GEORGE ELIOT
George Eliot began fiction a decade later than Thackeray, but
seems more than a decade nearer to us. With her the full pulse
of modern realism is felt a-throbbing. There is no more of the
ye's and thous with which, when he would make an exordium,
Thackeray addressed the world--a fashion long since laid aside.
Eliot drew much nearer to the truth, the quiet, homely verity of
her scenes is a closer approximation to life, realizes life more
vitally than the most veracious page of "Vanity Fair." Not that
the great woman novelist made the mistake of a slavish imitation
of the actual: that capital, lively scene in the early part of
"The Mill on the Floss," where Mrs. Tulliver's connections make
known to us their delightsome personalities, is not a mere
transcript from life; and all the better for that. Nevertheless,
the critic can easily discover a difference between Thackeray
and Eliot in this regard, and the ten years between them (as we
saw in the case of Dickens and Thackeray) are partly
responsible: technique and ideal in literary art were changing
fast. George Eliot was a truer realist. She took more seriously
her aim of interpreting life, and had a higher conception of her
artistic mission. Dickens in his beautiful tribute to Thackeray
on the latter's death, speaks of the failure of the author of
"Pendennis" to take his mission, his genius, seriously: there
was justice in the remark. Yet we heard from the preface to
"Pendennis" that Thackeray had the desire to depict a typical
man of society with the faithful frankness of a Fielding, and
since him, Thackeray states, never again used. But the
novelist's hearers were not prepared, the time was not yet ripe,
and the novelist himself lacked the courage, though he had the
clear vision. With Eliot, we reach the psychologic moment: that
deepest truth, the truth of character, exhibited in its
mainsprings of impulse and thought, came with her into English
fiction as it had never before appeared. It would hardly be
overstatement to say that modern psychology in the complete
sense as method and interest begins in the Novel with Eliot. For
there is a radical difference, not only between the Novel which
exploits plot and that which exploits character: but also
between that which sees character in terms of life and that
which sees it in terms of soul. Eliot's fiction does the latter:
life to her means character building, and has its meaning only
as an arena for spiritual struggle. Success or failure means but
this: have I grown in my higher nature, has my existence shown
on the whole an upward tendency?
If so, well and good. If not, whatever of place or power may be
mine, I am among the world's failures, having missed the goal.
This view, steadily to be encountered in all her fiction, gives
it the grave quality, the deep undertone and, be it confessed,
at times the almost Methodistic manner, which mark this woman's
worth in its weakness and its notable strength. In her early
days, long before she made fiction, she was morbidly religious;
she became in the fulness of time one of the intellectually
emancipated. Yet, emotionally, spiritually, she remained to the
end an intensely religious person. Conduct, aspiration,
communion of souls, these were to her always the realities. If
Thackeray's motto was Be good, and Dickens', Do good, Eliot's
might be expressed as: Make me good! Consider for a moment and
you will see that these phrases stand successively for a
convention, an action and an aspiration.
The life of Mary Ann Evans falls for critical purposes into
three well-defined divisions: the early days of country life
with home and family and school; her career as a savant; and the
later years, when she performed her service as story-teller.
Unquestionably, the first period was most important in
influencing her genius. It was in the home days at Griff, the
school days at Nuneaton nearby, that those deepest, most
permanent impressions were absorbed which are given out in the
finest of her fictions. Hence came the primal inspiration which
produced her best. And it is because she drew most generously
upon her younger life in her earlier works that it is they which
are most likely to survive the shocks of Time.
The experiences of Eliot's childhood, youth and young womanhood
were those which taught her the bottom facts about middle-class
country life in the mid-century, and in a mid-county of England;
Shakspere's county of Warwick. Those experiences gave her such
sympathetic comprehension of the human case in that environment
that she became its chronicler, as Dickens had become the
chronicler of the lower middle-class of the cities. Unerringly,
she generalized from the microcosm of Warwickshire to the life
of the world and guessed the universal human heart. With utmost
sympathy, joined with a nice power of scrutiny, she saw and
understood the character-types of the village, when there was a
village life which has since passed away: the yeoman, the small
farmer, the operative in the mill, the peasant, the squire and
the parson, the petty tradesman, the man of the professions: the
worker with his hands at many crafts.
She matured through travel, books and social contact, her
knowledge was greatly extended: she came to be, in a sense, a
cultured woman of the world, a learned person. Her later books
reflected this; they depict the so-called higher strata of
English society as in "Middlemarch," or, as in "Romola," give an
historical picture of another time in a foreign land. The woman
who was gracious hostess at those famous Sunday afternoons at
the Priory seems to have little likeness to the frail, shy,
country girl in Griff--seems, too, far more important; yet it
may be doubted whether all this later work reveals such mastery
of the human heart or comes from such an imperative source of
expression as do the earlier novels, "Adam Bede" and "The Mill
on the Floss." For human nature is one and the same in Griff or
London or Florence, as all the amplitude of the sky is mirrored
in the dewdrop. And although Eliot became in later life a more
accurate reporter of the intellectual unrest of her day, and had
probed deeper into the mystery and the burden of this
unintelligible world, great novels are not necessarily made in
that way and the majority of those who love her cleave to the
less burdened, more unforced expression of her power.
In those early days, moreover, her attitude towards life was
established: it meant a wish to improve the "complaining
millions of men." Love went hand in hand with understanding. It
may well be that the somberly grave view of humanity and of the
universe at large which came to be hers, although strengthened
by the positivistic trend of her mature studies, was generated
in her sickly youth and a reaction from the narrow theologic
thought with which she was then surrounded. Always frail--subject
through life to distressing illness--it would not be
fair to ask of this woman an optimism of the Mark Tapley stripe.
In part, the grave outlook was physical, temperamental: but also
it was an expression of a swiftly approaching mood of the late
nineteenth century. And the beginning can be traced back to the
autumn evenings in the big farmhouse at Griff when, as a mere
child, she wrestled or prayed with what she called her sick
soul. That stern, upright farmer father of hers seems the
dominant factor in her make-up, although the iron of her blood
was tempered by the livelier, more mundane qualities of her
sprightly mother, towards whom we look for the source of the
daughter's superb gift of humor. Whatever the component parts of
father and mother in her, and however large that personal
variation which is genius, of this we may be comfortably sure:
the deepest in the books, whether regarded as presentation of
life or as interpretation, came from the early Warwickshire
years.
Gradually came that mental eclaircissement which produced the
editor, the magazinist, the translator of Strauss. The
friendship with the Brays more than any one thing marks the
external cause of this awakening: but it was latent, this
response to the world of thought and of scholarship, and certain
to be called out sooner or later. Our chief interest in it is
due to the query how much it ministered to her coming career as
creative author of fiction.
George Eliot at this period looked perilously like a Blue
Stocking. The range and variety of her reading and the severely
intellectual nature of her pursuits justify the assertion. Was
this well for the novelist?
The reply might be a paradox: yes and no. This learning imparted
to Eliot's works a breadth of vision that is tonic and wins the
respect of the judicious. It helps her to escape from that bane
of the woman novelist--excessive sentiment without intellectual
orientation. But, on the other hand, there are times when she
appears to be writing a polemic, not a novel: when the tone
becomes didactic, the movement heavy--when the work seems
self-conscious and over-intellectualized. Nor can it be denied
that this tendency grew on Eliot, to the injury of her latest work.
There is a simple kind of exhortation in the "Clerical Scenes,"
but it disappears in the earliest novels, only to reappear in
stories like "Daniel Deronda." Any and all culture that comes to
a large, original nature (and such was Eliot's) should be for
the good of the literary product: learning in the narrower, more
technical sense, is perhaps likely to do harm. Here and there
there is a reminder of the critic-reviewer in her fiction.
George Eliot's intellectual development during her last years
widened her work and strengthened her comprehensive grasp of
life. She gained in interpretation thereby. There will, however,
always be those who hold that it would have been better for her
reputation had she written nothing after "Middlemarch," or even
after "Felix Holt." Those who object on principle to her
agnosticism, would also add that the negative nature of her
philosophy, her lack of what is called definite religious
convictions, had its share in injuring materially her maturest
fiction. The vitality or charm of a novel, however, is not
necessarily impaired because the author holds such views. It is
more pertinent to take the books as they are, in chronologic
order, to point out so far as possible their particular merits.
And first, the "Scenes from Clerical Life." It is interesting to
the student of this novelist that her writing of fiction was
suggested to her by Lewes, and that she tried her hand at a tale
when she was not far from forty years old. The question will
intrude: would a genuine fiction-maker need to be thus prodded
by a friend, and refrain from any independent attempt up to a
period so late? Yet it will not do to answer glibly in the
negative. Too many examples of late beginning and fine fiction
as a consequence are furnished by English literature to make
denial safe. We have seen Defoe and Richardson and a number of
later novelists breaking the rules--if any such exist. No one
can now read the "Clerical Scenes" without discovering in them
qualities of head and heart which, when allowed an enlarged
canvas and backed by a sure technique, could be counted on to
make worthy fiction. The quiet village life glows softly under
the sympathetic touch of a true painter.
A recent reading of this first book showed more clearly than
ever the unequalness of merit in the three stories, their strong
didactic bent, and the charmingly faithful observation which for
the present-day reader is their greatest attraction. The first
and simplest, "The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton," is by
far the best. The poorest is the second, "Mr. Gilfil's Love
Story," which has touches of conventional melodrama in a
framework reminiscent of earlier fictionists like Disraeli.
"Janet's Repentance," with its fine central character of the
unhappy wedded wife, is strong, sincere, appealing; and much of
the local color admirable. But--perhaps because there is more
attempt at story-telling, more plot--the narrative falls below
the beautiful, quiet chronicle of the days of Amos: an exquisite
portrayal of an average man who yet stands for humanity's best.
The tale is significant as a prelude to Eliot's coming work,
containing, in the seed, those qualities which were to make her
noteworthy. Perusing the volume to-day, we can hardly say that
it appears an epoch-making production in fiction, the
declaration of a new talent in modern literature. But much has
happened in fiction during the half century since 1857, and we
are not in a position to judge the feeling of those who then
began to follow the fortunes of the Reverend Amos.
But it is not difficult for the twentieth century reader, even
if blase, to understand that "Adam Bede," published when its
author was forty, aroused a furore of admiration: it still holds
general attention, and many whose opinion is worth having,
regard it with respect, affection, even enthusiasm.
The broader canvas was exactly what the novelist needed to show
her power of characterization, her ability to build up her
picture by countless little touches guided by the most
unflinching faith in detail and given vibrancy by the sympathy
which in all George Eliot's fiction is like the air you breathe.
Then, too, as an appeal to the general, there is more of story
interest, although neither here nor in any story to follow, does
plot come first with a writer whose chief interest is always
character, and its development. The autobiographic note deepens
and gives at once verity and intensity to the novel; here, as in
"The Mill on the Floss" which was to follow the next year, Eliot
first gave free play to that emotional seizure of her own past
to which reference has been made. The homely material of the
first novel was but part of its strength. Readers who had been
offered the flash-romantic fiction of Disraeli and Bulwer,
turned with refreshment to the placid annals of a village where,
none the less, the human heart in its follies and frailties and
nobilities, is laid bare. The skill with which the leisurely
moving story rises to its vivid moments of climactic interest--the
duel in the wood, Hetty's flight, the death of Adam's
father--is marked and points plainly to the advance, through
study and practice, of the novelist since the "Clerical Scenes";
constructive excellencies do not come by instinct. "Adam Bede"
is preeminently a book of belief, written not so much in ink as
in red blood, and in that psychic fluid that means the author's
spiritual nature. She herself declared, "I love it very much,"
and it reveals the fact on every page. Aside from its
indubitable worth as a picture of English middle-class country
life in an earlier nineteenth century than we know--the easy-going
days before electricity--it has its highest claim to our
regard as a reading in life, not conveyed by word of mouth
didactically, but carried in scene and character. The author's
tenderness over Hetty, without even sentimentalizing her as, for
example, Dumas sentimentalizes his Camille, suggests the mood of
the whole narrative: a large-minded, large-hearted comprehension
of humankind, an insistence on spiritual tests, yet with the
will to tell the truth and present impartially the darkest
shadows. It is because George Eliot's people are compounded with
beautiful naturalness of good and bad--not hopelessly bad with
Hetty, nor hopelessly good with Adam--that we understand them
and love them. Here is an element of her effectiveness. Even her
Dinah walks with her feet firmly planted upon the earth, though
her mystic vision may be skyward.
With "Adam Bede" she came into her own. The "Clerical Scenes"
had won critical plaudits: Dickens, in 1857 long settled in his
seat of public idolatry, wrote the unknown author a letter of
appreciation, so warm-hearted, so generous, that it is hard to
resist the pleasure of quoting it: it is interesting to remark
that in despite the masculine pen-name, he attributed the work
to a woman. But the public had not responded. With "Adam Bede"
this was changed; the book gained speedy popularity, the author
even meeting with that mixed compliment, a bogus claimant to its
authorship. And so, greatly encouraged, and stimulated to do her
best, she produced "The Mill on the Floss," a novel, which, if
not her finest, will always be placed high on her list of
representative fiction.
This time the story as such was stronger, there was more
substance and variety because of the greater number of
characters and their freer interplay upon each other. Most
important of all, when we look beyond the immediate reception by
the public to its more permanent position, the work is decidedly
more thoroughgoing in its psychology: it goes to the very core
of personality, where the earlier book was in some instances
satisfied with sketch-work. In "Adam Bede" the freshness comes
from the treatment rather than the theme. The framework, a
seduction story, is old enough--old as human nature and
pre-literary story-telling. But in "The Mill on the Floss" we
have the history of two intertwined lives, contrasted types from
within the confines of family life, bound by kin-love yet
separated by temperament. It is the deepest, truest of tragedy
and we see that just this particular study of humanity had not
been accomplished so exhaustively before in all the annals of
fiction. As it happened, everything conspired to make the author
at her best when she was writing this novel: as her letters
show, her health was, for her, good: we have noted the stimulus
derived from the reception of "Adam Bede"--which was as wine to
her soul. Then--a fact which should never be forgotten--the tale
is carried through logically and expresses, with neither
paltering nor evasion, George Eliot's sense of life's tragedy.
In the other book, on the contrary, a touch of the fictitious
was introduced by Lewes; Dinah and Adam were united to make at
the end a mitigation of the painfulness of Hetty's downfall.
Lewes may have been right in looking to the contemporary
audience, but never again did Eliot yield to that form of the
literary lie, the pleasant ending. She certainly did not in "The
Mill on the Floss": an element of its strength is its truth. The
book, broadly considered, moves slow, with dramatic accelerando
at cumulative moments; it is the kind of narrative where this
method is allowable without artistic sin. Another great
excellence is the superb insight into the nature of childhood,
boy and girl; if Maggie is drawn with the more penetrating
sympathy, Tom is finely observed: if the author never rebukes
his limitations, she states them and, as it were, lifts hands to
heaven to cry like a Greek chorus: "See these mortals love yet
clash! Behold, how havoc comes! Eheu! this mortal case!"
With humanity still pulling at her heart-strings, and conceiving
fiction which offered more value of plot than before, George
Eliot wrote the charming romance "Silas Marner," novelette in
form, modern romance in its just mingling of truth and
idealization: a work published the next year. She interrupted
"Romola" to do it, which is suggestive as indicating absorption
by the theme. This story offers a delightful blend of homely
realism with poetic symbolism. The miser is wooed from his
sordid love of gold by the golden glint of a little girl's hair:
as love creeps into his starved heart, heartless greed goes out
forever: before a soulless machine, he becomes a man. It is the
world-old, still potent thought that the good can drive out the
bad: a spiritual allegory in a series of vivid pictures carrying
the wholesomest and highest of lessons. The artistic and
didactic are here in happy union. And as nowhere else in her
work (unless exception be made in the case of "Romola") she sees
a truth in terms of drama. To read the story is to feel its
stage value: it is no surprise to know that several
dramatizations of the book have been made. Aside from its
central motive, the studies of homely village life, as well as
of polite society, are in Eliot's best manner: the humor of
Dolly Winthrop is of as excellent vintage as the humor of Mrs.
Poyser in "Adam Bede," yet with the necessary differentiation.
The typical deep sympathy for common humanity--just average
folks--permeates the handling. Moreover, while the romance has a
happy issue, as a romance should according to Stevenson, if it
possibly can, it does not differ in its view of life from so
fatalistic a book as "The Mill on the Floss"; for circumstances
change Silas; if the child Eppie had not come he might have
remained a miser. It was not his will alone that revolutionized
his life; what some would call luck was at work there. In "Silas
Marner" the teaching is of a piece with that of all her
representative work.
But when we reach "Romola" there is a change, debatable ground
is entered upon at once. Hitherto, the story-teller has mastered
the preacher, although an ever more earnest soul has been
expressing itself about Life. Now we enter the region of more
self-conscious literary art, of planned work and study, and
confront the possibility of flagging invention. Also, we leave
the solid ground of contemporary themes and find the realist
with her hang for truth, essaying an historical setting, an
entirely new and foreign motive. Eliot had already proved her
right to depict certain aspects of her own English life. To
strive to exercise the same powers on a theme like "Romola" was
a venturesome step. We have seen how Dickens and Thackeray
essayed romance at least once with ringing success; now the
third major mid-century novelist was to try the same thing.
It may be conceded at the start that in one important respect
this Florentine story of Savonarola and his day is entirely
typical: it puts clearly before us in a medieval romantic mis-en
scene, the problem of a soul: the slow, subtle, awful
degeneration of the man Tito, with its foil in the noble figure
of the girl Romola. The central personality psychologically is
that of the wily Greek-Italian, and Eliot never probed deeper
into the labyrinths of the perturbed human spirit than in this
remarkable analysis. The reader, too, remembers gratefully, with
a catch of the breath, the great scenes, two of which are the
execution of Savonarola, and the final confrontation of Tito by
his adoptive father, with its Greek-like sense of tragic doom.
The same reader stands aghast before the labor which must lie
behind such a work and often comes to him a sudden, vital sense
of fifteenth century Florence, then, as never since, the Lily of
the Arno: so cunningly and with such felicity are innumerable
details individualized, massed and blended. And yet, somehow it
all seems a splendid experiment, a worthy performance rather
than a spontaneous and successful creative endeavor: this, in
comparison with the fiction that came before. The author seems a
little over-burdened by the tremendousness of her material.
Whether it is because the Savonarola episode is not thoroughly
synthetized with the Tito-Romola part: or that the central theme
is of itself fundamentally unpleasant--or again, that from the
nature of the romance, head-work had largely to supplant that
genial draught upon the springs of childhood which gave us "Adam
Bede" and "The Mill on the Floss";--or once more, whether the
crowded canvas injures the unity of the design, be these as they
may, "Romola" strikes one as great in spots and as conveying a
noble though somber truth, but does not carry us off our feet.
That is the blunt truth about it, major work as it is, with only
half a dozen of its kind to equal it in all English literature.
It falls distinctly behind both "A Tale of Two Cities" and
"Esmond." It is a book to admire, to praise in many particulars,
to be impressed by: but not quite to treasure as one treasures
the story of the Tullivers. It was written by George Eliot,
famous novelist, who with that anxious, morbid conscience of
hers, had to live up to her reputation, and who received $50,000
for the work, even to-day a large sum for a piece of fiction. It
was not written by a woman irresistibly impelled to self-expression,
seized with the passionate desire to paint Life. It
is, in a sense, her first professional feat and performance.
Meanwhile, she was getting on in life: we saw that she was seven
and thirty when she wrote the "Clerical Scenes": it was almost a
decade later when "Felix Holt, Radical" appeared, and she was
nearing fifty. I believe it to be helpful to draw a line between
all her fiction before and after "Felix Holt," placing that book
somewhat uncertainly on the dividing line. The four earlier
novels stand for a period when there is a strong, or at least
sufficient story interest, the proper amount of objectification:
to the second division belong "Middlemarch" and "Daniel
Deronda," where we feel that problem comes first and story
second. In the intermediate novel, "Felix Holt," its excellent
story places it with the first books, but its increased didactic
tendency with the latest stories. Why has "Felix Holt" been
treated by the critics, as a rule, as of comparatively minor
value? It is very interesting, contains true characterization,
much of picturesque and dramatic worth; it abounds in enjoyable
first-hand observation of a period by-gone yet near enough to
have been cognizant to the writer. Her favorite types, too, are
in it. Holt, a study of the advanced workman of his day, is
another Bede, mutatis mutandis, and quite as truly realized.
Both Mr. Lyon and his daughter are capitally drawn and the
motive of the novel--to teach Felix that he can be quite as true
to his cause if he be less rough and eccentric in dress and
deportment, is a good one handled with success. To which may be
added that the encircling theme of Mrs. Transome's mystery,
grips the attention from the start and there is pleasure when it
is seen to involve Esther, leading her to make a choice which
reveals that she has awakened to a truer valuation of life--and
of Felix. With all these things in its favor, why has
appreciation been so scant?
Is it not that continually in the narrative you lose its broader
human interest because of the narrower political and social
questions that are raised? They are vital questions, but still,
more specific, technical, of the time. Nor is their weaving into
the more permanent theme altogether skilful: you feel like
exclaiming to the novelist: "O, let Kingsley handle chartism,
but do you stick to your last--love and its criss-cross, family
sin and its outcome, character changed as life comes to be more
vitally realized." George Eliot in this fine story falls into
this mistake, as does Mrs. Humphry Ward in her well-remembered
"Robert Elsmere," and as she has again in the novel which
happens to be her latest as these words are written, "Marriage a
la Mode." The thesis has a way of sticking out obtrusively in
such efforts.
Many readers may not feel this in "Felix Holt," which, whatever
its shortcomings, remains an extremely able and interesting
novel, often underestimated. Still, I imagine a genuine
distinction has been made with regard to it.
The difference is more definitely felt in "Middlemarch," not
infrequently called Eliot's masterpiece. It appeared five years
later and the author was over fifty when the book was published
serially during 1871 and 1872. Nearly four years were spent in
the work of composition: for it the sum of $60,000 was paid.
"Middlemarch," which resembles Thackeray's "Vanity Fair" in
telling two stories not closely related, seems less a Novel than
a chronicle-history of two families. It is important to remember
that its two parts were conceived as independent; their welding,
to call it such, was an afterthought. The tempo again, suiting
the style of fiction, is leisurely: character study, character
contrast, is the principal aim. More definitely, the marriage
problem, illustrated by Dorothea's experience with Casaubon, and
that of Lydgate with Rosamond, is what the writer places before
us. Marriage is chosen simply because it is the modern spiritual
battleground, a condition for the trying-out of souls. The
greatness of the work lies in its breadth (subjective more than
objective), its panoramic view of English country life of the
refined type, its rich garner of wisdom concerning human motive
and action. We have seen in earlier studies that its type, the
chronicle of events as they affect character, is a legitimate
one: a successful genus in English-speaking fiction in hands
like those of Thackeray, Eliot and Howells. It is one accepted
kind, a distinct, often able, sympathetic kind of fiction of our
race: its worth as a social document (to use the convenient term
once more) is likely to be high. It lacks the close-knit plot,
the feeling for stage effect, the swift progression and the
sense of completed action which another and more favored sort of
Novel exhibits. Yet it may have as much chance of permanence in
the hands of a master. The proper question, then, seems to be
whether it most fitly expresses the genius of an author.
Perhaps there will never be general agreement as to this in the
case of "Middlemarch." The book is drawn from wells of
experience not so deep in Eliot's nature as those which went to
the making of "Adam Bede" and "The Mill on the Floss," It is
life with which the author became familiar in London and about
the world during her later literary days. She knows it well, and
paints it with her usual noble insistence upon truth. But she
knows it with her brain; whereas, she knows "The Mill on the
Floss" with her blood. There is surely that difference. Hence,
the latter work has, it would seem, a better chance for long
life; for, without losing the author's characteristic
interpretation, it has more story-value, is richer in humor
(that alleviating ingredient of all fiction) and is a better
work of art. It shows George Eliot absorbed in story-telling:
"Middlemarch" is George Eliot using a slight framework of story
for the sake of talking about life and illustrating by
character. Those who call it her masterpiece are not judging it
primarily as art-work: any more than those who call Whitman the
greatest American poet are judging him as artist. While it seems
necessary to make this distinction, it is quite as necessary to
bear down on the attraction of the character-drawing. That is a
truly wonderful portrait of the unconsciously selfish scholar in
Casaubon. Dorothea's noble naturalness, Will Ladislaw's fiery
truth, the verity of Rosamond's bovine mediocrity, the fine
reality of Lydgate's situation, so portentous in its demand upon
the moral nature--all this, and more than this, is admirable and
authoritative. The predominant thought in closing such a study
is that of the tremendous complexity of human fate, influenced
as it is by heredity, environment and the personal equation, and
not without melioristic hope, if we but live up to our best. The
tone is grave, but not hopeless. The quiet, hesitant movement
helps the sense of this slow sureness in the working of the
social law:
"Though the mills of God grind slowly,
Yet they grind exceeding small."
In her final novel, "Daniel Deronda," between which and
"Middlemarch" there were six years, so that it was published
when the author was nearly sixty years old, we have another
large canvas upon which, in great detail and with admirable
variety, is displayed a composition that does not aim at
complete unity--or at any rate, does not accomplish it, for the
motive is double: to present the Jew so that Judenhetze may be
diminished: and to exhibit the spiritual evolution through a
succession of emotional experiences of the girl Gwendolen. This
phase of the story offers an instructive parallel with
Meredith's "Diana of the Crossways." If the Jew theme had been
made secondary artistically to the Gwendolen study, the novel
would have secured a greater degree of constructive success; but
there's the rub. Now it seems the main issue; again, Gwendolen
holds the center of the stage. The result is a suspicion of
patchwork; nor is this changed by the fact that both parts are
brilliantly done--to which consideration may be added the well-known
antipathy of many Gentile readers to any treatment of the
Jew in fiction, if an explanation be sought of the relative
slighting of a very noble book.
For it has virtues, many and large. Its spirit is broad,
tolerant, wide and loving. In no previous Eliot fiction are
there finer single effects: no one is likely to forget the scene
in which Gwendolen and Harcourt come to a rupture; or the scene
of Deronda's dismissal. And in the way of character portrayal,
nothing is keener and truer than the heroine of this book, whose
unawakened, seemingly light, nature is chastened and deepened as
she slowly learns the meaning of life. The lesson is sound and
salutary: it is set forth so vividly as to be immensely
impressive. Mordecai, against the background necessary to show
him, is sketched with splendid power. And the percentage of
quotable sayings, sword-thrusts, many of them, into the vitals
of life, is as high perhaps as in any other of the Novels,
unless it be "Middlemarch." Nevertheless those who point to
"Deronda" as illustrating the novelist's decadence--although
they use too harsh a word--have some right on their side. For,
viewed as story, it is not so successful as the books of the
first half of George Eliot's career. It all depends whether a
vital problem Novel is given preference over a Novel which does
not obtrude message, if it have any at all. And if fiction be a
fine art, it must be confessed that this latter sort is
superior. But we have perfect liberty to admire the elevation,
earnestness and skill en detail that denote such a work. Nay, we
may go further and say that the woman who wrote it is greater
than she who wrote "The Mill on the Floss."
With a backward glance now at the list, it may be said in
summary that the earlier fiction constitutes George Eliot's most
authoritative contribution to English novel-making, since the
thinking about life so characteristic of her is kept within the
bounds of good story-telling. And the compensation for this
artistic loss in her later fiction is found in its wider
intellectual outlook, its deeper sympathy, the more profound
humanity of the message.
But what of her philosophy? She was not a pessimist, since the
pessimist is one who despairs of human virtue and regards the
world as paralyzing the will nobly to achieve. She was, rather,
a meliorist who hoped for better things, though tardy to come;
who believed, in her own pungent phrase, "in the slow contagion
of good." Of human happiness she did in one of her latest moods
despair: going so far in a dark moment as to declare that the
only ideal left her was duty. In a way, she grew sadder as she
grew older. By intellect she was a positivist who has given up
any definite hope of personal immortality--save that which by a
metaphor is applied to one's influence upon the life of the
world here upon earth. And in her own career, by her
unconventional union with Lewes, she made a questionable choice
of action, though from the highest motives; a choice which I
believe rasped her sensitive soul because of the way it was
regarded by many whom she respected and whose good opinion she
coveted. But she remained splendidly wholesome and inspiring in
her fiction, because she clung to her faith in spiritual
self-development, tested all life by the test of duty, felt the
pathos and the preciousness of inconspicuous lives, and devoted
herself through a most exceptional career to loving service for
others. She was therefore not only a novelist of genius, but a
profoundly good woman. She had an ample practical credo for
living and will always be, for those who read with their mind
and soul as well as their eyes, anything but a depressing
writer. For them, on the contrary, she will be a tonic force, a
seer using fiction as a means to an end--and that end the
betterment of mankind.