(GEORGE ELIOT, 1819-1880)
George Eliot once declared that “if art does not enlarge men’s
sympathies, it does nothing morally.... The only effect I long to
produce by my writings is that those who read them shall be better able
to _imagine_ and to _feel_ the pains and joys of those who differ from
themselves.”
It is written in _Adam Bede_:
“My strongest effort is to avoid any arbitrary picture, and to give a
faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves
in my mind. The mirror is doubtless defective; the outlines will
sometimes be disturbed, the reflection faint or confused; but I feel
_as much bound_ to tell you as precisely as I can what that reflection
is, _as if I were in a witness box narrating my experience on oath_....
“I would not, even if I had the choice, be the clever novelist who
could create a world so much better than this, in which we get up
in the morning to do our daily work, that you would be likely to
turn a harder, colder eye on the dusty streets and the common green
fields--on the real breathing men and women who can be chilled by
your indifference or injured by your prejudice, who can be cheered
and helped onward by your fellow-feeling, your forbearance, your
outspoken, brave justice.
“So I am content to tell my simple story, without trying to make
things seem better than they were; dreading nothing, indeed, but
falsity, which, in spite of one’s efforts, there is reason to dread.
Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult....
“It is for this rare, precious quality of truthfulness that I delight
in many Dutch paintings; which lofty-minded people despise. I find
a source of delicious sympathy in these faithful pictures of a
monotonous, homely existence, which has been the fate of so many more
among my fellow-mortals than a life of pomp or of absolute indigence,
of tragic suffering or of world-stirring actions. I turn, without
shrinking, from cloud-borne angels, from prophets, sibyls, and heroic
warriors, to an old woman bending over her flower-pot, or eating
her solitary dinner, while the noonday light, softened perhaps by a
screen of leaves, falls on her mob-cap, and just touches the rim of
her spinning wheel, and her stone jug, and all those cheap common
things which are the precious necessaries of life to her; or I turn to
that village wedding, kept between four brown walls, where an awkward
bridegroom opens the dance with a high-shouldered, broad-faced bride,
while elderly and middle-aged friends look on, with very irregular
noses and lips, and probably with quart-pots in their hands, but with
an expression of unmistakable contentment and good-will....
“All honour and reverence to the divine beauty of form! Let us
cultivate it to the utmost in men, women, and children--in our
gardens and in our houses.... Paint us an angel if you can, with a
floating violet robe, and a face paled by the celestial light; paint
us yet oftener a Madonna, turning her mild face upward and opening
her arms to welcome the divine glory; but do not impose on us any
æsthetic rules which shall banish from the region of art those old
women scraping carrots with their work-worn hands, those heavy clowns
taking holiday in a dingy pothouse, those rounded backs and stupid,
weather-worn faces that have bent over the spade and done the rough
work of the world--those homes with their tin pans, their brown
pitchers, their rough curs, and their clusters of onions....
“There are few prophets in the world, few sublimely beautiful women,
few heroes. I can’t afford to give all my love and reverence to such
rarities: I want a great deal of those feelings for my everyday
fellow-men, especially for the few in the foreground of the great
multitude whose faces I know, whose hands I touch, for whom I have
to make way with kindly courtesy. Neither are picturesque lazzaroni
or romantic criminals half so frequent as your common labourer, who
gets his own bread, and eats it vulgarly but creditably with his
own pocket-knife. It is more needful that I should have a fibre
of sympathy connecting me with that vulgar citizen who weighs out
my sugar in a vilely-assorted cravat and waistcoat, than with the
handsomest rascal in red scarf and green feathers; more needful
that my heart should swell with loving admiration at some trait of
gentle goodness in the faulty people who sit at the same hearth with
me, or in the clergyman of my own parish, who is perhaps rather too
corpulent, and in other respects is not an Oberlin or a Tillotson,
than at the deeds of heroes whom I shall never know except by hearsay,
or at the sublimest abstract of all clerical graces that was ever
conceived by an able novelist.”
Woman has found, and proclaimed, her mission. She is a moral realist,
and her realism is not inspired by any idle ideal of art, but by
sympathy with life. Jane Austen and Mary Mitford were compared,
condescendingly, with Dutch painters. George Eliot claims the parallel
with pride. It may be questioned if realism was ever defended with so
much eloquence, from such high motives. Finally, if the romance of
high life has no place in these pictures, neither has the romance of
crime, adventure, or squalid destitution. They hold up the mirror to
mediocrity. They present the parish.
And for many years George Eliot influenced thought and culture among
the middle-classes more widely, and perhaps more profoundly, than
any other writer. We can remember a generation for whom the moral
problems involved in the relations between Dorothea and Will Ladislaw
were a favourite topic for tea-table conversation in serious families;
and when the novelist herself married a second time, it seemed to
many that an ideal had been desecrated. Her intensity of religious
feeling, combined with independence towards theological authority,
expressed with truly artistic effect the whole temperament of an
age whose spiritual cravings were almost exclusively ethical. Her
contribution to literature, placing her in the highest rank, was the
creation of many characters, instinct with humanity, struggling with
fine moral earnestness towards the attainment of an ideal, halting
long and stumbling often by the way. Their appeal to young readers
of each generation is irresistible; while the crowded backgrounds,
so truthfully and dramatically portrayed, of a day when the English
middle-classes were ever eager in extending their moral and mental
horizon, can never lose value as an important chapter in social history.
If we have read them rightly, it is this for which women’s work had
been all along preparing the way. George Eliot certainly had not so
great a genius as Jane Austen or Charlotte Brontë; she was not a
pioneer like Fanny Burney. But she had greater breadth, more firm
solidity; and she was conscious of her aim, with the professional
training, the culture, _and_ the genius to achieve.
Women, we see, have been always realistic and parochial. They have
avoided the glitter of wealth and the grime of sin. Tender to
prodigals, they have loved the home. If the “intense and continuous
note of personal conviction,” so conspicuous in George Eliot, began
with Charlotte Brontë, women have always felt and thought morally.
She has been summarily dismissed as an “example of the way in which the
novel--once a light and frivolous thing--had come to be taken with the
utmost seriousness--had in fact ceased to be light literature at all,
and began to require rigorous and elaborate training and preparation in
the writer, perhaps even something of the athlete’s processes in the
reader.”
But such seriousness was characteristic of her age, and everyone had
then learnt to demand professionalism in art; while, on the other hand,
readers of 1821 were assured that “Miss Austen had the merit of being
evidently a Christian writer,” who conveyed “that unpretending kind of
instruction which is furnished by real life,” and whose works may “on
the whole be recommended, not only as among the most unexceptionable of
their kind, but as combining, in an eminent degree, instruction with
amusement.”
Charlotte Brontë, we may remember, was declared, by her contemporaries,
“one who has, for some sufficient reason, long forfeited the society
of her sex”; and George Eliot herself was accused of “coarseness and
immorality,” in her attempt “to familiarise the minds of our young
women in the middle and higher ranks with matters on which their
fathers and brothers would never venture to speak in their presence ...
and to intrude on minds which ought to be guarded from impurity the
unnecessary knowledge of evil.” To such critics her claim to kinship
with the “honest old Dutchman” is set aside for a parallel to “the
perverseness of our modern ‘pre-Raphaelites,’ with their choice of
disagreeable subjects, uncomely models, and uncouth attitudes.”
Such is the natural result of women daring to think for themselves.
To-day we are content rather to notice that Miss Burney first cleansed
the circulating library, and Miss Austen most unobtrusively extolled
the domestic virtues; while their sisters in art all contributed to the
prevalence of wholesome fiction; until Miss Brontë and George Eliot
stirred up the conscience of man towards woman. In reality women are
born preachers, and always work for an ideal.
The period, indeed, is already approaching in which women’s work can no
longer be treated _en masse_ and by itself, apart from men’s. It is no
longer essentially spontaneous or unconscious, as in Miss Burney and
Jane Austen. We have described the writers immediately preceding George
Eliot as professional experts, careful of art; and once the world had
learnt to _expect_ good work from woman and grown accustomed to her
as an artist, there remained no further occasion for her to speak as
a woman among aliens. George Eliot, indeed, like Charlotte Brontë,
had been, by some of her contemporaries, taken for a man; but the
youngest and most inexperienced reader to-day could scarcely have been
momentarily deceived. There are, indeed, certain tricks, or mannerisms,
of masculinity; but they are superficial, and not actually worn with
much grace or skill.
No earlier woman-writer, indeed, had assumed so comprehensive a
philosophy, or scarcely any attempt at ordered opinion on life in
general, on character, or on faith. But, despite the enthusiasm of
certain biographers, despite the influence--unquestioned--of Herbert
Spencer, Strauss, George Henry Lewes, and others, we are not personally
disposed to grant much weight to our author’s generalisations; while
certainly the obtrusiveness of her moralising is an artistic blemish.
The fact is that George Eliot’s outlook remains thoroughly emotional
and feminine. In herself, we know, she always saw life through a
man-interpreter; and the didactics of her novels are derived from the
study of books, not from the exercise of independent reason or thought.
If she _talked_ ethics, she _felt_ faith.
But, on the other hand, her work has little external affinity with
that of the women of genius preceding her (though it may be a natural
development from theirs), because it is obviously the result of
training and study, that is _professional_. It is, moreover, the
first important contribution by women to the problem novel with a
purpose. Both points can be easily illustrated by the most elementary
comparison.
We have tacitly assumed, and with obvious justification in fact, that
Fanny Burney and Jane Austen, for example, wrote entirely out of their
own personal experience. We picture their own surroundings from the
society in their novels, noting the power acquired by the limitation.
Charlotte Brontë did not go beyond her own circle, save in imagination.
But George Eliot, no less certainly, _studied_ mankind _for copy_. It
is true that she made more direct _use of_ her own family and friends
than they. Maggie Tulliver is no less autobiographical than Lucy Snowe.
True also that for description and atmosphere she depended largely on
memory. But even here the treatment is that of a self-conscious artist,
composing and presenting from outside, studying effects, grouping
types; always alive to a comparison between life and literature. And
as she _uses_ the human material which has come to her in the natural
order of things, she increases it by the journalist’s eye for new copy,
piquant contrast, and unexpected revelation. She invokes, moreover, the
assistance of every literary device--prepared humour, scholarly style,
cultured allusion, local colour, analytical characterisation, and
dramatic construction. We have here no longer a spontaneous revelation
of woman; rather her captain in full array, armed for fight.
Nor is the message, or open discussion of problems, less novel or
less deliberate. It was possible, indeed inevitable, to notice in the
earlier examples of woman’s work that she held theories on life not
quite in accord with what man had always expected from her. Part of
her inspiration, no doubt, was the desire to express these. On certain
points, recognised womanly,--such as education and the ordering of a
home,--she soon learnt to speak openly; but, in the main, we studied
the woman’s ideal of character and conduct from her portrait-painting;
we deduced her approval from her sympathy, her budding criticism from
her scorn. If she attempted direct teaching, it was mostly in support
of mere conventional duty; the reward of virtue and the punishment of
vice, tentatively measured perhaps by a standard, not quite blindly
copied from men. The greatest artists among women before Charlotte
Brontë never obtruded the moral, discussed the problem.
But what was fearlessly urged on a few chosen topics from the
Haworth parsonage became the foreground and main subject with the
assistant editor of the _Westminster Review_. We are, to-day, somewhat
overweighted with problem novels; but George Eliot was the first among
us to realise the full power of fiction as a vehicle more persuasive,
if not more powerful, than the pulpit; for the fearless and intimate
discussion of all the questions and difficulties which must confront a
man, or a woman, who is not content to accept things as they are, or to
believe all he is told. To-day we may detect
“a curious _naïveté_ in the whole impression George Eliot’s novels
convey.... The ethical law is, in her universe, as all powerful as
the law of gravitation, and as unavoidable. Remorse, degeneration of
character, and even material loss, are meted out for transmission with
the rigid and childlike sense of justice which animated the writers of
the Old Testament. Her temper was Hebraistic, and goodness was more to
her than beauty. It may be doubted whether in the world, as we see it,
justice works as impartially and with such unmistakable exactitude,
whether the righteous is never forsaken, and evil always hunts the
wicked person to overthrow him.”
But we must remember that George Eliot’s conception of wickedness,
if limited, was well in advance of her age; that she understood
temptation, and could draw a most dramatically “mixed” character. Her
people are not all black or all white. She knew how slight an error or
slip, how amiable a weakness, could lead to actions which the Pharisee
called sin, and the Puritan would punish with hell-fire. She entirely
forgave Maggie Tulliver, she held out the hand of fellowship to Godfrey
Cass, and even to Arthur Donnithorne. If “we are almost afraid of”
Dinah Morris, she, too, certainly loved sinners. George Eliot, in
fact, will not accept any opinion on authority, or follow the world in
judgment; and if “the world has never produced a woman philosopher,”
her work remains pre-eminent as the first complete and outspoken record
of woman’s “scientific speculation to discover an interpretation of the
universe,” her first conscious message to mankind; destined to “raise
the standard of prose-fiction to a higher power; to give it a new
impulse and motive.” She has now spoken for herself on conduct and on
faith.
Nevertheless George Eliot remains a woman. We still look to her
primarily for the revelation of woman, and woman’s vision of man. We
have taken another step, onward and inward, towards the mystery of
the feminine ideal, the meaning of the Home and the Family to those
who make it. All this is far more complex, indeed, than anything we
have studied in earlier chapters. It embraces, in _Romola_, some
reconstruction of past times; in _Daniel Deronda_, some study of an
alien race. It includes sympathy for a woman wandering so far from
the natural feminine instincts as to abandon, and half murder, her
own child; for a girl who, given to dreamy ideals and passionate
self-sacrifice, will yet suffer attentions from the acknowledged lover
of her cousin, simply because he is handsome. It reveals the genuine
repentance and uplifting of a drunken wife; it permits “friendship”
between a married woman and a young artist whose very vices are more
attractive than the heartless tyrannical egoism of her husband. We
have travelled a long way, certainly, from Catherine Morland and Fanny
Price. We can imagine a new Lydia Bennet under George Eliot.
Still the problems are women’s problems: the solutions are feminine,
as we may see from the eagerness with which they were condemned by
man, the conservative and the conventional. “I’m no denyin’,” said Mrs.
Poyser, “the women are foolish. God almighty made ’em to match the
men.” It was George Eliot’s ambition, towards which she accomplished
much, that “the women” should be less intent upon that _matching_, more
willing, and able, to mould themselves after their own pattern: in
their turn to form a creed, to establish a standard--wherein she was
following, but more consciously, those who had gone before. As Huxley
remarked, in answer to Princess Louise, she did not “go in for” the
superiority of women. She rather “_teaches the inferiority of men_.”
For, verily, there is no more in it. Her women are lost outside the
home; they are not financially, or intellectually, “independent.”
They have no professions, no clubs, no sports. Their interests are
confined to religion, domesticity, and love. Nor does George Eliot
attempt to follow “the men” into politics[15] or business, on to the
cricket field or the parade ground. A soldier is distinguished by his
regimentals, a scholar by his library, a doctor by his gig. She has
a strong partiality, tempered by criticism, for the clergy; she can
distinguish, intelligently, between Church and Dissent; she knows a
good deal about squires and farmers; she loves the labourer. We may
safely regard her work as the continuation, and the completion, of our
subject.
The completion, indeed, is rather intellectual than artistic. She
covers the whole ground, as none of her predecessors had attempted; she
makes the last final addition of subject by discovering, and facing,
social problems; she applies the last word in literary professionalism;
but inasmuch as her characters are more typical and more studied than
Jane Austen’s, they are, in a sense, less modern and less universal. We
may learn _more_ from her about women, and women’s opinions; but these
are the women of one age only--fast awakening, indeed, and conscious of
many troubling possibilities, but not free.
Their chief aim is, while widening their knowledge and sympathy,
to speak with imperious accents of duty, that “stern Daughter of
the Voice of God.” Despite her assumption of masculine logic and
reasoning, itself an artistic blemish, she offers no explanation of
her categorical and materialistic, ethical dogma. The distinction
between good and evil with her is in the last resort a question of
emotional instinct, haunted by “the faltering hope that a spiritual
interpretation of the universe may be true.” It is impossible to avoid
feeling that she accords the greatest strength of character to serene
piety like that of Dinah Morris, or to Adam Bede’s conception of the
“deep, spiritual things in religion ... when feelings come into you
like a rushing, mighty wind.... His work, as you know, had always been
part of his religion, and from very early days he saw clearly that good
carpentry was God’s will.” In her heart of hearts, George Eliot, we are
certain, would have echoed Mrs. Poyser’s preference for character over
doctrine: “Mr. Irvine was like a good meal o’ victual, you were the
better for him without thinking on it; and Mr. Ryde was like a dose o’
physic, he gripped you and worrited you, and, after all, he left you
much the same.”
It was Mr. Irvine, you will remember, who put on his slippers before
going upstairs to his plain, invalid sister; and “whoever remembers how
many things he has declined to do even for himself, rather than have
the trouble of putting on or taking off his boots, will not think this
last detail insignificant.” It needs a woman, however, to appreciate
such a service of love.
George Eliot, indeed, could be humorous, somewhat pedantically, and
even genial about little things, and she recognised most fully their
importance in life. But her more calculated and accumulative effects
were all tragic or subdued melancholy; partly, no doubt, from this
uncertainty of hers about faith and her passionate sense of justice,
so relentless in its demand for the punishment of sin; partly also
from that tinge of sadness which overshadows the narrow, old-fashioned
dogma by which her own childhood was moulded. Hard as she strove for
intellectual freedom, and eagerly as she proclaimed independence of
judgment, the halter of early impressions was round her neck; and it
is only by dwelling upon incidents or individuals, and ignoring the
studied main motive, that we can gain from her work any of the joy in
physical or natural beauty which should be an artist’s first care to
impart.
Yet, after all, nature has triumphed over temperament. In reality,
for example, Dinah Morris lives for us in her tactful tenderness for
the querulous old Lisbeth, and in her yearning towards Hetty; not in
the “call,” the “leading,” and the “voices” by which her ministry was
inspired. On the other hand, we admire her dignified superiority to
masculine criticism of women’s preaching: “It isn’t for men to make
channels for God’s Spirit, as they make channels for the water-courses,
and say, ‘Flow here, but flow not there.’”
Hetty Sorrel, again, was only adventurous through misfortune; she
belongs to the fireside. Dorothea was a hero-worshipper; Maggie
Tulliver is the ideal sister; Mary Garth the ideal helpmate. The crimes
of Rosamond Vincy, if there be no mercy in their exposure, are wholly
domestic; the sins of Janet are committed for her husband.
It is the same with the men. Amos Barton is only a poor country
clergyman, and grey-haired Mr. Gilfil “filled his pocket with
sugar-plums for the little children.” Adam Bede “had no theories about
setting the world to rights,” and “couldn’t abide a fellow who thought
he made himself fine by being coxy to’s betters.” The Tullivers, father
and son, were, in their different ways, as fine specimens of honest
tradesmen as Bulstrode was a consummate hypocrite of the provinces.
Lydgate was no more than an exceptionally clever and cultured general
practitioner, and we fancy that Will Ladislaw was a better lover
than artist. George Eliot’s squires are typical ornaments of the
countryside; her farmers belong as permanently to one side of the
hearth as their wives to the other. Silas Marner, practising a trade
that could not “be carried on entirely without the help of the Evil
One,” since “all cleverness was in itself suspicious,” had no power of
filling his life with “movement, mental activity, and close fellowship”
outside the “narrow religious sect” in which his youth was passed.
Nancy Osgood “actually said ‘mate’ for ‘meat,’ ‘’appen’ for ‘perhaps,’
and ‘’oss’ for ‘horse,’ which, to young ladies living in good Lytherly
society, who habitually said ’orse, even in domestic privacy, and only
said ’appen on the right occasions, was necessarily shocking.” She
supported “a cheerful face under rough answers and unfeeling words by
the belief that ‘a man must have so much on his mind’”; and “had her
unalterable code” ready for all occasions.
They are not an heroic company, you perceive, these sons and daughters
of a highly intellectual woman-novelist. In its more primitive
exponents their “kindness” is “of a beery and bungling sort,” their
anger is brutal and bigoted; they are not really interested in general
principles, in psychological analysis, in refined passion, or in
the future of mankind. Yet they are very serious about life, a good
deal puzzled by the apparent injustice of God, and filled with love
or hatred towards all their neighbours. In this parish, as in most,
everyone knows all about everyone else’s affairs, and finds them of
supreme interest.
Thus George Eliot maintains the feminine attention to minutiæ; the
woman’s centralisation of Life round the family. She has acquired
knowledge, “read up” literature, and to some extent digested
philosophy; but she applies her powers, her culture, and her
training--from practice and association with professional writers--to
the amplification and rounding off of woman’s art. She established
domestic realism by the expression of feminine insight. She is content
to leave other things to other pens. The appearance of generalisations
not influenced by her sex is misleading. It is only a modern form of
the old story. Her heart, and her genius, are those of a woman, womanly.
_Scenes of Clerical Life_, 1858.
_Adam Bede_, 1859.
_The Mill on the Floss_, 1860.
_Silas Marner_, 1861.
_Romola_, 1863.
_Felix Holt_, 1866.
_Middlemarch_, 1872.
_Daniel Deronda_, 1876.