CRITICAL MISCELLANIES BYJOHN MORLEY VOL. III. Essay 4: The Life of George Eliot LondonMACMILLAN AND CO. , LimitedNEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1904 THE LIFE OF GEORGE ELIOT On Literary Biography 93 As a mere letter-writer will not rank among the famousmasters 96 Mr. Myers's Essay 100 Letter to Mr. Harrison 107 Hebrew her favourite study 112 Limitless persistency in application 113 Romola 114 Mr. R. W. Mackay's _Progress of the Intellect_ 120 The period of her productions, 1856-1876 124 Mr. Browning 125 An æsthetic not a doctrinal teacher 126 Disliked vehemence 130 Conclusion 131 THE LIFE OF GEORGE ELIOT. [1] The illustrious woman who is the subject of these volumes makes a remarkto her publisher which is at least as relevant now as it was then. Cannothing be done, she asks, by dispassionate criticism towards the reformof our national habits in the matter of literary biography? 'Is itanything short of odious that as soon as a man is dead his desk shouldbe raked, and every insignificant memorandum which he never meant forthe public be printed for the gossiping amusement of people too idle toreread his books?' Autobiography, she says, at least saves a man or awoman that the world is curious about, from the publication of a stringof mistakes called Memoirs. Even to autobiography, however, sheconfesses her deep repugnance unless it can be written so as to involveneither self-glorification nor impeachment of others--a condition, bythe way, with which hardly any, save Mill's, can be said to comply. 'Ilike, ' she proceeds, 'that _He being dead yet speaketh_ should havequite another meaning than that' (iii. 226, 297, 307). She shows thesame fastidious apprehension still more clearly in another way. 'I havedestroyed almost all my friends' letters to me, ' she says, 'because theywere only intended for my eyes, and could only fall into the hands ofpersons who knew little of the writers if I allowed them to remain tillafter my death. In proportion as I love every form of piety--which isvenerating love--I hate hard curiosity; and, unhappily, my experiencehas impressed me with the sense that hard curiosity is the more commontemper of mind' (ii. 286). There is probably little difference among usin respect of such experience as that. [Footnote 1: _George Eliot's Life_. By J. W. Cross. Three volumes. Blackwood and Sons. 1885. ] Much biography, perhaps we might say most, is hardly above the level ofthat 'personal talk, ' to which Wordsworth sagely preferred long barrensilence, the flapping of the flame of his cottage fire, and theunder-song of the kettle on the hob. It would not, then, have muchsurprised us if George Eliot had insisted that her works should remainthe only commemoration of her life. There be some who think that thosewho have enriched the world with great thoughts and fine creations, might best be content to rest unmarked 'where heaves the turf in many amouldering heap, ' leaving as little work to the literary executor, except of the purely crematory sort, as did Aristotle, Plato, Shakespeare, and some others whose names the world will not willinglylet die. But this is a stoic's doctrine; the objector may easily retortthat if it had been sternly acted on, we should have known very verylittle about Dr. Johnson, and nothing about Socrates. This is but an ungracious prelude to some remarks upon a book, whichmust be pronounced a striking success. There will be very little disputeas to the fact that the editor of these memorials of George Eliot hasdone his work with excellent taste, judgment, and sense. He found noautobiography nor fragment of one, but he has skilfully shaped a kind ofautobiography by a plan which, so far as we know, he is justified incalling new, and which leaves her life to write itself in extracts fromher letters and journals. With the least possible obtrusion from thebiographer, the original pieces are formed into a connected whole 'thatcombines a narrative of day-to-day life with the play of light and shadewhich only letters written in serious moods can give. ' The idea is agood one, and Mr. Cross deserves great credit for it. We may hope thatits success will encourage imitators. Certainly there are drawbacks. Wemiss the animation of mixed narrative. There is, too, a touch ofmonotony in listening for so long to the voice of a single speakeraddressing others who are silent behind a screen. But Mr. Cross couldnot, we think, have devised a better way of dealing with his material:it is simple, modest, and effective. George Eliot, after all, led the life of a studious recluse, with noneof the bustle, variety, motion, and large communication with the outerworld, that justified Lockhart and Moore in making a long story of thelives of Scott and Byron. Even here, among men of letters, who were alsomen of action and of great sociability, are not all biographies toolong? Let any sensible reader turn to the shelf where his Lives repose;we shall be surprised if he does not find that nearly every one of them, taking the present century alone, and including such splendid andattractive subjects as Goethe, Hume, Romilly, Mackintosh, Horner, Chalmers, Arnold, Southey, Cowper, would not have been all the betterfor judicious curtailment. Lockhart, who wrote the longest, wrote alsothe shortest, the Life of Burns; and the shortest is the best, in spiteof defects which would only have been worse if the book had been bigger. It is to be feared that, conscientious and honourable as his self-denialhas been, even Mr. Cross has not wholly resisted the natural andbesetting error of the biographer. Most people will think that thehundred pages of the Italian tour (vol. Ii. ), and some other not veryremarkable impressions of travel, might as well or better have been leftout. As a mere letter-writer, George Eliot will not rank among the famousmasters of what is usually considered especially a woman's art. She wastoo busy in serious work to have leisure for that most delightful way ofwasting time. Besides that, she had by nature none of that fluency, rapidity, abandonment, pleasant volubility, which make letters amusing, captivating, or piquant. What Mr. Cross says of her as the mistress of a_salon_, is true of her for the most part as a correspondent:--'Playingaround many disconnected subjects, in talk, neither interested noramused her much. She took things too seriously, and seldom found theeffort of entertaining compensated by the gain' (iii. 335). There is theoutpouring of ardent feeling for her friends, sobering down, as lifegoes on, into a crooning kindliness, affectionate and honest, but oftentinged with considerable self-consciousness. It was said of some onethat his epigrams did honour to his heart; in the reverse direction weoccasionally feel that George Eliot's effusive playfulness does honourto her head. It lacks simplicity and _verve_. Even in an invitation todinner, the words imply a grave sense of responsibility on both sides, and sense of responsibility is fatal to the charm of familiarcorrespondence. As was inevitable in one whose mind was so habitually turned to thedeeper elements of life, she lets fall the pearls of wise speech even inshort notes. Here are one or two:-- 'My own experience and development deepen every day my conviction thatour moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathisewith individual suffering and individual joy. ' 'If there is one attitude more odious to me than any other of the manyattitudes of "knowingness, " it is that air of lofty superiority to thevulgar. She will soon find out that I am a very commonplace woman. ' 'It so often happens that others are measuring us by our past selfwhile we are looking back on that self with a mixture of disgust andsorrow. ' The following is one of the best examples, one of the few examples, ofher best manner:-- I have been made rather unhappy by my husband's impulsive proposal about Christmas. We are dull old persons, and your two sweet young ones ought to find each Christmas a new bright bead to string on their memory, whereas to spend the time with us would be to string on a dark shrivelled berry. They ought to have a group of young creatures to be joyful with. Our own children always spend their Christmas with Gertrude's family; and we have usually taken our sober merry-making with friends out of town. Illness among these will break our custom this year; and thus _mein Mann_, feeling that our Christmas was free, considered how very much he liked being with you, omitting the other side of the question--namely, our total lack of means to make a suitably joyous meeting, a real festival, for Phil and Margaret. I was conscious of this lack in the very moment of the proposal, and the consciousness has been pressing on me more and more painfully ever since. Even my husband's affectionate hopefulness cannot withstand my melancholy demonstration. So pray consider the kill-joy proposition as entirely retracted, and give us something of yourselves only on simple black-letter days, when the Herald Angels have not been raising expectations early in the morning. This is very pleasant, but such pieces are rare, and the infirmity ofhuman nature has sometimes made us sigh over these pages at therecollection of the cordial cheeriness of Scott's letters, the highspirits of Macaulay, the graceful levity of Voltaire, the rattlingdare-devilry of Byron. Epistolary stilts among men of letters went outof fashion with Pope, who, as was said, thought that unless every periodfinished with a conceit, the letter was not worth the postage. Poorspirits cannot be the explanation of the stiffness in George Eliot'scase, for no letters in the English language are so full of playfulnessand charm as those of Cowper, and he was habitually sunk in gulfs deeperand blacker than George Eliot's own. It was sometimes observed of her, that in her conversation, _elle s'écoutait quand elle parlait_--sheseemed to be listening to her own voice while she spoke. It must beallowed that we are not always free from an impression ofself-listening, even in the most caressing of the letters before us. This is not much better, however, than trifling. I daresay that if alively Frenchman could have watched the inspired Pythia on the sublimetripod, he would have cried, _Elle s'écoute quand elle parle_. Wheneverything of that kind has been said, we have the profoundsatisfaction, which is not quite a matter of course in the history ofliterature, of finding after all that the woman and the writer were one. The life does not belie the books, nor private conduct stultify publicprofession. We close the third volume of the biography, as we have sooften closed the third volume of her novels, feeling to the very corethat in spite of a style that the French call _alambiqué_, in spite oftiresome double and treble distillations of phraseology, in spite offatiguing moralities, gravities, and ponderosities, we have still beenin communion with a high and commanding intellect and a great nature. Weare vexed by pedantries that recall the _précieuses_ of the HôtelRambouillet, but we know that she had the soul of the most heroic womenin history. We crave more of the Olympian serenity that makes actionnatural and repose refreshing, but we cannot miss the edification of alife marked by indefatigable labour after generous purposes, by anunsparing struggle for duty, and by steadfast and devout fellowship withlofty thoughts. Those who know Mr. Myers's essay on George Eliot will not have forgottenits most imposing passage:-- I remember how at Cambridge, I waited with her once in the Fellows' Garden of Trinity, on an evening of rainy May; and she, stirred somewhat beyond her wont, and taking as her text the three words which have been used so often as the inspiring trumpet-calls of men, --the words _God_, _Immortality_, _Duty_, --pronounced, with terrible earnestness, how inconceivable was the _first_, how unbelievable the _second_, and yet how peremptory and absolute the _third_. Never, perhaps, had sterner accents affirmed the sovereignty of impersonal and unrecompensing law. I listened, and night fell; her grave, majestic countenance turned toward me like a Sibyl's in the gloom; it was as though she withdrew from my grasp, one by one, the two scrolls of promise, and left me the third scroll only, awful with inevitable fates. To many, the relation which was the most important event in GeorgeEliot's life will seem one of those irretrievable errors which reduceall talk of duty to a mockery. It is inevitable that this should be so, and those who disregard a social law have little right to complain. Menand women whom in every other respect it would be monstrous to call bad, have taken this particular law into their own hands before now, andcommitted themselves to conduct of which 'magnanimity owes no account toprudence. ' But if they had sense and knew what they were about, theyhave braced themselves to endure the disapproval of a majorityfortunately more prudential than themselves. The world is busy, and itsinstruments are clumsy. It cannot know all the facts; it has neithertime nor material for unravelling all the complexities of motive, or fordistinguishing mere libertinage from grave and deliberate moralmisjudgment; it is protecting itself as much as it is condemning theoffenders. On all this, then, we need have neither sophistry nor cant. But those who seek something deeper than a verdict for the honestworking purpose of leaving cards and inviting to dinner, may feel, ashas been observed by a contemporary writer, that men and women are morefairly judged, if judge them we must, by the way in which they bear theburden of an error than by the decision that laid the burden on theirlives. Some idea of this kind was in her own mind when she wrote to hermost intimate friend in 1857, 'If I live five years longer, the positiveresult of my existence on the side of truth and goodness will outweighthe small negative good that would have consisted in my not doinganything to shock others' (i. 461). This urgent desire to balance themoral account may have had something to do with that laborious sense ofresponsibility which weighed so heavily on her soul, and had soequivocal an effect upon her art. Whatever else is to be said of thisparticular union, nobody can deny that the picture on which it left amark was an exhibition of extraordinary self-denial, energy, andpersistency in the cultivation and the use of great gifts and powers forwhat their possessor believed to be the highest objects for society andmankind. A more perfect companionship, one on a higher intellectual level, or ofmore sustained mental activity, is nowhere recorded. Lewes's mercurialtemperament contributed as much as the powerful mind of his consort toprevent their seclusion from degenerating into an owlish stagnation. Tothe very last (1878) he retained his extraordinary buoyancy. 'Nothingbut death could quench that bright flame. Even on his worst days he hadalways a good story to tell; and I remember on one occasion in thedrawing-room at Witley, between two bouts of pain, he sang through withgreat _brio_, though without much voice, the greater portion of thetenor part in the _Barber of Seville_, George Eliot playing hisaccompaniment, and both of them thoroughly enjoying the fun' (iii. 334). All this gaiety, his inexhaustible vivacity, the facility of histransitions from brilliant levity to a keen seriousness, the readinessof his mental response, and the wide range of intellectualaccomplishments that were much more than superficial, made him a sourceof incessant and varied stimulation. Even those, and there were some, who thought that his gaiety bordered on flippancy, that his genialself-content often came near to shockingly bad taste, and that hisreminiscences of poor Mr. Fitzball and the green-room and all the restof the Bohemia in which he had once dwelt, were too racy for hiscompany, still found it hard to resist the alert intelligence with whichhe rose to every good topic, and the extraordinary heartiness andspontaneity with which the wholesome spring of human laughter wastouched in him. Lewes had plenty of egotism, not to give it a more unamiable name, butit never mastered his intellectual sincerity. George Eliot describes himas one of the few human beings she has known who will, in the heat of anargument, see, and straightway confess, that he is in the wrong, insteadof trying to shift his ground or use any other device of vanity. 'Theintense happiness of our union, ' she wrote to a friend, 'is derived in ahigh degree from the perfect freedom with which we each follow anddeclare our own impressions. In this respect I know _no_ man so great ashe--that difference of opinion rouses no egotistic irritation in him, and that he is ready to admit that another argument is the stronger themoment his intellect recognises it' (ii. 279). This will sound very easyto the dispassionate reader, because it is so obviously just and proper, but if the dispassionate reader ever tries, he may find the virtue notso easy as it looks. Finally, and above all, we can never forget inLewes's case how much true elevation and stability of character wasimplied in the unceasing reverence, gratitude, and devotion with whichfor five-and-twenty years he treated her to whom he owed all hishappiness, and who most truly, in his own words (ii. 76), had made hislife a new birth. The reader will be mistaken if he should infer from such passages asabound in her letters that George Eliot had any particular weakness fordomestic or any other kind of idolatry. George Sand, in _LucreziaFloriani_, where she drew so unkind a picture of Chopin, has describedher own life and character as marked by 'a great facility for illusions, a blind benevolence of judgment, a tenderness of heart that wasinexhaustible; consequently great precipitancy, many mistakes, muchweakness, fits of heroic devotion to unworthy objects, enormous forceapplied to an end that was wretched in truth and fact, but sublime inher thought. ' George Eliot had none of this facility. Nor was generalbenignity in her at all of the poor kind that is incompatible with agreat deal of particular censure. Universal benevolence never lulled anactive critical faculty, nor did she conceive true humility as at allconsisting in hiding from an impostor that you have found him out. LikeCardinal Newman, for whose beautiful passage at the end of the_Apologia_ she expresses such richly deserved admiration (ii. 387), sheunites to the gift of unction and brotherly love a capacity for givingan extremely shrewd nip to a brother whom she does not love. Herpassion for Thomas-a-Kempis did not prevent her, and there was no reasonwhy it should, from dealing very faithfully with a friend, for instance(ii. 271); from describing Mr. Buckle as a conceited, ignorant man; orcastigating Brougham and other people in slashing reviews; or otherwisefrom showing that great expansiveness of the affections went with aremarkably strong, hard, masculine, positive, judging head. The benefits that George Eliot gained from her exclusive companionshipwith a man of lively talents were not without some compensatingdrawbacks. The keen stimulation and incessant strain, unrelieved byvariety of daily intercourse, and never diversified by participation inthe external activities of the world, tended to bring about a loaded, over-conscious, over-anxious state of mind, which was not only notwholesome in itself, but was inconsistent with the full freshness andstrength of artistic work. The presence of the real world in his lifehas, in all but one or two cases, been one element of the novelist'shighest success in the world of imaginative creation. George Eliot hadno greater favourite than Scott, and when a series of little books uponEnglish men of letters was planned, she said that she thought thatwriter among us the happiest to whom it should fall to deal with Scott. But Scott lived full in the life of his fellow-men. Even of Wordsworth, her other favourite, though he was not a creative artist, we may saythat he daily saturated himself in those natural elements and effects, which were the material, the suggestion, and the sustaining inspirationof his consoling and fortifying poetry. George Eliot did not live in themidst of her material, but aloof from it and outside of it. Heavenforbid that this should seem to be said by way of censure. Both herhealth and other considerations made all approach to busy sociability inany of its shapes both unwelcome and impossible. But in considering therelation of her manner of life to her work, her creations, hermeditations, one cannot but see that when compared with some writers ofher own sex and age, she is constantly bookish, artificial, andmannered. She is this because she fed her art too exclusively, first onthe memories of her youth, and next from books, pictures, statues, instead of from the living model, as seen in its actual motion. It isdirect calls and personal claims from without that make fiction alive. Jane Austen bore her part in the little world of the parlour that shedescribed. The writer of _Sylvia's Lovers_, whose work George Eliotappreciated with unaffected generosity (i. 305), was the mother ofchildren, and was surrounded by the wholesome actualities of the family. The authors of _Jane Eyre_ and _Wuthering Heights_ passed their days inone long succession of wild, stormy, squalid, anxious, and miserablescenes--almost as romantic, as poetic, and as tragic, to use GeorgeEliot's words, as their own stories. George Sand eagerly shared, even tothe pitch of passionate tumult and disorder, in the emotions, theaspirations, the ardour, the great conflicts and controversies of hertime. In every one of these, their daily closeness to the real life ofthe world has given a vitality to their work which we hardly expect thateven the next generation will find in more than one or two of theromances of George Eliot. It may even come to pass that their positionwill be to hers as that of Fielding is to Richardson in our own day. In a letter to Mr. Harrison, which is printed here (ii. 441), GeorgeEliot describes her own method as 'the severe effort of trying to makecertain ideas thoroughly incarnate, as if they had revealed themselvesto me first in the flesh and not in the spirit. ' The passage recalls adiscussion one day at the Priory in 1877. She was speaking of thedifferent methods of the poetic or creative art, and said that she beganwith moods, thoughts, passions, and then invented the story for theirsake, and fitted it to them; Shakespeare, on the other hand, picked up astory that struck him, and then proceeded to work in the moods, thoughts, passions, as they came to him in the course of meditation onthe story. We hardly need the result to convince us that Shakespearechose the better part. The influence of her reserved fashion of daily life was heightened bythe literary exclusiveness which of set purpose she imposed uponherself. 'The less an author hears about himself, ' she says, in oneplace, 'the better. ' 'It is my rule, very strictly observed, not toread the criticisms on my writings. For years I have found thisabstinence necessary to preserve me from that discouragement as anartist, which ill-judged praise, no less than ill-judged blame, tends toproduce in us. ' George Eliot pushed this repugnance to criticism beyondthe personal reaction of it upon the artist, and more than disparagedits utility, even in the most competent and highly trained hands. Shefinds that the diseased spot in the literary culture of our time istouched with the finest point by the saying of La Bruyère, that 'thepleasure of criticism robs us of the pleasure of being keenly moved byvery fine things' (iii. 327). 'It seems to me, ' she writes (ii. 412), 'much better to read a man's own writings than to read what others sayabout him, especially when the man is first-rate and the othersthird-rate. As Goethe said long ago about Spinoza, "I always preferredto learn from the man himself what _he_ thought, rather than to hearfrom some one else what he ought to have thought. "' As if the scholarwill not always be glad to do both, to study his author and not torefuse the help of the rightly prepared commentator; as if even Goethehimself would not have been all the better acquainted with Spinoza if hecould have read Mr. Pollock's book upon him. But on this question Mr. Arnold has fought a brilliant battle, and to him George Eliot's heresiesmay well be left. On the personal point whether an author should ever hear of himself, George Eliot oddly enough contradicts herself in a casual remark uponBulwer. 'I have a great respect, ' she says, 'for the energetic industrywhich has made the most of his powers. He has been writing diligentlyfor more than thirty years, constantly improving his position, andprofiting by the lessons of public opinion and of other writers' (ii. 322). But if it is true that the less an author hears about himself thebetter, how are these salutary 'lessons of public opinion' to penetrateto him? 'Rubens, ' she says, writing from Munich in 1858 (ii. 28), 'givesme more pleasure than any other painter whether right or wrong. Morethan any one else he makes me feel that painting is a great art, andthat he was a great artist. His are such real breathing men and women, moved by passions, not mincing, and grimacing, and posing in mereimitation of passion. ' But Rubens did not concentrate his intellect onhis own ponderings, nor shut out the wholesome chastenings of praise andblame, lest they should discourage his inspiration. Beethoven, anotherof the chief objects of George Eliot's veneration, bore all the roughstress of an active and troublesome calling, though of the musician, ifof any, we may say, that his is the art of self-absorption. Hence, delightful and inspiring as it is to read this story of diligentand discriminating cultivation, of accurate truth and real erudition andbeauty, not vaguely but methodically interpreted, one has some of thesensations of the moral and intellectual hothouse. Mental hygiene is aptto lead to mental valetudinarianism. 'The ignorant journalist, ' may beleft to the torment which George Eliot wished that she could inflict onone of those literary slovens whose manuscripts bring even the mostphilosophic editor to the point of exasperation: 'I should like to stickred-hot skewers through the writer, whose style is as sprawling as hishandwriting. ' By all means. But much that even the most sympatheticreader finds repellent in George Eliot's later work might perhaps neverhave been, if Mr. Lewes had not practised with more than Russian rigoura censorship of the press and the post-office which kept everydisagreeable whisper scrupulously from her ear. To stop every draft withsandbags, screens, and curtains, and to limit one's exercise to a drivein a well-warmed brougham with the windows drawn up, may save a fewannoying colds in the head, but the end of the process will be themanufacture of an invalid. Whatever view we may take of the precise connection between what sheread, or abstained from reading, and what she wrote, no studious man orwoman can look without admiration and envy on the breadth, variety, seriousness, and energy, with which she set herself her tasks andexecuted them. She says in one of her letters, 'there is something morepiteous almost than soapless poverty in the application of feminineincapacity to literature' (ii. 16). Nobody has ever taken theresponsibilities of literature more ardently in earnest. She wasaccustomed to read aloud to Mr. Lewes three hours a day, and herprivate reading, except when she was engaged in the actual stress ofcomposition, must have filled as many more. His extraordinary alacrityand her brooding intensity of mind prevented these hours from being thatleisurely process in slippers and easy-chair which passes with many forthe practice of literary cultivation. Much of her reading was for thedirect purposes of her own work. The young lady who begins to writehistoric novels out of her own head will find something much to heradvantage if she will refer to the list of books read by George Eliotduring the latter half of 1861, when she was meditating _Romola_ (ii. 325). Apart from immediate needs and uses, no student of our time hasknown better the solace, the delight, the guidance that abide in greatwritings. Nobody who did not share the scholar's enthusiasm could havedescribed the blind scholar in his library in the adorable fifth chapterof _Romola_; and we feel that she must have copied out with keen gustoof her own those words of Petrarch which she puts into old Bardo'smouth--'_Libri medullitus delectant, colloquuntur, consulunt, et vivaquadam nobis atque arguta familiaritate junguntur. _' As for books that are not books, as Milton bade us do with 'neat repastsof wine, ' she wisely spared to interpose them oft. Her standards ofknowledge were those of the erudite and the savant, and even in theregion of beauty she was never content with any but definiteimpressions. In one place in these volumes, by the way, she makes aremark curiously inconsistent with the usual scientific attitude of hermind. She has been reading Darwin's _Origin of Species_, on which shemakes the truly astonishing criticism that it is 'sadly wanting inillustrative facts, ' and that 'it is not impressive from want ofluminous and orderly presentation' (ii. 43-48). Then she says that 'thedevelopment theory, and all other explanation of processes by whichthings came to be, produce a feeble impression compared with the mysterythat lies under processes. ' This position it does not now concern us todiscuss, but at least it is in singular discrepancy with her stronghabitual preference for accurate and quantitative knowledge, over vagueand misty moods in the region of the unknowable and the unreachable. George Eliot's means of access to books were very full. She knew French, German, Italian, and Spanish accurately. Greek and Latin, Mr. Crosstells us, she could read with thorough delight to herself; though afterthe appalling specimen of Mill's juvenile Latinity that Mr. Bain hasdisinterred, the fastidious collegian may be sceptical of thescholarship of prodigies. Hebrew was her favourite study to the end ofher days. People commonly supposed that she had been inoculated with anartificial taste for science by her companion. We now learn that shetook a decided interest in natural science long before she made Mr. Lewes's acquaintance, and many of the roundabout pedantries thatdispleased people in her latest writings, and were set down to hisaccount, appeared in her composition before she had ever exchanged aword with him. All who knew her well enough were aware that she had what Mr. Crossdescribes as 'limitless persistency in application. ' This is an oldaccount of genius, but nobody illustrates more effectively the infinitecapacity of taking pains. In reading, in looking at pictures, in playingdifficult music, in talking, she was equally importunate in the search, and equally insistent on mastery. Her faculty of sustained concentrationwas part of her immense intellectual power. 'Continuous thought did notfatigue her. She could keep her mind on the stretch hour after hour; thebody might give way, but the brain remained unwearied' (iii. 422). It isonly a trifling illustration of the infection of her indefatigablequality of taking pains, that Lewes should have formed the importanthabit of rewriting every page of his work, even of short articles forReviews, before letting it go to the press. The journal shows what sorepain and travail composition was to her. She wrote the last volume of_Adam Bede_ in six weeks; she 'could not help writing it fast, becauseit was written under the stress of emotion. ' But what a prodigiouscontrast between her pace and Walter Scott's twelve volumes a year! Likemany other people of powerful brains, she united strong and cleargeneral retentiveness with a weak and untrustworthy verbal memory. 'Shenever could trust herself to write a quotation without verifying it. ''What courage and patience, ' she says of some one else, 'are wanted forevery life that aims to produce anything, ' and her own existence was onelong and painful sermon on that text. Over few lives have the clouds of mental dejection hung in such heavyunmoving banks. Nearly every chapter is strewn with melancholy words. 'Icannot help thinking more of your illness than of the pleasure inprospect--according to my foolish nature, which is always prone to livein past pain. ' The same sentiment is the mournful refrain that runsthrough all. Her first resounding triumph, the success of _Adam Bede_, instead of buoyancy and exultation, only adds a fresh sense of theweight upon her future life. 'The self-questioning whether my naturewill be able to meet the heavy demands upon it, both of personal dutyand intellectual production--presses upon me almost continually in a waythat prevents me even from tasting the quiet joy I might have in the_work done_. I feel no regret that the fame, as such, brings nopleasure; but it _is_ a grief to me that I do not constantly feel strongin thankfulness that my past life has vindicated its uses. ' _Romola_ seems to have been composed in constant gloom. 'I remember mywife telling me, at Witley, ' says Mr. Cross, 'how cruelly she hadsuffered at Dorking from working under a leaden weight at this time. Thewriting of _Romola_ ploughed into her more than any of her other books. She told me she could put her finger on it as marking a well-definedtransition in her life. In her own words, "I began it a young woman--Ifinished it an old woman. "' She calls upon herself to make 'greaterefforts against indolence and the despondency that comes from tooegoistic a dread of failure. ' 'This is the last entry I mean to make inmy old book in which I wrote for the first time at Geneva in 1849. Whatmoments of despair I passed through after that--despair that life wouldever be made precious to me by the consciousness that I lived to somegood purpose! It was that sort of despair that sucked away the sap ofhalf the hours which might have been filled by energetic youthfulactivity; and the same demon tries to get hold of me again whenever anold work is dismissed and a new one is being meditated' (ii. 307). Oneday the entry is: 'Horrible scepticism about all things paralysing mymind. Shall I ever be good for anything again? Ever do anything again?'On another, she describes herself to a trusted friend as 'a mindmorbidly desponding, and a consciousness tending more and more toconsist in memories of error and imperfection rather than in astrengthening sense of achievement. ' We have to turn to such books asBunyan's _Grace Abounding_ to find any parallel to such wretchedness. Times were not wanting when the sun strove to shine through the gloom, when the resistance to melancholy was not wholly a failure, and when, asshe says, she felt that Dante was right in condemning to the Stygianmarsh those who had been sad under the blessed sunlight. 'Sad were we inthe sweet air that is gladdened by the sun, bearing sluggish smoke inour hearts; now lie we sadly here in the black ooze. ' But still for themost part sad she remained in the sweet air, and the look of pain thathaunted her eyes and brow even in her most genial and animated moments, only told too truly the story of her inner life. That from this central gloom a shadow should spread to her work wasunavoidable. It would be rash to compare George Eliot with Tacitus, withDante, with Pascal. A novelist--for as a poet, after trying hard tothink otherwise, most of us find her magnificent but unreadable--as anovelist bound by the conditions of her art to deal in a thousandtrivialities of human character and situation, she has none of theirseverity of form. But she alone of moderns has their note of sharp-cutmelancholy, of sombre rumination, of brief disdain. Living in a timewhen humanity has been raised, whether formally or informally, into areligion, she draws a painted curtain of pity before the tragic scene. Still the attentive ear catches from time to time the accents of anunrelenting voice, that proves her kindred with those three mightyspirits and stern monitors of men. In George Eliot, a reader with aconscience may be reminded of the saying that when a man opens Tacitushe puts himself in the confessional. She was no vague dreamer over thefolly and the weakness of men, and the cruelty and blindness of destiny. Hers is not the dejection of the poet who 'could lie down like a tiredchild, And weep away this life of care, ' as Shelley at Naples; nor is itthe despairing misery that moved Cowper in the awful verses of the_Castaway_. It was not such self-pity as wrung from Burns the cry tolife, 'Thou art a galling load, Along a rough, a weary road, To wretchessuch as I;' nor such general sense of the woes of the race as made Keatsthink of the world as a place where men sit and hear each other groan, 'Where but to think is to be full of sorrow, And leaden-eyed despairs. 'She was as far removed from the plangent reverie of Rousseau as from thesavage truculence of Swift. Intellectual training had given her thespirit of order and proportion, of definiteness and measure, and thismarks her alike from the great sentimentalists and the sweepingsatirists. 'Pity and fairness, ' as she beautifully says (iii. 317), 'aretwo little words which, carried out, would embrace the utmost delicaciesof the moral life. ' But hers is not seldom the severe fairness of thejudge, and the pity that may go with putting on the black cap after aconviction for high treason. In the midst of many an easy flowing page, the reader is surprised by some bitter aside, some judgment of intenseand concentrated irony with the flash of a blade in it, some bitingsentence where lurks the stern disdain and the anger of Tacitus, andDante, and Pascal. Souls like these are not born for happiness. * * * * * This is not the occasion for an elaborate discussion of George Eliot'splace in the mental history of her time, but her biography shows thatshe travelled along the road that was trodden by not a few in her day. She started from that fervid evangelicalism which has made the base ofmany a powerful character in this century, from Cardinal Newmandownwards. Then with curious rapidity she threw it all off, and embracedwith equal zeal the rather harsh and crude negations which were thenassociated with the _Westminster Review_. The second stage did not lastmuch longer than the first. 'Religious and moral sympathy with thehistorical life of man, ' she said (ii. 363), 'is the larger half ofculture;' and this sympathy, which was the fruit of her culture, had bythe time she was thirty become the new seed of a positive faith and asemi-conservative creed. Here is a passage from a letter of 1862 (shehad translated Strauss, we may remind ourselves, in 1845, and Feuerbachin 1854):-- Pray don't ask me ever again not to rob a man of his religious belief, as if you thought my mind tended to such robbery. I have too profound a conviction of the efficacy that lies in all sincere faith, and the spiritual blight that comes with no-faith, to have any negative propagandism in me. In fact, I have very little sympathy with Freethinkers as a class, and have lost all interest in mere antagonism to religious doctrines. I care only to know, if possible, the lasting meaning that lies in all religious doctrine from the beginning till now (ii. 243). Eleven years later the same tendency had deepened and gone farther:-- All the great religions of the world, historically considered, are rightly the objects of deep reverence and sympathy--they are the record of spiritual struggles, which are the types of our own. This is to me preeminently true of Hebrewism and Christianity, on which my own youth was nourished. And in this sense I have no antagonism towards any religious belief, but a strong outflow of sympathy. Every community met to worship the highest Good (which is understood to be expressed by God) carries me along in its main current; and if there were not reasons against my following such an inclination, I should go to church or chapel, constantly, for the sake of the delightful emotions of fellowship which come over me in religious assemblies--the very nature of such assemblies being the recognition of a binding belief or spiritual law, which is to lift us into willing obedience and save us from the slavery of unregulated passion or impulse. And with regard to other people, it seems to me that those who have no definite conviction which constitutes a protesting faith, may often more beneficially cherish the good within them and be better members of society by a conformity based on the recognised good in the public belief, than by a nonconformity which has nothing but negatives to utter. _Not_, of course, if the conformity would be accompanied by a consciousness of hypocrisy. That is a question for the individual conscience to settle. But there is enough to be said on the different points of view from which conformity may be regarded, to hinder a ready judgment against those who continue to conform after ceasing to believe in the ordinary sense. But with the utmost largeness of allowance for the difficulty of deciding in special cases, it must remain true that the highest lot is to have definite beliefs about which you feel that 'necessity is laid upon you' to declare them, as something better which you are bound to try and give to those who have the worse (iii. 215-217). These volumes contain many passages in the same sense--as, of course, her books contain them too. She was a constant reader of the Bible, andthe _Imitatio_ was never far from her hand. 'She particularly enjoyedreading aloud some of the finest chapters of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and St. Paul's Epistles. The Bible and our elder English poets best suited theorgan-like tones of her voice, which required for their full effect acertain solemnity and majesty of rhythm. ' She once expressed to ayounger friend, who shared her opinions, her sense of the loss whichthey had in being unable to practise the old ordinances of familyprayer. 'I hope, ' she says, 'we are well out of that phase in which themost philosophic view of the past was held to be a smiling survey ofhuman folly, and when the wisest man was supposed to be one who couldsympathise with no age but the age to come' (ii. 308). For this wise reaction she was no doubt partially indebted, as so manyothers have been, to the teaching of Comte. Unquestionably thefundamental ideas had come into her mind at a much earlier period, when, for example, she was reading Mr. R. W. Mackay's _Progress of theIntellect_ (1850, i. 253). But it was Comte who enabled her tosystematise these ideas, and to give them that 'definiteness, ' which, asthese pages show in a hundred places, was the quality that she soughtbefore all others alike in men and their thoughts. She always remainedat a respectful distance from complete adherence to Comte's scheme, butshe was never tired of protesting that he was a really great thinker, that his famous survey of the Middle Ages in the fifth volume of the_Positive Philosophy_ was full of luminous ideas, and that she hadthankfully learned much from it. Wordsworth, again, was dear to her inno small degree on the strength of such passages as that from the_Prelude_, which is the motto of one of the last chapters of her lastnovel:-- The human nature with which I felt That I belonged and reverenced with love, Was not a persistent presence, but a spirit Diffused through time and space, with aid derived Of evidence from monuments, erect, Prostrate, or leaning towards their common rest In earth, _the widely scattered wreck sublime_ _Of vanished nations_. Or this again, also from the _Prelude_ (see iii. 389):-- There is One great society alone on earth: The noble Living and the noble Dead. Underneath this growth and diversity of opinion we see George Eliot'soneness of character, just, for that matter, as we see it in Mill's longand grave march from the uncompromising denials instilled into him byhis father, then through Wordsworthian mysticism and Coleridgeanconservatism, down to the pale belief and dim starlight faith of hisposthumous volume. George Eliot was more austere, more unflinching, andof ruder intellectual constancy than Mill. She never withdrew from theposition that she had taken up, of denying and rejecting; she stood tothat to the end: what she did was to advance to the far higherperception that denial and rejection are not the aspects best worthattending to or dwelling upon. She had little patience with those whofear that the doctrine of protoplasm must dry up the springs of humaneffort. Any one who trembles at that catastrophe may profit by apowerful remonstrance of hers in the pages before us (iii. 245-250, also228). The consideration of molecular physics is not the direct ground of human love and moral action, any more than it is the direct means of composing a noble picture or of enjoying great music. One might as well hope to dissect one's own body and be merry in doing it, as take molecular physics (in which you must banish from your field of view what is specifically human) to be your dominant guide, your determiner of motives, in what is solely human. That every study has its bearing on every other is true; but pain and relief, love and sorrow, have their peculiar history which make an experience and knowledge over and above the swing of atoms. With regard to the pains and limitations of one's personal lot, I suppose there is not a single man or woman who has not more or less need of that stoical resignation which is often a hidden heroism, or who, in considering his or her past history, is not aware that it has been cruelly affected by the ignorant or selfish action of some fellow-being in a more or less close relation of life. And to my mind there can be no stronger motive than this perception, to an energetic effort that the lives nearest to us shall not suffer in a like manner from _us_. As to duration and the way in which it affects your view of the human history, what is really the difference to your imagination between infinitude and billions when you have to consider the value of human experience? Will you say that since your life has a term of threescore years and ten, it was really a matter of indifference whether you were a cripple with a wretched skin disease, or an active creature with a mind at large for the enjoyment of knowledge, and with a nature which has attracted others to you? For herself, she remained in the position described in one of herletters in 1860 (ii. 283):--'I have faith in the working out of higherpossibilities than the Catholic or any other Church has presented; andthose who have strength to wait and endure are bound to accept noformula which their whole souls--their intellect, as well as theiremotions--do not embrace with entire reverence. The highest calling andelection is _to do without opium_, and live through all our pain withconscious, clear-eyed endurance. ' She would never accept the commonoptimism. As she says here:--'Life, though a good to men on the whole, is a doubtful good to many, and to some not a good at all. To my thoughtit is a source of constant mental distortion to make the denial of thisa part of religion--to go on pretending things are better than theyare. ' Of the afflicting dealings with the world of spirits, which in thosedays were comparatively limited to the untutored minds of America, butwhich since have come to exert so singular a fascination for some of themost brilliant of George Eliot's younger friends (see iii. 204), shethought as any sensible Philistine among us persists in thinking to thisday:-- If it were another spirit aping Charlotte Brontë--if here and there at rare spots and among people of a certain temperament, or even at many spots and among people of all temperaments, tricksy spirits are liable to rise as a sort of earth-bubbles and set furniture in movement, and tell things which we either know already or should be as well without knowing--I must frankly confess that I have but a feeble interest in these doings, feeling my life very short for the supreme and awful revelations of a more orderly and intelligible kind which I shall die with an imperfect knowledge of. If there were miserable spirits whom we could help--then I think we should pause and have patience with their trivial-mindedness; but otherwise I don't feel bound to study them more than I am bound to study the special follies of a peculiar phase of human society. Others, who feel differently, and are attracted towards this study, are making an experiment for us as to whether anything better than bewilderment can come of it. At present it seems to me that to rest any fundamental part of religion on such a basis is a melancholy misguidance of men's minds from the true sources of high and pure emotion (iii. 161). The period of George Eliot's productions was from 1856, the date of herfirst stories, down to 1876, when she wrote, not under her brighteststar, her last novel of _Daniel Deronda_. During this time the greatliterary influences of the epoch immediately preceding had not indeedfallen silent, but the most fruitful seed had been sown. Carlyle's_Sartor_ (1833-1834), and his _Miscellaneous Essays_ (collected, 1839), were in all hands; but he had fallen into the terrible slough of hisPrussian history (1858-1865), and the last word of his evangel had goneforth to all whom it concerned. _In Memoriam_, whose noble music anddeep-browed thought awoke such new and wide response in men's hearts, was published in 1850. The second volume of _Modern Painters_, of whichI have heard George Eliot say, as of _In Memoriam_ too, that she owedmuch and very much to it, belongs to an earlier date still (1846), andwhen it appeared, though George Eliot was born in the same year as itsauthor, she was still translating Strauss at Coventry. Mr. Browning, forwhose genius she had such admiration, and who was always so good afriend, did indeed produce during this period some work which the adeptsfind as full of power and beauty as any that ever came from his pen. ButMr. Browning's genius has moved rather apart from the general currentsof his time, creating character and working out motives from within, undisturbed by transient shadows from the passing questions and answersof the day. The romantic movement was then upon its fall. The great Oxford movement, which besides its purely ecclesiastical effects, had linked Englishreligion once more to human history, and which was itself one of theunexpected outcomes of the romantic movement, had spent its originalforce, and no longer interested the stronger minds among the risinggeneration. The hour had sounded for the scientific movement. In 1859was published the _Origin of Species_, undoubtedly the most far-reachingagency of the time, supported as it was by a volume of new knowledgewhich came pouring in from many sides. The same period saw theimportant speculations of Mr. Spencer, whose influence on George Eliothad from their first acquaintance been of a very decisive kind. Twoyears after the _Origin of Species_ came Maine's _Ancient Law_, and thatwas followed by the accumulations of Mr. Tylor and others, exhibitingorder and fixed correlation among great sets of facts which had hithertolain in that cheerful chaos of general knowledge which has been calledgeneral ignorance. The excitement was immense. Evolution, development, heredity, adaptation, variety, survival, natural selection, were so manypatent pass-keys that were to open every chamber. George Eliot's novels, as they were the imaginative application of thisgreat influx of new ideas, so they fitted in with the moods which thoseideas had called up. 'My function, ' she said (iii. 330), 'is that of theæsthetic, not the doctrinal teacher--the rousing of the nobler emotionswhich make mankind desire the social right, not the prescribing ofspecial measures, concerning which the artistic mind, however stronglymoved by social sympathy, is often not the best judge. ' Her influence inthis direction over serious and impressionable minds was great indeed. The spirit of her art exactly harmonised with the new thoughts that wereshaking the world of her contemporaries. Other artists had drawn theirpictures with a strong ethical background, but she gave a finer colourand a more spacious air to her ethics by showing the individual passionsand emotions of her characters, their adventures and their fortunes, asevolving themselves from long series of antecedent causes, and bound upwith many widely operating forces and distant events. Here, too, we findourselves in the full stream of evolution, heredity, survival, and fixedinexorable law. This scientific quality of her work may be considered to have stood inthe way of her own aim. That the nobler emotions roused by her writingstend to 'make mankind desire the social right' is not to be doubted; butwe are not sure that she imparts peculiar energy to the desire. What shekindles is not a very strenuous, aggressive, and operative desire. Thesense of the iron limitations that are set to improvement in present andfuture by inexorable forces of the past, is stronger in her than anyintrepid resolution to press on to whatever improvement may chance to bewithin reach if we only make the attempt. In energy, in inspiration, inthe kindling of living faith in social effort, George Sand, not to speakof Mazzini, takes a far higher place. It was certainly not the business of an artist to form judgments in thesphere of practical politics, but George Eliot was far too humane anature not to be deeply moved by momentous events as they passed. Yether observations, at any rate after 1848, seldom show that energy ofsympathy of which we have been speaking, and these observationsillustrate our point. We can hardly think that anything was ever saidabout the great civil war in America, so curiously far-fetched as thefollowing reflection:--'My best consolation is that an example on sotremendous a scale of the need for the education of mankind through theaffections and sentiments, as a basis for true development, will have astrong influence on all thinkers, and be a check to the arid narrowantagonism which in some quarters is held to be the only form of liberalthought' (ii. 335). In 1848, as we have said, she felt the hopes of the hour in all theirfulness. To a friend she writes (i. 179):--'You and Carlyle (have youseen his article in last week's _Examiner?_) are the only two people whofeel just as I would have them--who can glory in what is actually greatand beautiful without putting forth any cold reservations andincredulities to save their credit for wisdom. I am all the moredelighted with your enthusiasm because I didn't expect it. I feared thatyou lacked revolutionary ardour. But no--you are just as_sans-culottish_ and rash as I would have you. You are not one of thosesages whose reason keeps so tight a rein on their emotions that they aretoo constantly occupied in calculating consequences to rejoice in anygreat manifestation of the forces that underlie our everyday existence. 'I thought we had fallen on such evil days that we were to see no reallygreat movement--that ours was what St. Simon calls a purely criticalepoch, not at all an organic one; but I begin to be glad of my date. Iwould consent, however, to have a year clipt off my life for the sakeof witnessing such a scene as that of the men of the barricades bowingto the image of Christ, 'who first taught fraternity to men. ' Onetrembles to look into every fresh newspaper lest there should besomething to mar the picture; but hitherto even the scoffing newspapercritics have been compelled into a tone of genuine respect for theFrench people and the Provisional Government. Lamartine can act a poemif he cannot write one of the very first order. I hope that beautifulface given to him in the pictorial newspaper is really his: it is worthyof an aureole. I have little patience with people who can find time topity Louis Philippe and his moustachioed sons. Certainly our decayedmonarchs should be pensioned off: we should have an hospital for them, or a sort of zoological garden, where these worn-out humbugs may bepreserved. It is but justice that we should keep them, since we havespoiled them for any honest trade. Let them sit on soft cushions, andhave their dinner regularly, but, for heaven's sake, preserve me fromsentimentalising over a pampered old man when the earth has its millionsof unfed souls and bodies. Surely he is not so Ahab-like as to wish thatthe revolution had been deferred till his son's days: and I think theshades of the Stuarts would have some reason to complain if theBourbons, who are so little better than they, had been allowed to reignmuch longer. ' The hopes of '48 were not very accurately fulfilled, and in George Eliotthey never came to life again. Yet in social things we may be sure thatundying hope is the secret of vision. There is a passage in Coleridge's _Friend_ which seems to represent theoutcome of George Eliot's teaching on most, and not the worst, of herreaders:--'The tangle of delusions, ' says Coleridge, 'which stifled anddistorted the growing tree of our well-being has been torn away; theparasite weeds that fed on its very roots have been plucked up with asalutary violence. To us there remain only quiet duties, the constantcare, the gradual improvement, the cautious and unhazardous labours ofthe industrious though contented gardener--to prune, to strengthen, toengraft, and one by one to remove from its leaves and fresh shoots theslug and the caterpillar. ' Coleridge goes farther than George Eliot, when he adds the exhortation--'Far be it from us to undervalue withlight and senseless detraction the conscientious hardihood of ourpredecessors, or even to condemn in them that vehemence to which theblessings it won for us leave us now neither temptation nor pretext. ' George Eliot disliked vehemence more and more as her work advanced. Theword 'crudity, ' so frequently on her lips, stood for all that wasobjectionable and distasteful. The conservatism of an artistic moralnature was shocked by the seeming peril to which priceless moralelements of human character were exposed by the energumens of progress. Their impatient hopes for the present appeared to her ratherunscientific; their disregard of the past very irreverent and impious. Mill had the same feeling when he disgusted his father by standing upfor Wordsworth, on the ground that Wordsworth was helping to keep alivein human nature elements which utilitarians and innovators would needwhen their present and particular work was done. Mill, being free fromthe exaltations that make the artist, kept a truer balance. His famouspair of essays on Bentham and Coleridge were published (for the firsttime, so far as our generation was concerned) in the same year as _AdamBede_, and I can vividly remember how the 'Coleridge' first awoke inmany of us, who were then youths at Oxford, that sense of truth havingmany mansions, and that desire and power of sympathy with the past, withthe positive bases of the social fabric, and with the value ofPermanence in States, which form the reputable side of allconservatisms. This sentiment and conviction never took richer or moremature form than in the best work of George Eliot, and her storieslighted up with a fervid glow the truths that minds of another type hadjust brought to the surface. It was this that made her a great moralforce at that epoch, especially for all who were capable by intellectualtraining of standing at her point of view. We even, as I have said, tried hard to love her poetry, but the effort has ended less in lovethan in a very distant homage to the majestic in intention and thesonorous in execution. In fiction, too, as the years go by, we begin tocrave more fancy, illusion, enchantment, than the quality of her geniusallowed. But the loftiness of her character is abiding, and it passesnobly through the ordeal of an honest biography. 'For the lessons, ' saysthe fine critic already quoted, 'most imperatively needed by the mass ofmen, the lessons of deliberate kindness, of careful truth, of unwaveringendeavour, --for these plain themes one could not ask a more convincingteacher than she whom we are commemorating now. Everything in her aspectand presence was in keeping with the bent of her soul. The deeply-linedface, the too marked and massive features, were united with an air ofdelicate refinement, which in one way was the more impressive because itseemed to proceed so entirely from within. Nay, the inward beauty wouldsometimes quite transform the external harshness; there would be momentswhen the thin hands that entwined themselves in their eagerness, theearnest figure that bowed forward to speak and hear, the deep gazemoving from one face to another with a grave appeal, --all these seemedthe transparent symbols that showed the presence of a wise, benignantsoul. ' As a wise, benignant soul George Eliot will still remain for allright-judging men and women.