This glimpse of her is made up of what I
have called the author's _touches_. She excels in
the portrayal of homely stationary figures for
which her well-stored memory furnishes her with
types. Here is another touch, in which satire predominates.
Harold Transome makes a speech to
the electors at Treby.
"Harold's only interruption came from his own
party. The oratorical clerk at the Factory, acting
as the tribune of the dissenting interest, and feeling
bound to put questions, might have been
troublesome; _but his voice being unpleasantly
sharp, while Harold's was full and penetrating,
the questioning was cried down_."
Of the four English stories, _The Mill on the
Floss_ seems to me to have most dramatic continuity,
in distinction from that descriptive, discursive
method of narration which I have attempted to
indicate. After Hetty Sorrel, I think Maggie Tulliver
the most successful of the author's young
women, and after Tito Melema, Tom Tulliver the
best of her young men. English novels abound in
pictures of childhood; but I know of none more
truthful and touching than the early pages of this
work. Poor erratic Maggie is worth a hundred
of her positive brother, and yet on the very
threshold of life she is compelled to accept him
as her master. He falls naturally into the man's
privilege of always being in the right. The following
scene is more than a reminiscence; it is
a real retrospect. Tom and Maggie are sitting
upon the bough of an elder-tree, eating jam-puffs.
At last only one remains, and Tom undertakes to
divide it.
"The knife descended on the puff, and it was
in two; but the result was not satisfactory to
Tom, for he still eyed the halves doubtfully. At
last he said, 'Shut your eyes, Maggie.'
"'What for?'
"'You never mind what for,--shut 'em when I
tell you.'
"Maggie obeyed.
"'Now, which'll you have, Maggie, right hand
or left?'
"'I'll have that one with the jam run out,' said
Maggie, keeping her eyes shut to please Tom.
"'Why, you don't like that, you silly. You
may have it if it comes to you fair, but I sha'n't
give it to you without. Right or left,--you choose
now. Ha-a-a!' said Tom, in a tone of exasperation,
as Maggie peeped. 'You keep your eyes
shut now, else you sha'n't have any.'
"Maggie's power of sacrifice did not extend so
far; indeed, I fear she cared less that Tom should
enjoy the utmost possible amount of puff, than that
he should be pleased with her for giving him the
best bit. So she shut her eyes quite close until
Tom told her to 'say which,' and then she said,
'Left hand.'
"'You've got it,' said Tom, in rather a bitter
tone.
"'What! the bit with the jam run out?'
"'No; here, take it,' said Tom, firmly, handing
decidedly the best piece to Maggie.
"'O, please, Tom, have it; I don't mind,--I
like the other; please take this.'
"'No, I sha'n't,' said Tom, almost crossly, beginning
on his own inferior piece.
"Maggie, thinking it was of no use to contend
further, began too, and ate up her half puff with
considerable relish as well as rapidity. But Tom
had finished first, and had to look on while Maggie
ate her last morsel or two, feeling in himself a
capacity for more. _Maggie didn't know Tom was
looking at her: she was see-sawing on the elder-bough,
lost to everything but a vague sense of jam
and idleness._
"'O, you greedy thing!' said Tom, when she
had swallowed the last morsel."
The portions of the story which bear upon the
Dodson family are in their way not unworthy of
Balzac; only that, while our author has treated
its peculiarities humourously, Balzac would have
treated them seriously, almost solemnly. We are
reminded of him by the attempt to classify the
Dodsons socially in a scientific manner, and to
accumulate small examples of their idiosyncrasies,
I do not mean to say that the resemblance is very
deep.
The chief defect--indeed, the only serious one--in
_The Mill on the Floss_ is its conclusion. Such
a conclusion is in itself assuredly not illegitimate,
and there is nothing in the fact of the flood, to my
knowledge, essentially unnatural: what I object to
is its relation to the preceding part of the story.
The story is told as if it were destined to have, if
not a strictly happy termination, at least one within
ordinary probabilities. As it stands, the _denouement_
shocks the reader most painfully. Nothing
has prepared him for it; the story does not move
towards it; it casts no shadow before it. Did
such a _denouement_ lie within the author's intentions
from the first, or was it a tardy expedient
for the solution of Maggie's difficulties? This
question the reader asks himself, but of course he
asks it in vain.
For my part, although, as long as humanity is
subject to floods and earthquakes, I have no objection
to see them made use of in novels, I would
in this particular case have infinitely preferred
that Maggie should have been left to her own devices.
I understand the author's scruples, and
to a certain degree I respect them. A lonely spinsterhood
seemed but a dismal consummation of
her generous life; and yet, as the author conceives,
it was unlikely that she would return to Stephen
Guest. I respect Maggie profoundly; but nevertheless
I ask, Was this after all so unlikely? I
will not try to answer the question. I have shown
enough courage in asking it. But one thing is
certain: a _denouement_ by which Maggie should
have called Stephen back would have been extremely
interesting, and would have had far more
in its favour than can be put to confusion by a
mere exclamation of horror.
I have come to the end of my space without
speaking of _Romola_, which, as the most important
of George Eliot's works, I had kept in reserve. I
have only room to say that on the whole I think
it _is_ decidedly the most important,--not the most
entertaining nor the most readable, but the one in
which the largest things are attempted and
grasped. The figure of Savonarola, subordinate
though it is, is a figure on a larger scale than
any which George Eliot has elsewhere undertaken;
and in the career of Tito Melema there is a fuller
representation of the development of a character.
Considerable as are our author's qualities as an
artist, and largely as they are displayed in
"Romola," the book strikes me less as a work of
art than as a work of morals. Like all of George
Eliot's works, its dramatic construction is feeble;
the story drags and halts,--the setting is too large
for the picture; but I remember that, the first
time I read it, I declared to myself that much
should be forgiven it for the sake of its generous
feeling and its elevated morality. I still recognize
this latter fact, but I think I find it more on a
level than I at first found it with the artistic
conditions of the book.
"Our deeds determine us," George Eliot says
somewhere in _Adam Bede_, "as much as we determine
our deeds." This is the moral lesson of _Romola_.
A man has no associate so intimate as his own
character, his own career,--his present and his past;
and if he builds up his career of timid and base
actions, they cling to him like evil companions,
to sophisticate, to corrupt, and to damn him. As
in Maggie Tulliver we had a picture of the elevation
of the moral tone by honesty and generosity,
so that when the mind found itself face to face
with the need for a strong muscular effort, it was
competent to perform it; so in Tito we have a picture
of that depression of the moral tone by falsity
and self-indulgence, which gradually evokes on
every side of the subject some implacable claim,
to be avoided or propitiated. At last all his unpaid
debts join issue before him, and he finds the
path of life a hideous blind alley.
Can any argument be more plain? Can any
lesson be more salutary? "Under every guilty
secret," writes the author, with her usual felicity,
"there is a hidden 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 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 forever
swept away, _and the soul recovers the noble attitude
of simplicity_." And again: "Tito was experiencing
that inexorable law of human souls, that
we prepare ourselves for sudden deeds by the reiterated
choice of good or evil that gradually determines
character." Somewhere else I think she
says, in purport, that our deeds are like our children;
we beget them, and rear them and cherish
them, and they grow up and turn against us and
misuse us.
The fact that has led me to a belief in the fundamental
equality between the worth of _Romola_
as a moral argument and its value as a work of
art, is the fact that in each character it seems
to me essentially prosaic. The excellence both of
the spirit and of the execution of the book is emphatically
an obvious excellence. They make no
demand upon the imagination of the reader. It
is true of both of them that he who runs may read
them. It may excite surprise that I should intimate
that George Eliot is deficient in imagination;
but I believe that I am right in so doing. Very
readable novels have been written without imagination;
and as compared with writers who, like Mr.
Trollope, are totally destitute of the faculty,
George Eliot may be said to be richly endowed
with it. But as compared with writers whom we
are tempted to call decidedly imaginative, she
must, in my opinion, content herself with the very
solid distinction of being exclusively an observer.
In confirmation of this I would suggest a comparison
of those chapters in _Adam Bede_ which treat
of Hetty's flight and wanderings, and those of
Miss Bronte's _Jane Eyre_ which describe the heroine's
escape from Rochester's house and subsequent
perambulations. The former are throughout admirable
prose; the latter are in portions very good
poetry.
One word more. Of all the impressions--and
they are numerous--which a reperusal of George
Eliot's writings has given me, I find the strongest
to be this: that (with all deference to _Felix Holt,
the Radical_) the author is in morals and aesthetics
essentially a conservative. In morals her problems
are still the old, passive problems. I use the
word "old" with all respect. What moves her
most is the idea of a conscience harassed by the
memory of slighted obligations. Unless in the case
of Savonarola, she has made no attempt to depict
a conscience taking upon itself great and novel
responsibilities. In her last work, assuredly such
an attempt was--considering the title--conspicuous
by its absence.
Of a corresponding tendency in the second department
of her literary character,--or perhaps
I should say in a certain middle field where morals
and aesthetics move in concert,--it is very difficult
to give an example. A tolerably good one is furnished
by her inclination to compromise with the
old tradition--and here I use the word "old"
_without_ respect--which exacts that a serious story
of manners shall close with the factitious happiness
of a fairy-tale. I know few things more irritating
in a literary way than each of her final chapters,--for
even in _The Mill on the Floss_ there is a
fatal "Conclusion." Both as an artist and a
thinker, in other words, our author is an optimist;
and although a conservative is not necessarily an
optimist, I think an optimist is pretty likely to
be a conservative.