is immortal, but whether she has rendered services that her country and
mankind will value. She has undoubtedly added to the richness of English
literature. She has deeply interested and instructed her generation.
Thousands, and hundreds of thousands, owe to her a debt of gratitude for
the enjoyment she has afforded them. How many an idle hour has she not
beguiled! How many have felt the artistic delight she has given them,
like those who have painted beautiful pictures! As already remarked, we
read her descriptions of rural character and life as we survey the
masterpieces of Hogarth and Wilkie.
It is for her delineation of character, and for profound psychological
analysis, that her writings have permanent value. She is a faithful
copyist of Nature. She recalls to our minds characters whom everybody of
large experience has seen in his own village or town,--the conscientious
clergyman, and the minister who preaches like a lecturer; the angel who
lifts up, and the sorceress who pulls down. We recall the misers we have
scorned, and the hypocrites whom we have detested. We see on her canvas
the vulgar rich and the struggling poor, the pompous man of success and
the broken-down man of misfortune; philanthropists and drunkards, lofty
heroines and silly butterflies, benevolent doctors and smiling
politicians, quacks and scoundrels and fools, mixed up with noble men
and women whose aspirations are for a higher life; people of kind
impulses and weak wills, of attractive personal beauty with meanness of
mind and soul. We do not find exaggerated monsters of vice, or faultless
models of virtue and wisdom: we see such people as live in every
Christian community. True it is that the impression we receive of human
life is not always pleasant; but who in any community can bear the
severest scrutiny of neighbors? It is this fidelity to our poor humanity
which tinges the novels of George Eliot with so deep a gloom.
But the sadness which creeps over us in view of human imperfection is
nothing to that darkness which enters the soul when the peculiar
philosophical or theological opinions of this gifted woman are
insidiously but powerfully introduced. However great she was as a
delineator of character, she is not an oracle as a moral teacher. She
was steeped in the doctrines of modern agnosticism. She did not believe
in a personal God, nor in His superintending providence, nor in
immortality as brought to light in the gospel. There are some who do not
accept historical Christianity, but are pervaded with its spirit. Even
Carlyle, when he cast aside the miracles of Christ and his apostles as
the honest delusions of their followers, was almost a Calvinist in his
recognition of God as a sovereign power; and he abhorred the dreary
materialism of Comte and Mill as much as he detested the shallow atheism
of Diderot and Helvetius. But George Eliot went beyond Carlyle in
disbelief. At times, especially in her poetry, she writes almost like a
follower of Buddha. The individual soul is absorbed in the universal
whole; future life has no certainty; hope in redemption is buried in a
sepulchre; life in most cases is a futile struggle; the great problems
of existence are invested with gloom as well as mystery. Thus she
discourses like a Pagan. She would have us to believe that Theocritus
was wiser than Pascal; that Marcus Aurelius was as good as Saint Paul.
Hence, as a teacher of morals and philosophy George Eliot is not of much
account. We question the richness of any moral wisdom which is not in
harmony with the truths that Christian people regard as fundamental, and
which they believe will save the world. In some respects she has taught
important lessons. She has illustrated the power of conscience and the
sacredness of duty. She was a great preacher of the doctrine that
"whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." She showed that
those who do not check and control the first departure from virtue will,
in nine cases out of ten, hopelessly fall.
These are great certitudes. But there are others which console and
encourage as well as intimidate. The _Te Domine Speravi_ of the dying
Xavier on the desolate island of Sancian, pierced through the clouds of
dreary blackness which enveloped the nations he sought to save.
Christianity is full of promises of exultant joy, and its firmest
believers are those whose lives are gilded with its divine radiance.
Surely, it is not intellectual or religious narrowness which causes us
to regret that so gifted a woman as George Eliot--so justly regarded as
one of the greatest ornaments of modern literature--should have drifted
away from the Rock which has resisted the storms and tempests of nearly
two thousand years, and abandoned, if she did not scorn, the faith which
has animated the great masters of thought from Augustine to Bossuet.
"The stern mournfulness which is produced by most of her novels gives us
the idea of one who does not know, or who has forgotten, that the stone
was rolled away from the heart of the world on the morning when Christ
arose from the tomb."
AUTHORITIES.
Miss Blind's Life of George Eliot. Mr. Cross's Life of George Eliot, I
regret to say, did not reach me until after the foregoing pages had gone
to press. But as this lecture is criticism rather than history, the few
additional facts that might have been gained would not be important;
while, after tracing in that _quasi_-autobiography the development of
her mental and moral nature, I see no reason to change my conclusions
based on the outward facts of her life and on her works. The Nineteenth
Century, ix.; London Quarterly Review, lvii. 40; Contemporary Review,
xx. 29, 39; The National Review, xxxi. 23, 16; Blackwood's Magazine,
cxxix. 85-100, 112, 116, 103; Edinburgh Review, ex. 144, 124, 137, 150;
Westminster Review, lxxi. 110, lxxxvi. 74, 80, 90, 112; Dublin Review,
xlvii. 88, 89; Cornhill Magazine, xliii.; Atlantic Monthly, xxxviii. 18;
Fortnightly Review, xxvi. 19; British Quarterly Review, lxiv. 57, 48,
45; International Review, iv. 10; Temple Bar Magazine, 49; Littell's
Living Age, cxlviii.; The North American Review, ciii. 116, 107;
Quarterly Review, cxxxiv. 108; Macmillan's Magazine, iii. 4; North
British Review, xiv.