"I really feel for you, sacrificing as you are your own tastes and
comforts for the pleasure of others, and that in a manner the most
trying to rebellious flesh and blood; for I verily believe that in
most cases it requires more of a martyr's spirit to endure with
patience and cheerfulness daily crossings and interruptions of our
petty desires and pursuits and to rejoice in them, if they can be
made to conduce to God's glory and our own sanctification, than
even to lay down our lives for the truth."
Deep religious feeling was one of the most striking characteristics of
this period of her youth. On her nineteenth birthday she writes:--
"May the Lord give me such an insight into what is truly good that
I may not rest contented with making Christianity a mere addendum
to my pursuits, or with tacking it as a mere fringe to my garments!
May I seek to be sanctified wholly!"
This religious feeling she carried with her throughout life, although
she soon left behind her the tenets and creeds of the church in which
she was born and for which she had so strong an affection. In later
life, although placing herself entirely outside of historic
Christianity, and becoming a rationalist of the rationalists, the fervor
of strong religious feeling never left her, and to her latest days she
loved to read the Scriptures and to feel the glow of devotional feeling
which belonged to her nature. The strong and powerful motive of her life
in youth and age was the intense desire to aid and help the world, for
which she felt a compassion so strong as to remind one of the
descriptions given of Buddha in Eastern song and story. In every period
of her life, in her most private letters and journals, this burden of
the world's sorrow seemed to find expression, and her pitying love was
almost Christ-like in its tenderness.
In forming an estimate of the woman we must never lose sight of this
predominating feeling. Next to it in intensity is to be placed the
longing for love and sympathy, the strength of the affections. No such
deeply loving human heart has been pictured to the world in all the
realm of books. To those who have been accustomed to think of George
Eliot as the master-mind of her time, the greatest intellect of her
generation, the revelation of her heart will be a great surprise and
delight. A deep, strong, passionate, loving human soul, with heights and
depths of devotion and tenderness unthinkable even to the poorer natures
around her,--it was in this that both her strength and her weakness lay.
This affectionateness was shown in her youth in her devotion to her
father, whose home she kept for several years, and in lavish regard for
the few friends who were near her, all of whom she retained and loved
to her dying day. It was shown later on in the passionate and absorbing
love she gave to Mr. Lewes throughout a lifetime, and which seemed but
to deepen and widen with the years; and in the tenderness and
thoughtfulness of the mother-love she gave to his children, and which
seem to lack not one of the elements of real maternal feeling. This
strong, pitying, passionate love of hers--a love hardly to be conceived
of by cold and self-contained natures--is the key to the one action of
her life requiring apology and charitable construction. In the first
place, she pitied Mr. Lewes for the sorrows of his life and for the
unfaithfulness of the wife upon whom he had lavished his heart's
devotion, and whom he had forgiven for the first offence, only to be
deceived the second time. Next, the strong feeling for justice which
characterized her nature rebelled against that law which bound him to
this unfaithful wife simply because he had once forgiven her; and,
finally, the desire she felt to comfort his loneliness and redeem his
life overcame all the scruples which the integrity of her nature must
have confronted her with, and she defied the law which was odious to her
and the conventionalities which were dear to her, in the same act, and
assumed the tie which held her in such loyal allegiance until death
severed it. Here is the only allusion she made to it in all her
correspondence, as far as we know. This was written to one of her oldest
friends, Mrs. Bray.
"If there is any one action or relation of my life which is, and
always has been, profoundly serious, it is my relation to Mr.
Lewes. It is, however, natural enough that you should mistake me in
many ways, for not only are you unacquainted with Mr. Lewes's real
character, and the course of his actions, but also it is several
years since you and I were much together, and it is possible that
the modifications my mind has undergone may be quite in the
opposite direction of what you imagine. No one can be better aware
than yourself that it is possible for two people to hold different
opinions on momentous subjects with equal sincerity and an equally
earnest conviction that their respective opinions are alone the
truly moral ones. If we differ on the subject of the marriage laws,
I at least can believe that you cleave to what you believe to be
good, and I don't know of anything in the nature of your views that
should prevent you from believing the same of me. How far we differ
I think we neither of us know; for I am ignorant of your precise
views, and apparently you attribute to me both feelings and
opinions which are not mine. We cannot set each other right in
letters; but one thing I can tell you in few words. Light and
easily broken ties are what I neither desire theoretically nor
could live for practically. Women who are satisfied with such ties
do not act as I have done. That any unworldly, unsuperstitious
person who is sufficiently acquainted with the realities of life
can pronounce my relation to Mr. Lewes immoral, I can only
understand by remembering how subtle and complex are the influences
which mould opinion. But I do remember this, and I indulge in no
arrogant or uncharitable thoughts about those who condemn us, even
though we might have expected a somewhat different verdict. From
the majority of persons we never, of course, looked for anything
but condemnation. We are leading no life of self-indulgence,
except, indeed, that being happy in each other we find everything
easy. We are working hard to provide for others better than we
provide for ourselves, and to fulfil every responsibility that lies
upon us."
These responsibilities were not light, for they were poor and not yet
famous, and must support by their pens not only themselves, but three
boys of Mr. Lewes, and their mother. This they found no easy thing to do
at first; but when the great success of George Eliot's novels had been
attained, their financial affairs became easy, and continued so to the
end.
Their life together seemed to be one of unbroken love and confidence,
their delight in each other increasing, if possible, with time. The
letters and journals of George Eliot are full of expressions of this
love and trust, and give us very pleasing pictures of the character and
life of Mr. Lewes. He seems to have been an eminently genial, kind,
loving, and appreciative man; a man, too, of fascinating manners and
wonderfully keen intellect, though totally lacking in any such genius as
that which has made George Eliot immortal. Charming glimpses of their
home life occur on every page,--a home life that was sweet and well
ordered, pervaded by such a spirit of love and devotion as would
sanctify any home. George Eliot was the most womanly of women, despite
what is often called her masculine intellect; and she made a genuine
home, after the true and womanly fashion, delighting in good order and
neatness and such attention to details as is an absolute necessity in
the formation of a happy home. She never allowed her literary work to
prevent her from overseeing that home, and in her younger days seems to
have had a real taste for executing these housekeeping details herself.
There was no remote hint of Mrs. Jellyby in her, but strong, practical
common-sense in all the management of her family affairs, and a real
delight in having all things well ordered and agreeable in her home.
This is one of the most pleasing of the many revelations of this book.
We love to know that she was a true woman, and no intellectual
monstrosity. The glimpses that are given of her nursing her father
through his long last sickness are very sweet and touching, and
everything connected with her devotion to Mr. Lewes's children, down to
poor Thornie's death, makes us love her more and more. Indeed, it is a
strong, pure, loving, and noble woman that is brought out on every page
of this Life. But a very sad and deep-thoughted woman, too; one to whom
pity goes out as naturally as love. She was afflicted with ill health
all her life, and the record of all this suffering is at times
oppressive. One cannot help wishing that we might have had the same
woman strong and well, and wondering what sort of books would have been
the result. Far pleasanter and more cheering, no doubt, for some of them
are heart-breakingly sad as it is, but perhaps no deeper or truer. Then,
too, she suffered keenly through her sympathies, feeling for all loss
and wrong with the acutest pain; and her lack of faith intensified all
her suffering. So did lack of hope; for she was almost as destitute of
this cheering friend of man as Carlyle himself, and was given to
despondency as the sparks fly upward. In her earlier writing the tears
and smiles are blended, her humor lighting up the dark places; but the
deepening years deepened her gloom, and her later writing is sombre
almost throughout. Yet she had great capacity for joy as well as for
sorrow, and enjoyed with the utmost intensity the brighter parts of
life, and retained this sense of the pleasure of life even to the end.
She speaks much of the intense happiness of her life with Mr. Lewes, and
they seem never to have been separated, taking all journeys and holidays
together, and never wearying of what she calls their "_solitude a
deux_." Such expressions as these are very frequent throughout the
book:--
"I never have anything to call out my ill-humor or
discontent,--which you know was always ready enough to come on
slight call,--and I have everything to call out love and gratitude.
I am very happy,--happy in the highest blessing life can give us,
the perfect love and sympathy of a nature that stimulates my own to
healthful activity. My life has deepened unspeakably during the
last year. I feel a greater capacity for moral and intellectual
enjoyment, a more acute sense of my deficiencies in the past, a
more solemn desire to be faithful to coming duties, than I remember
at any former period of my life. And my happiness has deepened,
too; the blessedness of a perfect love and union grows daily. Few
women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long,
sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age."
And this extract from the journal of Mr. Lewes leaves us his thought
about their life, which is so like her own:--
"I owe Spencer another and a deeper debt. It was through him that I
learned to know Marian,--to know her was to love her,--and since
then my life has been a new birth. To her I owe all my prosperity
and all my happiness. God bless her!"
That her great books would ever have been written without this loving
sympathy and appreciation on the part of Mr. Lewes, seems extremely
doubtful. She needed encouragement at every step, being prone to despair
about her writings, and she had the utmost reliance upon the judgment
and taste of the companion of her life. And he seems to have been
everything that heart could desire as loving critic and counsellor. Her
sympathy with the lives and hopes of others is very charming,
particularly with the love and marriage of their eldest boy, though it
is shown constantly in a true womanly way; as, for instance:--
"A pretty thing has happened to an acquaintance of mine, which is
quite a tonic to one's hope. She has all her life been working in
various ways, as housekeeper, governess, etc.,--a dear little dot
about four feet eleven in height; pleasant to look at and clever; a
working-woman without any of those epicene queernesses that belong
to the class. More than once she has told me that courage quite
forsook her. She felt there was no good in living and striving.
Well, a man of fortune and accomplishments has just fallen in love
with her--now she is thirty-three. It is the prettiest story of a
swift-decided passion, and made me cry for joy. Madame B---- and I
went with her to buy her wedding clothes. If you will only imagine
all I have not said, you will think this a very charming fairy
tale."
In 1878 her happy companionship with the man she had so passionately
loved was ended by his death. The only entry in her diary in 1879 is
this: "Here I and sorrow sit." The desolation of her life told terribly
upon her health and spirits. She saw no one, wrote to no one, had no
thoughts, as she tells us, for many months. Among the first lines she
wrote were these:--
"Some time, if I live, I shall be able to see you,--perhaps sooner
than any one else,--but not yet. Life seems to get harder instead
of easier. When I said some time, I meant still a distant time. I
want to live a little time, that I may do certain things for his
sake. So I try to keep up my strength, and I work as much as I can
to save my mind from imbecility. But that is all at present. But
what used to be joy is joy no longer, and what is pain is easier,
because he has not to bear it."