Bede," though the special qualities of the four sisters are perhaps
unduly exaggerated. Sister Pullet's eternal tears become wearisome, and
lose their effect by causeless and ceaseless repetition; and surely
sister Grigg could not have been always such an unmitigated Gorgon! Mrs.
Tulliver's helpless foolishness and tactless interference, moving with
her soft white hands the lever which set the whole crushing machinery
in motion, are after George Eliot's best manner; and the whole comedy
circling round sister Pullet's wonderful bonnet and the linen and the
chaney--comedy at last linked on to tragedy--is of inimitable richness.
The girlish bond of sympathy between sister Pullet and sister Tulliver,
in that they both liked spots for their patterned linen, while sister
Grigg--allays contrairy to Sophy Pullet, would have striped things--is
repeated in that serio-comic scene of the ruin, when the Tullivers are
sold up and the stalwart cause of their disaster is in bed, paralysed.
By the way, would he have recovered so quickly and so thoroughly as he
did from such a severe attack? Setting that aside, for novelists are not
expected to be very accurate pathologists, the humour of this part of
the book is all the more striking for the pathos mingled with it.
"The head miller, a tall broad-shouldered man of forty, black-eyed and
black-haired, subdued by a general mealiness like an auricula":--
"They're nash things, them lop-eared rabbits--they'd happen ha' died if
they'd been fed. Things out o' natur never thrive. God Almighty doesn't
like 'em. He made the rabbit's ears to lie back, and it's nothing but
contrariness to make 'em lie down like a mastiff dog's":--"Maggie's
tears began to subside, and she put out her mouth for the cake and bit
a piece; and then Tom bit a piece, just for company, and they ate
together and rubbed each other's cheeks and brows and noses together,
while they ate, with a humiliating resemblance to two friendly
ponies":--Is there anything better than these in Mrs. Poyser's
repertory?
Of acute psychological vision is that fine bit on "plotting contrivance
and deliberate covetousness"; and the summing up of the religious and
moral life of the Dodsons and Tullivers, beginning "Certainly the
religious and moral ideas of the Dodsons and Tullivers," is as good as
anything in our language. No one theoretically knew human nature better
than George Eliot. Practically, she was too thin-skinned to bear the
slightest abrasion, such as necessarily comes to us from extended
intercourse or the give and take of equality. But theoretically she
sounded the depths and shallows, and knew where the bitter springs rose
and where the healing waters flowed; and when she translated what she
knew into the conduct and analysis of her fictitious characters, she
gave them a life and substance peculiarly her own.
* * * * *
Hitherto George Eliot has dealt with her own experiences, her
reminiscences of old friends and well-known places, of familiar
acquaintances, and, in Maggie Tulliver, of her own childish frowardness
and affectionateness--her girlish desire to do right and facile slipping
into wrong. In "Silas Marner" she ventures into a more completely
creative region; and, for all the exquisite beauty and poetry of the
central idea, she has failed her former excellence. The story is one of
the not quite impossible but highly improbable kind, with a _Deus ex
machina_ as the ultimate setter-to-rights of all things wrong. As with
"Adam Bede," the date is thrown back a generation or two, without the
smallest savour of the time indicated, save in the fashion of the
dresses of the sisters Lammeter--a joseph substituted for a cloak, and
riding on a pillion for a drive in a fly. Else there is not the least
attempt to synchronise time, circumstances and sentiment, while the
story is artificial in its plot and unlikely in its treatment. Yet it is
both pretty and pathetic; and the little introduction of fairyland in
the golden-haired child asleep by the fire, as the substitute for the
stolen hoard, is as lovely as fairy stories generally are. But we
altogether question the probability of a marriage between the young
squire and his drunken wife. Such a woman would not have been too
rigorous, and was not; and such a man as Godfrey Cass would not have
married a low-born mistress from "a movement of compunction." As we
said before, in the story of Hetty and Arthur, young squires a century
ago were not so tender-hearted towards the honour of a peasant girl. It
was a pity, of course, when things went wrong; but then young men will
be young men, and it behoved the lasses to keep themselves to
themselves! If the young squire did the handsome thing in money, that
was all that could be expected of him. The girl would be none the worse
thought of for her slip; and the money got by her fault would help in
her plenishing with some honest fellow who understood things. This is
the sentiment still to be found in villages, where the love-children of
the daughters out in service are to be found comfortably housed in the
grandmother's cottage, and where no one thinks any the worse of the
unmarried mother; and certainly, a century ago, it was the universal
rule of moral measurement. George Eliot undoubtedly made a chronological
mistake in both stories by the amount of conscientious remorse felt by
her young men, and the depth of social degradation implied in this slip
of her young women.
The beginning of "Silas Marner" is much finer than that of either of her
former books. It strikes the true note of a harmonious introduction, and
is free from the irritating trivialities of the former openings. In
those early days of which "Silas Marner" treats, a man from the next
parish was held as a "stranger"; and even now a Scotch, Irish or Welsh
man would be considered as much a foreigner as a "Frenchy" himself, were
he to take up his abode in any of the more remote hamlets of the north
or west. The state of isolation in which Silas Marner lived was true on
all these counts--his being a "foreigner" to the autochthonous shepherds
and farmers of Ravaloe--his half mazed, half broken-hearted state owing
to the false accusation brought against him and the criminal neglect of
Providence to show his innocence--and his strange and uncongenial trade.
Yet, for this last, were not the women of that time familiar with the
weaving industry?--else what could they have done with the thread which
they themselves had spun? If it were disposed of to a travelling agent
for the hand-loom weavers, why not have indicated the fact? It would
have been one touch more to the good of local colour and conditional
accuracy. To be sure, the paints are laid on rather thickly throughout;
but eccentricities and folks with bees in their bonnets were always to
be found in remote places before the broom of steam and electricity came
to sweep them into a more common conformity; and that line between
oddity and insanity, always narrow, was then almost invisible.
The loss of the hoarded treasure and the poor dazed weaver's terrified
flight to the Rainbow introduces us to one of George Eliot's most
masterly of her many scenes of rustic humour.
"The more important customers, who drank spirits and sat nearest the
fire, staring at each other as if a bet were depending on the first man
who winked; while the beer drinkers, chiefly men in fustian jackets and
smock-frocks, kept their eyelids down and rubbed their hands across
their mouths, as if their draughts of beer were a funereal duty attended
with embarrassing sadness"--these, as well as Mr. Snell, the landlord,
"a man of a neutral disposition, accustomed to stand aloof from human
differences, as those of beings who were all alike in need of
liquor"--do their fooling admirably. From the cautious discussion on the
red Durham with a star on her forehead, to the authoritative dictum of
Mr. Macey, tailor and parish clerk (were men of his social stamp called
_Mr._ in those days?) when he asserts that "there's allays two 'pinions;
there's the 'pinion a man has of himsen, and there's the 'pinion other
folks have on him. There'd be two 'pinions about a cracked bell, if the
bell could hear itself"--from the gossip about the Lammeter land to the
ghos'es in the Lammeter stables, it is all excellent--rich, racy and to
the manner born. And the sudden appearance of poor, scared, weazen-faced
Silas in the midst of the discussion on ghos'es, gives occasion for
another fytte of humour quite as good as what has gone before.
Worthy of Mrs. Poyser, too, was sweet and patient Dolly Winthrop's
estimate of men. "It seemed surprising that Ben Winthrop, who loved his
quart-pot and his joke, got along so well with Dolly; but she took her
husband's jokes and joviality as patiently as everything else,
considering that 'men _would_ be so' and viewing the stronger sex in the
light of animals whom it had pleased Heaven to make naturally
troublesome, like bulls and turkey-cocks." Good, too, when speaking of
his wife, is Mr. Macey's version of the "mum" and "budget" of the
fairies' dance. "Before I said 'sniff' I took care to know as she'd say
'snaff,' and pretty quick too. I wasn't a-going to open _my_ mouth like
a dog at a fly, and snap it to again, wi' nothing to swaller."
But in spite of all this literary value of "Silas Marner" we come back
to our first opinion of its being unreal and almost impossible in plot.
The marriage of Godfrey to an opium-eating(?) drab, and the robbery of
Silas Marner's hoard by the squire's son were pretty hard nuts to crack
in the way of probability; but the timely death of the wife just at the
right moment and in the right place--the adoption of a little girl of
two by an old man as nearly "nesh" as was consistent with his power of
living free from the restraint of care--the discovery of Dunsay's body
and the restoration to the weaver of his long-lost gold--the _impasse_
of Eppie, the squire's lawfully born daughter and his only legal
inheritor, married to a peasant and living as a peasant at her father's
gates: all these things make "Silas Marner" a beautiful unreality,
taking it out of the ranks of human history and placing it in those of
fairy tale and romance.
* * * * *
In "Felix Holt" we come back to a more actual kind of life, such as it
was in the early thirties when the "democratic wave," which has swept
away so much of the old parcelling out of things social and political,
was first beginning to make itself felt. But here again George Eliot
gives us the sense of anachronism in dealing too familiarly with those
new conditions of the Reform Bill which gave Treby Magna for the first
time a member, and which also for the first time created the Revising
Barrister--while Trades Unions were still unrecognised by the law, and
did their work mainly by rattening and violence. Any one who was an
intelligent and wide-awake child at that time, and who can remember the
talk of the excited elders, must remember things somewhat differently
from what George Eliot has set down. Radical was in those days a term of
reproach, carrying with it moral obloquy and condemnation. The Tories
might call the Whigs Radicals when they wanted to overwhelm them with
shame, as we might now say Anarchists and Dynamiters. But the most
advanced Gentleman would never have stood for Parliament as a Radical.
Felix Holt himself, and the upper fringe of the working class, as also
the lower sediment, might be Radicals, but scarcely such a man as Harold
Transome, who would have been a Whig of a broad pattern. And as for the
Revising Barrister, he was looked on as something akin to Frankenstein's
Monster. No one knew where his power began nor where it ended; and on
each side alike he was dreaded as an unknown piece of machinery which,
once set a-going, no one could say what it would do or where it would
stop.
In its construction "Felix Holt" is perhaps the most unsatisfactory of
all George Eliot's books. The ins and outs of Transome and Durfey and
Scaddon and Bycliffe were all too intricate in the weaving and too
confused in the telling to be either intelligible or interesting. In
trying on the garment of Miss Braddon the author of "Felix Holt" showed
both want of perception and a deplorable misfit. Also she repeats the
situation of Eppie and her adopted father Silas in that of Esther and
Rufus Lyon. But where it was natural enough for the contentedly rustic
Eppie to refuse to leave her beloved old father for one new and
unknown--her old habits of cottage simplicity, including a suitable
lover, for the unwelcome luxuries of an unfamiliar state--natural in her
though eminently unnatural in the drama of life--it was altogether
inharmonious with Esther's character and tastes to prefer poverty to
luxury, Felix to Harold, Malhouse Yard to Transome Court. George Eliot's
usually firm grip on character wavers into strange self-contradiction in
her delineations of Esther Lyon. Even the situation of which she is so
fond--the evolution of a soul from spiritual deadness to keen spiritual
intensity, and the conversion of a mind from folly to seriousness--even
in this we miss the masterly drawing of her better manner. The humour
too is thinner. Mrs. Holt is a bad Mrs. Nickleby; and the comic chorus
of rustic clowns, which George Eliot always introduces where she can, is
comparatively poor. She is guilty of one distinct coarseness, in her own
character as the author, when she speaks of the cook at Treby Manor--"a
much grander person than her ladyship"--"as wearing gold and jewelry to
a vast amount of suet."
When Esther has been taken up by the Transomes, George Eliot misses what
would have been absolutely certain--these fine little points of
difference between the high-bred lady of Transome Court and the
half-bred Esther of Malhouse Yard; and yet, quite unintentionally, she
makes Esther as vulgar as a barmaid in her conversations and flirtatious
coquetries with Harold Transome. Nor, we venture to think, as going too
far on the other side, would a girl of Esther's upbringing and
surroundings have used such a delightfully literary phrase as
"importunate scents." On the whole we do not think it can be denied
that, so far as she had gone in her literary career when she wrote
"Felix Holt," it is undeniably her least successful work.
And yet, how many and how beautiful are the good things in it! If Homer
nods at times, when he is awake who can come near him? The opening of
the book is beyond measure fine, and abounds in felicitous phrases. "His
sheep-dog following with heedless unofficial air as of a beadle in
undress:"--"The higher pains of a dim political consciousness:"--"The
younger farmers who had almost a sense of dissipation in talking to a
man of his questionable station and unknown experience:"--"Her life
would be exalted into something quite new--into a sort of difficult
blessedness such as one may imagine in beings who are conscious of
painfully growing into the possession of higher powers" (true for George
Eliot herself but not for such a girl as Esther Lyon):--These are
instances of literary supremacy taken at random, with many more behind.
Then how exquisite is that first love-scene between Felix and Esther! It
is in these grave and tender indications of love that George Eliot is at
her best. Gentle as "sleeping flowers"--delicately wrought, like the
most perfect cameos--graceful and suggestive, subtle and yet
strong--they are always the very gems of her work. And in "Felix Holt"
especially they stand out with more perfectness because of the inferior
quality of so much that surrounds them.
Felix himself is one of George Eliot's masterpieces in the way of
nobleness of ideal and firmness of drawing. Whether he would have won
such a girl as Esther, or have allowed himself to be won by her, may be
doubtful; but for all the rugged and disagreeable honesty of his
nature--for all his high ideals of life and hideous taste in
costume--for all his intrinsic tendency and external bearishness, he is
supreme. And with one of George Eliot's best aphorisms, made in his
intention, we close the book with that kind of mingled disappointment
and delight which must needs be produced by the inferior work of a great
master. "Blows are sarcasms turned stupid; wit is a form of force that
leaves the limbs at rest."
The last three books of the series are the most ponderous. Still
beautiful and ever noble, they are like over-cultivated fruits and
flowers of which the girth is inconvenient; and in one, at least,
certain defects already discernible in the earlier issues attain a
prominence fatal to perfect work.
Never spontaneous, as time went on George Eliot became painfully
laboured. Her scholarship degenerated into pedantry, and what had been
stately and dignified accuracy in her terms grew to be harsh and
inartistic technicality. The artificial pose she had adopted in her life
and bearing reacted on her work; and the contradiction between her
social circumstances and literary position coloured more than her
manners. All her teaching went to the side of self-sacrifice for the
general good, of conformity with established moral standards, while her
life was in direct opposition to her words; for though she did no other
woman personal injustice, she did set an example of disobedience to the
public law which wrought more mischief than was counteracted by even the
noblest of her exhortations to submit to the restraints of
righteousness, however irksome they might be. And it was this endeavour
to co-ordinate insurgency and conformity, self-will and self-sacrifice,
that made the discord of which every candid student of her work, who
knew her history, was conscious from the beginning. Nowhere do we find
this contradiction more markedly shown than in "Romola," the first of
the ponderous last three.
Her noblest work, "Romola" is yet one of George Eliot's most defective
in what we may call the scaffolding of the building. The loftiness of
sentiment, the masterly delineation of character, the grand grasp of the
political and religious movement of the time, the evidences of deep
study and conscientious painstaking visible on every page, are combined
with what seems to us to be the most extraordinary indifference to--for
it cannot be ignorance of--the social and domestic conditions of the
time. The whole story is surely impossible in view of the long arm of
the Church--the personal restraints necessarily imposed on women during
the turbulent unrest of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries--the proud
exclusiveness of the well-born citizens of any state.
Take the last first. Grant all the honour paid by Cosmo and Lorenzo to
the learned men of all nations, especially to Greek scholars who, in the
first fervour of the Renaissance, were as sons of the gods to those
thirsting for the waters of the divine spring. Grant, too, the example
set by Bartolommeo Scala, who had given his beautiful daughter
Alessandra in marriage to the "soldier-poet" Marullo; was it likely that
even an eccentric old scholar like the blind Bardo de' Bardi should
have so unreservedly adopted a nameless Greek adventurer, flung up like
a second Ulysses from the waves, unvouched for by any sponsor and
unidentified by any document? We allow that Bardo might have taken Tito
as his scribe and secretary, seeing that the Cennini had already
employed him, waif and stray as he was; but that he should have
consented to his daughter's marriage with this stranger, and that her
more conservative and more suspicious godfather, Bernado del Nero,
should have consented, even if reluctantly, was just about as likely as
that an English country gentleman should allow his daughter to marry a
handsome gipsy.
If we think for a moment of what citizenship meant in olden times, the
improbability of the whole of Tito's career becomes still more striking.
As, in Athens, the Sojourner never stood on the same plane with the
autochthon, so in Rome the Peregrinus was ineligible for public office
or the higher kind of marriage; and though the stricter part of the law
was subsequently relaxed in favour of a wider civic hospitality, the
sentiment of exclusiveness remained, and indeed does yet remain in
Italy. It seems more than improbable that Tito, a Greek adventurer,
should have been employed in any political service, save perhaps as a
base kind of scout and unhonoured spy. That he should ever have taken
the position of an accredited public orator was so contrary to all the
old traditions and habits of thought as to be of the same substance as a
fairy tale.
The character of Bardo, too, is non-Italian; and his modes of life and
thought were as impossible as are some other things to be hereafter
spoken of. The Church had a long arm, as we said, and a firm grip; and
while it blinked indulgently enough at certain aberrations, it demanded
the show of conformity in essentials. Lorenzo was a pagan, but he died
receiving the Sacraments. The Borgias were criminals, but their
professions of faith were loud-voiced and in true earnest. Men might
inveigh against the evil lives of the clergy and the excesses of monks
and nuns, but they had to confess God and the Church; and their
diatribes had to be carefully worded--as witness Rabelais--or a plea
would certainly be found for the fire and faggot--as with Fra Dolcino
and Savonarola. So with conformity to the usages of life which, then and
now, are considered integral to morality. It could not have been
possible for Bardo to bring up his daughter "aloof from the debasing
influence" of her own sex, and in a household with only one old man for
a servant. The times did not allow it; no more than we should allow it
now in this freer day. This womanless home for an Italian girl at any
time, more especially in the Middle Ages, when even young wives were
bound to have their companions and duennas, is a serious blot in
workmanship. So, indeed, is the whole of Romola's life, being
anachronism and simply nineteenth-century English from start to finish.