who occasionally called at Griff House, “a queer, three-cornered,
awkward girl,” who sat in corners and shyly watched her elders, she
was placed as boarder with the Misses Franklin at Coventry. This
school, then in high repute throughout the neighborhood, was kept
by two sisters, of whom the younger, Miss Rebecca Franklin, was a
woman of unusual attainments and lady-like culture, although not
without a certain taint of Johnsonian affectation. She seems to have
thoroughly grounded Miss Evans in a sound English education, laying
great stress in particular on the propriety of a precise and careful
manner of speaking and reading. She herself always made a point of
expressing herself in studied sentences.... Miss Evans, in whose family
a broad provincial dialect was spoken, soon acquired Miss Rebecca’s
carefully elaborated speech, and, not content with that, she might
be said to have created a new voice for herself. In later life every
one who knew her was struck by the sweetness of her voice, and the
finished construction of every sentence as it fell from her lips;
for by that time the acquired habit had become second nature, and
blended harmoniously with her entire personality. But in those early
days the artificial effort at perfect propriety of expression was
still perceptible, and produced an impression of affectation, perhaps
reflecting that of her revered instructress.
MATHILDE BLIND: ‘George Eliot.’ (Famous Women Series.) Boston: Roberts
Bros., 1883.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Evangelical influences at school--Miss Lewis.]
At Miss Wallington’s the growing girl soon distinguished herself by an
easy mastery of the usual school-learning of her years, and there, too,
the religious side of her nature was developed to a remarkable degree.
Miss Lewis was an ardent Evangelical Churchwoman, and exerted a strong
influence on her young pupil, whom she found very sympathetically
inclined.
[Sidenote: The Miss Franklins.]
In talking about those early days, my wife impressed on my mind the
debt that she felt she owed to the Miss Franklins for their excellent
instruction, and she had also the very highest respect for their moral
qualities. With her chameleon-like nature she soon adopted their
religious views with intense eagerness and conviction, although she
never formally joined the Baptists or any other communion than the
Church of England. She at once, however, took a foremost place in the
school, and became a leader of prayer-meetings among the girls. In
addition to a sound English education the Miss Franklins managed to
procure for their pupils excellent masters for French, German, and
music; so that, looking to the lights of those times, the means of
obtaining knowledge was very much above the average for girls. Her
teachers, on their side, were very proud of their exceptionally gifted
scholar; and years afterwards, when Miss Evans came with her father
to live in Coventry, they introduced her to one of their friends, not
only as a marvel of mental power, but also as a person “sure to get
something up very soon in the way of clothing-club or other charitable
undertaking.”
[Sidenote: Lonely life at Griff: housekeeper, Lady Bountiful, and
student.]
After Christiana’s marriage the entire charge of the Griff
establishment devolved on Mary Ann, who became a most exemplary
housewife, learned thoroughly everything that had to be done, and,
with her innate desire for perfection, was never satisfied unless her
department was administered in the very best manner that circumstances
permitted. She spent a great deal of time in visiting the poor,
organizing clothing-clubs, and other works of active charity. But over
and above this, as will be seen from the following letters, she was
always prosecuting an active intellectual life of her own. Mr. Brezzi,
a well-known master of modern languages at Coventry, used to come over
to Griff regularly to give her lessons in Italian and German. Mr.
McEwen, also from Coventry, continued her lessons in music, and she
got through a large amount of miscellaneous reading by herself. In the
evening she was always in the habit of playing to her father, who was
very fond of music. But it requires no great effort of the imagination
to conceive that this life, though full of interests of its own, and
the source from whence the future novelist drew the most powerful and
the most touching of her creations, was, as a matter of fact, very
monotonous, very difficult, very discouraging. It could scarcely be
otherwise to a young girl with a full, passionate nature and hungry
intellect, shut up in a farm-house in the remote country. For there
was no sympathetic human soul near with whom to exchange ideas on the
intellectual and spiritual problems that were beginning to agitate her
mind.
J. W. CROSS: ‘George Eliot’s Life.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Butter and cheese making.]
One of her chief beauties was in her large, finely shaped, feminine
hands--but she once pointed out to a friend at Foleshill that one of
them was broader across than the other, saying, with some pride, that
it was due to the quantity of butter and cheese she had made during her
housekeeping days at Griff.
MATHILDE BLIND: ‘George Eliot.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Her narrow views of fiction at this period.]
As to the discipline our minds receive from the perusal of fictions,
I can conceive none that is beneficial but may be attained by that
of history. It is the merit of fictions to come within the orbit
of probability: if unnatural they would no longer please. If it be
said the mind must have relaxation, “Truth is strange--stranger than
fiction.” When a person has exhausted the wonders of truth there
is no other resort than fiction: till then, I cannot imagine how
the adventures of some phantom conjured up by fancy can be more
entertaining than the transactions of real specimens of human nature,
from which we may safely draw inferences.
MARY ANN EVANS: _Letter to Miss Lewis_, 1839, in ‘George Eliot’s Life.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Opinions on music.]
We have had an oratorio at Coventry lately, Braham, Phillips, Mrs.
Knyvett, and Mr. Shaw--the last, I think, I shall attend. I am not
fitted to decide on the question of the propriety or lawfulness of
such exhibitions of talent and so forth, because I have no soul for
music. “Happy is he that condemneth not himself in that thing which
he alloweth.” I am a tasteless person, but it would not cost me any
regrets if the only music heard in our land were that of strict
worship, nor can I think that a pleasure that involves the devotion
of all the time and powers of an immortal being to the acquirement
of an expertness in so useless (at least in ninety-nine cases out of
a hundred) an accomplishment, can be quite pure or elevating in its
tendency.
MARY ANN EVANS: _Letter to Miss Lewis_, 1838, in ‘George Eliot’s Life.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: A significant reaction.]
The above remarks on oratorio are the more surprising because, two
years later, when Miss Evans went to the Birmingham festival, in
September, 1840, previous to her brother’s marriage, she was affected
to an extraordinary degree, so much so that Mrs. Isaac Evans--then
Miss Rawlins--told me that the attention of people sitting near was
attracted by her hysterical sobbing. And in all her later life music
was one of the chiefest delights to her, and especially oratorio.
J. W. CROSS: ‘George Eliot’s Life.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Mr. Bray’s impressions in 1841.]
Although I had known Mary Ann Evans as a child at her father’s house at
Griff, our real acquaintance began in 1841, when after she came with
her father to reside near Coventry, my sister, who lived next door
to her, brought her to call upon us one morning, thinking, amongst
other natural reasons for introducing her, that the influence of this
superior young lady of Evangelical opinions might be beneficial to our
heretical minds. She was then about one-and-twenty, and I can well
recollect her appearance and modest demeanor as she sat down on a low
ottoman by the window, and I had a sort of surprised feeling when she
first spoke, at the measured, highly-cultivated mode of expression, so
different from the usual tones of young persons from the country. We
became friends at once. We soon found that her mind was already turning
toward greater freedom of thought in religious opinion, that she had
even bought for herself Hennell’s ‘Inquiry,’ and there was much mutual
interest between the author and herself in their frequent meeting at
our house.
CHARLES BRAY: ‘Phases of Opinion and Experience During a Long Life.’
London: Longmans & Co., 1885.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Remarkable proportions of Miss Evans’ head.]
Mr. Bray, an enthusiastic believer in phrenology, was so much struck
with the grand proportions of her head that he took Marian Evans to
London to have a cast taken. He thinks that, after that of Napoleon,
her head showed the largest development from brow to ear of any
person’s recorded.
MATHILDE BLIND: ‘George Eliot.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The house in the Foleshill road.]
[Sidenote: Marian’s study.]
[Sidenote: Her bedroom.]
If you go through the quaint old city of Coventry, with its glorious
spires, its huge factories, its narrow, irregular streets of timbered
houses, you reach at last the road leading to the village of Foleshill,
a mile or so outside the limits of the borough. Dirty coal-wharves and
smoke-grimed houses, last remnants of the town, gradually give place to
scattered cottages, dropped here and there among fields and hedge-rows,
smoke-grimed too, but still green in summer. Then on the right comes a
little brook with a pathway through some posts beside it. Three tall
poplars in a garden fence overshadow it; and through the trees behind,
you catch a glimpse of two unpretending brown-stone, semi-detached
houses, regular suburban villas, with the same carriage-drive winding
up among the trees to each, the same grass-lawn with its beds of
evergreens, the same little strips of garden at the back--a mournful
attempt to combine town and country; as uninspiring a spot as one can
well conceive. To the first of these houses in 1841 came Mr. Evans,
when he left Griff; and with him his grave, soft-voiced daughter, Mary
Ann, or, as she now called herself, Marian.... “How often have I seen
that pale, thoughtful face wandering along the path by the little
stream,” said one of her early friends, as we turned into the gate....
Upstairs I was taken into a tiny room over the front door, with a plain
square window. This was George Eliot’s little study. Here to the left
on entering was her desk; and upon a bracket, in the corner between it
and the window, stood an exquisite statuette of Christ, looking towards
her. Here she lived among her books, which covered the walls. Here she
worked with ardor in the new fields of thought which her friendship
with the Brays opened to her.... Out of the study opened her bedroom,
looking over the little villa garden with its carriage-drive under
the shady trees. But three of these trees remain--a weeping lime, a
venerable acacia, with the silvery sheen of a birch between them. In
old days there were many more--so many, indeed, as to render the house
gloomy in the extreme. But they served to shut off all the sight of the
noisy road thirty yards away, though they could not shut off the sound
of the busy coal-wharf farther on, whence foul and cruel words to horse
and fellow-man floated up through the still summer air, and jarred
painfully on that highly strung organization, as Miss Evans sat plunged
in thought and work beside her window. It was one of the penalties of a
nearer approach to the civilization she had so ardently longed for in
her old country life at Griff. From the study you look on the exquisite
spires of Coventry, or through the tree-stems on gently-swelling fields
with their row of hedge-row elms against the sky.
ROSE G. KINGSLEY: ‘George Eliot’s County.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Marian’s appearance and temperament.]
[Sidenote: A sketch by Mrs. Bray.]
[Sidenote: Her voice.]
Though not above the middle height Marian gave people the impression
of being much taller than she really was, her figure, although thin
and slight, being well-poised and not without a certain sturdiness
of make. She was never robust in health, being delicately strung,
and of a highly nervous temperament. In youth the keen excitability
of her nature often made her wayward and hysterical. In fact her
extraordinary intellectual vigor did not exclude the susceptibilities
and weaknesses of a peculiarly feminine organization. There exists a
colored sketch done by Mrs. Bray about this period, which gives one a
glimpse of George Eliot in her girlhood. In those Foleshill days she
had a quantity of soft pale-brown hair worn in ringlets. Her head was
massive, her features powerful and rugged, her mouth large but shapely,
the jaw singularly square for a woman, yet having a certain delicacy
of outline. A neutral tone of coloring did not help to relieve this
general heaviness of structure, the complexion being pale but not
fair. Nevertheless the play of expression and the wonderful mobility
of the mouth, which increased with age, gave a womanly softness to
the countenance in curious contrast with its frame-work. Her eyes, of
a gray-blue, constantly varying in color, striking some as intensely
blue, others as of a pale, washed-out gray, were small and not
beautiful in themselves, but when she grew animated in conversation,
those eyes lit up the whole face, seeming in a manner to transfigure
it. So much was this the case, that a young lady who had once enjoyed
an hour’s conversation with her, came away under its spell with the
impression that she was beautiful, but afterwards, on seeing George
Eliot again when she was not talking, she could hardly believe her to
be the same person. The charm of her nature disclosed itself in her
manner and her voice, the latter recalling that of Dorothea in being
“like the voice of a soul that has once lived in an Æolian harp.” It
was low and deep, vibrating with sympathy.
MATHILDE BLIND: ‘George Eliot.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Conduct on her great change of opinion.]
It was impossible for such a nature as Miss Evans’s, in the enthusiasm
of this first great change, to rest satisfied in compliance with the
old forms, and she was so uneasy in an equivocal position that she
determined to give up going to church. This was an unforgivable offence
in the eyes of her father, who was a Churchman of the old school,
and nearly led to a family rupture. He went so far as to put into an
agent’s hands the lease of the house in the Foleshill road, with the
intention of going to live with his married daughter. Upon this, Miss
Evans made up her mind to go into lodgings at Leamington, and to try to
support herself by teaching.
The conclusion of the matter was that Mr. Evans withdrew his house from
the agent’s hands, and his daughter went to stay at Griff, with Mr. and
Mrs. Isaac Evans.
[Sidenote: Resumes attendance at church.]
[Sidenote: Her subsequent regrets.]
Miss Evans remained for about three weeks at Griff, at the end of which
time, through the intervention of her brother, the Brays, and Miss
Rebecca Franklin, the father was very glad to receive her again, and
she resumed going to church as before.... In the last year of her life
she told me that, although she did not think she had been to blame, few
things had occasioned her more regret than this temporary collision
with her father, which might, she thought, have been avoided with a
little management.
J. W. CROSS: ‘George Eliot’s Life.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: A devoted daughter.]
As her friend said with loving pride, “She was the most devoted
daughter for those nine years that it is possible to imagine.” Her
father always spent three days in the week away from home; and those
three days were Miss Evans’ holidays, given up to her work and her
friends. But on the evenings he was at home, not the most tempting
invitation in the world would induce her to leave him.
[Sidenote: Her housekeeping.]
“If I am to keep my father’s house, I am going to do it thoroughly,”
she would say. And thoroughly she did try to do her duty, even to
the matter of cooking on certain occasions. A friend recalls a visit
one afternoon, when she found Marian in comical distress over her
failures. The cook was ill, and Miss Evans undertook to manufacture a
batter-pudding. “And when it came to table, it broke. To think that the
mistress could not even make a batter-pudding!”
ROSE G. KINGSLEY: ‘George Eliot’s County.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Remarks on her connection with George Henry Lewes.]
Not only was Mr. Lewes’ previous family life irretrievably spoiled, but
his home had been wholly broken up for nearly two years. In forming
a judgment on so momentous a question, it is, above all things,
necessary to understand what was actually undertaken, what was actually
achieved; and, in my opinion, this can best be arrived at, not from any
outside statement or arguments, but by consideration of the whole tenor
of the life which follows.
J. W. CROSS: ‘George Eliot’s Life.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Her own words on the subject.]
One thing I can tell you in few words. Light and easily broken ties are
what I neither desire theoretically nor could live for practically.
Women who are satisfied with such ties do _not_ act as I have done.
That any unworldly, unsuperstitious person who is sufficiently
acquainted with the realities of life can pronounce my relation to Mr.
Lewes immoral, I can only understand by remembering how subtile and
complex are the influences that mould opinion.... From the majority
of persons, of course, we never looked for anything but condemnation.
We are leading no life of self-indulgence, except, indeed, that being
happy in each other, we find everything easy. We are working hard to
provide for others better than we provide for ourselves, and to fulfil
every responsibility that lies upon us. Levity and pride would not be a
sufficient basis for that.
MARIAN EVANS [LEWES]: _Letter to Mrs. Bray_, 1855, in ‘George Eliot’s
Life.’
* * * * *
If I live five years longer the positive result of my existence on the
side of truth and goodness will out-weigh the small negative good that
would have consisted in my not doing anything to shock others, and I
can conceive no consequences that will make me repent the past. Do not
misunderstand me, and suppose that I think myself heroic or great in
any way. Far enough from that! Faulty, miserably faulty I am--but least
of all faulty where others most blame.
MARIAN EVANS [LEWES]: _Letter to Miss Sara Hennell_, 1857, in ‘George
Eliot’s Life.’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: “George Eliot” and George Lewes.]
What a contrast the pair presented! He, _pétillant d’esprit_, as the
French say, as brimful of life, geniality, and animation, as it was
possible for any human being often oppressed with bodily ailments to
be, ever able to shake off these for the sake of lively, engrossing
talk, ever on the alert to discover intellectual qualities in others;
she, grave, pensive, thoughtful, not disinclined for sportiveness and
wit certainly, as ready as he to bring out the best in those around
her, but equally devoid of his habitual gayety and lightheartedness,
as was he of her own earnest mood. There was something irresistibly
winning and attractive about Mr. Lewes. The heart warmed to him at
once, he was so kindly, so ready to offer help or counsel, so pleased
to be of use. George Eliot’s large-hearted, deep-souled benevolence
took in all human kind, but could not so easily individualize. That
commanding spirit, that loyal, much-tried nature, could not be expected
to testify the same catholicity in personal likings as a man, who,
despite his rare intellectual endowments and devotion to especial
fields of learning, yet remained a man of the world.
Charles Lamb speaks somewhere of a woman’s “divine plain face,”
and perhaps the same criticism might be passed on George Eliot. The
plainness vanished as soon as she smiled, and the tone of the voice
was singularly sympathetic and harmonious. As to Mr. Lewes’ looks or
personal appearance, one never thought of the matter at all. Small,
spare, sallow, much bearded, with brilliant eyes, he could neither be
called handsome nor ugly. Delightful he ever was, kindness itself,
always on the look-out to serve and to amuse. For he knew--none
better--the value of a smile.
With George Eliot acquaintance ripened slower into friendship. In spite
of her warm human sympathies and the keenness of her desire to enter
into the feelings of others, her manner at first awed, perhaps even
repelled. It was so much more difficult for her than for Mr. Lewes to
quit her own world of thought and speculation, and enter into that
of the common joys and sorrows and aspirations of humanity. Yet few
delighted more in gathering her friends together. “From my good father
I learned the pleasure of being hospitable,” she once said to me with
a glow of feeling. “He rejoiced ever to receive his friends, and to my
eyes now the pleasure wears the shape of a duty.”
I am not sure as to the precise words she used, but this was the
sentiment.
It is pleasant to record their love of the good and the beautiful in
the least little thing--George Eliot’s rapture at the sight of an
exquisite flower, Mr. Lewes’ delight in a bright happy child; also
the keenness of their sympathy with common joys and sorrows, and the
unbounded kindliness and pitifulness of their nature.
---- ----: ‘A Week with George Eliot.’ _Temple Bar_, February, 1885.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: First attempt at fiction.]
[Sidenote: “A capital title.”]
[Sidenote: ‘Scenes from Clerical Life.’]
[Sidenote: Last chapters of ‘Amos Barton.’]