respectfully of any theory of work which would produce such fruit as
_Romola_ and _Middlemarch_. But it testifies to that side of George
Eliot’s nature which was weakest--the absence of free æsthetic life (I
venture this remark in the face of a passage quoted from one of her
letters in Mr. Cross’s third volume); it gives the hand, as it were, to
several other instances that may be found in the same pages. “My
function is that of the _æsthetic_, not the doctrinal teacher; the
rousing of the nobler emotions, which make mankind desire the social
right, not the prescribing of special measures, concerning which the
artistic mind, however strongly moved by social sympathy, is often not
the best judge.” That is the passage referred to in my parenthetic
allusion, and it is a good general description of the manner in which
George Eliot may be said to have acted on her generation; but the
“artistic mind,” the possession of which it implies, existed in her with
limitations remarkable in a writer whose imagination was so rich. We
feel in her, always, that she proceeds from the abstract to the
concrete; that her figures and situations are evolved, as the phrase is,
from her moral consciousness, and are only indirectly the products of
observation. They are deeply studied and massively supported, but they
are not _seen_, in the irresponsible plastic way. The world was, first
and foremost, for George Eliot, the moral, the intellectual world; the
personal spectacle came after; and lovingly humanly as she regarded it
we constantly feel that she cares for the things she finds in it only so
far as they are types. The philosophic door is always open, on her
stage, and we are aware that the somewhat cooling draught of ethical
purpose draws across it. This constitutes half the beauty of her work;
the constant reference to ideas may be an excellent source of one kind
of reality--for, after all, the secret of seeing a thing well is not
necessarily that you see nothing else. Her preoccupation with the
universe helped to make her characters strike you as also belonging to
it; it raised the roof, widened the area, of her æsthetic structure.
Nothing is finer, in her genius, than the combination of her love of
general truth and love of the special case; without this, indeed, we
should not have heard of her as a novelist, for the passion of the
special case is surely the basis of the story-teller’s art. All the
same, that little sign of all that Balzac failed to suggest to her
showed at what perils the special case got itself considered. Such
dangers increased as her activity proceeded, and many judges perhaps
hold that in her ultimate work, in _Middlemarch_ and _Daniel Deronda_
(especially the latter), it ceased to be considered at all. Such critics
assure us that Gwendolen and Grandcourt, Deronda and Myra, are not
concrete images, but disembodied types, pale abstractions, signs and
symbols of a “great lesson.” I give up Deronda and Myra to the objector,
but Grandcourt and Gwendolen seem to me to have a kind of superior
reality; to be, in a high degree, what one demands of a figure in a
novel, planted on their legs and complete.
The truth is, perception and reflection, at the outset, divided George
Eliot’s great talent between them; but as time went on circumstances led
the latter to develop itself at the expense of the former--one of these
circumstances being apparently the influence of George Henry Lewes.
Lewes was interested in science, in cosmic problems; and though his
companion, thanks to the original bent of her versatile, powerful mind,
needed no impulse from without to turn herself to speculation, yet the
contagion of his studies pushed her further than she would otherwise
have gone in the direction of scientific observation, which is but
another form of what I have called reflection. Her early novels are
full of natural as distinguished from systematic observation, though
even in them it is less the dominant note, I think, than the love of the
“moral,” the reaction of thought in the face of the human comedy. They
had observation sufficient, at any rate, to make their fortune, and it
may well be said that that is enough for any novel. In _Silas Marner_,
in _Adam Bede_, the quality seems gilded by a sort of autumn haze, an
afternoon light, of meditation, which mitigates the sharpness of
portraiture. I doubt very much whether the author herself had a clear
vision, for instance, of the marriage of Dinah Morris to Adam, or of the
rescue of Hetty from the scaffold at the eleventh hour. The reason of
this may be, indeed, that her perception was a perception of nature much
more than of art, and that these particular incidents do not belong to
nature (to my sense at least); by which I do not mean that they belong
to a very happy art. I cite them, on the contrary, as an evidence of
artistic weakness; they are a very good example of the view in which a
story must have marriages and rescues in the nick of time, as a matter
of course. I must add, in fairness to George Eliot, that the marriage of
the nun-like Dinah, which shocks the reader, who sees in it a base
concession, was a _trouvaille_ of Lewes’s and is a small sign of that
same faulty judgment in literary things which led him to throw his
influence on the side of her writing verse--verse which is _all_
reflection, with direct, vivifying vision, or emotion, remarkably
absent.
It is a part of this same limitation of the pleasure she was capable of
taking in the fact of representation for itself that the various
journals and notes of her visits to the Continent are, though by no
means destitute of the tempered enjoyment of foreign sights which was as
near as she ever came to rapture, singularly vague in expression on the
subject of the general and particular spectacle--the life and manners,
the works of art. She enumerates diligently all the pictures and statues
she sees, and the way she does so is a proof of her active, earnest
intellectual habits; but it is rarely apparent that they have said much
to her, or that what they have said is one of their deeper secrets. She
is capable of writing, after coming out of the great chapel of San
Lorenzo, in Florence, that “the world-famous statues of Michael Angelo
on the tombs ... remained to us as affected and exaggerated in the
original as in copies and casts.” That sentence startles one, on the
part of the author of _Romola_, and that Mr. Cross should have printed
it is a commendable proof of his impartiality.
It was in _Romola_, precisely, that the equilibrium I spoke of just now
was lost, and that reflection began to weigh down the scale. _Romola_ is
pre-eminently a study of the human conscience in an historical setting
which is studied almost as much, and few passages in Mr. Cross’s volumes
are more interesting than those relating to the production of this
magnificent romance. George Eliot took all her work with a noble
seriousness, but into none of it did she throw herself with more
passion. It drained from her as much as she gave to it, and none of her
writing ploughed into her, to use her biographer’s expression, so
deeply. She told him that she began it a young woman and finished it an
old one. More than any of her novels it was evolved, as I have said,
from her moral consciousness--a moral consciousness encircled by a
prodigious amount of literary research. Her literary ideal was at all
times of the highest, but in the preparation of _Romola_ it placed her
under a control absolutely religious. She read innumerable books, some
of them bearing only remotely on her subject, and consulted without
stint contemporary records and documents. She neglected nothing that
would enable her to live, intellectually, in the period she had
undertaken to describe. We know, for the most part, I think, the result.
_Romola_ is on the whole the finest thing she wrote, but its defects are
almost on the scale of its beauties. The great defect is that, except in
the person of Tito Melema, it does not seem positively to live. It is
overladen with learning, it smells of the lamp, it tastes just
perceptibly of pedantry. In spite of its want of blood, however, it
assuredly will survive in men’s remembrance, for the finest pages in it
belong to the finest part of our literature. It is on the whole a
failure, but such a failure as only a great talent can produce; and one
may say of it that there are many great “hits” far less interesting
than such a mistake. A twentieth part of the erudition would have
sufficed, would have given us the feeling and colour of the time, if
there had been more of the breath of the Florentine streets, more of the
faculty of optical evocation, a greater saturation of the senses with
the elements of the adorable little city. The difficulty with the book,
for the most part, is that it is not Italian; it has always seemed to me
the most Germanic of the author’s productions. I cannot imagine a German
writing (in the way of a novel) anything half so good; but if I could
imagine it I should suppose _Romola_ to be very much the sort of picture
he would achieve--the sort of medium through which he would show us how,
by the Arno-side, the fifteenth century came to an end. One of the
sources of interest in the book is that, more than any of its
companions, it indicates how much George Eliot proceeded by reflection
and research; how little important, comparatively, she thought that same
breath of the streets. It carries to a maximum the in-door quality.
The most definite impression produced, perhaps, by Mr. Cross’s volumes
(by the second and third) is that of simple success--success which had
been the result of no external accidents (unless her union with Lewes be
so denominated), but was involved in the very faculties nature had given
her. All the elements of an eventual happy fortune met in her
constitution. The great foundation, to begin with, was there--the
magnificent mind, vigorous, luminous, and eminently sane. To her
intellectual vigour, her immense facility, her exemption from cerebral
lassitude, her letters and journals bear the most copious testimony. Her
daily stint of arduous reading and writing was of the largest. Her
ability, as one may express it in the most general way, was astonishing,
and it belonged to every season of her long and fruitful career. Her
passion for study encountered no impediment, but was able to make
everything feed and support it. The extent and variety of her knowledge
is by itself the measure of a capacity which triumphed wherever it
wished. Add to this an immense special talent which, as soon as it tries
its wings, is found to be adequate to the highest, longest flights and
brings back great material rewards. George Eliot of course had drawbacks
and difficulties, physical infirmities, constant liabilities to
headache, dyspepsia, and other illness, to deep depression, to despair
about her work; but these jolts of the chariot were small in proportion
to the impetus acquired, and were hardly greater than was necessary for
reminding her of the secret of all ambitious workers in the field of
art--that effort, effort, always effort, is the only key to success. Her
great furtherance was that, intensely intellectual being as she was, the
life of affection and emotion was also widely open to her. She had all
the initiation of knowledge and none of its dryness, all the advantages
of judgment and all the luxuries of feeling. She had an imagination
which enabled her to sit at home with book and pen, and yet enter into
the life of other generations; project herself into Warwickshire
ale-houses and Florentine symposia, reconstitute conditions utterly
different from her own. Toward the end she triumphed over the great
impossible; she reconciled the greatest sensibility with the highest
serenity. She succeeded in guarding her pursuits from intrusion; in
carrying out her habits; in sacrificing her work as little as possible;
in leading, in the midst of a society united in conspiracies to
interrupt and vulgarise, an independent, strenuously personal life.
People who had the honour of penetrating into the sequestered precinct
of the Priory--the house in London in which she lived from 1863 to
1880--remember well a kind of sanctity in the place, an atmosphere of
stillness and concentration, something that suggested a literary temple.
It was part of the good fortune of which I speak that in Mr. Lewes she
had found the most devoted of caretakers, the most jealous of ministers,
a companion through whom all business was transacted. The one drawback
of this relation was that, considering what she attempted, it limited
her experience too much to itself; but for the rest it helped her in a
hundred ways--it saved her nerves, it fortified her privacy, it
protected her leisure, it diminished the friction of living. His
admiration of her work was of the largest, though not always, I think,
truly discriminating, and he surrounded her with a sort of temperate
zone of independence--independence of everything except him and her own
standards. Nervous, sensitive, delicate in every way in which genius is
delicate (except, indeed, that she had a robust reason), it was a great
thing for her to have accident made rare and exposure mitigated; and to
this result Lewes, as the administrator of her fame, admirably
contributed. He filtered the stream, giving her only the clearer water.
The accident of reading reviews of one’s productions, especially when
they are bad, is, for the artist of our day, one of the most frequent;
and Mr. Lewes, by keeping these things out of her way, enabled her to
achieve what was perhaps the highest form of her success--an
inaccessibility to the newspaper. “It is remarkable to me,” she writes
in 1876, “that I have entirely lost my _personal_ melancholy. I often,
of course, have melancholy thoughts about the destinies of my fellow
creatures, but I am never in that _mood_ of sadness which used to be my
frequent visitant even in the midst of external happiness.” Her later
years, coloured by this accumulated wisdom, when she had taken her final
form before the world and had come to be regarded more and more as a
teacher and philosopher, are full of suggestion to the critic, but I
have exhausted my limited space. There is a certain coldness in them
perhaps--the coldness that results from most of one’s opinions being
formed, one’s mind made up, on many great subjects; from the degree, in
a word, to which “culture” had taken the place of the more primitive
processes of experience.
“Ah, les livres, ils nous débordent, ils nous étouffent--nous périssons
par les livres!” That cry of a distinguished French novelist (there is
no harm in mentioning M. Alphonse Daudet), which fell upon the ear of
the present writer some time ago, represents as little as possible the
emotion of George Eliot confronted with literatures and sciences. M.
Alphonse Daudet went on to say that, to his mind, the personal
impression, the effort of direct observation, was the most precious
source of information for the novelist; that nothing could take its
place; that the effect of books was constantly to check and pervert this
effort; that a second-hand, third-hand, tenth-hand, impression was
constantly tending to substitute itself for a fresh perception; that we
were ending by seeing everything through literature instead of through
our own senses; and that in short literature was rapidly killing
literature. This view has immense truth on its side, but the case would
be too simple if, on one side or the other, there were only one way of
finding out. The effort of the novelist is to find out, to know, or at
least to see, and no one, in the nature of things, can less afford to be
indifferent to sidelights. Books are themselves, unfortunately, an
expression of human passions. George Eliot had no doubts, at any rate;
if impressionism, before she laid down her pen, had already begun to be
talked about, it would have made no difference with her--she would have
had no desire to pass for an impressionist.
There is one question we cannot help asking ourselves as we close this
record of her life; it is impossible not to let our imagination wander
in the direction of what turn her mind or her fortune might have taken
if she had never met George Henry Lewes, or never cast her lot with his.
It is safe to say that, in one way or another, in the long run, her
novels would have got themselves written, and it is possible they would
have been more natural, as one may call it, more familiarly and casually
human. Would her development have been less systematic, more
irresponsible, more personal, and should we have had more of _Adam Bede_
and _Silas Marner_ and less of _Romola_ and _Middlemarch_? The question,
after all, cannot be answered, and I do not push it, being myself very
grateful for _Middlemarch_ and _Romola_. It is as George Eliot does
actually present herself that we must judge her--a condition that will
not prevent her from striking us as one of the noblest, most beautiful
minds of our time. This impression bears the reader company throughout
these letters and notes. It is impossible not to feel, as we close them,
that she was an admirable being. They are less brilliant, less
entertaining, than we might have hoped; they contain fewer “good things”
and have even a certain grayness of tone, something measured and
subdued, as of a person talking without ever raising her voice. But
there rises from them a kind of fragrance of moral elevation; a love of
justice, truth, and light; a large, generous way of looking at things;
and a constant effort to hold high the torch in the dusky spaces of
man’s conscience. That is how we see her during the latter years of her
life: frail, delicate, shivering a little, much fatigued and
considerably spent, but still meditating on what could be acquired and
imparted; still living, in the intelligence, a freer, larger life than
probably had ever been the portion of any woman. To her own sex her
memory, her example, will remain of the highest value; those of them for
whom the “development” of woman is the hope of the future ought to erect
a monument to George Eliot. She helped on the cause more than any one,
in proving how few limitations are of necessity implied in the feminine
organism. She went so far that such a distance seems enough, and in her
effort she sacrificed no tenderness, no grace. There is much talk to-day
about things being “open to women”; but George Eliot showed that there
is nothing that is closed. If we criticise her novels we must remember
that her nature came first and her work afterwards, and that it is not
remarkable they should not resemble the productions, say, of Alexandre
Dumas. What _is_ remarkable, extraordinary--and the process remains
inscrutable and mysterious--is that this quiet, anxious, sedentary,
serious, invalidical English lady, without animal spirits, without
adventures or sensations, should have made us believe that nothing in
the world was alien to her; should have produced such rich, deep,
masterly pictures of the multiform life of man.
1885.
III
DANIEL DERONDA
A CONVERSATION
Theodora, one day early in the autumn, sat on her verandah with a piece
of embroidery, the design of which she made up as she proceeded, being
careful, however, to have a Japanese screen before her, to keep her
inspiration at the proper altitude. Pulcheria, who was paying her a
visit, sat near her with a closed book, in a paper cover, in her lap.
Pulcheria was playing with the pug-dog, rather idly, but Theodora was
stitching, steadily and meditatively. “Well,” said Theodora, at last, “I
wonder what he accomplished in the East.” Pulcheria took the little dog
into her lap and made him sit on the book. “Oh,” she replied, “they had
tea-parties at Jerusalem--exclusively of ladies--and he sat in the midst
and stirred his tea and made high-toned remarks. And then Mirah sang a
little, just a little, on account of her voice being so weak. Sit still,
Fido,” she continued, addressing the little dog, “and keep your nose out
of my face. But it’s a nice little nose, all the same,” she pursued, “a
nice little short snub nose and not a horrid big Jewish nose. Oh, my
dear, when I think what a collection of noses there must have been at
that wedding!” At this moment Constantius steps upon the verandah from
within, hat and stick in hand and his shoes a trifle dusty. He has some
distance to come before he reaches the place where the ladies are
sitting, and this gives Pulcheria time to murmur, “Talk of snub noses!”
Constantius is presented by Theodora to Pulcheria, and he sits down and
exclaims upon the admirable blueness of the sea, which lies in a
straight band across the green of the little lawn; comments too upon the
pleasure of having one side of one’s verandah in the shade. Soon Fido,
the little dog, still restless, jumps off Pulcheria’s lap and reveals
the book, which lies title upward. “Oh,” says Constantius, “you have
been finishing _Daniel Deronda_?” Then follows a conversation which it
will be more convenient to present in another form.
_Theodora._ Yes, Pulcheria has been reading aloud the last chapters to
me. They are wonderfully beautiful.
_Constantius_ (after a moment’s hesitation). Yes, they are very
beautiful. I am sure you read well, Pulcheria, to give the fine passages
their full value.
_Theodora._ She reads well when she chooses, but I am sorry to say that
in some of the fine passages of this last book she took quite a false
tone. I couldn’t have read them aloud myself; I should have broken
down. But Pulcheria--would you really believe it?--when she couldn’t go
on it was not for tears, but for--the contrary.
_Constantius._ For smiles? Did you really find it comical? One of my
objections to _Daniel Deronda_ is the absence of those delightfully
humorous passages which enlivened the author’s former works.
_Pulcheria._ Oh, I think there are some places as amusing as anything in
_Adam Bede_ or _The Mill on the Floss_: for instance where, at the last,
Deronda wipes Gwendolen’s tears and Gwendolen wipes his.
_Constantius._ Yes, I know what you mean. I can understand that
situation presenting a slightly ridiculous image; that is, if the
current of the story don’t swiftly carry you past.
_Pulcheria._ What do you mean by the current of the story? I never read
a story with less current. It is not a river; it is a series of lakes. I
once read of a group of little uneven ponds resembling, from a
bird’s-eye view, a looking-glass which had fallen upon the floor and
broken, and was lying in fragments. That is what _Daniel Deronda_ would
look like, on a bird’s-eye view.
_Theodora._ Pulcheria found that comparison in a French novel. She is
always reading French novels.
_Constantius._ Ah, there are some very good ones.
_Pulcheria_ (perversely). I don’t know; I think there are some very poor
ones.
_Constantius._ The comparison is not bad, at any rate. I know what you
mean by _Daniel Deronda_ lacking current. It has almost as little as
_Romola_.
_Pulcheria._ Oh, _Romola_ is unpardonably slow; it is a kind of literary
tortoise.
_Constantius._ Yes, I know what you mean by that. But I am afraid you
are not friendly to our great novelist.
_Theodora._ She likes Balzac and George Sand and other impure writers.
_Constantius._ Well, I must say I understand that.
_Pulcheria._ My favourite novelist is Thackeray, and I am extremely fond
of Miss Austen.
_Constantius._ I understand that too. You read over _The Newcomes_ and
_Pride and Prejudice_.
_Pulcheria._ No, I don’t read them over now; I think them over. I have
been making visits for a long time past to a series of friends, and I
have spent the last six months in reading _Daniel Deronda_ aloud.
Fortune would have it that I should always arrive by the same train as
the new number. I am accounted a frivolous, idle creature; I am not a
disciple in the new school of embroidery, like Theodora; so I was
immediately pushed into a chair and the book thrust into my hand, that I
might lift up my voice and make peace between all the impatiences that
were snatching at it. So I may claim at least that I have read every
word of the work. I never skipped.
_Theodora._ I should hope not, indeed!
_Constantius._ And do you mean that you really didn’t enjoy it?
_Pulcheria._ I found it protracted, pretentious, pedantic.
_Constantius._ I see; I can understand that.
_Theodora._ Oh, you understand too much! This is the twentieth time you
have used that formula.
_Constantius._ What will you have? You know I must try to understand;
it’s my trade.
_Theodora._ He means he writes reviews. Trying not to understand is what
I call that trade!
_Constantius._ Say then I take it the wrong way; that is why it has
never made my fortune. But I do try to understand; it is my--my--(He
pauses.)
_Theodora._ I know what you want to say. Your strong side.
_Pulcheria._ And what is his weak side?
_Theodora._ He writes novels.
_Constantius._ I have written _one_. You can’t call that a side. It’s a
little facet, at the most.
_Pulcheria._ You talk as if you were a diamond. I should like to read
it--not aloud!
_Constantius._ You can’t read it softly enough. But you, Theodora, you
didn’t find our book too “protracted”?
_Theodora._ I should have liked it to continue indefinitely, to keep
coming out always, to be one of the regular things of life.