The critic's first duty in the presence of an
author's collective works is to seek out some
key to his method, some utterance of his literary
convictions, some indication of his ruling theory.
The amount of labour involved in an inquiry of
this kind will depend very much upon the author.
In some cases the critic will find express declarations;
in other cases he will have to content himself
with conscientious inductions. In a writer so fond
of digressions as George Eliot, he has reason to
expect that broad evidences of artistic faith will
not be wanting. He finds in _Adam Bede_ the following
passage:--
"Paint us an angel if you can, with a floating
violet robe and a face paled by the celestial light;
paint us yet oftener a Madonna, turning her mild
face upward, and opening her arms to welcome the
divine glory; but do not impose on us any aesthetic
rules which shall banish from the region of art
those old women scraping carrots with their work-worn
hands,--those heavy clowns taking holiday
in a dingy pot-house,--those rounded backs and
stupid weather-beaten faces that have bent over the
spade and done the rough work of the world,--those
homes with their tin cans, their brown
pitchers, their rough curs, and their clusters of
onions. In this world there are so many of these
common, coarse people, who have no picturesque,
sentimental wretchedness. It is so needful we
should remember their existence, else we may happen
to leave them quite out of our religion and philosophy,
and frame lofty theories which only fit
a world of extremes....
"There are few prophets in the world,--few sublimely
beautiful women,--few heroes. I can't
afford to give all my love and reverence to such
rarities; I want a great deal of those feelings for
my every-day fellowmen, especially for the few
in the foreground of the great multitude, whose
faces I know, whose hands I touch, for whom I
have to make way with kindly courtesy....
"I herewith discharge my conscience," our author
continues, "and declare that I have had quite
enthusiastic movements of admiration toward old
gentlemen who spoke the worst English, who were
occasionally fretful in their temper, and who had
never moved in a higher sphere of influence than
that of parish overseer; and that the way in which
I have come to the conclusion that human nature
is loveable--the way I have learnt something of
its deep pathos, its sublime mysteries--has been
by living a great deal among people more or less
commonplace and vulgar, of whom you would perhaps
hear nothing very surprising if you were to
inquire about them in the neighbourhoods where
they dwelt."
But even in the absence of any such avowed
predilections as these, a brief glance over the principal
figures of her different works would assure
us that our author's sympathies are with common
people. Silas Marner is a linen-weaver, Adam
Bede is a carpenter, Maggie Tulliver is a miller's
daughter, Felix Holt is a watchmaker, Dinah Morris
works in a factory, and Hetty Sorrel is a dairy-maid.
Esther Lyon, indeed, is a daily governess;
but Tito Melema alone is a scholar. In the _Scenes
of Clerical Life_, the author is constantly slipping
down from the clergymen, her heroes, to the most
ignorant and obscure of their parishioners. Even
in _Romola_ she consecrates page after page to the
conversation of the Florentine populace. She is as
unmistakably a painter of _bourgeois_ life as Thackeray
was a painter of the life of drawing-rooms.
Her opportunities for the study of the manners
of the solid lower classes have evidently been very
great. We have her word for it that she has lived
much among the farmers, mechanics, and small
traders of that central region of England which
she has made known to us under the name of Loamshire.
The conditions of the popular life in this
district in that already distant period to which
she refers the action of most of her stories--the
end of the last century and the beginning of the
present--were so different from any that have been
seen in America, that an American, in treating
of her books, must be satisfied not to touch upon
the question of their accuracy and fidelity as pictures
of manners and customs. He can only say
that they bear strong internal evidence of truthfulness.
If he is a great admirer of George Eliot, he
will indeed be tempted to affirm that they must
be true. They offer a completeness, a rich density
of detail, which could be the fruit only of a long
term of conscious contact,--such as would make
it much more difficult for the author to fall into
the perversion and suppression of facts, than to
set them down literally. It is very probable that
her colours are a little too bright, and her shadows
of too mild a gray, that the sky of her landscapes
is too sunny, and their atmosphere too redolent of
peace and abundance. Local affection may be accountable
for half of this excess of brilliancy; the
author's native optimism is accountable for the
other half.
I do not remember, in all her novels, an instance
of gross misery of any kind not directly
caused by the folly of the sufferer. There are no
pictures of vice or poverty or squalor. There are
no rags, no gin, no brutal passions. That average
humanity which she favours is very _borne_ in intellect,
but very genial in heart, as a glance at
its representatives in her pages will convince us.
In _Adam Bede_, there is Mr. Irwine, the vicar,
with avowedly no qualification for his profession,
placidly playing chess with his mother, stroking his
dogs, and dipping into Greek tragedies; there is
the excellent Martin Poyser at the Farm, good-natured
and rubicund; there is his wife, somewhat
too sharply voluble, but only in behalf of cleanliness
and honesty and order; there is Captain Donnithorne
at the Hall, who does a poor girl a mortal
wrong, but who is, after all, such a nice, good-looking
fellow; there are Adam and Seth Bede, the
carpenter's sons, the strongest, purest, most discreet
of young rustics. The same broad felicity
prevails in _The Mill on the Floss_. Mr. Tulliver,
indeed, fails in business; but his failure only serves
as an offset to the general integrity and prosperity.
His son is obstinate and wilful; but it is
all on the side of virtue. His daughter is somewhat
sentimental and erratic; but she is more conscientious
yet.
Conscience, in the classes from which George
Eliot recruits her figures, is a universal gift. Decency
and plenty and good-humour follow contentedly
in its train. The word which sums up
the common traits of our author's various groups
is the word _respectable_. Adam Bede is pre-eminently
a respectable young man; so is Arthur Donnithorne;
so, although he will persist in going without
a cravat, is Felix Holt. So, with perhaps the
exception of Maggie Tulliver and Stephen Guest,
is every important character to be found in our
author's writings. They all share this fundamental
trait,--that in each of them passion proves
itself feebler than conscience.
The first work which made the name of George
Eliot generally known, contains, to my perception,
only a small number of the germs of her future
power. From the _Scenes of Clerical Life_ to _Adam
Bede_ she made not so much a step as a leap. Of
the three tales contained in the former work, I
think the first is much the best. It is short,
broadly descriptive, humourous, and exceedingly
pathetic. "The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend
Amos Barton" are fortunes which clever story-tellers
with a turn for pathos, from Oliver Goldsmith
downward, have found of very good account,--the
fortunes of a hapless clergyman of the
Church of England in daily contention with the
problem how upon eighty pounds a year to support
a wife and six children in all due ecclesiastical gentility.
"Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story," the second of the
tales in question, I cannot hesitate to pronounce
a failure. George Eliot's pictures of drawing-room
life are only interesting when they are linked
or related to scenes in the tavern parlour, the dairy,
and the cottage. Mr. Gilfil's love-story is enacted
entirely in the drawing-room, and in consequence
it is singularly deficient in force and reality. Not
that it is vulgar,--for our author's good taste never
forsakes her,--but it is thin, flat, and trivial. But
for a certain family likeness in the use of language
and the rhythm of the style, it would be
hard to believe that these pages are by the same
hand as _Silas Marner_.
In "Janet's Repentance," the last and longest
of the three clerical stories, we return to middle
life,--the life represented by the Dodsons in _The
Mill on the Floss_. The subject of this tale might
almost be qualified by the French epithet _scabreux_.
It would be difficult for what is called _realism_ to
go further than in the adoption of a heroine stained
with the vice of intemperance. The theme is unpleasant;
the author chose it at her peril. It must
be added, however, that Janet Dempster has many
provocations. Married to a brutal drunkard, she
takes refuge in drink against his ill-usage; and
the story deals less with her lapse into disgrace than
with her redemption, through the kind offices of
the Reverend Edgar Tryan,--by virtue of which,
indeed, it takes its place in the clerical series. I
cannot help thinking that the stern and tragical
character of the subject has been enfeebled by the
over-diffuseness of the narrative and the excess of
local touches. The abundance of the author's recollections
and observations of village life clogs the
dramatic movement, over which she has as yet a
comparatively slight control. In her subsequent
works the stouter fabric of the story is better able
to support this heavy drapery of humour and digression.
To a certain extent, I think _Silas Marner_ holds
a higher place than any of the author's works.
It is more nearly a masterpiece; it has more of
that simple, rounded, consummate aspect, that
absence of loose ends and gaping issues, which
marks a classical work. What was attempted in
it, indeed, was within more immediate reach than
the heart-trials of Adam Bede and Maggie Tulliver.
A poor, dull-witted, disappointed Methodist cloth-weaver;
a little golden-haired foundling child; a
well-meaning, irresolute country squire, and his
patient, childless wife;--these, with a chorus of
simple, beer-loving villagers, make up the _dramatis
personae_. More than any of its brother-works,
_Silas Marner_, I think, leaves upon the mind a deep
impression of the grossly material life of agricultural
England in the last days of the old _regime_,--the
days of full-orbed Toryism, of Trafalgar
and of Waterloo, when the invasive spirit of
French domination threw England back upon a
sense of her own insular solidity, and made her
for the time doubly, brutally, morbidly English.
Perhaps the best pages in the work are the first
thirty, telling the story of poor Marner's disappointments
in friendship and in love, his unmerited
disgrace, and his long, lonely twilight-life at Raveloe,
with the sole companionship of his loom, in
which his muscles moved "with such even repetition,
that their pause seemed almost as much a
constraint as the holding of his breath."
Here, as in all George Eliot's books, there is
a middle life and a low life; and here, as usual,
I prefer the low life. In _Silas Marner_, in my opinion,
she has come nearest the mildly rich tints of
brown and gray, the mellow lights and the undreadful
corner-shadows of the Dutch masters
whom she emulates. One of the chapters contains
a scene in a pot-house, which frequent reference
has made famous. Never was a group of honest,
garrulous village simpletons more kindly and humanely
handled. After a long and somewhat
chilling silence, amid the pipes and beer, the landlord
opens the conversation "by saying in a doubtful
tone to his cousin the butcher:--
"'Some folks 'ud say that was a fine beast you
druv in yesterday, Bob?'
"The butcher, a jolly, smiling, red-haired man,
was not disposed to answer rashly. He gave a
few puffs before he spat, and replied, 'And they
wouldn't be fur wrong, John.'
"After this feeble, delusive thaw, silence set in
as severely as before.
"'Was it a red Durham?' said the farrier, taking
up the thread of discourse after the lapse of
a few minutes.
"The farrier looked at the landlord, and the
landlord looked at the butcher, as the person who
must take the responsibility of answering.
"'Red it was,' said the butcher, in his good-humoured
husky treble,--'and a Durham it was.'
"'Then you needn't tell me who you bought it
of,' said the farrier, looking round with some
triumph; 'I know who it is has got the red Durhams
o' this country-side. And she'd a white star
on her brow, I'll bet a penny?'
"'Well; yes--she might,' said the butcher,
slowly, considering that he was giving a decided
affirmation. 'I don't say contrairy.'
"'I knew that very well,' said the farrier, throwing
himself back defiantly; 'if I don't know Mr.
Lammeter's cows, I should like to know who does,--that's
all. And as for the cow you bought, bargain
or no bargain, I've been at the drenching of
her,--contradick me who will.'
"The farrier looked fierce, and the mild
butcher's conversational spirit was roused a little.
"'I'm not for contradicking no man,' he said;
'I'm for peace and quietness. Some are for cutting
long ribs. I'm for cutting 'em short myself;
but _I_ don't quarrel with 'em. All I say is, it's a
lovely carkiss,--and anybody as was reasonable,
it'ud bring tears into their eyes to look at it.'
"'Well, it's the cow as I drenched, whatever it
is,' pursued the farrier, angrily; 'and it was Mr.
Lammeter's cow, else you told a lie when you said
it was a red Durham.'
"'I tell no lies,' said the butcher, with the same
mild huskiness as before; 'and I contradick none,--not
if a man was to swear himself black; he's
no meat of mine, nor none of my bargains. All I
say is, it's a lovely carkiss. And what I say I'll
stick to; but I'll quarrel wi' no man.'
"'No,' said the farrier, with bitter sarcasm,
looking at the company generally; 'and p'rhaps
you didn't say the cow was a red Durham; and
p'rhaps you didn't say she'd got a star on her
brow,--stick to that, now you are at it.'"
Matters having come to this point, the landlord
interferes _ex officio_ to preserve order. The Lammeter
family having come up, he discreetly invites
Mr. Macey, the parish clerk and tailor, to favour
the company with his recollections on the subject.
Mr. Macey, however, "smiled pityingly in answer
to the landlord's appeal, and said: 'Ay, ay; I
know, I know: but I let other folks talk. I've laid
by now, and gev up to the young uns. Ask them
as have been to school at Tarley: they've learn't
pernouncing; that's came up since my day.'"
Mr. Macey is nevertheless persuaded to dribble
out his narrative; proceeding by instalments, and
questioned from point to point, in a kind of Socratic
manner, by the landlord. He at last arrives
at Mr. Lammeter's marriage, and how the clergyman,
when he came to put the questions, inadvertently
transposed the position of the two essential
names, and asked, "Wilt thou have this man
to be thy wedded wife?" etc.
"'But the partic'larest thing of all,' pursues
Mr. Macey, 'is, as nobody took any notice on it
but me, and they answered straight off "Yes,"
like as if it had been me saying "Amen" i' the
right place, without listening to what went before.'
"'But _you_ knew what was going on well enough,
didn't you, Mr. Macey? You were live enough,
eh?' said the butcher.
"'Yes, bless you!' said Mr. Macey, pausing,
and smiling in pity at the impatience of his
hearer's imagination,--'why, I was all of a tremble;
it was as if I'd been a coat pulled by two
tails, like; for I couldn't stop the parson, I couldn't
take upon me to do that; and yet I said to myself,
I says, "Suppose they shouldn't be fast married,"
'cause the words are contrairy, and my head
went working like a mill, for I was always uncommon
for turning things over and seeing all round
'em; and I says to myself, "Is't the meaning or
the words as makes folks fast i' wedlock?" For
the parson meant right, and the bride and bride-groom
meant right. But then, when I came to
think on it, meaning goes but a little way i' most
things, for you may mean to stick things together
and your glue may be bad, and then where are
you?'"
Mr. Macey's doubts, however, are set at rest by
the parson after the service, who assures him that
what does the business is neither the meaning nor
the words, but the register. Mr. Macey then arrives
at the chapter--or rather is gently inducted
thereunto by his hearers--of the ghosts who frequent
certain of the Lammeter stables. But
ghosts threatening to prove as pregnant a theme
of contention as Durham cows, the landlord again
meditates: "'There's folks i' my opinion, they
can't see ghos'es, not if they stood as plain as
a pikestaff before 'em. And there's reason i' that.
For there's my wife, now, can't smell, not if
she'd the strongest o' cheese under her nose. I
never seed a ghost myself, but then I says to myself,
"Very like I haven't the smell for 'em." I
mean, putting a ghost for a smell or else contrairiways.
And so I'm for holding with both sides....
For the smell's what I go by.'"
The best drawn of the village worthies in _Silas
Marner_ are Mr. Macey, of the scene just quoted,
and good Dolly Winthrop, Marner's kindly patroness.
I have room for only one more specimen
of Mr. Macey. He is looking on at a New Year's
dance at Squire Cass's, beside Ben Winthrop,
Dolly's husband.
"'The Squire's pretty springy, considering his
weight,' said Mr. Macey, 'and he stamps uncommon
well. But Mr. Lammeter beats 'em all for
shapes; you see he holds his head like a sodger,
and he isn't so cushiony as most o' the oldish
gentlefolks,--they run fat in gineral;--and he's
got a fine leg. The parson's nimble enough, but
he hasn't got much of a leg: it is a bit too thick
downward, and his knees might be a bit nearer
without damage; but he might do worse, he might
do worse. Though he hasn't that grand way o'
waving his hand as the Squire has.'
"'Talk o' nimbleness, look at Mrs. Osgood,' said
Ben Winthrop.... 'She's the finest made
woman as is, let the next be where she will.'
"'I don't heed how the women are made,' said
Mr. Macey, with some contempt. 'They wear nayther
coat nor breeches; you can't make much out o'
their shapes!'"
Mrs. Winthrop, the wheelwright's wife who, out
of the fullness of her charity, comes to comfort
Silas in the season of his distress, is in her way one
of the most truthfully sketched of the author's
figures. "She was in all respects a woman of
scrupulous conscience, so eager for duties that life
seemed to offer them too scantily unless she rose
at half past four, though this threw a scarcity of
work over the more advanced hours of the morning,
which it was a constant problem for her to
remove.... She was a very mild, patient
woman, whose nature it was to seek out all the
sadder and more serious elements of life and pasture
her mind upon them." She stamps I. H. S.
on her cakes and loaves without knowing what the
letters mean, or indeed without knowing that they
are letters, being very much surprised that Marner
can "read 'em off,"--chiefly because they are
on the pulpit cloth at church. She touches upon
religions themes in a manner to make the superficial
reader apprehend that she cultivates some
polytheistic form of faith,--extremes meet. She
urges Marner to go to church, and describes the
satisfaction which she herself derives from the performance
of her religious duties.
"If you've niver had no church, there 's no
telling what good it'll do you. For I feel as set
up and comfortable as niver was, when I've been
and heard the prayers and the singing to the praise
and glory o' God, as Mr. Macey gives out,--and
Mr. Crackenthorp saying good words and more
partic'lar on Sacramen' day; and if a bit o' trouble
comes, I feel as I can put up wi' it, for I've looked
for help i' the right quarter, and giv myself up
to Them as we must all give ourselves up to at
the last: and if we've done our part, it isn't to be
believed as Them as are above us 'ud be worse nor
we are, and come short o' Theirn."
"The plural pronoun," says the author, "was
no heresy of Dolly's, but only her way of avoiding
a presumptuous familiarity." I imagine that there
is in no other English novel a figure so simple in
its elements as this of Dolly Winthrop, which is
so real without being contemptible, and so quaint
without being ridiculous.
In all those of our author's books which have
borne the name of the hero or heroine,--_Adam
Bede_, _Silas Marner_, _Romola_, and _Felix Holt_,--the
person so put forward has really played a subordinate
part. The author may have set out with
the intention of maintaining him supreme; but
her material has become rebellious in her hands,
and the technical hero has been eclipsed by the
real one. Tito is the leading figure in _Romola_.
The story deals predominantly, not with Romola
as affected by Tito's faults, but with Tito's faults
as affecting first himself, and incidentally his wife.
Godfrey Cass, with his lifelong secret, is by right
the hero of _Silas Marner_. Felix Holt, in the work
which bears his name, is little more than an occasional
apparition; and indeed the novel has no
hero, but only a heroine.
The same remark applies to _Adam Bede_, as the
work stands. The central figure of the book, by
virtue of her great misfortune, is Hetty Sorrel.
In the presence of that misfortune no one else,
assuredly, has a right to claim dramatic pre-eminence.
The one person for whom an approach to
equality may be claimed is, not Adam Bede, but
Arthur Donnithorne. If the story had ended, as
I should have infinitely preferred to see it end,
with Hetty's execution, or even with her reprieve,
and if Adam had been left to his grief, and Dinah
Morris to the enjoyment of that distinguished celibacy
for which she was so well suited, then I
think Adam might have shared the honours of pre-eminence
with his hapless sweetheart. But as it
is, the continuance of the book in his interest is
fatal to him. His sorrow at Hetty's misfortune
is not a _sufficient_ sorrow for the situation. That
his marriage at some future time was quite possible,
and even natural, I readily admit; but that
was matter for a new story.
This point illustrates, I think, the great advantage
of the much-censured method, introduced by
Balzac, of continuing his heroes' adventures from
tale to tale. Or, admitting that the author was indisposed
to undertake, or even to conceive, in its
completeness, a new tale, in which Adam, healed
of his wound by time, should address himself to
another woman, I yet hold that it would be possible
tacitly to foreshadow some such event at the
close of the tale which we are supposing to end
with Hetty's death,--to make it the logical consequence
of Adam's final state of mind. Of course
circumstances would have much to do with bringing
it to pass, and these circumstances could not
be foreshadowed; but apart from the action of
circumstances would stand the fact that, to begin
with, the event was _possible_.
The assurance of this possibility is what I should
have desired the author to place the sympathetic
reader at a stand-point to deduce for himself. In
every novel the work is divided between the writer
and the reader; but the writer makes the reader
very much as he makes his characters. When he
makes him ill, that is, makes him different, he
does no work; the writer does all. When he makes
him well, that is, makes him interested, then the
reader does quite half the labour. In making such
a deduction as I have just indicated, the reader
would be doing but his share of the task; the grand
point is to get him to make it. I hold that there
is a way. It is perhaps a secret; but until it is
found out, I think that the art of story-telling
cannot be said to have approached perfection.
When you re-read coldly and critically a book
which in former years you have read warmly and
carelessly, you are surprised to see how it changes
its proportions. It falls away in those parts which
have been pre-eminent in your memory, and it increases
in the small portions. Until I lately read
_Adam Bede_ for a second time, Mrs. Poyser was
in my mind its representative figure; for I remembered
a number of her epigrammatic sallies. But
now, after a second reading, Mrs. Poyser is the
last figure I think of, and a fresh perusal of her
witticisms has considerably diminished their classical
flavour. And if I must tell the truth, Adam
himself is next to the last, and sweet Dinah Morris
third from the last. The person immediately
evoked by the title of the work is poor Hetty
Sorrel.
Mrs. Poyser is _too_ epigrammatic; her wisdom
smells of the lamp. I do not mean to say that
she is not natural, and that women of her class
are not often gifted with her homely fluency, her
penetration, and her turn for forcible analogies.
But she is too sustained; her morality is too shrill,--too
much in _staccato_; she too seldom subsides
into the commonplace. Yet it cannot be denied
that she puts things very happily. Remonstrating
with Dinah Morris on the undue disinterestedness
of her religious notions, "But for the matter o'
that," she cries, "if everybody was to do like you,
the world must come to a stand-still; for if everybody
tried to do without house and home and eating
and drinking, and was always talking as we
must despise the things o' the world, as you say,
I should like to know where the pick of the stock,
and the corn, and the best new milk-cheeses 'ud
have to go? _Everybody 'ud be wanting to make
bread o' tail ends_, and everybody 'ud be running
after everybody else to preach to 'em, i'stead o'
bringing up their families and laying by against
a bad harvest." And when Hetty comes home late
from the Chase, and alleges in excuse that the
clock at home is so much earlier than the clock
at the great house: "What, you'd be wanting the
clock set by gentlefolks' time, would you? an' sit
up burning candle, and lie a-bed wi' the sun
a-bakin' you, like a cowcumber i' the frame?"
Mrs. Poyser has something almost of Yankee
shrewdness and angularity; but the figure of a
New England rural housewife would lack a whole
range of Mrs. Poyser's feelings, which, whatever
may be its effect in real life, gives its subject in
a novel at least a very picturesque richness of
colour; the constant sense, namely, of a superincumbent
layer of "gentlefolks," whom she and her
companions can never raise their heads unduly
without hitting.
My chief complaint with Adam Bede himself
is that he is too good. He is meant, I conceive,
to be every inch a man; but, to my mind, there
are several inches wanting. He lacks spontaneity
and sensibility, he is too stiff-backed. He lacks
that supreme quality without which a man can
never be interesting to men,--the capacity to be
tempted. His nature is without richness or responsiveness.
I doubt not that such men as he
exist, especially in the author's thrice-English
Loamshire; she has partially described them as
a class, with a felicity which carries conviction.
She claims for her hero that, although a plain
man, he was as little an ordinary man as he was
a genius.
"He was not an average man. Yet such men
as he are reared here and there in every generation
of our peasant artisans, with an inheritance of affections
nurtured by a simple family life of common
need and common industry, and an inheritance
of faculties trained in skillful, courageous
labour; they make their way upward, rarely as
geniuses, most commonly as painstaking, honest
men, with the skill and conscience to do well the
tasks that lie before them. Their lives have no
discernible echo beyond the neighbourhood where
they dwelt; but you are almost sure to find there
some good piece of road, some building, some application
of mineral produce, some improvement
in farming practice, some reform of parish abuses,
with which their names are associated by one or
two generations after them. Their employers were
the richer for them; the work of their hands has
worn well, and the work of their brains has guided
well the hands of other men."
One cannot help feeling thankful to the kindly
writer who attempts to perpetuate their memories
beyond the generations which profit immediately
by their toil. If she is not a great dramatist,
she is at least an exquisite describer. But one
can as little help feeling that it is no more than a
strictly logical retribution, that in her hour of
need (dramatically speaking) she should find them
indifferent to their duties as heroes. I profoundly
doubt whether the central object of a novel may
successfully be a passionless creature. The ultimate
eclipse, both of Adam Bede and of Felix Holt
would seem to justify my question. Tom Tulliver
is passionless, and Tom Tulliver lives gratefully in
the memory; but this, I take it, is because he is
strictly a subordinate figure, and awakens no reaction
of feeling on the reader's part by usurping
a position which he is not the man to fill.
Dinah Morris is apparently a study from life;
and it is warm praise to say, that, in spite of the
high key in which she is conceived, morally, she
retains many of the warm colours of life. But
I confess that it is hard to conceive of a woman
so exalted by religious fervour remaining so cool-headed
and so temperate. There is in Dinah Morris
too close an agreement between her distinguished
natural disposition and the action of her
religious faith. If by nature she had been passionate,
rebellious, selfish, I could better understand
her actual self-abnegation. I would look
upon it as the logical fruit of a profound religious
experience. But as she stands, heart and soul go
easily hand in hand. I believe it to be very uncommon
for what is called a religious conversion
merely to intensify and consecrate pre-existing inclinations.
It is usually a change, a wrench; and
the new life is apt to be the more sincere as the
old one had less in common with it. But, as I
have said, Dinah Morris bears so many indications
of being a reflection of facts well known to the
author,--and the phenomena of Methodism, from
the frequency with which their existence is referred
to in her pages, appear to be so familiar to her,--that
I hesitate to do anything but thankfully
accept her portrait.
About Hetty Sorrel I shall have no hesitation
whatever: I accept her with all my heart. Of all
George Eliot's female figures she is the least ambitious,
and on the whole, I think, the most successful.
The part of the story which concerns her is
much the most forcible; and there is something infinitely
tragic in the reader's sense of the contrast
between the sternly prosaic life of the good people
about her, their wholesome decency and their noon-day
probity, and the dusky sylvan path along which
poor Hetty is tripping, light-footed, to her ruin.
Hetty's conduct throughout seems to me to be
thoroughly consistent. The author has escaped the
easy error of representing her as in any degree
made serious by suffering. She is vain and superficial
by nature; and she remains so to the end.
As for Arthur Donnithorne, I would rather have
had him either better or worse. I would rather
have had a little more premeditation before his
fault, or a little more repentance after it; that is,
while repentance could still be of use. Not that,
all things considered, he is not a very fair image
of a frank-hearted, well-meaning, careless, self-indulgent
young gentleman; but the author has in
his case committed the error which in Hetty's she
avoided,--the error of showing him as redeemed by
suffering. I cannot but think that he was as weak
as she. A weak woman, indeed, is weaker than a
weak man; but Arthur Donnithorne was a superficial
fellow, a person emphatically not to be moved
by a shock of conscience into a really interesting
and dignified attitude, such as he is made to assume
at the close of the book. Why not see things
in their nakedness? the impatient reader is tempted
to ask. Why not let passions and foibles play
themselves out?
It is as a picture, or rather as a series of pictures,
that I find _Adam Bede_ most valuable. The
author succeeds better in drawing attitudes of feeling
than in drawing movements of feeling. Indeed,
the only attempt at development of character
or of purpose in the book occurs in the case of
Arthur Donnithorne, where the materials are of
the simplest kind. Hetty's lapse into disgrace is
not gradual, it is immediate: it is without struggle
and without passion. Adam himself has arrived
at perfect righteousness when the book opens; and
it is impossible to go beyond that. In his case too,
therefore, there is no dramatic progression. The
same remark applies to Dinah Morris.
It is not in her conceptions nor her composition
that George Eliot is strongest: it is in her _touches_.
In these she is quite original. She is a good deal
of a humourist, and something of a satirist; but she
is neither Dickens nor Thackeray. She has over
them the great advantage that she is also a good
deal of a philosopher; and it is to this union of
the keenest observation with the ripest reflection,
that her style owes its essential force. She is a
thinker,--not, perhaps, a passionate thinker, but
at least a serious one; and the term can be applied
with either adjective neither to Dickens nor
Thackeray. The constant play of lively and vigourous
thought about the objects furnished by her
observation animates these latter with a surprising
richness of colour and a truly human interest. It
gives to the author's style, moreover, that lingering,
affectionate, comprehensive quality which
is its chief distinction; and perhaps occasionally it
makes her tedious. George Eliot is so little tedious,
however, because, if, on the one hand, her reflection
never flags, so, on the other, her observation never
ceases to supply it with material. Her observation,
I think, is decidedly of the feminine kind: it deals,
in preference, with small things. This fact may
be held to explain the excellence of what I have
called her pictures, and the comparative feebleness
of her dramatic movement.
The contrast here indicated, strong in _Adam
Bede_, is most striking in _Felix Holt, the Radical_.
The latter work is an admirable tissue of details;
but it seems to me quite without character as a
composition. It leaves upon the mind no single
impression. Felix Holt's radicalism, the pretended
motive of the story, is utterly choked
amidst a mass of subordinate interests. No representation
is attempted of the growth of his opinions,
or of their action upon his character; he is
marked by the same singular rigidity of outline
and fixedness of posture which characterized Adam
Bede,--except, perhaps, that there is a certain inclination
towards poetry in Holt's attitude. But
if the general outline is timid and undecided in
_Felix Holt_, the different parts are even richer than
in former works. There is no person in the book
who attains to triumphant vitality; but there is
not a single figure, of however little importance,
that has not caught from without a certain reflection
of life. There is a little old waiting-woman
to a great lady,--Mrs. Denner by name,--who does
not occupy five pages in the story, but who leaves
upon the mind a most vivid impression of decent,
contented, intelligent, half-stoical servility.
"There were different orders of beings,--so ran
Denner's creed,--and she belonged to another
order than that to which her mistress belonged.
She had a mind as sharp as a needle, and would
have seen through and through the ridiculous pretensions
of a born servant who did not submissively
accept the rigid fate which had given her
born superiors. She would have called such pretensions
the wrigglings of a worm that tried to
walk on its tail.... She was a hard-headed,
godless little woman, but with a character to be
reckoned on as you reckon on the qualities of
iron."
"I'm afraid of ever expecting anything good
again," her mistress says to her in a moment of
depression.
"'That's weakness, madam. Things don't happen
because they are bad or good, else all eggs
would be addled or none at all, and at the most it
is but six to the dozen. There's good chances and
bad chances, and nobody's luck is pulled only by
one string.... There's a good deal of pleasure
in life for you yet.'
"'Nonsense! There's no pleasure for old
women.... What are your pleasures, Denner,
besides being a slave to me?'
"O, there's pleasure in knowing one is not a
fool, like half the people one sees about. And
managing one's husband is some pleasure, and
doing one's business well. Why, if I've only got
some orange-flowers to candy, I shouldn't like to
die till I see them all right. Then there's the sunshine
now and then; I like that, as the cats do.
I look upon it life is like our game at whist, when
Banks and his wife come to the still-room of an
evening. I don't enjoy the game much, but I like
to play my cards well, and see what will be the
end of it; and I want to see you make the best of
your hand, madam, for your luck has been mine
these forty years now."
And, on another occasion, when her mistress exclaims,
in a fit of distress, that "God was cruel
when he made women," the author says:--
"The waiting-woman had none of that awe
which could be turned into defiance; the sacred
grove was a common thicket to her.
"'It mayn't be good luck to be a woman,' she
said. 'But one begins with it from a baby; one
gets used to it. And I shouldn't like to be a
man,--to cough so loud, and stand straddling about
on a wet day, and be so wasteful with meat and
drink. _They're a coarse lot, I think._'"