everything, and I have arrived at the end without even pointing to the
grounds on which Emerson justifies the honours of biography, discussion
and illustration. I have assumed his importance and continuance, and
shall probably not be gainsaid by those who read him. Those who do not
will hardly rub him out. Such a book as Mr. Cabot’s subjects a
reputation to a test--leads people to look it over and hold it up to the
light, to see whether it is worth keeping in use or even putting away in
a cabinet. Such a revision of Emerson has no relegating consequences.
The result of it is once more the impression that he serves and will not
wear out, and that indeed we cannot afford to drop him. His instrument
makes him precious. He did something better than any one else; he had a
particular faculty, which has not been surpassed, for speaking to the
soul in a voice of direction and authority. There have been many
spiritual voices appealing, consoling, reassuring, exhorting, or even
denouncing and terrifying, but none has had just that firmness and just
that purity. It penetrates further, it seems to go back to the roots of
our feelings, to where conduct and manhood begin; and moreover, to us
to-day, there is something in it that says that it is connected somehow
with the virtue of the world, has wrought and achieved, lived in
thousands of minds, produced a mass of character and life. And there is
this further sign of Emerson’s singular power, that he is a striking
exception to the general rule that writings live in the last resort by
their form; that they owe a large part of their fortune to the art with
which they have been composed. It is hardly too much, or too little, to
say of Emerson’s writings in general that they were not composed at all.
Many and many things are beautifully said; he had felicities,
inspirations, unforgettable phrases; he had frequently an exquisite
eloquence.
“O my friends, there are resources in us on which we have not yet
drawn. There are men who rise refreshed on hearing a threat; men to
whom a crisis which intimidates and paralyses the
majority--demanding not the faculties of prudence and thrift, but
comprehension, immovableness, the readiness of sacrifice, come
graceful and beloved as a bride.... But these are heights that we
can scarce look up to and remember without contrition and shame.
Let us thank God that such things exist.”
None the less we have the impression that that search for a fashion and
a manner on which he was always engaged never really came to a
conclusion; it draws itself out through his later writings--it drew
itself out through his later lectures, like a sort of renunciation of
success. It is not on these, however, but on their predecessors, that
his reputation will rest. Of course the way he spoke was the way that
was on the whole most convenient to him; but he differs from most men of
letters of the same degree of credit in failing to strike us as having
achieved a style. This achievement is, as I say, usually the bribe or
toll-money on the journey to posterity; and if Emerson goes his way, as
he clearly appears to be doing, on the strength of his message alone,
the case will be rare, the exception striking, and the honour great.
1887.
II
THE LIFE OF GEORGE ELIOT
The writer of these pages has observed that the first question usually
asked in relation to Mr. Cross’s long-expected biography is whether the
reader has not been disappointed in it. The inquirer is apt to be
disappointed if the question be answered in the negative. It may as well
be said, therefore, at the threshold of the following remarks, that such
is not the feeling with which this particular reader laid down the book.
The general feeling about it will depend very much on what has been
looked for; there was probably, in advance, a considerable belief that
we were to be treated to “revelations.” I know not exactly why it should
have been, but certain it is that the announcement of a biography of
George Eliot has been construed more or less as a promise that we were
to be admitted behind the scenes, as it were, of her life. No such
result has taken place. We look at the drama from the point of view
usually allotted to the public, and the curtain is lowered whenever it
suits the biographer. The most “intimate” pages in the book are those in
which the great novelist notes her derangements of health and
depression of spirits. This history, to my sense, is quite as
interesting as it might have been; that is, it is of the deepest
interest, and one misses nothing that is characteristic or essential
except perhaps a few more examples of the _vis comica_ which made half
the fortune of _Adam Bede_ and _Silas Marner_. There is little that is
absent that it would have been in Mr. Cross’s power to give us. George
Eliot’s letters and journals are only a partial expression of her
spirit, but they are evidently as full an expression as it was capable
of giving itself when she was not wound up to the epic pitch. They do
not explain her novels; they reflect in a singularly limited degree the
process of growth of these great works; but it must be added that even a
superficial acquaintance with the author was sufficient to assure one
that her rich and complicated mind did not overflow in idle confidences.
It was benignant and receptive in the highest degree, and nothing could
have been more gracious than the manner of its intercourse; but it was
deeply reserved and very far from egotistical, and nothing could have
been less easy or agreeable to it, I surmise, than to attempt to tell
people how, for instance, the plot of _Romola_ got itself constructed or
the character of Grandcourt got itself observed. There are critics who
refuse to the delineator of this gentleman the title of a genius; who
say that she had only a great talent overloaded with a great store of
knowledge. The label, the epithet, matters little, but it is certain
that George Eliot had this characteristic of the mind _possessed_: that
the creations which brought her renown were of the incalculable kind,
shaped themselves in mystery, in some intellectual back-shop or secret
crucible, and were as little as possible implied in the aspect of her
life. There is nothing more singular or striking in Mr. Cross’s volumes
than the absence of any indication, up to the time the _Scenes from
Clerical Life_ were published, that Miss Evans was a likely person to
have written them; unless it be the absence of any indication, after
they were published, that the deeply-studious, concentrated,
home-keeping Mrs. Lewes was a likely person to have produced their
successors. I know very well that there is no such thing in general as
the air of the novelist, which it behoves those who practise this art to
put on so that they may be recognised in public places; but there is
such a thing as the air of the sage, the scholar, the philosopher, the
votary of abstractions and of the lore of the ages, and in this pale but
rich _Life_ that is the face that is presented.
The plan on which it is composed is, so far as I know, without
precedent, but it is a plan that could have occurred only to an
“outsider” in literature, if I may venture to apply this term to one who
has executed a literary task with such tact and success. The regular
_littérateur_, hampered by tradition, would, I think, have lacked the
boldness, the artless artfulness, of conjoining in the same text
selected morsels of letters and journals, so as to form a continuous
and multifarious _talk_, on the writer’s part, punctuated only by
marginal names and dates and divisions into chapters. There is something
a little violent in the system, in spite of our feeling that it has been
applied with a supple hand; but it was probably the best that Mr. Cross
could have adopted, and it served especially well his purpose of
appearing only as an arranger, or rather of not appearing at all. The
modesty, the good taste, the self-effacement of the editorial element in
the book are, in a word, complete, and the clearness and care of
arrangement, the accuracy of reference, leave nothing to be desired. The
form Mr. Cross has chosen, or invented, becomes, in the application,
highly agreeable, and his rule of omission (for we have, almost always,
only parts and passages of letters) has not prevented his volumes from
being as copious as we could wish. George Eliot was not a great
letter-writer, either in quantity or quality; she had neither the
spirit, the leisure, nor the lightness of mind to conjure with the
epistolary pen, and after her union with George Henry Lewes her
disposition to play with it was further damped by his quick activity in
her service. Letter-writing was part of the trouble he saved her; in
this as in other ways he interposed between the world and his sensitive
companion. The difference is striking between her habits in this respect
and those of Madame George Sand, whose correspondence has lately been
collected into six closely-printed volumes which testify afresh to her
extraordinary energy and facility. Madame Sand, however, indefatigable
producer as she was, was not a woman of study; she lived from day to
day, from hand to mouth (intellectually), as it were, and had no general
plan of life and culture. Her English compeer took the problem of
production more seriously; she distilled her very substance into the
things she gave the world. There was therefore so much the less of it
left for casual utterance.
It was not till Marian Evans was past thirty, indeed, that she became an
author by profession, and it may accordingly be supposed that her early
letters are those which take us most into her confidence. This is true
of those written when she was on the threshold of womanhood, which form
a very full expression of her feelings at the time. The drawback here is
that the feelings themselves are rather wanting in interest--one may
almost say in amiability. At the age of twenty Marian Evans was a deeply
religious young woman, whose faith took the form of a narrow
evangelicism. Religious, in a manner, she remained to the end of her
life, in spite of her adoption of a scientific explanation of things;
but in the year 1839 she thought it ungodly to go to concerts and to
read novels. She writes to her former governess that she can “only sigh”
when she hears of the “marrying and giving in marriage that is
constantly transacted;” expresses enjoyment of Hannah More’s letters
(“the contemplation of so blessed a character as hers is very
salutary”); wishes that she “might be more useful in her own obscure and
lowly station” (“I feel myself to be a mere cumberer of the ground”),
that she “might seek to be sanctified wholly.” These first fragments of
her correspondence, first glimpses of her mind, are very curious; they
have nothing in common with the later ones but the deep seriousness of
the tone. Serious, of course, George Eliot continued to be to the end;
the sense of moral responsibility, of the sadness and difficulty of
life, was the most inveterate part of her nature. But the provincial
strain in the letters from which I have quoted is very marked: they
reflect a meagreness and grayness of outward circumstance; have a tinge
as of Dissent in a small English town, where there are brick chapels in
back streets. This was only a moment in her development; but there is
something touching in the contrast between such a state of mind and that
of the woman before whom, at middle age, all the culture of the world
unrolled itself, and towards whom fame and fortune, and an activity
which at the earlier period she would have thought very profane, pressed
with rapidity. In 1839, as I have said, she thought very meanly of the
art in which she was to attain such distinction. “I venture to believe
that the same causes which exist in my own breast to render novels and
romances pernicious have their counterpart in every fellow-creature....
The weapons of Christian warfare were never sharpened at the forge of
romance.” The style of these pietistic utterances is singularly
strenuous and hard; the light and familiar are absent from them, and I
think it is not too much to say that they show scarcely a single
premonitory ray of the genius which had _Silas Marner_ in reserve. This
dryness was only a phase, indeed; it was speedily dispelled by more
abundant showers of emotion--by the overflow of perception. Premonitory
rays are still absent, however, after her first asceticism passes
away--a change apparently co-incident with her removal from the country
to the pleasant old town of Coventry, where all American pilgrims to
midland shrines go and murmur Tennyson on the bridge. After the
evangelical note began to fade it was still the desire for faith (a
faith which could reconcile human affection with some of the unamiable
truths of science), still the religious idea that coloured her thought;
not the love of human life as a spectacle, nor the desire to spread the
wings of the artist. It must be remembered, though, that during these
years, if she was not stimulating prophecy in any definite form she was
inhaling those impressions which were to make her first books so full of
the delightful midland quality, the air of old-fashioned provincialism.
The first piece of literary work she attempted (and she brought it to
the best conclusion), was a translation of Strauss’s _Life of Jesus_,
which she began in 1844, when she was not yet twenty-five years of age;
a task which indicates not only the persistence of her religious
preoccupations, as well as the higher form they took, but the fact that
with the limited facilities afforded by her life at that time she had
mastered one of the most difficult of foreign languages and the
vocabulary of a German exegetist. In 1841 she thought it wrong to
encourage novels, but in 1847 she confesses to reading George Sand with
great delight. There is no exhibition in Mr. Cross’s pages of the steps
by which she passed over to a position of tolerant scepticism; but the
details of the process are after all of minor importance: the essential
fact is that the change was predetermined by the nature of her mind.
The great event of her life was of course her acquaintance with George
Henry Lewes. I say “of course,” because this relation had an importance
even more controlling than the publication and success of her first
attempt at fiction, inasmuch as it was in consequence of Mr. Lewes’s
friendly urgency that she wrote the _Scenes of Clerical Life_. She met
him for the first time in London, in the autumn of 1851; but it was not
till the summer of 1854 that the connection with him began (it was
marked to the world by their going to spend together several months in
Germany, where he was bent on researches for his _Life of Goethe_),
which was to become so much closer than many formal marriages and to
last till his death in 1878. The episode of Miss Evans’s life in London
during these three years was already tolerably well known. She had
become by this time a professional literary woman, and had regular work
as assistant editor of the _Westminster Review_, to which she gave her
most conscientious attention. Her accomplishments now were wide. She was
a linguist, a copious reader, an earnest student of history and
philosophy. She wrote much for her magazine as well as solicited
articles from others, and several of her contributions are contained in
the volume of essays published after her death--essays of which it is
fair to say that they give but a faint intimation of her latent powers.
George Henry Lewes was a versatile, hard-working journalist, with a
tendency, apparently, of the drifting sort; and after having been made
acquainted with each other by Mr. Herbert Spencer, the pair commingled
their sympathies and their efforts. Her letters, at this season, contain
constant mention of Lewes (one allusion to the effect that he “has quite
won my regard, after having had a good deal of my vituperation”); she
takes an interest in his health and corrects his proofs for him when he
is absent. It was impossible for Mr. Lewes to marry, as he had a wife
living, from whom he was separated. He had also three children, of whom
the care did not devolve upon their mother. The union Miss Evans formed
with him was a deliberate step, of which she accepted all the
consequences. These consequences were excellent, so far as the world is
at liberty to judge, save in an important particular. This particular
is the fact that her false position, as we may call it, produced upon
George Eliot’s life a certain effect of sequestration which was not
favourable to social freedom, or to freedom of observation, and which
excited on the part of her companion a protecting, sheltering,
fostering, precautionary attitude--the assumption that they lived in
special, in abnormal conditions. It would be too much to say that George
Eliot had not the courage of the situation she had embraced, but she
had, at least, not the levity, the indifference; she was unable, in the
premises, to be sufficiently superficial. Her deep, strenuous,
much-considering mind, of which the leading mark is the capacity for a
sort of luminous brooding, fed upon the idea of her irregularity with an
intensity which doubtless only her magnificent intellectual activity and
Lewes’s brilliancy and ingenuity kept from being morbid. The fault of
most of her work is the absence of spontaneity, the excess of
reflection; and by her action in 1854 (which seemed superficially to be
of the sort usually termed reckless), she committed herself to being
nothing if not reflective, to cultivating a kind of compensatory
earnestness. Her earnestness, her educated conscience, her exalted sense
of responsibility, were coloured by her peculiar position; they
committed her to a plan of life, of study, in which the accidental, the
unexpected, were too little allowed for, and this is what I mean by
speaking of her sequestration. If her relations with the world had been
easier, in a word, her books would have been less difficult. Mr. Cross,
very justly, merely touches upon this question of her forming a tie
which was deprived of the sanction of the law; but he gives a portion of
a letter written to Mrs. Bray more than a year after it had begun, which
sufficiently indicates the serenity of her resolution. Repentance, of
course, she never had--the success of her experiment was too rare and
complete for that; and I do not mean that her attitude was ever for a
moment apologetic. On the contrary, it was only too superabundantly
confirmatory. Her effort was to pitch her life ever in the key of the
superior wisdom that made her say to Mrs. Bray, in the letter of
September 1855, “That any unworldly, unsuperstitious person who is
sufficiently acquainted with the realities of life can pronounce my
relation to Mr. Lewes immoral, I can only understand when I remember how
subtle and complex are the influences that mould opinion.” I need not
attempt to project the light of criticism on this particular case of
conscience; there remains ever, in the mutual relations of intelligent
men and women, an element which is for themselves alone to consider. One
reflection, however, forces itself upon the mind: if the connection had
not taken place we should have lost the spectacle and influence of one
of the most successful partnerships presented to us in the history of
human affection. There has been much talk about George Eliot’s
“example,” which is not to be deprecated so long as it is remembered
that in speaking of the example of a woman of this value we can only
mean example for good. Exemplary indeed in her long connection with
George Henry Lewes were the qualities on which beneficent intimacy
rests.
She was thirty-seven years old when the _Scenes from Clerical Life_ were
published, but this work opened wide for her the door of success, and
fame and fortune came to her rapidly. Her union with Lewes had been a
union of poverty: there is a sentence in her journal, of the year 1856,
which speaks of their ascending certain cliffs called the Tors, at
Ilfracombe, “only twice; for a tax of 3d. per head was demanded for this
luxury, and we could not afford a sixpenny walk very frequently.” The
incentive to writing _Amos Barton_ seems to have been mainly pecuniary.
There was an urgent need to make money, and it appears to have been
agreed between the pair that there was at least no harm in the lady’s
trying her hand at a story. Lewes professed a belief that she would
really do something in this line, while she, more sceptical, reserved
her judgment till after the test. The _Scenes from Clerical Life_ were
therefore pre-eminently an empirical work of fiction. With the sending
of the first episode to the late Mr. John Blackwood for approval, there
opened a relation between publisher and author which lasted to the end,
and which was probably more genial and unclouded than any in the annals
of literature, as well as almost unprecedentedly lucrative to both
parties. This first book of George Eliot’s has little of the usual air
of a first book, none of the crudity of an early attempt; it was not the
work of a youthful person, and one sees that the material had been long
in her mind. The ripeness, the pathos, a sort of considered quality, are
as striking to-day as when _Amos Barton_ and _Janet’s Repentance_ were
published, and enable us to understand that people should have asked
themselves with surprise, at that time, who it was, in the midst of
them, that had been taking notes so long and so wisely without giving a
sign. _Adam Bede_, written rapidly, appeared in 1859, and George Eliot
found herself a consummate novelist without having suspected it. The
book was an immense, a brilliant success, and from this moment the
author’s life took its definite and final direction. She accepted the
great obligations which to her mind belonged to a person who had the ear
of the public, and her whole effort thenceforth was highly to respond to
them--to respond to them by teaching, by vivid moral illustration and
even by direct exhortation. It is striking that from the first her
conception of the novelist’s task is never in the least as the game of
art. The most interesting passage in Mr. Cross’s volumes is to my sense
a simple sentence in a short entry in her journal in the year 1859, just
after she had finished the first volume of _The Mill on the Floss_ (the
original title of which, by the way, had been _Sister Maggie_): “We have
just finished reading aloud Père Goriot, a hateful book.” That Balzac’s
masterpiece should have elicited from her only this remark, at a time,
too, when her mind might have been opened to it by her own activity of
composition, is significant of so many things that the few words are, in
the whole _Life_, those I should have been most sorry to lose. Of course
they are not all George Eliot would have had to say about Balzac, if
some other occasion than a simple jotting in a diary had presented
itself. Still, what even a jotting may _not_ have said after a first
perusal of _Le Père Goriot_ is eloquent; it illuminates the author’s
general attitude with regard to the novel, which, for her, was not
primarily a picture of life, capable of deriving a high value from its
form, but a moralised fable, the last word of a philosophy endeavouring
to teach by example.