value consists, as he indicates, in the fact
that she interprets the inner personality as it is understood by the
scientific student of human nature. She describes those obscure moral
tendencies, nascent forces, and undertones of feeling and thought, which
enter so much into life. She lays much stress on the subconscious mental
life, the domain of vague emotion and rapidly fugitive thought.
The aim of the psychologic method is to interpret man from within, in his
motives and impulses. It endeavors to show why he acts, and it unfolds the
subtler elements of his character. This method George Eliot uses in
connection with her evolutionary philosophy, and uses it for the purpose of
showing that man is a product of hereditary conditions, that he has been
shaped into his life of the emotions and sentiments by the influence of
tradition. The psychologic method may be applied, however, without
connection with the positive or evolutionary philosophy. The mind may be
regarded as a distinct force and power, exercised within social and
material limits, and capable of being studied in all its inner motives and
impulses. Yet in her mental inquiries George Eliot did not regard man as an
eternal soul in the process of development by divine methods, but as the
inheritor of the past, moulded by every surrounding circumstance, and as
the creature of the present. Instead of regarding man as _sub specie
eternitatis_, she regarded him as an animal who has through feeling and
social development come to know that he cannot exist beyond the present.
This limitation of his nature affected her work throughout.
The psychologic method in literature has also been that of Robert Browning,
and he has been as faithful to it as any other. He, too, analyzes his
characters, penetrates all the hidden causes of motive and deed, lays bare
the soul. No other poet has surpassed him in power to unveil the inner
workings of the mind, to discover all the influences affecting it or in
revealing how motives are created and how motives lead up to deeds. In two
important particulars Robert Browning differs from George Eliot. His
characters speak for themselves, reveal the secrets of their own minds. He
does not talk about them, does not criticise their words and conduct, does
not stand off from them as a spectator. He differs from her also in his
conception of man as a being who is here developing an eternal existence
under the laws of an Infinite Spirit. He, too, believes in the natural, and
believes that the highest law of the soul is, to be true to every pure
impulse arising within us. To calculate, to philosophize, he holds to be
always to man's injury, that nature when perfectly obeyed is the only
guide. He studies man as affected by all the circumstances of his
existence, and as wrought upon by the great social forces which have made
him what he is. His analysis is as keen as George Eliot's; he makes the
soul appear before us in all its reality. His is a more creative, a more
dramatic method than hers; yet he is fully as subjective, as much an
interpreter of the soul. Neither is content to record the deeds of men;
both wish to know why men act.
Browning has fittingly been called the poet of psychology. He is a
dissecter, a prober, an analyzer in the full spirit of scientific research.
He spares no pains to get at and to completely unfold the truth about man's
nature, to show all the hidden causes of his action, all the secret motives
of his life, using this method as thoroughly as George Eliot. It is
interesting to note his attitude towards the great religious problems. His
faith in God is intensely passionate and sublime in its conception. In
words the most expressive in their meaning, and indicating a conviction the
deepest, he reveals his faith.
"He glows above
With scarce an intervention, presses close
And palpitatingly, His soul o'er ours."
The lifting and inspiring power of faith in an Infinite Being he has sung
with a poet's purity of vision. Along with this faith goes his belief that
man is being glowly perfected for a higher and nobler existence.