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