The accounts of George Eliot’s earlier life, which are in general
circulation, are in some respects imaginary. ‘George Eliot’--Mary Ann
Evans--was not the daughter of a poor clergyman, nor was she ever
‘adopted’ by a wealthy one. She was the daughter of a land surveyor
in the Midland Counties, and was brought up at her father’s home,
her mother dying when Mary Ann Evans was still a child. Nor was she
ever the ‘pupil’ of Mr. Herbert Spencer, nor a frequent writer in the
_Westminster Review_. She made the acquaintance and the friendship
of Mr. Spencer when she was a woman, and already the mistress of
the abstruse subjects in which she then chiefly delighted. She was
for a time joint-editor of the _Westminster_ with Dr. Chapman; but
her writings in that Review were neither numerous nor generally
important. After a residence of some years in Coventry--where she
learned profoundly the features of the ‘Midlands,’ which she afterwards
described--Mary Ann Evans came to London. At twenty-six years old
she translated Strauss’s _Life of Jesus_, and seven years later,
Feuerbach’s _Essence of Christianity_; but her efforts at creative
writing were wisely delayed. Her apprenticeship to Literature and
Philosophy was elaborate and laborious; her training was extensive and
deep. It was not until 1858 that _Scenes of Clerical Life_ betrayed the
presence of a new artist in Fiction--an artist of fresh gifts, but of
undeveloped art.
The narratives of the ‘Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton,’ of
‘Janet’s Repentance,’ and of ‘Mr. Gilfil’s Love-Story’--the _Scenes of
Clerical Life_, in other words--impressed certain readers, and deserved
to impress them; but not even the pathos of Mrs. Barton’s death would
have given the writer lasting reputation had the book continued to
stand alone. On re-perusal, the imperfections of its mechanism are too
apparent; the novelist had not learned the art of proportion, nor the
art of selection and rejection. Some little books, no bigger than the
_Scenes of Clerical Life_, have been enough to secure for their authors
an enduring fame. Nothing more than the _Vicar of Wakefield_ could have
been required to keep Goldsmith’s memory green. Sterne, desiring to be
immortal, was under no obligation to write anything more, after he had
written the _Sentimental Journey_. But the _Scenes of Clerical Life_,
admirably fresh and spontaneous as they were, gave no such position to
their author. It was not a young woman, but it was a woman young in her
art, who was at work in them.
With _Adam Bede_ it was otherwise. _Adam Bede_, published about the
beginning of 1859, was seen at once to be more than a touching, and
more than a popular, story. It was an achievement of complete art,
and had the power of complete art, ‘to teach a truth obliquely,’ nor
‘wrong the thought’--as Mr. Browning has subtly put it--‘nor wrong
the thought, missing the mediate word.’ It was at bottom a work of
noble teaching. In it the novelist described with fidelity, but with
poetic fidelity, scenes and characters the like of which she thoroughly
knew; and the world recognised both the truth and the charm of the
portrayal, and if it did not take to the young Squire, it took about
equally to the two most strongly contrasted heroines that ever figured
in one volume--to the preaching woman, Dinah Morris, with her exalted
and patient spirit, and to the giddy Hetty, who had no virtue but the
virtue of fascination.
It was chiefly to provincial society, or to the humbler society of the
country-side, that George Eliot kept in her earlier works; and it was
there that she was ever best. The elaborate Dutch painting of _Silas
Marner_ dealt sympathetically with the religious life of obscure sects;
_The Mill on the Floss_ portrayed the humours of the lower middle
class, and gave us a delightful study of the passionate and lovable
‘Maggie’; _Felix Holt_ dealt with country politics, though its best
interest lay in the development of three wonderful characters--the
agreeable Esther, the perplexed Felix, and the Dissenting minister
who, in that old-world corner of England where the scene lay, had even
in our own generation the dignity and quietude of an ancient Puritan
emigrating beyond seas. Immense and always tender study of actual life
was evident in these novels; and yet it did not require the publication
of such a _tour de force_ as _Romola_, which, in 1863, followed _The
Mill on the Floss_ and _Silas Marner_, to prove that the only novelist
of quite the first rank who had arisen since Dickens and Thackeray
was most powerful in work inspired by meditation and learning, rather
than by observation, and that in that respect, as of course in many
others, she differed absolutely from Dickens, whose strength lay in the
observation of humanity, and from Thackeray, whose strength lay in the
observation of ‘good society.’ If some works of George Eliot’s, of
later date than _Romola_, remind us too often that their author, like
the character in _Faust_, had _schrecklich viel gelesen_--that George
Eliot was burdened with her learning--_Romola_ is a conspicuous example
of the ‘talent that forms itself,’ not exactly ‘in solitude,’ yet by
profound and continuous meditation. Like all the greater works of its
writer, it is a study of the heart. And in _Romola_ the subtle wit of
Italy is displayed, with curious variety of power, by a writer who had
shown herself mistress, long before, of the blunter English humour.
But such a success as that of _Romola_--the success of an historical
novelist for whom history is alive and is not a mere tradition, mere
decorative background--is hardly to be made more than once. _Romola_
may live at least as long as _Esmond_--in _Esmond_ the _tour de force_
is, if anything, more apparent; the machinery creaks sometimes yet more
audibly in the working. In any case George Eliot did wisely to bring
her imagination back to England, and to the shires ‘which we the heart
of England well may call,’ and, having given us _Felix Holt_, to give
us _Middlemarch_. _Middlemarch_, perhaps, has two faults as a work of
art, but they are faults which evidence, at all events, the range of
its writer’s mind. It is not properly one story, but several stories.
The desire to put forth in a single colossal work--and _Middlemarch_
is of the length of two three-volume novels--a picture of the whole
of provincial life, touched at points, and disturbed, by the problems
of our time, resulted in the creation of a book in which the many
threads of narrative were often but slightly blended. _Middlemarch_ is
not a cabinet picture; it is a vast panorama. Again, in _Middlemarch_
there was visible, for the first time in George Eliot’s career, some
relaxation--or worse than relaxation--of literary style. Though on the
whole it is justly allowed to be a noble piece of English writing, it
is in expression less lucid and felicitous than the earlier novels;
and the germs of a style charged too much with scientific similes are
found to be of increased growth in _Daniel Deronda_. In George Eliot’s
earliest fiction, though it was written in mature years, her art was
not developed. In her latest, it was not concealed.
But between the two--between the _Scenes of Clerical Life_ and _Daniel
Deronda_--there lie some half-dozen romances, prolix, indeed, and dull
at times, yet in some ways almost perfect in the most serious order of
literary work. And, moreover, the presence of sheer mental power, the
power chiefly of analysis and of synthesis, is almost as evident in
_Daniel Deronda_ as in the better fictions. The study of modern Jewish
life and character in that formidable novel was of such a nature as to
lead a leader of Jewish Society to pay a tribute to its knowledge and
its sympathy. That study was directed, not only by insight, but by a
continuous desire to do justice to the subject selected--to the minds
chosen for dissection. The wide and deep interest in the fortunes of
humanity, which characterised George Eliot, and which increased with
her learning and her years--as her art somewhat declined--can never
have been more apparent than in _Daniel Deronda_. The interest was
sometimes, it is true, evidenced by way of an exalted pity; and seeing
how removed that pity seemed from all that aroused it, the saying was
remembered by certain critics that pity is akin to contempt. Those
critics had understood George Eliot but superficially. All through her
later works--and not in _Daniel Deronda_ and _Middlemarch_ alone--there
is visible an increasing personal sense of the inevitableness of
mistake, of a ‘waste of force’ in human life; and that gave to the
labour of even this bright intellect a sadness which was scarcely
bitterness at all.
George Eliot, during many years, was occasionally busy with what is
formally poetry--informally, of course, much of her best prose was
poetry, and poetry of a higher order. In some of her verse--in _Jubal_
and the _Spanish Gypsy_--she touched on the careers and characters
of people whom she would hardly have brought into her novels, and in
one or other of her poems she expressed with a fulness and intensity
not found in her prose fiction that love of music and that sympathy
with the aspirations of the musical artist which she shared with the
great writer of _Abt Vogler_. The docile public received her poems
with at least sufficient appreciation--a part of which may fairly be
set down to the remembrance of those triumphs as a novelist which, for
the time, she had laid aside. But her poems were, in the main, like
Raphael’s departure from the art of his more constant practice--like
the sonnets of Michael Angelo--the evidences of an artist’s aspiration
towards a field of success which shall have the charm of what is new
and unfamiliar. They were that, and hardly more. It is, of course,
on the romances of George Eliot that her fame will rest, and on them
not because of any reflection they present of the manners of our
time--these, in truth, they left to other novelists--but because of the
earnestness and profundity of their dealing with problems of the age,
and problems of our nature. A future generation may find, and, indeed,
not a few judges, most worthy to be listened to, declare already, that
much of her sad philosophy is itself a mistake as great as any which
her genius discovered in the world she lived in. But if George Eliot’s
analysis of life betrays some deeply rooted faults, it will at least
always be admitted that it was that of a grave and gifted inquirer. If
the work which began with the _Scenes of Clerical Life_, and ended,
not auspiciously, with _Theophrastus Such_, has great deficiencies, it
was wrought, at all events, by a serious artist, a free and wonderful
spirit.
(_Standard_, 24th December 1880.)