"The newer oath
Thrusts its loud presence on him,"
we feel that any madness of act the wild conflict within may dictate has
become possible; and we follow to that presence of Fedalma which is now
the only goal life has left to him, prepared for such outbreak of despair
as shall be commensurate with a life called to such nobleness of deed and
fallen to such a depth of ruin. We see the trust he has deserted in the
hands of the foe against whom he had accepted commission to guard it; his
friends slaughtered at the post he had forsaken; himself as the sworn
Zincalo in alliance with the enemy and slaughterer, and associated with
the havoc they have wrought. The "right to damn" himself which he had
claimed is his in all its bitterness; and when he would charge the self
damnation upon the Gypsy chief, the reply of calm withering scorn can but
add keener pang to his awaking remorse: the self-damning
"Deed was done
Before you took your oath, or reached our camp,
Done when you slipped in secret from the post
'Twas yours to keep, and not to meditate
If others might not fill it."
The climax of his revulsion, remorse, and despair is reached when the
Prior, the man whom he has impeached as the true author of all his sin,
is led forth to die. Then all sophistries are swept away, and the full
import of his deed glares up before him, and its import as _his_, only
and wholly his. Zarca, in his high self-possession of soul, almost
pitying while he cannot but despise, presents a fitting object on which
all the fierce conflicting passions of wrath, self-accusing remorse, and
despair, may vent themselves; and the sudden and treacherous deed, which
"Strangles one
Whom ages watch for vainly,"
gives also to Don Silva himself to carry
"For ever with him what he fled--
_Her_ murdered love--her love, a dear wronged ghost,
Facing him, beauteous, 'mid the throngs of hell."
Few authors or artists but George Eliot could have won us again to look
on Don Silva except with revulsion or disgust; and it is characteristic
of more than all ordinary power that through the deep impressive
solemnity of the closing scene, he, the renegade and murderer, almost
divides our interest and sympathy with Fedalma herself; and this by no
condoning of his guilt, no extenuation of the depth of his fall, for
these are here, most of all, kept ever before our eyes. But the better
and nobler elements of his nature, throughout all his degradation
revealed to us as never wholly overborne, as ever struggling to assert
themselves, have begun to prevail, and to put down from supremacy that
meaner self which has led him into such abysses of faithlessness,
apostasy, and sin. The wild despair of remorse is giving way to the self-
renunciation of repentance; the storm of conflicting passions and
emotions is stilled; the fearful battle between good and evil through
which he has passed has left him exhausted of every hope and aim save to
die, repentant and absolved, for the country and faith he had abjured.
The self-assertion, too, of love is gone, and only its deep purity and
tenderness remain. Without murmur or remonstrance, he acquiesces in the
doom of hopeless separation; accepting all that remains possible to him
of that "high allegiance higher than our love," which is thenceforth the
only bond of union between these two. In that last sad interview with
her for whom he had so fearfully sinned, and so all but utterly fallen,
we can regard Don Silva with a fuller and truer sympathy than we dare
accord to him in all the height of his greatness, and all the wealth,
beauty, and joy of his yet unshadowed love.
* * * * *
In the next of this series of great works, and the one which to many of
her readers is and will remain the most fascinating--'Middlemarch'--George
Eliot has stretched a broader and more crowded canvas, on which, however,
every figure, to the least important that appears, is--not sketched or
outlined, but--filled in with an intense and lifelike vividness and
precision that makes each stand out as if it stood there alone. Quote
but a few words from any one of the speakers, and we know in a moment who
that speaker is. And each is the type or representative of a class; we
have no monsters or unnatural creations among them. To a certain extent
all are idealised for good or for evil,--it cannot be otherwise in
fiction without its ceasing to be fiction; but the essential elements of
character and life in all are not peculiar to them, but broad and
universal as our humanity itself. Dorothea and her sister, Mr Brooke and
Sir James Chettam, Rosamond Vincy and her brother, Mr Vincy and his wife,
Casaubon and Lydgate, Farebrother and Ladislaw, Mary Garth and her
parents, Bulstrode and Raffles, even Drs Sprague and Minchin, old
Featherstone and his kindred--all are but representative men and women,
with whose prototypes every reader, if gifted with the subtle power of
penetration and analysis of George Eliot, might claim personal
acquaintance.
This richly-crowded canvas presents to us such variety of illustration of
the two great antagonistic principles of human life--self-pleasing and
self-abnegation, love of pleasure and the love of God more or less
absolute and consummate--that it is no easy task to select from among
them. But two figures stand out before us, each portrayed with such
finished yet unlaboured art--living, moving, talking before us--contrasted
with such exquisite yet unobtrusive delicacy, and so subtilely
illustrating the two great phases of human inspiration and life--that
which centres in self, and that which yearns and seeks to lose itself in
the infinite of truth, purity, and love--that instinctively and
irresistibly the mind fixes upon them. These are Dorothea and Rosamond
Vincy.
To not a few of George Eliot's readers, we believe that Dorothea is and
will always be a fairer and more attractive form than Dinah Morris or
Romola di Bardi, Fedalma or Mirah Cohen. In her sweet young enthusiasm,
often unguided or misguided by its very intensity, but always struggling
and tending on toward the highest good; in the touching maidenly
simplicity with which she at once identifies and accepts Mr Casaubon as
her guide and support toward a higher, less self-contained and
self-pleasing, more inclusive and all-embracing life; in the yearning
pain with which the first dread of possible disappointment dawns and
darkens over her, and the meek humility of her repentance on the one
faint betrayal--wrung from her by momentary anguish--of that
disappointment; in the tender wifely patience, reticence, forbearance,
with which she hides from all, the heart-gnawings of shattered and
expiring hope; the sense which she can no longer veil from her own
deepest consciousness that in Mr Casaubon there is no help or stay for
her and the unwearied though too soon unhoping earnestness with which she
labours to establish true relations between herself and her uncongenial
mate; in the patient yet crushing anguish of that long night's
heart-struggle which precedes the close--a struggle not against her own
higher self, but whether she dare bind down that higher self to a
lifelong, narrow, worthless task, and the aching consciousness of
what--almost against conscience and right--her answer must be;--there is
an inexpressible charm and loveliness in all this which no one, not
utterly dead to all that is fairest and best in womanhood, can fail to
recognise.
Not less wonderfully depicted is the guileless frankness which, from
first to last, characterises her whole relations to Ladislaw. If there
is one flaw in this noble work, it is that Ladislaw on first examination
is scarcely equal to this exquisite creation. Yet it might have been
nearly as difficult even for George Eliot to satisfy our instinctive
cravings in this particular with regard to Dorothea, as in respect to
Romola or Fedalma. And when we study her portrait of Ladislaw more
carefully, there is a latent beauty and nobleness about him; an innate
and intense reverence for the highest and purest, and an unvarying aim
and struggle toward it; an utter scorn and loathing of everything mean
and base,--that almost makes us cancel the word flaw. We recognise this
nobleness of nature almost on his first appearance, in the deep reverence
with which he regards Dorothea, the fulness with which he penetrates the
guileless candour of the relation she assumes to him, the entireness of
his trust in the spotless purity of her whole nature. And in him we have
presented all those essential and fundamental elements of nature which
give assurance that, Dorothea by his side, he shall be no unfitting
helpmeet to her, no drag or hindrance on her higher life; that he shall
rise to the elevation and purity of her self-consecration, and shall
stand by her side sustaining, guiding, expanding that life of
ever-growing fulness and human helpfulness to which each is dedicated.
But the essence of all this moral and spiritual loveliness is its
unconsciousness. Self has no place in it. From the first the one
absorbing life aim and action is toward others--toward aiding the toils,
advancing the well-being, relieving the suffering, elevating the life, of
all around her. And this in no spirit of self-satisfied and vainglorious
self-estimation, but in that utter unconsciousness which is
characteristic of her whole being. Of the social reformer, the purposed
philanthropist, the benefactor of the poor, the wretched, and the fallen,
there is no trace in Dorothea Brooke. Grant that, as she is first
presented to us, that aim is for the time apparently concentrated in
improved cottage accommodation for the poor; even here there is no
thought of displaying the skill of the design and contriver: there is
thought alone of the object she seeks--ameliorating the condition of
those she yearns to benefit.
In her very first interview with Casaubon, there is something
inexpressibly touching in the humility of childlike trust with which she
accepts him and his "great mind," and the innocent purity with which she
allows herself to indulge the vision of a life passed by his side; a life
which he, by his influence and guidance, is to make more full and free,
and delivered from those conventionalities of custom and fashion which
restrict it. At last his cold, formal proposal of marriage is made. She
sees nothing of its true character--that he is but seeking, not an
helpmeet for life and soul in all their higher requirements, but simply
and solely a kind of superior, blindly submissive dependant and drudge.
In the _impossibility_ of marriage presenting itself to her purity of
maiden innocence as a mere establishment in life, or in any of those
meaner aspects in which meaner natures regard it, she sees nothing of all
this--nothing save that the yearning of her heart is fulfilled, and that
henceforth her life shall pass under a higher guardianship, sustained by
a holier strength, animated by a more self-expansive fulness, guided
toward nobler and fuller aims.
Picturing to some extent, in degree as we are capable of entering into a
nature like hers, the anguish that such an awakening must be to her, it
is exquisitely painful to follow in imagination the slow sure process of
her awakening to what this man, who "has no good red blood in his body,"
really is--a cold, shallow pedant, whose entire existence is bound up in
researches, with regard to which he even shrinks from inquiry as to
whether all he has for years been vaguely attempting has not been
anticipated, and whose intense and absorbing egoism makes the remotest
hint of depreciation pierce like a dagger. The first faint dawn of
discovery breaks on her almost immediately on their arrival at Rome.
Conscious of her want of mere aesthetic culture--neglected in the past as
a turning aside from life's highest aims--she has looked forward to his
guidance and support for the supply of this want as enlarging her whole
being; broadening and deepening, refining and elevating all its
sympathies. For all shadow of aid or sympathy here, she finds herself as
utterly alone as if she were in a trackless and uninhabited desert. Nay,
more: he who sits by her side is as cold and dead to all sensations or
emotions that art can enkindle, as the glorious marbles amid which they
wander. Soon she finds herself relegated to the society and fellowship
of her maid; her husband is less to her, is incapable of being other than
less, amid those transcendant treasures of architecture, painting, and
sculpture, than a hired guide or cicerone would be.
Soon follows the scene where her timid offer of humble service is thrown
back with all the irritation of that absorbing egoism which is the very
essence and life-in-death of the man. For the first and only time, a
faint cry of conscious irritation escapes her, followed by an anguish of
repentance so deep, so meekly, humbly self-accusing, it reveals to us
more of her truest and innermost life than pages of elaborate description
could do. A single sentence descriptive of her mood even in that first
irritation brings before us her deepest soul, and the utter absence of
self isolation and self-insistence there:--"However just her indignation
might be, her ideal was not _to claim justice_, but _to give
tenderness_."
She meets Ladislaw; and he more than hints to her that the dim, vague
labours and accumulations of years which have constituted her husband's
nearest approach to life have been labour in vain; that the "great mind"
has been toiling, with feeble uncertain steps, in a path which has
already been trodden into firmness and completeness; toiling in wilful
and obdurate ignorance that other and abler natures have more than
anticipated all he has been painfully and abortively labouring to
accomplish. Again a cry bursts from the wounded heart, seemingly of
anger against her informant, really of anguish--anguish, not for her own
sinking hopes, but for the burden of disappointment and failure which she
instinctively perceives must, sooner or later, fall on the husband who is
thus throwing away life in vain.
So it goes on, through all the ever-darkening problem of her married, yet
unmated, life. Effort, always more earnest on the part of her yearning,
unselfish tenderness, to establish true relations between them; to find
in him something of that sweet support, that expansive and elevating
force, silently entering into her own innermost life, which her first
childlike trust inspired; to become to him, even if no more may be, that
to which her childlike humility at first alone aspired--eyes to his
weakness, and strength and freedom to his pen. So it goes on;
ever-gnawing pain and anguish, as all her yearning love and pity is
thrown back, and that dulled insensate heart and all-absorbing egoism can
find only irritation in her timid attempts at sympathy, only dread of
detection of the half-conscious futility of all his labours, in her
humble proffers of even mechanical aid. Not easily can even the most
fervid and penetrative imagination conceive what, to a nature like
Dorothea's, such a life must be, with its never-ceasing, ever-gathering
pain; its longing tenderness not even actively repelled, but simply
ignored or misinterpreted; its humblest, equally with its highest
yearnings, baffled and shattered against that triple mail of shallowest
self-includedness. And all has to be borne in silence and alone. No
word, no look, no sign, betrays to other eye the inward anguish, the
deepening disappointment, the slow dying away of hope. Nay, for long, on
indeed to the bitter close, failure seems to her to be almost wholly on
her own side; and repentance and self-upbraiding leave no room for
resentment.
Ere long--indeed, very soon--another, and, if possible, a still deeper
humiliation comes upon her,--another, and, in some respects, a keener
pang, as showing more intensely how entirely she stands alone, is thrown
into her life,--in her husband's jealousy of Ladislaw. Yet jealousy it
cannot be called. Of any emotion so comparatively profound, any passion
so comparatively elevated, that self-absorbed, self-tormenting nature is
utterly incapable. Jealousy, in some degree, presupposes love; love not
wholly absorbed in self, but capable to some extent of going forth from
our own mean and sordid self-inclusion in sympathetic relation,
dependence, and aid, towards another existence. In Mr Casaubon there is
no capability, no possibility of this. What in him wears the aspect of
jealousy is simply and solely self-love, callous irritation, that any one
should--not stand above, but--approach himself in importance with the
woman he has purchased as a kind of superior slave. For long her
guileless innocence and purity, her utter inability to conceive such a
feeling, leaves her only in doubt and perplexity before it; long after it
has first betrayed itself, she reveals this incapability in the fullest
extent, and in the way most intensely irritating to her husband's self-
love--by her simple-hearted proposal that whatever of his property would
devolve on her should be shared with Ladislaw. Then it is that Casaubon
is roused to inflict on her the last long and bitter anguish; to lay on
her for life--had not death intervened--the cold, soul-benumbing, life
contracting clutch of "the Dead Hand." In the innocence of her entire
relations with Ladislaw, not the faintest dawning of thought connects
itself with him in her husband's cold, insistent demand on her blind
obedience to his will. She thinks alone of his thus binding her to a
lifelong task, not only hard and ungenial, but one that shall absorb and
fetter all her energies, restrain all her faculties, impair and frustrate
all her higher and broader aims, make impossible all that better and
purer fulness of life for which she yearns. Then follows the long and
painful struggle,--a struggle so agonising to such a nature, that only
one nearly akin to her own can adequately conceive or picture it. For it
is a struggle not primarily to forego any certain or fancied mere
personal good. On one side is ranged tenderest pitifulness over her
husband's wasted life and energies, even though she knows those energies
have been wasted--that life has been thrown away--on an object in which
there is no gain to humanity, no advancement of human well-being, no
profit even to himself, save, perchance, a barren and useless notoriety
at last; an object that has been already far more fully and ably
achieved. On the other stands her clear undoubting _conscience_ of her
own truest and highest course,--the course to which every prompting of
the Divine within impels her,--that she shall not thus isolate herself
within this narrowest sphere, shut herself out from all social sympathies
and social outgoings, and sacrifice to the Dead Hand that holds her in
its cold remorseless clutch every interest that may be intrusted to her.
We instinctively shudder at the result; but we never doubt what the
answer will be. We know that the tender, womanly, wifely pitifulness,
the causeless remorse, will be the nearest and most urgent conscience,
and will prevail. The agonised assent is to be given; but it falls on
the ear of the dead.
It is scarcely necessary to follow Dorothea minutely through all the
details of her widowed relations to Mr Casaubon. Enough that these are
all in touching and beautiful harmony with everything that has gone
before. No resentment, no recalcitration against all the ever-gathering
perplexity, pain, and anguish he has caused her--nothing but the sweet
unfailing pitifulness, the uncalled-for repentance, almost remorse, over
her own assumed shortcomings and deficiencies--her failures to be to him
what in those first days of her childlike simplicity and innocence she
had hoped she might become. Even on the discovery of the worse than
treachery, of the mean insulting malignity with which, trusting to her
confiding purity and truthfulness, he had sought to grasp her for life in
his "Dead Hand" with regard to Ladislaw, and she only escaped the
irrevocable bond her own blindly-given pledge would have fixed around her
by his death,--the momentary and violent shock of revulsion from her dead
husband, who had had hidden thoughts of her, perhaps perverting
everything she said or did, _terrified her as if it had been a sin_.
It is not alone, however, toward her husband that this simple,
unconscious self-devotion and self-abnegation of Dorothea Brooke displays
itself. Toward every one with whom she comes in contact, it steals out
unobtrusively and silently, as the dew from heaven on the tender grass,
to each and all according to the kind and nearness of that relation. Even
for her "pulpy" uncle she has no supercilious contempt--no sense of
isolation or separation; not even the consciousness of toleration toward
him. Toward Celia, with her delicious commonplace of rather superficial
yet _naive_ worldly wisdom, her half-conscious selfishness, her
baby-worship, and her inimitable "staccato," she is more than tolerant.
She looks up to her as in many respects a superior, even though her own
far higher instincts and aims of life cannot accept her as an aid and
guidance toward the realisation of these. Even at old Featherstone's
funeral, her one emotion is of pitiful sorrow over that loveless mockery
of all human pity and love; and for the "Frog-faced" there is no feeling
but sympathetic compassion for his apparent loneliness amongst strangers,
who all stand aloof and look askance on him. Into all Lydgate's plans,
into the whole question of the hospital and all he hopes to achieve
through means of it, she throws herself with swift intelligence, with
active, eager sympathy, as a probable instrumentality by which at least
one phase of suffering may be redressed or allayed. And in the hour of
his deep humiliation, when all others have fallen away from his side,
when the wife of his bosom forsakes him in callous and heartless
resentment of what was done for her sake alone; when he stands out the
mark of scorn and obloquy for all save Farebrother, and scans and all but
loathes himself--she, with her artless trust in the best of humanity, in
the strength of her instinctive recognition of the merest glimmering of
whatever is true and right and high in others, comes to his side, yields
him at once her fullest confidence, gives him with frank simplicity her
aid, and enables him, so far as determined prejudice and uncharity will
allow, to right himself before others.
Reference has already been made to her whole relations, from first to
last, with Ladislaw. It is not easy to conceive anything more touchingly
beautiful than these, more perfectly in harmony with her whole nature. Of
anything approaching either coquetry or prudery she is incapable. The
utter absence of all self-consciousness, whether of external beauty or
inward loveliness; the ethereal purity, the childlike trustfulness, the
instinctive recognition of all that is true and earnest and high in
Ladislaw, through all the surface appearance of indecision, of vague
uncertain aim and purpose and limited object in life; no thought of what
is ordinarily called love toward him, of love on his part toward her--ever
dawns upon her guileless innocence. Through all her yearning to do
justice to him as regards the property of her dead husband, which she
looks upon as fairly and justly his, or at least to be shared with him,
there arises before her the determination of her dead husband that it
should not be so; and her sweet regretful pitifulness over that meagre
wasted life prevails. Anon, when at last through the will she is made
aware of the crowning act of that concentrated callousness of heart and
soul, and of the true nature of the benumbing grasp it had sought to lay
on her for life, and had so far succeeded in doing, then for the first
time her "tremulous" maiden purity and simplicity awakens, and for the
first time it enters her mind that Ladislaw could, under any
circumstances, become her lover; that another had thought of them in that
light, and that he himself had been conscious of such a possibility
arising. The later scenes between them are characterised by a quiet
beauty, a suppressed power and pathos, compared to which most other love-
scenes in fiction appear dull and coarse. The tremulous yearning of her
love, as it awakens more and more to distinct consciousness within; the
new-born shyness blent with the old, trustful, frank simplicity,--bring
before us a picture of love, in its purest and most beautiful aspect,
such as cannot easily be paralleled in fiction.
Toward her late husband's parishioners there is the same wise instinctive
insight as to their true needs, the same thoughtful and provident
consideration that characterises her in every relation into which she is
brought. If she at once objects, on their behoof, to Mr Tyke's so-called
"apostolic" preaching, it is that she means by that, sermons about
"imputed righteousness and the prophecies in the Apocalypse. I have
always been thinking of the different ways in which Christianity is
taught, and whenever I find one way that makes it a wider blessing than
any other, I cling to that as the truest--I mean that which takes in the
most good of all kinds, and brings in the most people as sharers in it."
And in her final selection of Mr Farebrother, she is guided not alone by
her sense of his general and essential fitness for the work assigned to
him, but also in some degree by her desire to make whist-playing for
money, and the comparatively inferior society into which it necessarily
draws him, no longer a need of his outer life.
Of all the less prominent relations into which Dorothea Brooke is
brought, there is not one more touchingly tender, or in which her whole
nature is drawn more beautifully out, than that to Rose Vincy. Between
these two, at least on the side of the hard unpenetrable incarnation of
self-inclusion and self-pleasing, any approach to harmony or sympathy is
impossible. There is not even any true ground of womanhood on which
Rosamond can meet Dorothea; for she is nearly as far removed from
womanhood as Tito Melema is from manliness or manhood. Yet even here the
tender pitifulness of Dorothea overpasses a barrier that to any other
would be impassable. In her sweet, instinctive, universal sympathy for
human sorrow and pain, she finds a common ground of union; and in no
fancied sense of superiority--solely from the sense of common human
need--she strives to console, to elevate, to lead back to hope and trust,
with a gentle yet steadfast simplicity all her own.
Such, as portrayed by unquestionably the greatest fictionist of the
time--is it too much to say, the greatest genius of our English
nineteenth century?--is the nineteenth century St Theresa.
The question may be raised by some of George Eliot's readers whether it
constitutes the best and completest ethical teaching that fiction can
attain, to bring before its readers such high ideals of the possibilities
of humanity--of the aim and purpose of life toward which it should ever
aspire. Were the author's canvas occupied with such portraitures
alone--with Romolas and Fedalmas, Dinah Morrises and Dorothea Brookes,
Daniel Derondas and Adam Bedes, even Mr Tryans and Mr Gilfils--the
question might call for full discussion, and a contrast might be
unfavourably drawn between the author and him whose emphatic praise it is
that he "holds the mirror up to nature." But the great artist for all
time brings before us not only an Iago and an Edmund, an Angelo and an
Iachimo, a Regan and a Goneril, but a Miranda and an Imogen, an Isabella
and a Viola, a Cordelia and a Desdemona, with every conceivable
intermediate shade of human character and life; and in George Eliot we
have the same clearly-defined contrasts and endless variety. That a
Becky Sharp and a Beatrix Castlewood are drawn with the consummate skill
and force of the most perfect artist in his own special sphere our age
has produced, few will be disposed to deny: and that they have momentous
lessons to teach us all,--that they may by sheer antagonism rouse some
from dreams of selfish vanity and corruption, and awaken within some germ
of better and purer elements of life,--will scarcely be disputed. But it
is not from these, or such as these, that the highest and noblest, the
purest and most penetrative, the most extended and enduring teaching and
elevation of the world has come. That has come emphatically from Him
whose self-chosen name, "the Son of Man," designates Him the ideal of
humanity on earth; Him who is at once the "Lamb of God" and "the Lion of
the tribe of Judah," the "Good Shepherd," and the stern and fearless but
ever-righteous Judge--the concentration of all tender and holy love, and
of divinest scorn of, and revulsion from, everything mean and false in
humanity; Him who for the repentant sinner has no harsher word of rebuke
than "Go and sin no more," and who over the self-righteous, self-wrapt,
all-despising Pharisees thundered back, to His own ultimate destruction,
His terrible "Woe unto you _hypocrites_." He too stands out, not
isolated or severed, but prominent, amid every conceivable phase and
gradation of human character, from a John to a Judas; touches each and
all at some point of living contact; meets them with tender sympathy,
with gentle patience, and pitying love, over their weaknesses and falls.
Can the true artist err in aiming, according to his nature or to the
purity and elevation of his genius, to approach in his portraitures such
ideals as this great typical exemplar of our humanity, whose influence
has for eighteen centuries been stealing down into the hearts and souls
of men to elevate and refine, and who is now, and who is more and more
becoming, the paramount factor in individual character, and in social and
political relations? Or can such ideals, presented before us, fail to
arouse in some degree the better elements of our humanity, and to lead us
to strive toward the realisation of these?
In wonderfully drawn and finished yet never obtruded contrast to this
beautiful creation comes before us Rosamond Vincy. Outwardly even more
characterised by every personal charm, save that one living and crowning
charm which outshines from the soul within; to the eye, therefore--such
eyes as can penetrate no deeper than the surface--prettier, more
graceful, more accomplished and fascinating, than Dorothea Brooke;--it is
difficult to conceive a more utterly unlovable example of womanhood,
whether as maiden or wife. Hard and callous of heart and dead of soul,
incapable of one thought or emotion that rises above or extends beyond
self, insistent on her own petty claims and ambitions to the exclusion of
all others, ever aiming to achieve these, now by dogged sullen
persistence, now by mean concealments and frauds, no more repellent
portraiture of womanhood has ever been placed before us. The fundamental
character of her entire home relations is, on her first appearance, drawn
by a single delicate touch--her objecting to her brother's red herring,
or rather to its presence after she enters the room, because its odour
jars on her sense of pseudo-refinement. In her relation to her husband
there is not from first to last one shadow of anything that can be called
love, no approach to sympathy or harmony of life. She looks on him
solely as a means for removing herself to what she considers a higher
social circle, securing to her greater ease, freedom, and luxury of daily
life, and ultimately withdrawing her to a wider sphere of petty and
selfish enjoyment. Seeking these ends, she resorts to every mean device
of deceit and concealment. Utterly callous and impenetrable to his
feelings, to every manlier instinct within him, as she is utterly
insensible of, and indeed incapable of, entering into his higher and
wider professional aims, she not only ignores these, but in her dull and
hard insensibility runs counter to, and tramples on them all.
Even toward Mary Garth there is nothing approaching true friendship or
affection; no power of recognising her honesty, unselfishness, and
earnestness of nature. She is nothing to her but a tool and
_confidante_, the recipient of her own petty hopes and desires, worries
and cares.
All Dorothea's gentle, unobtrusive attempts to soothe, to win her back to
truer and better relations with her husband, and to awaken to active life
and exercise the true womanhood, which she in her sweet instinct believes
to be inherent in all her sex, are met by hard indifference or dull
resistance. And in the one act of apparent friendliness or rather
explanation toward Dorothea, she is actuated far less by sympathy or
desire to clear away what has come between her and Ladislaw, than by
sullen resentment against the latter for his rejection of her unseemly
and unwifely advances to him.
In the position she at last takes up toward Ladislaw, there is no
approach to anything in the very least resembling love--even illicit and
overmastering passion. Of that her very nature is incapable. She is
influenced solely by resentment against her husband, and his failure to
fulfil her vain and self-absorbed dreams; by the hope that he will remove
her to a sphere which will give wider scope to her heartless selfishness,
and take her away from the social disappointments and humiliations into
which that selfishness has mainly plunged her. In every relation of life
near or far, important or trivial, amid all environments, under all
impulsion toward anything purer and better, Rosamond Vincy is ever the
same; as consistent and unvarying in her hard unwomanliness and
impenetrable, insistent self-seeking, as is Dorothea in every opposite
characteristic. And even while the picture in one way fascinates the
reader, it is the fascination of ever-increasing contempt and loathing
where the extremest charity can hardly even pity; and from it we ever
turn to that of St Theresa with the more intense refreshment alike of
mind and heart, and the deeper sense of its elevating and refining
influence.
Among the many clearly defined and vividly drawn portraits in this great
work, it would be easy, did space permit, to select others well worthy of
detailed examination, and illustrative of the salient aim and tendency of
all George Eliot's works. The homely yet beautiful family groups of the
Garths, Celia and Sir James Chettam, the Bulstrodes, {97} even the
wretched old Featherstone, and the crowd of vultures "waiting for death
around him," all more or less illustrate the fundamental principle of the
highest ethics--that self-abnegation is life, elevation, purity,
uplifting our humanity toward the Divine; that self-seeking and
self-isolation tend surely toward moral and spiritual death. Two,
however, stand out so delicately yet clearly defined and contrasting,
that they claim brief consideration before passing from this great
work--Lydgate and Farebrother.
The whole character and career of Lydgate are brought before us with the
skill of the consummate artist. At first he appears as a man of massive
and energetic proportions, of high professional impulses and aims,
resolute to carry these through against all difficulty and amid all
indifference and opposition, and apparently seeking through these aims
the general good of humanity--the alleviation of suffering, and the
arrestment, it may be, of death. But even then there are signs of
inherent weakness, and all but certain decline and fall. There are
indications of arrogant self sufficiency and supercilious contempt for
others; of undue deference for Bulstrode, not from respect or esteem, but
as a tool to further his views; and a tendency to treat patients not as
human beings but as cases--objects to experiment on, and verify
hypotheses regarding pathology and disease, all which betray a nature not
attuned to the highest and noblest pitch, and that cannot be expected to
stand in the hour of trial. His first direct lapse is when, against his
secret conviction, he supports Tyke as hospital chaplain in opposition to
Farebrother; but mainly in mere defiance and resentment of the general
style of his reception at the Board meeting, and the opposition he
encounters there. Anon comes his marriage to Rosamond Vincy,--a marriage
prompted by no true affection, but solely by the fascination of her
prettiness, her external grace and accomplishments. Led on mainly by his
own taste for luxury and external show, he plunges into extravagances of
every kind. Debt inevitably follows, crippling his resources, cramping
his energies, fettering him as regards all his higher professional aims
and efforts. To his wife he looks in vain for sympathy or aid. She only
aggravates the difficulties and harassments of his life by her callous
selfishness, her dull obdurate insistance on all her own claims, her mean
deceits and concealments. Embarrassments of every kind thicken around
him; and at last in the all but universal estimation of his fellows, and
nearly in his own, in the hope of temporary relief he becomes accessory
to murder. His end is as sad a one for his character, and in his
circumstances, as can well be conceived: falling from all his high if
somewhat arrogant professional aims, his hopes of elevating the general
practitioner, and of raising medicine from an art to a science, into the
fashionable London lady's doctor.
Though Mr Farebrother occupies a somewhat less prominent place in the
narrative, he is delineated with not less consummate skill. He comes
before us at first a man of genial kindly sympathies, frankly alive to,
and frankly acknowledging, his own deficiencies. There is an utter
absence of pretence and affectation about him, a graceful and engaging
simplicity and frankness of whole nature, that can hardly fail to win the
heart. All his home relations--toward mother and sisters--are singularly
touching. Feeling all his defects as a clergyman, half laughing, half
apologetic over his devotion to his favourite Coleoptera, and admitting
that which is so far a necessity to him, not of choice, but of actual
external need in his narrow circumstances--admitting, too, the
comparatively inferior and uncongenial society into which he is drawn--the
full revelation of his nobler and higher nature begins. His true and
deep appreciation of Mary Garth, and tender, devoted, and unselfish love
for her, more clearly reveal his innate manliness, self-denial, and
simplicity of character. This revelation is still further unfolded
before us in his entire relations with Fred Vincy. That firm persistent
interview in the billiard-room, is actuated by the one absorbing and self-
abnegating desire that he may still be saved from the moral and spiritual
decay impending over him: and when, in answer to Fred's appeal for his
intercession, we discover the blighting of his own hopes, the shattering
of his love, the tender heart stricken to the core should Fred prove, as
he suspects, his successful rival, we discern in him a nature of the
finest capabilities, and surely tending on and up toward the noblest
ends; and we part from him as from a dear and valued friend, whose
society has cheered and elevated us, whose pure simplicity of nature has
refuted our vain pretensions, and whose memory clings to us as a
fragrance and refreshment.
There now only remains the last yet published, and in the estimation of
many, the greatest, of George Eliot's works--'Daniel Deronda.' In it the
author takes up--not a new scope, but extends one that has all along been
present, and that indeed was inevitably associated with her great ethical
principle,--the bringing of that principle definitely and directly to
bear upon not only every domestic but every social and political relation
of human life. This tendency may be briefly expressed in the old and
profound words: "No man liveth to himself; no man dieth to himself." As
we aim toward the true and good and pure, or surrender ourselves the
slaves of self and sense, we live or die to God or to the devil.
Before, however, proceeding to detailed examination of this remarkable
work, it seems necessary to draw attention to one objection which has
been urged against it--the prominent introduction of the Jewish element
into its scheme. Such objection could scarcely have been put forward by
any one who considers what the Jew has been in the past--what an enormous
factor his past and present have been and are, in the development and
progress of our highest civilisation. Historically, we first meet him
coming forth from the Arabian desert, a rude unlettered herdsman, in
intelligence, cultivation, and morality far below the tribes among whom
he is thrown. A terrible weapon arms him--a theism stern, hard, and
pitiless, beyond, perhaps, all the world has ever seen. To the bravest
and best of his race--a Moses and a Joshua, a Deborah and a Jephtha--this
presents ruthless massacre, the vilest treachery, offering up a sacrifice
the dearest and most loved, not as mere permissible acts, but as deeds of
religious homage solemnly enjoined by his Most High. This theism has one
central thought in which it practically stands alone, and which it was
the aim of all its supposed heads and legislators to keep inviolate amid
all surrounding antagonisms--the intense assertion of the Divine unity.
"Hear, O Israel! the Lord thy God is _one_ Lord." In these brief words
lies the very core of Judaism. So long as he holds fast by this central
truth, the Jew is exhibited to us as practically omnipotent. Seas and
floods divide before him; hosts numberless as the sands are scattered at
his appearance; cyclopean walls fall prone at his trumpet-blast.
And this thought of the Divine unity, thus intensely pervading the
national life, upfolds within capacity of indefinite development. No
long time in the life of a nation elapses ere "The Lord thy God is a
jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children,"
became "As a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that
fear Him." "Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not
have compassion on the son of her womb? Yea, she _may_ forget; yet will
not _I_ forget thee."
In no sense of the word was the Jew a creature of imagination. The stern
and hard realities of his life would seem to have crushed out every trace
of the aesthetic element within him. Yet from among these people arose a
literature, especially a hymnology, which has never been approached
elsewhere; and it arose emphatically and distinctly out of the great
central and animating thought of the Divine unity. To the Psalms
so-called of David, the glorious outbursts of sacred song in their
mythico-historical books, as in Isaiah {103} and some of the minor
prophets, the finest of the Vedic or Orphic hymns or the Homeric ballads
are cold and spiritless. These address themselves to scholars alone, or
chiefly to a cultivated few, and address themselves to them eloquently
and gloriously. The hymns of the Jews have so interpenetrated the very
heart of humanity, so identified themselves with the best longings, the
noblest aspirations, the purest hopes, and the deepest sorrows of man,
that still, after more than twenty centuries, that wonderful hymnology
breathes up day after day, week after week, from millions of households
and hearts. They outbreathe its fervid aspirations toward a purer and
diviner life. They give expression to its profound wailings over
degradation and fall. They give utterance on all the inscrutable
mysteries of existence; and ever and anon as the clouds and darkness
break away from the Infinite Love,--they burst forth into the exultant
cry, "God reigneth, let the earth be glad. . . . Give thanks at
remembrance of His _holiness_."
But important as is this factor of Judaism, there is another generally
considered which has perhaps exercised a still more profound and
cumulative influence on the civilisation especially of the West. This
lies in the intense indestructible nationality of the race. Eighteen
centuries have passed since they became a people, "scattered and peeled,"
their "holy and beautiful house" a ruin, their capital a desolation,
their land proscribed to the exile's foot. During these centuries deluge
after deluge of so-called barbarians has swept over Asia and Europe: Hun
and Tartar, Alan and Goth, Suev and Vandal,--we attach certain vague
meanings to the names, but can the most learned scholar identify one
individual of the true unmingled blood? All have disappeared, merged in
the race they overran, in the kingdoms they conquered and devastated. The
Jew alone, through these centuries, has remained the Jew: proscribed,
persecuted, hunted as never was tiger or wolf, he is as vividly defined,
as unchangeably national, as when he stood alone, everywhere without and
beyond the despised and hated Gentile. And this intense and conservative
nationality springs essentially out of the central conception of Judaism,
"God is _one_." Be He the incarnation of pitiless vengeance, hardening
Pharaoh's heart that He may execute sevenfold wrath on him and his
people; be He the Good Shepherd, who "gathers the lambs in His arms," and
for their sakes "tempers His rough wind in the day of His east wind;"--to
the Jew He has been and is, "I am the Lord; that is My name; and My glory
will I not give to another."
Through those long ages of darkness, devil-worship, and polytheism (in
its grossest forms all around), the Jew stood up in unfaltering protest
against all. Persecutions, proscriptions, tortures in every form, were
of no avail. On the gibbet, on the rack, amid the flames, his last words
embodied the central confession of Judaism, "O Israel, the Lord _thy_ God
is one Lord." Christianity, the appointed custodier of the still more
central truth, "God is love," had to all appearance failed of its
mission; had not only merged its higher message in a theistic
presentation, dark and terroristic as that of Judaism at its dawn, but
had absorbed into its scheme, under other names, the gods many who swarm
all around it; till nowhere and never, save by some soul upborne by its
own fervour above these dense fogs and mists, could individual man meet
his God face to face, and realise that higher life of the soul which is
His free gift to all who seek it. Between this heathenised Christianity
and Judaism, the contrast was the sharpest, the contest the most
embittered and unvarying. Elsewhere we hear of times of toleration and
indulgence even for the hunted Monotheist,--in medieval Christendom,
never. The Inquisition plied its rack for the Jews with a more fiendish
zeal than even for the hated Morisco. The mob held him responsible for
plague and famine; and kings and nobles hounded the mob on to
indiscriminate massacre. The Jew lived on through it all,--lived,
multiplied, and prospered, and became more and more emphatically the Jew.
Is it too much to say that in the West in particular, where this contrast
and contest were keenest, Judaism was, during these long ages of terror
and darkness, the great conservator of the vital truth of the Divine
unity, under whatever forms science or philosophy may now attempt to
define this; and in being so, became the conservator of that thought,
without the vivifying power of which, howsoever imperfectly apprehended,
all human advance is impossible? Is it exaggerating the importance of
the Jew and his intense nationality, based on such a truth, to say that,
but for his presence, "scattered and peeled," among all nations, the
Europe we now know could not have been? And this indestructible
nationality, for whose existence miracle has been called into account--has
it no significance in the future equal to what it has had in the past?
There seems an impression that the Jew is being absorbed by other races.
We hear much of relaxing Judaisms; of rituals and beliefs assimilating to
those around them; of peculiarities being laid aside, that have withstood
the wear and tear of centuries. The inference is sought to be drawn that
the Jew is beginning to feel his isolation, and to sink his own national
life amid that among which he dwells. We accept all the facts; but can
only see in them that, under the influence of the profound thought and
research of its great leaders, Judaism is shaking off the dust of ages,
and is more vividly awaking to its mission upon earth. We believe it is
coming forth from all this superficial change, more intensely and
powerfully Judaical, more penetrated and vivified by that thought which
for untold centuries has been the life of its life. What is to be its
specific future as a leader in the advancement and redemption of
humanity, none can foresee. But it seems the reverse of strange that a
genius like George Eliot's should have been powerfully attracted by this
problem; and that, in one of her noblest works, she should have very
prominently addressed herself to at least a partial solution of it. That
the solution she suggests is a noble one, few who carefully consider the
subject will, we think, deny. The establishment of a Jewish polity, in
the true sense of the word a theocracy, where the Infinite Holiness is
supreme, and in its supremacy is included a reign of justice, purity, and
love;--the establishment of such a polity locally between the
materialistic proclivities of the West and the psychological subtleties
of the East, mediative between them, communicating from each to each of
those essentials to human life in which the other is deficient, is a
conception worthy of her genius.
Another minor and very trivial objection to the presence of this Jewish
element need be no more than adverted to. It is the presence of such
different types as the mean-souled scoundrel Lapidoth; the shrewd self-
approving trader Cohen, with the inimitable picture of a home-life so
pleasant and kindly; the vague intense enthusiasm, the ardent aspirations
and fervent hopes of Mordecai; the absorbing Judaism of the Physician;
the fierce revulsion of his daughter against her race and name; the meek,
delicate, ethereal purity of Mirah; the innate Jewish yearnings and
aspirations of Deronda, expanded by all the breadth that could be given
by the highest Anglo-Saxon culture and training. To those who take
exception to this, it is answer more than sufficient that, as an artist,
it was necessary to present every typical phase of Jewish character and
life; and we confess there are other passages in the work we could better
spare than these delicious pictures of a London-Jewish pawnbroker at
home.
Of all the characters portrayed in fiction, there is perhaps not one so
difficult to analyse and define as that which stands out so prominently
in this wonderful work, Gwendolen Harleth. At once attractive and
repellent--fascinating in no ordinary degree, and yet, in the estimation
of all around her, hard, cold, and worldly-minded--bewitching, alike from
her beauty, grace, and accomplishments, yet a superficial and seemingly
heartless coquette,--she presents a combination of at once some of the
finest and some of the meanest qualities of woman. Her hardness towards
her fond, doting mother, and her contempt for her sisters, are
conspicuous almost from her first appearance. Her arrogant defiance of
Deronda in the gambling-house, and the fierce revulsion of pride with
which she received the return of her necklace, are entirely in keeping
with these characteristics. And the news of the reduction of her family
to utter poverty awakens no emotion save on her own behalf alone. Yet,
ever and anon, faint gleams of tenderness towards her gentle mother break
forth, though soon obscured by the bitter insistance with which her own
claims to station, wealth, and luxury assert themselves. Her first
acceptance of Grandcourt represents this phase of her twofold nature; her
rejection of him and flight from him, after her interview with Mrs
Glasher, are equally characteristic of the second. That rejection is
actuated much more by resentment against Mrs Glasher, that she should
have dared to anticipate her in anything resembling affection he had to
give, and against him, that he should have presumed to offer to her a
heart already sealed to anything resembling love, than by the faintest
approach to it in her own. The leap, as it were, by which she ultimately
accepts him, is merely a quick, half-conscious instinct to secure her own
deliverance from poverty, and the attainment of those higher external
enjoyments of life for which she conceived herself formed; and if, in
addition, a thought of relieving the wants of her mother and sisters
obtrudes, it holds only a very secondary place in her mind. Deeming
herself born for dominion over every male heart, in her utter childish
ignorance of human character, she deems that Grandcourt also shall be her
slave.
But through all her relations with that magnificent incarnation of self-
isolation and self-love, she is compelled to cower before him. Again and
again she attempts to turn, only to be crushed under his heel as
ruthlessly as a worm. During the yachting voyage it is the same; intense
inward revulsion on the one side--cold, inexorable despotism on the
other.
The drowning scene first begins to stir the better nature within her. The
intensity of terror with which she regards the involuntary murderous
thought, and which prompted her leap into the water, the fervour of
remorse which followed, all begin to indicate a nature which may yet be
attuned to the highest qualities. On the other hand, the sweet clinging
trust with which she hangs on Deronda, looks up to him, feels that for
her every possibility of good lies in association with him, are those of
a guileless, artless child. She has been called a hard-hearted, callous
woman of the world: her worldliness is on the surface alone. Her first
cry to Deronda is the piteous wail of a forsaken child; the letter with
which their relations close is the fond yearning of a child towards one
whom she looks up to as protector and saviour.
Grandcourt is portrayed before us in more massive and simple proportions
as a type of concentrated selfishness. We dare not despise him, we
cannot loathe him--we stand bowed and awe-stricken before him. He never
for a moment falls from that calm dignity of pride and
self-isolation--never for a moment softens into respect for anything
without himself. Without a moment's exception he is ever consistent,
imperturbable in his self-containedness, ruthlessly crushing all things
from dog to wife, under his calm, cold, slighting contempt. He stands up
before us, not so much indomitable as simply unassailable. We cannot
conceive the boldest approaching or encroaching on him--all equally
shiver and quail before that embodiment of the devil as represented by
human self-love.
Fain would we linger over the Jewish girl, Mirah. She has been spoken of
as characterless; to us it seems as if few characters of more exquisite
loveliness have ever been portrayed. From her first appearance robed in
her meek despair, through all her subsequent relations with Deronda, her
brother, and Gwendolen, there is the same delicate purity, the same
tender meekness, the same full acceptance of the life of a Jewess as--in
harmony with the life of her race--one of "sufferance." Even as her
spirits gladden in that sunny Meyrick home, with its delicious interiors,
and brighten under the noble-hearted musician Klesmer's encouragement,
the brightness refers to something entirely without herself. In one
sense far more acquainted with the evil that is in the world than
Gwendolen with all her alleged worldliness, it is her shrinking from the
least approach to this that prompts her strange, apparently hopeless
flight in search of the mother she had loved so dearly. Her sad, humble
complaints that she has not been a good Jewess, because she has been
inevitably cut off from the use of Jewish books, and restrained by her
scoundrel father from attendance at Jewish worship, find their answer in
her deep unfailing sense of her share in the national doom of suffering.
We feel with Mrs Meyrick "that she is a pearl, and the mud has only
washed her." In her startling interview with Gwendolen, the sudden
indignant protest which the inquiry of the latter calls out is a protest
against even a hint of evil being directed towards that which has been
best and highest to her. Her love for Deronda steals into the maiden
purity of her soul with an unconscious delicacy which cannot be
surpassed; and as she parts from us by his side, we feel that she is no
Judith or Esther, but the meek Mary of the annunciation, going forth on
her unknown mission of love with the words, "Behold the handmaid of the
Lord."
Beside the exquisitely meek child-figure, with the small delicate head
faintly drooping under the sorrow which is the heritage of her race,
stands up Deronda in his calm dignity. As he lies on the grass, and the
first faint glimmering of the possible origin of his life breaks upon
him, even the first inevitable risings of resentment against Sir Hugo are
softened and toned down by the old yearning affection; and the longings
for the unknown mother, intense as they are, yet shrink from full
discovery of what she may have been or may still be. He and he alone, in
unconscious dignity, stands up uncowering before Grandcourt. His whole
relations to Mordecai are characterised by a deep suppressed enthusiasm,
that fully responds to the enthusiast's soul. Towards Gwendolen every
word he speaks, every act he does, is marked by the fervour of his whole
nature; but it is beside the fair head drooping under its burden of
hereditary sorrow that Deronda passes from our sight, the fitting type of
him who shall yet, sooner or later, re-establish that great Jewish
theocracy so long dreamt of, and reaffirm that Judaism yet holds a great
place in human life and civilisation.
We have throughout had no intention of dealing with George Eliot merely
as the artist; but if we have succeeded in showing this unity of moral
purpose and aim as pervading all her works, as giving rise to their
variety by reason of the varieties and modifications it necessitates in
order to its full illustration, and as ministered to, directly or
indirectly, by all the accessory characters and incidents of these
creations,--the question naturally arises, whether this does not
constitute her an artist of the highest possible order.
But the true worth of George Eliot's works rests, we think, on higher
grounds than any mere perfection of artistic finish; on this ground,
specially, that among all our fictionists she stands out as the deepest,
broadest, and most catholic illustrator of the true ethics of
Christianity; the most earnest and persistent expositor of the true
doctrine of the Cross, that we are born and should live to something
higher than the love of happiness; the most subtle and profound
commentator on the solemn words, "He that loveth his soul shall lose it:
he that hateth his soul shall keep it unto life eternal."
Footnotes:
{15} The translators of our English Bible, possibly perplexed by the
seeming paradox involved in these remarkable words, have taken an
unwarrantable freedom with the original, in rendering the Greek [Greek
text], invariably the synonym of the soul, the spiritual and undying
element in man, by "life"--the [Greek text] of all Greek literature so-
called, sacred and profane alike; the synonym of that life which is his
in common with the beast of the field and the tree of the forest.
{29} Perhaps no finer and more subtle illustration of this "instinct of
the gentleman" can be found in literature than when, at the moment of
Harold Transome's deepest humiliation, where Jermyn claims him as his
son, good old Sir Marmaduke, not only his political opponent but
personally disliking him, for the first and only time in all their
intercourse addresses him by his Christian name, "Come, _Harold_."
{97} In connection with Bulstrode occurs one of those delicate
indications of character, condensed into a few words, which others would
expand into pages, peculiar to George Eliot. It occurs in the depth of
his humiliation, when his wife, hitherto comparatively characterless, in
full token of her acceptance of their fallen lot, "takes off all her
ornaments, and puts on a plain gown, and instead of wearing her much
adorned-cap and large bows of hair, brushes down her hair, and puts on a
plain bonnet-cap, which makes her look like an early Methodist."
{103} Does all poetry ancient or modern, so-called sacred or profane,
contain an image more impressive and majestic than that in the "doom of
Babylon," as the great incarnation of pride and luxury descends to its
place: "Hades from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming:
it stirreth up the dead for thee, even all the chief ones of the earth;
it hath raised up from their thrones all the kings of the nations."