Builder and maker, Thou, of houses not made with hands!
What, have fear of change from Thee, who art ever the same?
Doubt that Thy power can fill the heart that Thy power expands?
There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before;
The evil is null, is naught, is silence implying sound;
What was good, shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more;
On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven the perfect round.
"All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good, shall exist;
Not its likeness, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power
Whose voice has gone forth, but, each survives for the melodist
When eternity confirms the conceptions of an hour.
The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,
The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;
Enough that He heard it once: we shall hear it by and by."
He teaches that progress is the true mark and aim of man's being, a
progress sure and glorious.
"Progress, man's distinctive mark alone,
Not God's and not the beast's; God is, they are,
Man partly is, and wholly hopes to be."
Man yearns after more than he can gain here; that yearning is the mark of
his higher nature and the means of progress. If he follows the better
impulses of his nature, all experience will help to unfold his soul into
higher attainments, and impulse will at last become, in clearer moments,
revelation.
"Oh, we're sunk enough here, God knows!
But not quite so much that moments,
Sure tho' seldom, are denied us,
When the spirit's true endowments
Stand out plainly from its false ones,
And appraise it if pursuing
Or the right way or the wrong way
To its triumph or undoing.
There are flashes struck from midnights,
There are fireflames noondays kindle,
Whereby piled-up honors perish.
Whereby swol'n ambitions dwindle,
While just this or that poor impulse
Which for once had play unstifled
Seems the sole work of a lifetime,
That away the rest have trifled."
More impersonal and dramatic than George Eliot, Browning introduces his
doctrines less often. It is not easy to discover what are his theories as
distinguished from those of his characters, for he makes no comments, and
is faithful in developing the unity and integrity of his _dramatis
personae_, whether in his monologues or dramas. Great as his other faults
maybe, he surpasses George Eliot in his power to reveal character, but not
in his power to make his characters stand out distinctly and unprejudiced
from his own mind. His obscurity of expression and his involved style are
serious defects in much of his work; and to most readers his thoroughly
dramatic manner is puzzling. He gives but faint clue to the situation in
his monologues, little explanation of the person, time or place. All is to
be discovered from the obscurest allusions and hints. Defective as this
method is in Browning's treatment, it is the true psychologic method,
wherein motive and character are developed dramatically and without labored
discussion. It is a more vital and constructive process than that followed
by George Eliot, because nothing of the meaning and fulness of life is lost
in the process of analysis. That Browning can never be read by more than a
few, indicates how great are his faults; but in lyric passion, dramatic
power and psychologic analysis he is one of the greatest poets of the
century. The value and range of the new method are well illustrated in its
use by two such thinkers and poets.
The analytic method as applied by George Eliot regards man as a social
being, studies him as a member of society. All that he is, and all
the influences working upon him, are understood only as affected by
his connection with the life of the race. This fact gives the most
distinguishing characteristic to her literary methods. Her imitators may
not, and nearly all of them do not, follow her into positivism; but they
all study man as a social being. They deal with him as affected by
heredity, education, and social characteristics. Even here it is not her
theories, but her artistic methods, which are imitated. The novel is no
longer regarded as a story to be told dramatically and with moving effect,
but as a study of character, as an analysis of situations and motives. The
advocates of the new method say that "in one manner or another the stories
were all told long ago; and now we want merely to know what the novelist
thinks about persons and situations." [Footnote: W.D. Howells in the
Century for November, 1882.] This interpretation of the mission of the
novelist well describes George Eliot's work, for she never hesitated to
tell her reader what she thought about the situations and the persons of
whom she wrote.
The new method, as developed in sympathy with agnosticism, fails in
literature just as science fails to be a complete interpretation of the
universe. The process which answers in the material world does not answer
in the spiritual. The instruments which tell the secrets of matter, close
the avenues to the revelations of mind. The methods of experiment and
demonstration which have brought the universe to man's knowledge, have not
been sufficient to make the soul known to itself. Any literary methods
imitating physical science must share in its limitations without its power
over the materials with which it has to deal. Literature has hitherto been
made helpful and delightful and acceptable because of its ideal elements.
Belief in a spiritual world, belief in the imperative law of righteousness
as a divine command, runs through all effective literature. However
realistic the poets have been when they have reached their highest and
best, they have believed that the soul, and what belongs to it, is the only
_reality_. Divorced of this Element, literature is at once lowered in tone,
a dry-rot seizes upon it and eats away its finest portions. If Goethe and
Shakspere are realists in literary method, as some of their interpreters
would claim, yet to them the spiritual is supreme, the soul is monarch.
So it is with Homer, with Dante, with Scott, with Cervantes, with Victor
Hugo, with every supremely artistic and creative mind. Great minds
instinctively believe in the creative power of the mind, in its capacity
for self-direction. An unbiassed mind gifted with genius sees over
and through all obstacles, leaps to magnificent results, will not be
restrained by the momentary conditions of the present. Education or social
environment, however adverse, will not long hinder the poet from his work.
He writes for the future, if the present will not accept him, confident
that what his soul has to utter can be truly uttered only as his own
individuality impels, and that if he is faithful to his genius the world
will listen in due time. This power of personality lies at the basis of all
genuine literature, teaching faith in the soul, faith in a providential
ordering of the world, and overturning all agnostic theories about realism
and environment.
This instinctive faith in mind is the basis of all genuine idealism. The
idealist is not the creator of an imaginary world, peopling it with shapes
that never existed; but he is one who believes in ideas, and in mind as
their creator and the vehicle of their expression. Contemporary with George
Eliot was a group of men who believed in the mind as something other than
the temporary product of an evolutionary process. With them she may be
contrasted, her work may be measured by theirs. Carlyle, Tennyson, Browning
and Buskin shared with her the radical ideas of the time. Not one of them
has been fettered by narrow theories or cramped by old social doctrines.
The broad, inquiring, scientific spirit of the time has been shared by them
all. Buskin is a realist, Carlyle believed in the enduring realm of facts,
and they have all accepted the spirit of naturalism which has ruled the
century. The scientific, philosophic and social theories of the time have
been their inspiration. Certain ideas about law, progress and social
regeneration have affected them through and through. Yet as regards the one
great characteristic of idealism, all have widely departed from George
Eliot, for all regard mind as supreme, all believe in a spiritual realm
environing man. This fact appears throughout their work. To them the
spiritual is objective; they are the true realists. To George Eliot the
spiritual is subjective, the result of our own feelings, to which it is
limited. When the feelings are gone, all is gone. In the pages of these men
there is consequently to be found a power and an inspiration not to be
found in hers. Wonderful as is her skill as an artist, and in the analysis
of character, yet we feel that we are walking over mocking graves whenever
we reach her spiritual conception of the world. She deceives us with a
shadow, offers us a name in place of what we crave for with every nobler
instinct of the soul. Our own feelings are given us, mirrored in the
feelings of others, in place of the reality we desire to possess.
These men have linked their work with those spiritual convictions which
have been the moral sustenance of the ages. They have gained in strength
and effectiveness thereby. Tennyson has his many doubts, his teachings have
been questioned; and yet he sings,--
"That each, who seems a separate whole,
Should move his rounds, and passing all
The skirts of self again, should fall,
Remerging in the general soul,--
"Is faith as vague as all unsweet:
Eternal form shall still divide
The eternal soul from all beside;
And I shall know him when we meet."
His flight of song is more sustained for this faith. He is a truer poet, of
stronger wing and loftier flight, because life has for him an infinite
meaning, because he opens his mind to the impressions which come of man's
spiritual existence. In the same way, Carlyle has a grander meaning running
through his books, more of sublimity, a finer eloquence, because the
spiritual is to him real. Doubter and scorner as he was, he could not but
see that man's being reaches beyond the material world and interprets some
higher realm. Vague as that faith was with him, it was a source of the most
effective literary power and stimulus. He bursts forth, under its impulse,
into impassioned passages of the noblest poetic beauty.
"Perhaps my father, all that essentially was my father, is even now near
me, with me. Both he and I are with God. Perhaps, if it so please God, we
shall in some higher state of being meet one another, recognize one
another. As it is written, we shall be forever with God. The possibility,
nay (in some way) the certainty, of perennial existence daily grows plainer
to me."
Ruskin has made it plain how necessary is that tone of mind which is
religious to the best work in art. His own faith has been earnest and
strong in the reality of the spiritual. Realist as he is in art, he
believes in the original and creative power of the mind, and his work has
all taken on a higher spirit and a finer expression because of his
religious convictions. Writing in _Modern Painters_ of man as made in the
image of God, he answers the objection which is raised to the idea that all
the revelation man has is contained in a being so imperfect.
"No other book, nor fragment of book, than that, will you ever
find,--nothing in the clouds above, nor in the earth beneath. The
flesh-bound volume is the only revelation that is, that was, or that can
be. In that is the image of God painted; in that is the law of God written;
in that is the promise of God revealed. Know thyself; for through thyself
only thou canst know God. Through the glass, darkly; but except through the
glass, in no wise. A tremulous crystal, waved as water, poured out upon the
ground;--you may defile it, despise it, pollute it at your pleasure and at
your peril; for on the peace of those weak waves must all the heaven you
shall ever gain be first seen; and through such purity as you can win for
those dark waves must all the light of the risen Sun of Righteousness be
bent down by faint refraction. Cleanse them, and calm them, as you love
your life. Therefore it is that all the power of nature depends on
subjection to the human soul. Man is the Sun of the world; more than the
real sun. The fire of his wonderful heart is the only light and heat worth
gauge or measure. Where he is, are the tropics; where he is not, the
ice-world."
Such words may not be scientific, but they convey real meaning. Their
assertion that the world is to be tested and understood by man, not man by
the world, is one worthy of attention. The conviction of this truth has a
literary power and incentive not to be found in "the scientific method" or
any of its corollaries.
To this group of writers may be added Mrs. Browning, who, as a poet, did
great and lasting work. Its value, in large measure, rests on its depth of
spiritual conviction, and on its idealism in purpose and spirit. Her
conception of love is finer and truer than George Eliot's, because she gave
it an ideal as well as an altruistic meaning; because she thought it has an
eternal as well as a social significance. As a poet she lost nothing of
charm or of power or of inspiration because she could herself believe, with
simple trust, what she has embodied in "A Child's Thought of God."
"God is so good, He wears a fold
Of heaven and earth across his face--
Like secrets kept, for love, untold.
But still I feel that his embrace
Slides down by thrills, through all things made,
Through sight and sound of every place."
That art is to be nothing more than a copying and interpretation of nature
Mrs. Browning did not believe. In _Aurora Leigh_ she says,--
"Art's the witness of what is
Beyond this show. If this world's show were all,
Mere imitation would be all in art."
The glow of genius burns up out of all her pages, and there is an aroma and
a subtle power in them which comes alone of this conception of art. She
could not rest content with the little round of man's experience, but found
that all the universe is bound together and all its parts filled with a
God-spirit.
"No lily-muffled hum of a summer bee
But finds some coupling with, the spinning stars;
No pebble at your foot but proves a sphere;
No chaffinch but implies the cherubim:
... Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God."
That is a larger faith and a truer faith than appears anywhere in the pages
of George Eliot, and it is one which impregnates most of the best
literature the world posseses with light and life. It is a faith which
gives hope and impulse where the other saddens and unnerves.
There is wanting in George Eliot's books that freshness of spirit, that
faith in the future, and that peaceful poise of soul which is to be found
in the writings of Tennyson, Ruskin and Mrs. Browning. Even with all his
constitutional cynicism and despair, the teachings of Carlyle are much more
hopeful than hers. An air of fatigue and world-weariness is about all her
work, even when it is most stimulating with its altruism. Though in theory
not a pessimist, yet a sense of pain and sorrow grows out of the touch of
each of her books. In this she missed one of the highest uses of
literature, to quicken new hopes and to awaken nobler purposes. There is a
tone of joy and exultation in the power life confers, an instinctive sense
of might to conquer the world, in the best writing. To make men think, to
move men to action, to confer finer feelings and motives, is the power of
the true poet. When he does not accomplish this he has written to a lesser
purpose. Literature aims either to please or to quicken the mind. It cannot
please when it leaves the heart depressed and burdened with the failures
and sadness of the world. If it is to please, it must make use of that
goodness and joy which are in excess of evil and misery. It cannot quicken
when it unnerves the mind and brings despair of moral purpose. If it is to
inspire it must show that something great is to be done, and awaken the
courage to do it.
That life has its sad and painful elements is a terrible fact, and the
novelist who would paint life as it is must recognize them. It is quite as
true that the good and the hopeful are more than the sad and painful, that
right is more powerful in human life than wrong. The novelist who would
paint life with an exact and even-handed justice, must not make all his
endings sorrowful, for very many in real life are not so. _The Mill on the
Floss_ would have been a more powerful and effective book could Maggie have
been made to conquer. It would have been quite as true to nature to have
represented her as overcoming her defects, and as being purified through
suffering. Is all suffering to conquer us, instead of our being able to
conquer it, and gaining a more peaceful and a purer life through its aid?
If Maggie is George Eliot in her youthful experiences, then the novel is
untrue to fact in that Marian Evans conquered and Maggie failed. The same
fault is to be found in _Middlemarch_, that Dorothea, great as she is,
deserved a much better fate than that accorded to her. The elements of
womanly greatness were in her character, and with all the barriers created
by society she would have done better things had her creator been true to
her capacities in unfolding her life-history. The effect of both these
great novels is one of depression and disappointment. The reader always
expects more as he goes on his way through these scenes, depicted with such
genius, than is realized at the end. Disappointment is almost inevitable,
for the promise is greater than the fulfilment. The like result is produced
by those books which have the brightest closing scenes, as in _Adam Bede_
and _Daniel Deronda_, where the author's aim was evidently hopeful and
constructive. _Silas Marner_ and _Felix Holt_ are the only exceptions to
this pessimistic tone, and in which justice is done to the better side of
life. In all her later books the ending is painful. In _The Mill on the
Floss_, Maggie and Tom are drowned after Maggie had been led to a most
bitter end of her love-affairs. In _Romola_ the heroine is left a widow,
after her husband's treachery had brought him to a terrible death, and
after Savonarola had suffered martyrdom. Dorothea marries into a life of
ordinary drudgery, and Lydgate fails. Daniel Deronda and Gwendolen are
separated from each other, and Deronda goes to the east in furtherance of a
wild scheme of Jewish colonization. Fedalma loses her father by the
treachery of her lover, and without hope conducts her tribe to Africa.
Jubal dies dishonored, and Armgart loses her voice. Yet it is not merely
that the conclusion does not lead to the expected result, but throughout
there is a tone of doubt and failure. That George Eliot purposed to give
life this tinge of sadness is not to be accepted as the true explanation of
it. It is known that she did not have such a purpose, that she was
surprised and disappointed that her books should produce such a result on
her readers. The explanation is to be found in another direction.
She was an agnostic; life had no wide horizon for her. The light of a
genuinely ideal and spiritual conception of life was not hers. The world
was bounded to her vision, rounded into the little capacity possessed by
man. Where others would have cast a glow of hope and sunset brilliance,
promise of a brighter day yet to dawn over the closing scenes of her
novels, she could see nothing beyond but the feeble effect of an earthly
transmitted good. In this regard her books afford a most interesting
contrast to those of the two other great women who have adorned English
literature with their genius. The lot of Mrs. Browning and Charlotte Brontë
was much sadder and more depressing than that of George Eliot; more of
darkness and pain affected their lives. A subtle tone of sadness runs
through their books, but it is not burdensome and depressing as is the case
of George Eliot. There is hope with it, and a buoyant faith in the good,
which lies above and beyond all pain and sorrow. With neither of them was
this faith conventional, a mere reflection of the religion taught them in
childhood. It was a thoughtful result of a large experience, and of hard
contact with many of the severest facts of human experience. That wide
horizon of spiritual reality which shone for them on every hand, lights all
their work with a brilliance which almost puts out of sight the pain and
sorrow of the world. The reader of their books is made to believe that life
is an endless good; he is cheered and made stronger for what life offers
him.
Agnosticism may have its great and heroic incentives, it may impel men to a
nobler activity, but its literary effect, as a motive towards a more
inspiring life, has not been satisfactory in the hands of George Eliot.
Shakspere is not a teacher of philosophy or ethics, he has no doctrines to
preach, no theories to advocate. What he believed, it would be difficult to
ascertain from his writings; yet he is an effective teacher of morals, he
stimulates into activity all that is best in man, life widens and deepens
under the touch of his genius. So is it with Milton, Schiller, Moliere,
Calderon, Montaigne and Wordsworth. So is it with George Eliot in all that
concerns our duties, and even with our human sympathies. In the one
direction of trust she is wanting, and her books are devoid of it.
Shakspere makes us realize that God rules over the world; George Eliot
leaves us with the feeling that we know nothing, and can hope for but
little. That her theories really cast a shadow over the world, may be seen
in all her dealings with love. Love is with her a human passion, deep,
pure, blessed. It crowns some of her characters with joy and peace and
strength; it is never impure and base in her pages. Yet it is human, it is
a social force, it is to be made altruistic. It never gains that high
poetic influence and charm which glorifies it in the writings of Mrs.
Browning, Browning and Tennyson. Browning conceives of it as an eternal
passion, as one with all that is divinest in man, as a medium of his
spiritual development. In his pages it glows with moral promise, it
inspires and regenerates. The poet should deal with love, not as a thing
base and susceptible of abuse, but as an influence capable of the most
beneficent results in the uplifting of man's nature. If it degrades, it
also sweetens; and only that is love which makes life richer and more
worthy. The true artist can afford to deal with that which pleases, not
with that which saddens and disgusts. The real love is the pure love, not
the depraved. The natural is the noble, not the debased life.
George Eliot's originality of method has given rise to a new school in
fiction. Her imitators, even when at their best, are not her equals, and
they have degraded her methods oftentimes to paltry uses. They have tried
to take photographs of life, supposing that art has for its aim to copy
nature. They have failed to see, what she did see, though not so clearly as
could have been desired, that art must do much more than imitate some scene
or fact out of nature. It must give beauty, meaning and expression to what
it copies. And it must do more than imitate: it must go beyond mere
description, and introduce unity, purpose and thought into its work. True
art has a soul as well as a body, says something to the mind as well as to
the eye, appeals to the soul as well as to sense. Had George Eliot done
nothing more than to describe common English life there would have been
small excuse for her work. She did more, touched that life with genius,
made it blossom into beauty, and gave to it deep moral meanings. The
defects of her method are to be seen in the fact that her imitators cannot
get above life's surface, and deal mainly with shallow or degraded natures.
Her methods do not inspire great work, while her own genius redeemed the
false ways into which she was led by her philosophic theories.