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