and natural, and described with great felicity and humor. None
of them are interesting people; in fact, most of them are very
uninteresting,--vulgar, money-loving, material, purse-proud, selfish,
such as are seen among those to whom money and worldly prosperity are
everything, with no perception of what is lofty and disinterested, and
on whom grand sentiments are lost,--yet kind-hearted in the main, and in
the case of the Dobsons redeemed by a sort of family pride. The moral of
the story is the usual one with George Eliot,--the conflict of duty with
passion, and the inexorable fate which pursues the sinner. She brings
out the power of conscience as forcibly as Hawthorne has done in his
"Scarlet Letter."
The "Mill on the Floss" was soon followed by "Silas Marner," regarded by
some as the gem of George Eliot's novels, and which certainly--though
pathetic and sad, as all her novels are--does not leave on the mind so
mournful an impression, since in its outcome we see redemption. The
principal character--the poor, neglected, forlorn weaver--emerges at
length from the Everlasting Nay into the Everlasting Yea; and he emerges
by the power of love,--love for a little child whom he has rescued from
the snow, the storm, and death. Driven by injustice to a solitary life,
to abject penury, to despair, the solitary miser, gloating over his gold
pieces,--which he has saved by the hardest privation, and in which he
trusts,--finds himself robbed, without redress or sympathy; but in the
end he is consoled for his loss in the love he bestows on a helpless
orphan, who returns it with the most noble disinterestedness, and lives
to be his solace and his pride. Nothing more touching has ever been
written by man or woman than this short story, as full of pathos as
"Adam Bede" is full of humor.
What is remarkable in this story is that the plot is exactly similar to
that of "Jermola the Potter," the masterpiece of a famous Polish
novelist,--a marvellous coincidence, or plagiarism, difficult to be
explained. But Shakspeare, the most original of men, borrowed some of
his plots from Italian writers; and Mirabeau appropriated the knowledge
of men more learned than he, which by felicity of genius he made his
own; and Webster, too, did the same thing. There is nothing new under
the sun, except in the way of "putting things."
After the publication of the various novels pertaining to the rural and
humble life of England, with which George Eliot was so well acquainted,
into which she entered with so much sympathy, and which she so
marvellously portrayed, she took a new departure, entering a field with
which she was not so well acquainted, and of which she could only learn
through books. The result was "Romola," the most ambitious, and in some
respects the most remarkable, of all her works. It certainly is the most
learned and elaborate. It is a philosophico-historical novel, the scene
of which is laid in Florence at the time of Savonarola,--the period
called the Renaissance, when art and literature were revived with great
enthusiasm; a very interesting period, the glorious morning, as it were,
of modern civilization.
This novel, the result of reading and reflection, necessarily called
into exercise other faculties besides accurate observation,--even
imagination and invention, for which she is not pre-eminently
distinguished. In this novel, though interesting and instructive, we
miss the humor and simplicity of the earlier works. It is overloaded
with learning. Not one intelligent reader in a hundred has ever heard
even the names of many of the eminent men to whom she alludes. It is
full of digressions, and of reflections on scientific theories. Many of
the chapters are dry and pedantic. It is too philosophical to be
popular, too learned to be appreciated. As in some of her other stories,
highly improbable events take place. The plot is not felicitous, and the
ending is unsatisfactory. The Italian critics of the book are not, on
the whole, complimentary. George Eliot essayed to do, with prodigious
labor, what she had no special aptitude for. Carlyle in ten sentences
would have made a more graphic picture of Savonarola. None of her
historical characters stand out with the vividness with which Scott
represented Queen Elizabeth and Mary, Queen of Scots, or with which even
Bulwer painted Rienzi and the last of the Barons.
Critics do not admire historical novels, because they are neither
history nor fiction. They mislead readers on important issues, and they
are not so interesting as the masterpieces of Macaulay and Froude. Yet
they have their uses. They give a superficial knowledge of great
characters to those who will not read history. The field of history is
too vast for ordinary people, who have no time for extensive reading
even if they have the inclination.
The great historical personage whom George Eliot paints in "Romola" is
Savonarola,--and I think faithfully, on the whole. In the main she
coincides with Villani, the greatest authority. In some respects I
should take issue with her. She makes the religion of the Florentine
reformer to harmonize with her notions of self-renunciation. She makes
him preach the "religion of humanity," which was certainly not taught in
his day. He preached duty, indeed, and appealed to conscience; but he
preached duty to God rather than to man. The majesty of a personal God,
fearful in judgment and as represented by the old Jewish prophets, was
the great idea of Savonarola's theology. His formula was something like
this: "Punishment for sin is a divine judgment, not the effect of
inexorable laws. Repentance is a necessity. Unless men repent of their
sins, God will punish them. Unless Italy repents, it will be desolated
by His vengeance." Catholic theology, which he never departed from, has
ever recognized the supreme allegiance of man to his Maker, because _He_
demands it. Even among the Jesuits, with their corrupted theology, the
motto emblazoned on their standard was, _Ad majorem dei gloriam_. But
the great Dominican preacher is made by George Eliot to be "the
spokesman of humanity made divine, not of Deity made human." "Make your
marriage vows," said he to Romola, "an offering to the great work by
which sin and sorrow are made to cease."
But Savonarola is only a secondary character in the novel. He might as
well have been left out altogether. The real hero and heroine are Romola
and Tito; and they are identified with the life of the period, which is
the Renaissance,--a movement more Pagan than Christian. These two
characters may be called creations. Romola is an Italian woman, supposed
to represent a learned and noble lady four hundred years ago. She has
lofty purposes and aspirations; she is imbued with the philosophy of
self-renunciation; her life is devoted to others,--first to her father,
and then to humanity. But she is as cold as marble; she is the very
reverse of Corinne. Even her love for Tito is made to vanish away on the
first detection of his insincerity, although he is her husband. She
becomes as hard and implacable as fate; and when she ceases to love her
husband, she hates him and leaves him, and is only brought back by a
sense of duty. Yet her hatred is incurable; and in her wretched
disappointment she finds consolation only in a sort of stoicism. How far
George Eliot's notions of immortality are brought out in the spiritual
experiences of Romola I do not know; but the immortality of Romola is
not that which is brought to light by the gospel: it is a vague and
indefinite sentiment kindred to that of Indian sages,--that we live
hereafter only in our teachings or deeds; that we are absorbed in the
universal whole; that our immortality is the living in the hearts and
minds of men, not personally hereafter among the redeemed To quote her
own fine thought,--
"Oh, may I join the choir invisible
In pulses stirred to generosity,
In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn
For miserable aims that end in self,
In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars,
And, with their mild persistence, urge man's search
To vaster issues!"
Tito is a more natural character, good-natured, kind-hearted, with
generous impulses. He is interesting in spite of his faults; he is
accomplished, versatile, and brilliant. But he is inherently selfish,
and has no moral courage. He gradually, in his egotism, becomes utterly
false and treacherous, though not an ordinary villain. He is the
creature of circumstances. His weakness leads to falsehood, and
falsehood ends in crime; which crime pursues him with unrelenting
vengeance,--not the agonies of remorse, for he has no conscience, but
the vindictive and persevering hatred of his foster father, whom he
robbed. The vengeance of Baldassare is almost preternatural; it
surpasses the wrath of Achilles and the malignity of Shylock. It is the
wrath of a demon, from which there is no escape; it would be tragical if
the subject of it were greater. Though Tito perishes in an improbable
way, he is yet the victim of the inexorable law of human souls.
But if "Romola" has faults, it has remarkable excellences. In this book
George Eliot aspires to be a teacher of ethics and philosophy. She is
not humorous, but intensely serious and thoughtful. She sometimes
discourses like Epictetus:--
"And so, my Lillo," says she at the conclusion, "if you mean to act
nobly, and seek to know the best things God has put within reach of man,
you must learn to fix your mind on that end, and not on what will happen
to you because of it. And remember, if you were to choose something
lower, and make it the rule of your life to seek your own pleasure and
escape what is disagreeable, calamity might come just the same; and it
would be a calamity falling on a base mind,--which is the one form of
sorrow that has no balm in it, and that may well make a man say, 'It
would have been better for me if I had never been born.'"
Three years elapsed between the publication of "Romola" and that of
"Felix Holt," which shows to what a strain the mind of George Eliot had
been subjected in elaborating an historical novel. She now returns to
her own peculiar field, in which her great successes had been made, and
with which she was familiar; and yet even in her own field we miss now
the genial humanity and inimitable humor of her earlier novels. In
"Felix Holt" she deals with social and political problems in regard to
which there is great difference of opinion; for the difficult questions
of political economy have not yet been solved. Felix Holt is a political
economist, but not a vulgar radical filled with discontent and envy. He
is a mechanic, tolerably educated, and able to converse with
intelligence on the projected reforms of the day, in cultivated
language. He is high-minded and conscientious, but unpractical, and gets
himself into difficulties, escaping penal servitude almost by miracle,
for the crime of homicide. The heroine, Esther Lyon, is supposed to be
the daughter of a Dissenting minister, who talks theology after the
fashion of the divines of the seventeenth century; unknown to herself,
however, she is really the daughter of the heir of large estates, and
ultimately becomes acknowledged as such, but gives up wealth and social
position to marry Felix Holt, who had made a vow of perpetual poverty.
Such a self-renunciation is not common in England. Even a Paula would
hardly have accepted such a lot; only one inspired with the philosophy
of Marcus Aurelius would be capable of such a willing sacrifice,--very
noble, but very improbable.
The most powerful part of the story is the description of the remorse
which so often accompanies an illicit love, as painted in the proud,
stately, stern, unbending, aristocratic Mrs. Transome. "Though youth has
faded, and joy is dead, and love has turned to loathing, yet memory,
like a relentless fury, pursues the gray-haired woman who hides within
her breast a heavy load of shame and dread." Illicit love is a common
subject with George Eliot; and it is always represented as a mistake or
crime, followed by a terrible retribution, sooner or later,--if not
outwardly, at least inwardly, in the sorrows of a wounded and
heavy-laden soul.
No one of George Eliot's novels opens more beautifully than "Felix
Holt," though there is the usual disappointment of readers with the
close. And probably no description of a rural district in the Midland
Counties fifty years ago has ever been painted which equals in graphic
power the opening chapter. The old coach turnpike, the roadside inns
brilliant with polished tankards, the pretty bar-maids, the repartees of
jocose hostlers, the mail-coach announced by the many blasts of the
bugle, the green willows of the water-courses, the patient cart-horses,
the full-uddered cows, the rich pastures, the picturesque milkmaids, the
shepherd with his slouching walk, the laborer with his bread and bacon,
the tidy kitchen-garden, the golden corn-ricks, the bushy hedgerows
bright with the blossoms of the wild convolvulus, the comfortable
parsonage, the old parish church with its ivy-mantled towers, the
thatched cottage with double daisies and geraniums in the
window-seats,--these and other details bring before our minds a rural
glory which has passed away before the power of steam, and may never
again return.
"Felix Holt" was published in 1866, and it was five years before
"Middlemarch" appeared,--a very long novel, thought by some to be the
best which George Eliot has written; read fifteen times, it is said, by
the Prince of Wales. In this novel the author seems to have been
ambitious to sustain her fame. She did not, like Trollope, dash off
three novels a year, and all alike. She did not write mechanically, as a
person grinds at a mill. Nor was she greedy of money, to be spent in
running races with the rich. She was a conscientious writer from first
to last. Yet "Middlemarch," with all the labor spent upon it, has more
faults than any of her preceding novels. It is as long as "The History
of Sir Charles Grandison;" it has a miserable plot; it has many tedious
chapters, and too many figures, and too much theorizing on social
science. Rather than a story, it is a panorama of the doctors and
clergymen and lawyers and business people who live in a provincial town,
with their various prejudices and passions and avocations. It is not a
cheerful picture of human life. We are brought to see an unusual number
of misers, harpies, quacks, cheats, and hypocrites. There are but few
interesting characters in it: Dorothea is the most so,--a very noble
woman, but romantic, and making great mistakes. She desires to make
herself useful to somebody, and marries a narrow, jealous, aristocratic
pedant, who had spent his life in elaborate studies on a dry and
worthless subject. Of course, she awakes from her delusion when she
discovers what a small man, with great pretensions, her learned husband
is; but she remains in her dreariness of soul a generous, virtuous, and
dutiful woman. She does not desert her husband because she does not love
him, or because he is uncongenial, but continues faithful to the end.
Like Maggie Tulliver and Romola, she has lofty aspirations, but marries,
after her husband's death, a versatile, brilliant, shallow Bohemian, as
ill-fitted for her serious nature as the dreary Casaubon himself.
Nor are we brought in sympathy with Lydgate, the fashionable doctor with
grand aims, since he allows his whole scientific aspirations to be
defeated by a selfish and extravagant wife. Rosamond Vincy is, however,
one of the best drawn characters in fiction, such as we often
see,--pretty, accomplished, clever, but incapable of making a sacrifice,
secretly thwarting her husband, full of wretched complaints, utterly
insincere, attractive perhaps to men, but despised by women. Caleb Garth
is a second Adam Bede; and Mrs. Cadwallader, the aristocratic wife of
the rector, is a second Mrs. Poyser in the glibness of her tongue and
in the thriftiness of her ways. Mr. Bullstrode, the rich banker, is a
character we unfortunately sometimes find in a large country town,--a
man of varied charities, a pillar of the Church, but as full of cant as
an egg is of meat; in fact, a hypocrite and a villain, ultimately
exposed and punished.
The general impression left on the mind from reading "Middlemarch" is
sad and discouraging. In it is brought out the blended stoicism,
humanitarianism, Buddhism, and agnosticism of the author. She paints the
"struggle of noble natures, struggling vainly against the currents of a
poor kind of world, without trust in an invisible Rock higher than
themselves to which they could entreat to be lifted up."
In another five years George Eliot produced "Daniel Deronda," the last
and most unsatisfactory of her great novels, written in feeble health
and with exhausted nervous energies, as she was passing through the
shadows of the evening of her life. In this work she doubtless essayed
to do her best; but she could not always surpass herself, any more than
could Scott or Dickens. Nor is she to be judged by those productions
which reveal her failing strength, but by those which were written in
the fresh enthusiasm of a lofty soul. No one thinks the less of Milton
because the "Paradise Regained" is not equal to the "Paradise Lost."
Many are the immortal poets who are now known only for two or three of
their minor poems. It takes a Michael Angelo to paint his grandest
frescos after reaching eighty years of age; or a Gladstone, to make his
best speeches when past the age of seventy. Only people with a wonderful
physique and unwasted mental forces can go on from conquering to
conquer,--people, moreover, who have reserved their strength, and lived
temperate and active lives.
Although "Daniel Deronda" is occasionally brilliant, and laboriously
elaborated, still it is regarded generally by the critics as a failure.
The long digression on the Jews is not artistic; and the subject itself
is uninteresting, especially to the English, who have inveterate
prejudices against the chosen people. The Hebrews, as they choose to
call themselves, are doubtless a remarkable people, and have
marvellously preserved their traditions and their customs. Some among
them have arisen to the foremost rank in scholarship, statesmanship, and
finance. They have entered, at different times, most of the cabinets of
Europe, and have held important chairs in its greatest universities. But
it was a Utopian dream that sent Daniel Deronda to the Orient to collect
together the scattered members of his race. Nor are enthusiasts and
proselytes often found among the Jews. We see talent, but not visionary
dreamers. To the English they appear as peculiarly practical,--bent on
making money, sensual in their pleasures, and only distinguished from
the people around them by an extravagant love of jewelry and a proud and
cynical rationalism. Yet in justice it must be confessed, that some of
the most interesting people in the world are Jews.
In "Daniel Deronda" the cheerless philosophy of George Eliot is fully
brought out. Mordecai, in his obscure and humble life, is a good
representative of a patient sufferer, but "in his views and aspirations
is a sort of Jewish Mazzini." The hero of the story is Mordecai's
disciple, who has discovered his Hebrew origin, of which he is as proud
as his aristocratic mother is ashamed The heroine is a spoiled woman of
fashion, who makes the usual mistake of most of George Eliot's heroines,
in violating conscience and duty. She marries a man whom she knows to be
inherently depraved and selfish; marries him for his money, and pays the
usual penalty,--a life of silent wretchedness and secret sorrow and
unavailing regret. But she is at last fortunately delivered by the
accidental death of her detested husband,--by drowning, of course.
Remorse in seeing her murderous wishes accomplished--though not by her
own hand, but by pursuing fate--awakens a new life in her soul, and she
is redeemed amid the throes of anguish and conscious guilt.
"Theophrastus Such," the last work of George Eliot, is not a novel, but
a series of character sketches, full of unusual bitterness and withering
sarcasm. Thackeray never wrote anything so severe. It is one of the most
cynical books ever written by man or woman. There is as much difference
in tone and spirit between it and "Adam Bede," as between "Proverbs" and
"Ecclesiastes;" as between "Sartor Resartus" and the "Latter-Day
Pamphlets." And this difference is not more marked than the difference
in style and language between this and her earlier novels. Critics have
been unanimous in their admiration of the author's style in "Silas
Marner" and "The Mill on the Floss,"--so clear, direct, simple, natural;
as faultless as Swift, Addison, and Goldsmith, those great masters of
English prose, whose fame rests as much on their style as on their
thoughts. In "Theophrastus Such," on the contrary, as in some parts of
"Daniel Deronda," the sentences are long, involved, and often almost
unintelligible.
In presenting the works of George Eliot, I have confined myself to her
prose productions, since she is chiefly known by her novels. But she
wrote poetry also, and some critics have seen considerable merit in it.
Yet whatever merit it may have I must pass without notice. I turn from
the criticism of her novels, as they successively appeared, to allude
briefly to her closing days. Her health began to fail when she was
writing "Middlemarch," doubtless from her intense and continual studies,
which were a severe strain on her nervous system. It would seem that she
led a secluded life, rarely paying visits, but receiving at her house
distinguished literary and scientific men. She was fond of travelling on
the Continent, and of making short visits to the country. In
conversation she is said to have been witty, tolerant, and sympathetic.
Poetry, music, and art absorbed much of her attention. She read very
little contemporaneous fiction, and seldom any criticisms on her own
productions. For an unbeliever in historical Christianity, she had great
reverence for all earnest Christian peculiarities, from Roman Catholic
asceticism to Methodist fervor. In her own belief she came nearest to
the positivism of Comte, although he was not so great an oracle to her
as he was to Mr. Lewes, with whom twenty years were passed by her in
congenial studies and labors. They were generally seen together at the
opening night of a new play or the _début_ of a famous singer or actor,
and sometimes, within a limited circle, they attended a social or
literary reunion.
In 1878 George Eliot lost the companion of her literary life. And yet
two years afterward--at the age of fifty-nine--she surprised her friends
by marrying John Walter Cross, a man much younger than herself. No one
can fathom that mystery. But Mrs. Cross did not long enjoy the
felicities of married life. In six months from her marriage, after a
pleasant trip to the Continent, she took cold in attending a Sunday
concert in London; and on the 22d of December, 1880, she passed away
from earth to join her "choir invisible," whose thoughts have enriched
the world.
It is not extravagant to say that George Eliot left no living competitor
equal to herself in the realm of fiction. I do not myself regard her as
great a novelist as Scott or Thackeray; but critics generally place her
second only to those great masters in this department of literature. How
long her fame will last, who can tell? Admirers and rhetoricians say,
"as long as the language in which her books are written." She doubtless
will live as long as any English novelist; but do those who amuse live
like those who save? Will the witty sayings of Dickens be cherished like
the almost inspired truths of Plato, of Bacon, of Burke? Nor is
popularity a sure test of posthumous renown.