life; indeed, every indication is to the contrary, and the husband seems
to have been kind, considerate and affectionate. Still this thing upon
which so many of her thoughts had been fixed during her whole life,
which she had felt to be the necessary condition of full development,
and for which the little impassioned female circle of which she was the
expositor had sighed and cried to heaven and earth, came to her at last
very much in the form of a catastrophe. No doubt the circumstances of
her quickly failing health and shortened life promote this feeling. But
without really taking these into consideration the sensation remains the
same. The strange little keen soul with its sharply fixed restrictions,
yet intense force of perception within its limits, dropped out of the
world into which it had made an irruption so brilliant and so brief and
sank out of sight altogether, sank into the humdrum house between the
old father and the sober husband, into the clerical atmosphere with
which she had no sympathy, into the absolute quiet of domestic life to
which no Prince Charming could now come gaily round the corner, out of
the mists and moors, and change with a touch of his wand the grey
mornings and evenings into golden days. Well! was not this that which
she had longed for, the natural end of life towards which her Shirley,
her Caroline, her Lucy had angrily stretched forth their hands,
indignant to be kept waiting, clamouring for instant entrance? And so it
was, but how different! Lucy Snowe's little housekeeping, all the
preparations which M. Paul made for her comfort and which seemed better
to her than any palace, would not they too have taken the colour of
perpetual dulness if everything had settled down and the Professor
assumed his slippers by the domestic hearth? Ah no, for Lucy Snowe loved
the man, and Charlotte Bronte, as appears, loved only the love. It is a
parable. She said a little later that she began to see that this was the
fate which she would wish for those she loved best, for her friend
Ellen, perhaps for her Emily if she had lived--the good man very
faithful, very steady, worth his weight in gold--yet flatter than the
flattest days of old, _solidement nourri_, a good substantial husband,
managing all the parish business, full of talk about the Archdeacon's
charge, and the diocesan meetings, and the other clergy of the moorland
parishes. We can conceive that she got to fetching his slippers for him
and taking great care that he was comfortable, and perhaps had it been
so ordained might have grown into a contented matron and forgotten the
glories and miseries, so inseparably twined and linked together, of her
youth. But she only had a year in which to do all that, and this is how
her marriage seems to turn into a catastrophe, the caging of a wild
creature that had never borne captivity before, and which now could no
longer rush forth into the heart of any shining _fete_, or to the window
of a strange confessional, anywhere, to throw off the burden of the
perennial contradiction, the ceaseless unrest of the soul, the boilings
of the volcano under the snow.
* * * * *
I have said it was difficult to account for the extreme interest still
attaching to everything connected with Charlotte Bronte; not only the
story of her peculiar genius, but also of everybody connected with her,
though the circle was in reality quite a respectable, humdrum, and
uninteresting one, containing nobody of any importance except the
sister, who was her own wilder and fiercer part. One way, however, in
which these sisters have won some part of their long-lasting interest is
due to the treatment to which they have been subjected. They are the
first victims of that ruthless art of biography which is one of the
features of our time; and that not only by Mrs. Gaskell, who took up her
work in something of an apologetic vein, and was so anxious to explain
how it was that her heroine expressed certain ideas not usual in the
mouths of women, that she was compelled to take away the reputation of a
number of other people in order to excuse the peculiarities of these two
remarkable women. But everybody who has touched their history since, and
there have been many--for it would seem that gossip, when restrained by
no bonds of decorum or human feeling, possesses a certain interest
whether it is concerned with the household of a cardinal or that of a
parish priest--has followed the same vicious way without any
remonstrance or appeal for mercy. We have all taken it for granted that
no mercy was to be shown to the Brontes. Let every rag be torn from
Charlotte, of whom there is the most to say. Emily had the good luck to
be no correspondent, and so has escaped to some degree the complete
exposure of every confidence and every thought which has happened to
her sister. Is it because she has nobody to defend her that she has been
treated thus barbarously? I cannot conceive a situation more painful,
more lacerating to every feeling, than that of the father and the
husband dwelling silent together in that sombre parsonage, from which
every ray of light seems to depart with the lost woman, whose presence
had kept a little savour in life, and looking on in silence to see their
life taken to pieces, and every decent veil dragged from the inner being
of their dearest and nearest. They complained as much as two voiceless
persons could, or at least the father complained: and the very servants
came hot from their kitchen to demand a vindication of their character:
but nobody noted the protest of the old man amid the silence of the
moors: and the husband was more patient and spoke no word. Even he,
however, after nearly half a century, when that far-off episode of life
must have become dim to him, has thrown his relics open for a little
more revelation, a little more interference with the helpless ashes of
the dead.
No dot is now omitted upon i, no t left uncrossed. We know, or at least
are told, who Charlotte meant by every character she ever portrayed,
even while the model still lives. We know her opinion of her friends, or
rather acquaintances, the people whom she saw cursorily and formed a
hasty judgment upon, as we all do in the supposed safety of common life.
Protests have been offered in other places against a similar treatment
of other persons; but scarcely any protest has been attempted in respect
to Charlotte Bronte. The resurrection people have been permitted to make
their researches as they pleased. It throws a curious pathos, a not
unsuitably tragic light upon a life always so solitary, that this should
all have passed in silence because there was actually no one to
interfere, no one to put a ban upon the dusty heaps and demand that no
mere should be said. When one looks into the matter a little more
closely, one finds it is so with almost all those who have specially
suffered at the hands of the biographer. The Carlyles had no child, no
brother to rise up in their defence. It gives the last touch of
melancholy to the conclusion of a lonely life. Mrs. Gaskell, wise woman,
defended herself from a similar treatment by will, and left children
behind her to protect her memory. But the Brontes are at the mercy of
every one who cares to give another raking to the diminished heap of
_debris_. The last writer who has done so, Mr. Clement Shorter, had some
real new light to throw upon a story which surely has now been
sufficiently turned inside out, and has done his work with perfect good
feeling, and, curiously enough after so many exploitations, in a way
which shows that interest has not yet departed from the subject. But we
trust that now the memory of Charlotte Bronte will be allowed to rest.
[Signature: Mrs. M. Oliphant]
GEORGE ELIOT
_By_ MRS. LYNN LINTON
GEORGE ELIOT
In this essay it is not intended to go into the vexed question of George
Eliot's private life and character. Death has resolved her individuality
into nothingness, and the discrepancy between her lofty thoughts and
doubtful action no longer troubles us. But her work still remains as
common property for all men to appraise at its true value--to admire for
its beauty, to reverence for its teaching, to honour for its grandeur,
yet at the same time to determine its weaknesses and to confess where it
falls short of the absolute perfection claimed for it in her lifetime.
For that matter indeed, no one has suffered from unmeasured adulation
more than has George Eliot. As a philosopher, once bracketed with Plato
and Kant; as a novelist, ranked the highest the world has seen; as a
woman, set above the law and, while living in open and admired
adultery, visited by bishops and judges as well as by the best of the
laity; her faults of style and method praised as genius--since her death
she has been treated with some of that reactionary neglect which always
follows on extravagant esteem. The mud-born ephemeridae of literature
have dispossessed her. For her profound learning, which ran like a
golden thread through all she wrote till it became tarnished by
pedantry, we have the ignorance which misquotes Lempriere and thinks
itself classic. For her outspoken language and forcible diction,
wherein, however, she always preserved so much modesty, and for her
realism which described things and feelings as they are, but without
going into revolting details, we have those lusciously suggestive
epithets and those unveiled presentations of the sexual instinct which
seem to make the world one large lupanar. For her accurate science and
profound philosophy, we have those claptrap phrases which have passed
into common speech and are glibly reproduced by facile parrots who do
not understand and never could have created; and for her scholarly
diction we have the tawdriness of a verbal ragbag where grammar is as
defective as taste. Yet our modern tinselled dunces have taken the place
of the one who, in her lifetime, was made almost oppressively
great--almost too colossal in her supremacy.
But when all this rubbish has been thrown into the abyss of oblivion,
George Eliot's works will remain solid and alive, together with
Thackeray's, Scott's and Fielding's. Our Immortals will include in their
company, as one of the "choir invisible" whose voice will never be
stilled for man, the author of "Adam Bede" and "Romola," of the "Mill on
the Floss" and "Middlemarch."
* * * * *
Her first essays in fiction, her "Scenes of Clerical Life," show the
germs of her future greatness as well as the persistency of her aim. In
"Janet's Repentance," which to our mind is the best of the three, those
germs are already shaped to beauty. Nothing can be more delicately
touched than the nascent love between Janet and Mr. Tryon. No more
subtle sign of Janet's besetting sin could be given than by that
candlestick held "aslant;" while her character, compounded of pride,
timidity, affectionateness, spiritual aspiration and moral degradation,
is as true to life as it was difficult to portray. It would be
impossible to note all the gems in these three stories. We can indicate
only one or two. That splendid paragraph in "Mr. Gilfil's Love Story,"
beginning: "While this poor heart was being bruised"--the sharp summing
up of Mr. Amos Barton's "middling" character--Lady Cheverel's silent
criticisms contrasted with her husband's iridescent optimism--the almost
Shakesperean humour of the men, the author's keen appraisement of the
commonplace women; such aphorisms as Mrs. Linnet's "It's right enough to
be speritial--I'm no enemy to that--but I like my potatoes
meally;"--these and a thousand more, eloquent, tender, witty, deep, make
these three stories masterpieces in their way, despite the improbability
of the Czerlaski episode in "Amos Barton" and the inherent weakness of
the Gilfil plot. We, who can remember the enthusiasm they excited when
they first appeared in _Blackwood's Magazine_, on re-reading them in
cooler blood can understand that enthusiasm, though we no longer share
its pristine intensity. It was emphatically a new departure in
literature, and the noble note of that religious feeling which is
independent of creed and which touches all hearts alike, woke an echo
that even to this day reverberates though in but a poor, feeble and
attenuated manner.
* * * * *
"Adam Bede," the first novel proper of the long series, shows George
Eliot at her best in her three most noteworthy qualities--lofty
principles, lifelike delineation of character, and fine humour, both
broad and subtle. The faults of the story are the all-pervading
anachronism of thought and circumstance; the dragging of the plot in the
earlier half of the book; and the occasional ugliness of style, where,
as in that futile opening sentence the author as I directly addresses
the reader as You. The scene is laid in the year 1799--before the Trades
Unions had fixed a man's hours of work so accurately as to make him
leave off with a screw half driven in, so soon as the clock begins to
strike--before too the hour of leaving off was fixed at six. We older
people can remember when workmen wrought up to eight and were never too
exact even then. Precision of the kind practised at the present day was
not known then; and why were there no apprentices in Adam's shop?
Apprentices were a salient feature in all the working community, and no
shop could have existed without them. Nor would the seduction by the
young squire of a farmer's niece or daughter have been the heinous crime
George Eliot has made it. If women of the lower class held a somewhat
better position than they did in King Arthur's time, when, to be the
mother of a knight's bastard, raised a churl's wife or daughter far
above her compeers and was assumed to honour not degrade her, they still
retained some of the old sense of inferiority. Does any one remember
that famous answer in the Yelverton trial not much more than a
generation ago? In 1799 Hetty's mishap would have been condoned by all
concerned, save perhaps by Adam himself; and Arthur Donnithorne would
have suffered no more for his escapade than did our well-known Tom Jones
for his little diversions. And--were there any night schools for
illiterate men in 1799? And how was that reprieve got so quickly at a
time when there were neither railroads nor telegraphs?--indeed, would it
have been got at all in days when concealment of birth alone was felony
and felony was death? Also, would Hetty have been alone in her cell? In
1799 all prisoners were herded together, young and old, untried and
condemned; and the separate system was not in existence. Save for
Hetty's weary journey on foot and in chance carts, the story might have
been made as of present time with more _vraisemblance_ and
harmoniousness.
These objections apart, how supreme the whole book is! The characters
stand out fresh, firm and living. As in some paintings you feel as if
you could put your hand round the body, so in George Eliot's writings
you feel that you have met those people in the flesh, and talked to
them, holding them by the hand and looking into their eyes. There is not
a line of loose drawing anywhere. From the four Bedes, with that
inverted kind of heredity which Zola has so powerfully shown, to the
stately egoism of Mrs. Irwine--from the marvellous portraiture of Hetty
Sorrel with her soft, caressing, lusciously-loving outside, and her
heart "as hard as a cherry-stone" according to Mrs. Poyser--from the
weak-willed yet not conscienceless Arthur Donnithorne to the exquisite
purity of Dinah, the character-drawing is simply perfect. Many were
people personally known to George Eliot, and those who were at all
behind the scenes recognised the portraits. Down at Wirksworth they knew
the Bedes, Dinah, the Poysers, and some others. In London, among the
intimates of George Lewes, Hetty needed no label. Mrs. Poyser's good
things were common property in the neighbourhood long before George
Eliot crystallised them for all time, and embellished them by her
matchless setting; and Dinah's sermon was not all imaginary. But though
in some sense her work was portraiture, it was portraiture passed
through the alembic of her brilliant genius, from commonplace material
distilled into the finest essence.
It is impossible here again to give adequate extracts of the wise,
witty, tender and high-minded things scattered broadcast over this
book--as, indeed, over all that George Eliot ever wrote. That paragraph
beginning--"Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it"; the
description of Hetty's flower-like beauty, which fascinated even her
sharp-tongued aunt; phrases like "John considered a young master as the
natural enemy of an old servant," and "young people in general as a poor
contrivance for carrying on the world"; that sharp little bit of moral
and intellectual antithesis, with the learned man "meekly rocking the
twins in the cradle with his left hand, while with his right he
inflicted the most lacerating sarcasms on an opponent who had betrayed a
brutal ignorance of Hebrew"--forgiving human weaknesses and moral errors
as is a Christian's bounden duty, but treating as "the enemy of his
race, the man who takes the wrong side on the momentous subject of the
Hebrew points"; how masterly, how fine are these and a dozen other
unnoted passages!
Hetty in her bedroom, parading in her concealed finery, reminds one too
closely of Gretchen with her fatal jewels to be quite favourable to the
English version; and we question the truth of Adam Bede's hypothetical
content with such a Dorothy Doolittle as his wife. Writers of love
stories among the working classes in bygone days forget that notableness
was then part of a woman's virtue--part of her claims to love and
consideration--and that mere flower-like kittenish prettiness did not
count to her honour any more than graceful movements and aesthetic taste
would count to the honour of a Tommy in the trenches who could neither
handle a spade nor load a rifle. Blackmore made the same mistake in his
"Lorna Doone," and George Eliot has repeated it in Adam's love for Hetty
solely for her beauty and without "faculty" as her dower. In his own way
Bartle Massey, misogynist, is as smart as Mrs. Poyser herself, as
amusing and as trenchant; but the coming-of-age dance is fifty years
and more too modern, and the long dissertation at the beginning of the
second book is a blot, because it is a clog and an interruption. Not so
that glorious description of nature in August when "the sun was hidden
for a moment and then shone out warm again like a recovered joy;"--nor
that deep and tender bit of introspection, setting forth the spiritual
good got from sorrow as well as its indestructible impress.
Yet for all the beauty of these philosophic passages there are too many
of them in this as in all George Eliot's works. They hamper the action
and lend an air of pedantry and preaching with which a novel proper has
nothing to do. It is bad style as well as bad art, and irritating to a
critical, while depressing to a sympathetic reader. But summing up all
the faults together, and giving full weight to each, we gladly own the
masterly residuum that is left. The dawning love between Adam and Dinah
alone is enough to claim for "Adam Bede" one of the highest places in
literature, had not that place been already taken by the marvellous
truth, diversity and power of the character-drawing. Mrs. Poyser's
epigrams, too, generally made when she was "knitting with fierce
rapidity, as if her movements were a necessary function like the
twittering of a crab's antennae," both too numerous and too well known
to quote, would have redeemed the flimsiest framework and the silliest
padding extant.
The light that seemed to flash on the world when this glorious book was
published will never be forgotten by those who were old enough at the
time to read and appreciate. By the way, is that would-be famous Liggins
still alive? When he sums it all up, how much did he get out of his bold
attempt to don the giant's robe?
* * * * *
If "Adam Bede" was partly reminiscent, "The Mill on the Floss" was
partly autobiographical. There is no question that in the sensitive,
turbulent, loving nature of Maggie Tulliver Marian Evans painted
herself. Those who knew her when she first came to London knew her as a
pronounced insurgent. Never noisy and never coarse, always quiet in
manner, sensitive, diffident and shrinking from unpleasantness, she yet
had not put on that "made" and artificial pose which was her
distinguishing characteristic in later years. She was still Maggie
Tulliver, with a conscience and temperament at war together, and with a
spiritual ideal in no way attained by her practical realisation. For
indeed, the union between Marian Evans and George Lewes was far more
incongruous in some of its details than was Maggie's love for Philip or
her passion for Stephen. Philip appealed to her affection of old time,
her pity and her love of art--Stephen to her hot blood and her sensuous
love of beauty. But George Lewes's total want of all religiousness of
feeling, his brilliancy of wit, which was now coarse now mere
_persiflage_, his cleverness, which was more quickness of assimilation
than the originality of genius, were all traits of character unlike the
deeper, truer and more ponderous qualities of the woman who braved the
world for his sake when first she linked her fate with his--the woman
who did not, like Maggie, turn back when she came to the brink but who
boldly crossed the Rubicon--and who, in her after efforts to cover up
the conditions, showed that she smarted from the consequences.
Read in youth by the light of sympathy with insurgency, Maggie is
adorable, and her brother Tom is but a better-looking Jonas Chuzzlewit.
Read in age by the light of respect for conformity and self-control,
much of Maggie's charm vanishes, while most of Tom's hardness becomes
both respectable and inevitable. Maggie was truly a thorn in the side of
a proud country family, not accustomed to its little daughters running
off to join the gipsies, nor to its grown girls eloping with their
cousin's lover. Tom was right when he said no reliance could be placed
on her; for where there is this unlucky divergence between principle and
temperament, the will can never be firm nor the walk steady. Sweet
little Lucy had more of the true heroism of a woman in her patient
acceptance of sorrow and her generous forgiveness of the cause thereof,
than could be found in all Maggie's struggles between passion and
principle. The great duties of life lying at our feet and about our path
cannot be done away with by the romantic picturesqueness of one
character contrasted with the more prosaic because conventional
limitations of the other; nor is it right to give all our sympathy to
the one who spoilt so many lives and brought so much disgrace on her
family name, merely because she did not mean, and did not wish, and had
bitter remorse after terrible conflicts, which never ended in real
self-control or steadfast pursuance of the right.
There is something in "The Mill on the Floss" akin to the gloomy
fatalism of a Greek tragedy. In "Adam Bede" is more spontaneity of
action, more liberty of choice; but, given the natures by which events
were worked out to their final issues in "The Mill on the Floss," it
seems as if everything must have happened precisely as it did. An
obstinate, litigious and irascible man like Mr. Tulliver was bound to
come to grief in the end. Fighting against long odds as he did, he could
not win. Blind anger and as blind precipitancy, against cool tenacity
and clear perceptions, must go under; and Mr. Tulliver was no match
against the laws of life as interpreted by Mr. Wakem and the decisions
of the law courts. His choice of a fool for his wife--was not Mrs.
Tulliver well known at Coventry?--was another step in the terrible March
of Fate. She was of no help to him as a wife--with woman's wit to assist
his masculine decisions--nor as a mother was she capable of ruling her
daughter or influencing her son. She was as a passive instrument in the
hands of the gods--one of those unnoted and unsuspected agents by whose
unconscious action such tremendous results are produced. George Eliot
never did anything more remarkable than in the union she makes in this
book between the most commonplace characters and the most majestic
conception of tragic fate. There is not a stage hero among them all--not
a pair of buskins for the whole company; but the conception is
AEschylean, though the stage is no bigger than a doll's house.