a par with "Gulliver's Travels" and "Peter Wilkins." It was as
impossible for Tessa, a pretty young unmarried girl, contadina as she
was, to come into Florence alone, as for a peasant child of three years
old to be sent with a message on business into the City of London alone.
To this day well-conducted women of any class do not wander about the
streets of Italian cities unaccompanied; and maidenhood is, as it always
was, sacredly and jealously guarded. Nor could Romola have gone out and
come in at her desire, as she is allowed by the author. With streets
filled by the turbulent factions of the Bianchi and Neri, always ready
for a fight or for a love-adventure, what would have happened to, and
been thought of, a beautiful young woman slipping about within the city
and outside the gates at all hours of the day and night? She is said to
be either quite alone (!), as when she goes to Tessa's house, or merely
accompanied by Monna Brigida, as when she goes to the convent to see
her dying brother--which also, by the way, was impossible--or attended,
at a distance, by old Maso when she attempts her flight as a solitary
nun. She would have lost name and state had she committed these
eccentricities; and had she persisted in them, she would have been sent
to a convent--that refuge for sorrow, that shelter from danger, that
prison for contumacy--and her godfather would have been the first to
consign her to what was then the only safe asylum for women. The scene
she has with Tito before Nello's shop is ludicrously impossible--as is
their English-like return home together, without retinue or lights, just
like a man and wife of to-day when she has been to fetch him from the
public-house, or, if she be of the better class, from his club. English,
too, is Romola's sitting up for her husband in her queer womanless
establishment, and opening the door to him when he comes home late at
night. For the matter of that, indeed, Tito's solitary rambles are as
much out of line with the time, and the circumstances of that time, as
is Romola's strange daring. No man of any note whatever appeared alone
in the streets when out on a midnight expedition, either to commit
murder or break the seventh commandment. He took some one with him,
friend or servant, armed; and to this day you will not find Italians
willingly walk alone at night. The whole of this kind of life, if
necessary for the story, is dead against truth and probability. So is
Romola's flight, disguised as a nun. Splendid as is the scene between
her and Savonarola, the _vraisemblance_ is spoilt by this impossibility
of condition. Nor could any woman of that time, brought up in a city,
have felt a sense of freedom when fairly outside the walls by herself on
a strange road, going to meet an unknown fate and bound to an unknown
bourne. She would have felt as a purdah woman of India suddenly turned
loose in the streets and environs of Delhi--as felt all those women
whose evidence we read of in matters of crime and murder, when they came
face to face with the desolation of unprotectedness. Modern women call
it freedom, but in the Middle Ages such a feeling did not exist. All
these things are anachronisms; as much so as if a novelist of the
twentieth century, writing of English life in the eighteenth, should
clothe his women in knickerbockers, mount them on bicycles, and turn
them into the football field and cricket-ground.
These exceptions taken to the scaffolding of the book, we are free to
admire its glorious nobility of sentiment, its lofty purpose, its
perfection of character-drawing, and the dramatic power of its various
scenes. Nothing can excel the power with which Tito's character is shown
in its gradual slipping from simple selfishness to positive
criminality. The whole action may be summed up in George Eliot's own
words.
"When, the next morning, Tito put this determination into act, he had
chosen his colour in the game, and had given an inevitable bent to his
wishes. He had made it impossible that he should not from henceforth
desire it to be the truth that his father was dead; impossible that he
should not be tempted to baseness rather than that the precise facts of
his conduct should not remain for ever concealed. Under every guilty
secret there is hidden a brood of guilty wishes, whose unwholesome
infecting life is cherished by the darkness. The contaminating effect of
deeds often lies less in the commission than in the consequent
adjustment of our desires--the enlistment of our self-interest on the
side of falsity; as, on the other hand, the purifying influence of
public confession springs from the fact that by it the hope in lies is
for ever swept away, and the soul recovers its noble attitude of
sincerity."
But, giving every weight to the natural weakness, sweetness and
affectionateness, as well as to the latent falsity of Tito's character,
we cannot accept the Tessa episode as true to life in general, while it
is eminently untrue to Italian life, especially of those times. Tessa
herself, too, is wearisome with her tears and her kisses, her blue eyes
and baby face, so incessantly repeated and harped on. She is as
nauseating as she is impossible; and the whole story from first to last
is an ugly blot on the book.
In Romola and in Savonarola we touch the heights. The "tall lily" is an
exquisite conception and is supreme in human loveliness. Her two
interviews with Savonarola are superbly done, and the gradual crushing
down of her proud self-will under the passionate fervour of the priest
is beyond praise both for style and psychology. So, too, are the changes
in the great preacher himself--the first, when his simple earnestness of
belief in his mission degenerates into self-consciousness and personal
assumption, as is the way with all reformers--the second, when he
abandons his later attitude, and the dross is burnt away as the hour of
trial comes on him, and the World no longer stands between God and his
soul. The final scenes of the Frate's public life are powerfully
wrought, with all George Eliot's mastery and eloquence and deep
religious fervour; but it is in scenes and circumstances of this kind
that she is ever at her best. In humour and psychologic insight she is
greater than any English woman writer we have had; in aphorisms she is
unrivalled; but in playfulness she is clumsy, and in catching the moral,
intellectual and social tone of the times of which she writes, she is
nowhere.
Contrast Romola's character and manner of life--above all those two
thoroughly English letters of hers--with all that we know of Vittoria
Colonna, the purest and noblest woman of her day--which was
Romola's--and at once we see the difference between them--the difference
wrought by four centuries--Vittoria being essentially a woman of the
time, though a head and shoulders above the ruck; while Romola is as
essentially a product of the nineteenth century. In spite of the local
colour--which, after all, is only a wash--given by the descriptions of
pageants and processions, and by the history of which George Eliot so
ably mastered the details, the whole book is nineteenth century, from
Monna Brigida's characteristically English speech about Tessa's place in
the house and the children's sweets, to Romola's as characteristically
English attitude and hygienic objections--from a little maiden, without
a caretaker, carrying eggs to Piero, to Romola's solitary visit to the
studio and night perambulations about the city.
All these shortcomings notwithstanding, "Romola" will ever remain one of
the noblest works of our noblest author; and, after all, did not
Shakspere make Hector quote Aristotle, and show all his Greeks and
Romans and outlandish nondescripts from countries unknown to himself, as
nothing but sturdy Englishmen, such as lived and loved in the times of
the great Eliza? Where we have so much to admire--nay, to venerate--we
may let the smaller mistakes pass. Yet they must be spoken of by those
who would be candid and not fulsome--just and not flattering. By the
way, did George Eliot know that "Baldassare" is the name of one of the
devils invoked to this day by Sicilian witches?
* * * * *
The longest of all the novels, "Middlemarch," is the most interesting in
its characters, its isolated scenes, its moral meaning and philosophic
extension; but it is also the most inartistic and the most encumbered
with subordinate interests and personages. The canvas is as crowded as
one of George Cruikshank's etchings; and the work would have gained by
what George Eliot would have called fission--a division into two. The
stories of Dorothea and Casaubon and of Rosamond and Lydgate are
essentially separate entities; and though they are brought together at
the last by an intermingled interest, the result is no more true
unification than the Siamese twins or the Double-headed Nightingale
represented one true human being. The contrast between the two beautiful
young wives is well preserved, and the nicer shades of difference are as
clearly marked as are the more essential; for George Eliot was far too
good a workman to scamp in any direction, and the backs of her stories
are as well wrought as the fronts. But if one-third of the book had been
cut out--failing that fission, which would have been still better--the
work would have gained in proportion to its compression.
The character of Dorothea marks the last stage in the development of the
personality which begins with Maggie Tulliver, and is in reality Marian
Evans's own self. Maggie, Romola and Dorothea are the same person in
progressive stages of moral evolution. All are at cross corners with
life and fate--all are rebellious against things as they find them.
Maggie's state of insurgency is the crudest and simplest; Romola's is
the most passionate in its moral reprobation of accepted unworthiness;
Dorothea's is the widest in its mental horizon, and the most womanly in
the whole-hearted indifference to aught but love, which ends the story
and gives the conclusive echo. In its own way, her action in taking Will
Ladislaw is like Esther's in marrying Felix Holt; but it has not the
unlikelihood of Esther's choice. It is all for love, if one will, but it
runs more harmoniously with the broad lines of her character, and gives
us no sense of that dislocation which we get from Esther's decision. And
in its own way it is at once a parallel and an apology.
The most masterly bits of work in "Middlemarch" are the characters of
Rosamond and Casaubon. Rosamond's unconscious selfishness, her moral
thinness, and the superficial quality of her love are all portrayed
without a flaw in the drawing; while Casaubon's dryness, his literary
indecision following on his indefatigable research, and his total
inability to adjust himself to his new conditions, together with his
scrupulous formality of politeness combined with real cruelty of temper,
make a picture of supreme psychologic merit. They who think that
Casaubon was meant for the late Rector of Lincoln know nothing about
George Eliot's early life. They who do know some of those obscurer
details, are well aware of the origin whence she drew her masterly
portrait, as they know who was Mrs. Poyser, who Tom Tulliver, and who
Hetty Sorrel. Hetty, indeed, is somewhat repeated in that amazingly
idiotic Tessa, who is neither English nor Italian, nor, indeed, quite
human in her molluscous silliness; but there are lines of relation which
show themselves to experts, and the absence of the "cherry stone" does
not count for more than the dissimilarity always to be found between two
copies.
No finer bit of work was ever done than the deep and subtle but true and
most pathetic tragedy of Lydgate's married life. The character of
Rosamond was a difficult one to paint, and one false touch could have
been fatal. To show her intense selfishness and shallowness and yet not
to make her revolting, was what only such a consummate psychologist as
George Eliot could have done. And to show how Lydgate, strong man as he
was and full of noble ambition and splendid aims, was necessarily
subdued, mastered and ruined by the tenacious weakness and moral
unworthiness of such a wife, yet not to make him contemptible, was also
a task beyond the power of any but the few Masters of our literature.
All the scenes between this ill-assorted pair are in George Eliot's best
manner and up to her highest mark; and the gradual declination of
Rosamond's love, together with Lydgate's gradual awakening to the truth
of things as they were, are portrayed with a touch as firm as it is
tender.
That scene on the receipt of Sir Godwin's letter is as tragic in its own
way as Othello or a Greek drama. It has in it the same sense of human
helplessness in the presence of an overmastering fate. Rosamond was
Lydgate's Fate. Her weakness, tenacity and duplicity--his stronger
manhood, which could not crush the weaker woman--his love, which could
not coerce, nor punish, nor yet control the thing he loved--all made the
threads of that terrible net in which he was entangled, and by which the
whole worth of his life was destroyed. It is a story that goes home to
the consciousness of many men, who know, as Lydgate knew, that they have
been mastered by the one who to them is "as an animal of another and
feebler species"--who know, as Lydgate knew, that their energies have
been stunted, their ambition has been frustrated, and their horizon
narrowed and darkened because of that tyranny which the weaker woman so
well knows how to exercise over the stronger man.
Casaubon is as masterly in drawing as is Rosamond or Lydgate. We confess
to a sadly imperfect sympathy with Dorothea in her queer enthusiasm for
this dry stick of a man. Learned or not, he was scarcely one to whom a
young woman, full of life's strong and sweet emotions, would care to
give herself as a wife. One can understand the more impersonal impulse
which threw Marian Evans into an attitude of adoration before the
original of her dry stick; but when it comes to the question of
marriage, the thing is simply revolting as done by the girl, not only of
her own free-will but against the advice and prayers of her friends. Tom
was to be excused for his harshness and irritation against Maggie; and
Celia's commonplaces of wisdom for the benefit of that self-willed and
recalcitrant Dodo, if not very profound nor very stimulating, nor yet
sympathetic, were worth more in the daily life and ordering of sane folk
than Dorothea's blind and obstinate determination. Beautiful and
high-minded as she is, she is also one of those irritating saints whose
virtues one cannot but revere, whose personal charms one loves and
acknowledges, and whose wrongheadedness makes one long to punish
them--or at least restrain them by main force from social suicide. And
to think that to her first mistake she adds that second of marrying Will
Ladislaw--the utter snob that he is! Where were George Eliot's
perceptions? Or was it that in Ladislaw she had a model near at hand,
whom she saw through coloured glasses, which also shed their rosy light
on her reproduction, so that her copy was to her as idealised as the
original, and she was ignorant of the effect produced on the
clear-sighted? Yet over all the mistakes made by her through defective
taste and obstinate unwisdom, the beauty of Dorothea's character stands
out as did Romola's--like a "white lily" in the garden. She is a superb
creature in her own way, and her disillusionment is of the nature of a
tragedy. But what could any woman expect from a man who could write such
a love-letter as that of Mr. Casaubon's?
The canvas of "Middlemarch" is overcrowded, as we said; yet how good
some of the characters are! The sturdy uprightness, tempered with such
loving sweetness, of Cabel Garth; the commonplace negation of all great
and all unworthy qualities of the Vincys--Celia and Sir James--Mr.
Farebrother and Mr. and Mrs. Cadwallader--all are supreme. We confess we
do not care much for the portraiture of Mr. Bulstrode and his spiteful
delator Raffles--George Eliot is not good at melodrama; also the whole
episode of Mr. Featherstone's illness, with his watching family and Mary
Garth, too vividly recalls old Anthony Chuzzlewit and all that took
place round his death-bed and about his will, to give a sense of truth
or novelty. George Eliot's power did not lie in the same direction as
that of Charles Dickens, and the contrast is not to her advantage. Great
humorists as both were, their humour was essentially different, and will
not bear comparison.
No book that George Eliot ever wrote is without its wise and pithy
aphorisms, its brilliant flashes of wit, its innumerable good things.
Space will not permit our quoting one-tenth part of the good things
scattered about these fascinating pages. Celia's feeling, which she
stifled in the depths of her heart, that "her sister was too religious
for family comfort. Notions and scruples were like spilt needles, making
one afraid of treading or sitting down, or even eating:"--(But, farther
on, what an unnecessary bit of pedantry!--"In short, woman was a problem
which, since Mr. Brooke's mind felt blank before it, could be hardly
less complicated than the _revolutions of an irregular solid_.")--Mrs.
Cadwallader's sense of birth, so that a "De Bracy reduced to take his
dinner in a basin would have seemed to her an example of pathos worth
exaggerating; and I fear his aristocratic vices would not have horrified
her. But her feeling towards the vulgar rich was a sort of religious
hatred:"--"Indeed, she (Mrs. Waule) herself was accustomed to think that
entire freedom from the necessity of behaving agreeably was included in
the Almighty's intentions about families:"--"Strangers, whether wrecked
and clinging to a raft, or duly escorted and accompanied by
portmanteaus, have always had a circumstantial fascination for the
virgin mind, against which native merit has urged itself in
vain:"--"Ladislaw, a sort of Burke with a leaven of Shelley:"--"But it
is one thing to like defiance, and another thing to like its
consequences"--an observation wrung out of her own disturbed and
inharmonious experience:--"That controlled self-consciousness of manner
which is the expensive substitute for simplicity:"--These are a few
picked out at random, but the wealth that remains behind is but
inadequately represented by stray nuggets.
Before we close the volume we would like to note the one redeeming
little flash of human tenderness in Mr. Casaubon when he had received
his death-warrant from Lydgate, and Dorothea waits for him to come up to
bed. It is the only tender and spontaneous moment in his life as George
Eliot has painted it, and its strangeness makes its pathos as well as
its truth.
* * * * *
The last of the lengthy three, and the last novel she wrote, "Daniel
Deronda" is the most wearisome, the least artistic, and the most
unnatural of all George Eliot's books. Of course it has the masterly
touch, and, for all its comparative inferiority, has also its supreme
excellence. But in plot, treatment and character it is far below its
predecessors. Some of the characters are strangely unnatural.
Grandcourt, for instance, is more like the French caricature of an
English milord than like a possible English gentleman depicted by a
compatriot. Deronda himself is a prig of the first water; while
Gwendolen is self-contradictory all through--like a tangled skein of
which you cannot find the end, and therefore cannot bring it into order
and intelligibility. Begun on apparently clear lines of self-will,
pride, worldly ambition and personal self-indulgence--without either
conscience or deep affections--self-contained and self-controlled--she
wavers off into a condition of moral weakness, of vagrant impulses and
humiliating self-abandonment for which nothing that went before has
prepared us.
That she should ever have loved, or even fancied she loved, such a
frozen fish as Grandcourt was impossible to a girl so full of energy as
Gwendolen is shown to be. Clear in her desires of what she wanted, she
would have accepted him, as she did, to escape from the hateful life to
which else she would have been condemned. But she would have accepted
him without even that amount of self-deception which is portrayed in the
decisive interview. She knew his cruel secret, and she deliberately
chose to ignore it. So far good. It is what she would have done. But
where is the logic of making her "carry on" as she did when she received
the diamonds on her wedding-day? It was a painful thing, sure enough,
and the mad letter that came with them was disagreeable enough; but it
could not have been the shock it is described, nor could it have made
Gwendolen turn against her husband in such sudden hatred, seeing that
she already knew the whole shameful story. These are faults in
psychology; and the conduct of the plot is also imperfect. George
Eliot's plots are always bad when she attempts intricacy, attaining
instead confusion and unintelligibility; but surely nothing can be much
sillier than the whole story of Deronda's birth and upbringing, nor can
anything be more unnatural than the character and conduct of his
mother. What English gentleman would have brought up a legitimately-born
Jewish child under conditions which made the whole world believe him to
be his own illegitimate son? And what young man, brought up in the
belief that he was an English gentleman by birth--leaving out on which
side of the blanket--would have rejoiced to find himself a Jew instead?
The whole story is improbable and far-fetched; as also is Deronda's
rescue of Mirah and her unquestioning adoption by the Meyricks. It is
all distortion, and in no wise like real life; and some of the
characters are as much twisted out of shape as is the story. Sir Hugo
Mallinger and Mr. and Mrs. Gascoigne are the most natural of the whole
gallery--the defect of exaggeration or caricature spoiling most of the
others.
Of these others, Gwendolen herself is far and away the most
unsatisfactory. Her sudden hatred of her husband is strained; so is her
love for Deronda; so is her repentance for her constructive act of
murder. That she should have failed to throw the rope to Grandcourt,
drowning in the sea, was perhaps natural enough. That she should have
felt such abject remorse and have betrayed herself in such humiliating
unreserve to Deronda was not. All through the story her action with
regard to Deronda is dead against the base lines of her character, and
is compatible only with such an overwhelming amount of physical passion
as does sometimes make women mad. We have no hint of this. On the
contrary, all that Gwendolen says is founded on spiritual longing for
spiritual improvement--spiritual direction with no hint of sexual
impulse. Yet she acts as one overpowered by that impulse--throwing to
the winds pride, reserve, womanly dignity and common sense. Esther was
not harmonious with herself in her choice of Felix Holt over Harold
Transome, but Esther was naturalness incarnate compared with Gwendolen
as towards Daniel Deronda. And the evolution of Esther's soul, and the
glimpse given of Rosamond's tardy sense of some kind of morality,
difficult to be believed as each was, were easy sums in moral arithmetic
contrasted with the birth and sudden growth of what had been Gwendolen's
very rudimentary soul--springing into maturity in a moment, like a
fully-armed Athene, without the need of the more gradual process. Add to
all these defects, an amount of disquisition and mental dissection which
impedes the story till it drags on as slowly as a heavily laden
wain--add the fatal blunder of making long scenes which do not help on
the action nor elucidate the plot, and the yet more fatal blunder of
causeless pedantry, and we have to confess that our great master's last
novel is also her worst. But then the one immediately preceding was
incomparably her best.
We come now to the beauties of the work--to the inimitable force of some
phrases--to the noble aim and meaning of the story--to the lofty spirit
informing all those interrupting disquisitions, which are really
interpolated moral essays, and must not be confounded with padding. Take
this little shaft aimed at that _Graeculus esuriens_ Lush, that
"half-caste among gentlemen" and the _ame damnee_ of Grandcourt. "Lush's
love of ease was well satisfied at present, and if his puddings were
rolled towards him in the dust he took the inside bits and found them
relishing." Again: "We sit up at night to read about Cakya-Mouni, Saint
Francis and Oliver Cromwell, but whether we should be glad for any one
at all like them to call on us the next morning, still more to reveal
himself as a new relation, is quite another matter:"--"A man of refined
pride shrinks from making a lover's approaches to a woman whose wealth
or rank might make them appear presumptuous or low-motived; but Deronda
was finding a more delicate difficulty in a position which,
superficially taken, was the reverse of that--though, to an ardent
reverential love, the loved woman has always a kind of wealth which
makes a man keenly susceptible about the aspect of his addresses." (We
extract this sentence as an instance of George Eliot's fine feeling and
delicate perception expressed in her worst and clumsiest manner.) "A
blush is no language, only a dubious flag-signal, which may mean either
of two contradictions."
"Grandcourt held that the Jamaican negro was a beastly sort of baptist
Caliban; Deronda said he had always felt a little with Caliban, who
naturally had his own point of view and could sing a good song;" "Mrs.
Davilow observed that her father had an estate in Barbadoes, but that
she herself had never been in the West Indies; Mrs. Torrington was sure
she should never sleep in her bed if she lived among blacks; her husband
corrected her by saying that the blacks would be manageable enough if it
were not for the half-breeds; and Deronda remarked that the whites had
to thank themselves for the half-breeds."