Various
Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, April 1885
The benefits that George Eliot gained from her exclusive companionship with a man of lively talents were not without some compensating drawbacks. The keen stimulation and incessant strain, unrelieved by variety of daily intercourse, and never diversified by participation in the external activities of the world, tended to bring about a loaded, over-conscious, over-anxious state of mind, which was not only not wholesome in itself, but was inconsistent with the full freshness and strength of artistic work. The presence of the real world in his life has, in all but one or two cases, been one element of the novelist’s highest success in the world of imaginative creation. George Eliot had no greater favorite than Scott, and when a series of little books upon English men of letters was planned, she said that she thought that writer 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 favorite, though he was not a creative artist, we may say that he daily saturated himself in those natural elements and effects, which were the material, the suggestion, and the sustaining inspiration of his consoling and fortifying poetry. George Eliot did not live in the midst of her material, but aloof from it and outside of it. Heaven forbid that this should seem to be said by way of censure. Both her health and other considerations made all approach to busy sociability in any of its shapes both unwelcome and impossible. But in considering the relation of her manner of life to her work, her creations, her meditations, one cannot but see that when compared with some writers of her own sex and age, she is constantly bookish, artificial, and mannered. She is this because she fed her art too exclusively, first on the memories of her youth, and next from books, pictures, statues, instead of from the living model, as seen in its actual motion. It is direct calls and personal claims from without that make fiction alive. Jane Austen bore her part in the little world of the parlor that she described. The writer of Sylvia’s Lovers, whose work George Eliot appreciated with unaffected generosity (i. 305), was the mother of children, and was surrounded by the wholesome actualities of the family. The authors of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights passed their days in one long succession of wild, stormy, squalid, anxious, and miserable scenes – almost as romantic, as poetic, and as tragic, to use George Eliot’s words, as their own stories. George Sand eagerly shared, even to the pitch of passionate tumult and disorder, in the emotions, the aspirations, the ardor, the great conflicts and controversies of her time. In every one of these, their daily closeness to the real life of the world has given a vitality to their work which we hardly expect that even the next generation will find in more than one or two of the romances of George Eliot. It may even come to pass that their position will 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), George Eliot describes her own method, as “the severe effort of trying to make certain ideas thoroughly incarnate, as if they had revealed themselves to me first in the flesh and not in the spirit,” The passage recalls a discussion one day at the Priory in 1877. She was speaking of the different methods of the poetic or creative art, and said that she began with moods, thoughts, passions, and then invented the story for their sake, and fitted it to them; Shakespeare, on the other hand, picked up a story that struck him, and then proceeded to work in the moods, thoughts, passions, as they came to him in the course of meditation on the story. We hardly need the result to convince us that Shakespeare chose the better part.
The influence of her reserved fashion of daily life was heightened by the literary exclusiveness which of set purpose she imposed upon herself. “The less an author hears about himself,” she says, in one place, “the better.” “It is my rule, very strictly observed, not to read the criticisms on my writings. For years I have found this abstinence necessary to preserve me from that discouragement as an artist, which ill-judged praise, no less than ill-judged blame, tends to produce in us.” George Eliot pushed this repugnance to criticism beyond the personal reaction of it upon the artist, and more than disparaged its utility, even in the most competent and highly trained hands. She finds that the diseased spot in the literary culture of our time is touched with the finest point by the saying of La Bruyère, that “the pleasure of criticism robs us of the pleasure of being keenly moved by very 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 say about him, especially when the man is first-rate and the others third-rate. As Goethe said long ago about Spinoza, ‘I always preferred to learn from the man himself what he thought, rather than to hear from some one else what he ought to have thought.’” As if the scholar will not always be glad to do both, to study his author and not to refuse the help of the rightly prepared commentator; as if even Goethe himself would not have been all the better acquainted with Spinoza, if he could 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 heresies may 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 upon Bulwer. “I have a great respect,” she says, “for the energetic industry which has made the most of his powers. He has been writing diligently for more than thirty years, constantly improving his position, and profiting 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 the better, how are these salutary “lessons of public opinion” to penetrate to him? “Rubens,” she says, writing from Munich, in 1858 (ii. 28), “gives me more pleasure than any other painter whether right or wrong. More than any one else he makes me feel that painting is a great art, and that he was a great artist. His are such real breathing men and women, moved by passions, not mincing, and grimacing, and posing in mere imitation of passion.” But Rubens did not concentrate his intellect on his own ponderings, nor shut out the wholesome chastenings of praise and blame, lest they should discourage his inspiration. Beethoven, another of the chief objects of George Eliot’s veneration, bore all the rough stress of an active and troublesome calling, though of the musician, if of any, we may say, that his is the art of self-absorption.
Hence, delightful and inspiring as it is to read this story of diligent and discriminating cultivation, of accurate truth and real erudition and beauty, not vaguely but methodically interpreted, one has some of the sensations of the moral and intellectual hothouse. Mental hygiene is apt to lead to mental valetudinarianism. “The ignorant journalist” may be left to the torment which George Eliot wished that she could inflict on one of those literary slovens whose manuscripts bring even the most philosophic editor to the point of exasperation: “I should like to stick red-hot skewers through the writer, whose style is as sprawling as his handwriting.” By all means. But much that even the most sympathetic reader finds repellent in George Eliot’s later work might perhaps never have been, if Mr. Lewes had not practised with more than Russian rigor a censorship of the press and the post office which kept every disagreeable whisper scrupulously from her ear. To slop every draft with sandbags, screens, and curtains, and to limit one’s exercise to a drive in a well-warmed brougham with the windows drawn up, may save a few annoying colds in the head, but the end of the process will be the manufacture of an invalid.
Whatever view we may take of the precise connection between what she read, or abstained from reading, and what she wrote, no studious man or woman can look without admiration and envy on the breadth, variety, seriousness, and energy, with which she set herself her tasks and executed them. She says in one of her letters, “there is something more piteous almost than soapless poverty in the application of feminine incapacity to literature” (ii. 16). Nobody has ever taken the responsibilities of literature more ardently in earnest. She was accustomed to read aloud to Mr. Lewes three hours a day, and her private reading, except when she was engaged in the actual stress of composition, must have filled as many more. His extraordinary alacrity and her brooding intensity of mind, prevented these hours from being that leisurely process in slippers and easy chair which passes with many for the practice of literary cultivation. Much of her reading was for the direct purposes of her own work. The young lady who begins to write historic novels out of her own head will find something much to her advantage if she will refer to the list of books read by George Eliot during the latter half of 1861, when she was meditating Romola (ii. 325). Apart from immediate needs and uses, no student of our time has known better the solace, the delight, the guidance that abide in great writings. Nobody who did not share the scholars enthusiasm could have described the blind scholar in his library in the adorable fifth chapter of Romola; and we feel that she must have copied out with keen gusto of her own those words of Petrarch which she puts into old Bardo’s mouth – “Libri medullitus delectant, colloquuntur, consulunt, et viva quadam nobis atque arguta familiaritate junguntur.”
As for books that are not books, as Milton bade us do with “neat repasts with wine,” she wisely spared to interpose them oft. Her standards of knowledge were those of the erudite and the savant, and even in the region of beauty she was never content with any but definite impressions. In one place in these volumes, by the way, she makes a remark curiously inconsistent with the usual scientific attitude of her mind. She has been reading Darwin’s Origin of Species, on which she makes the truly astonishing criticism that it is “sadly wanting in illustrative facts,” and that “it is not impressive from want of luminous and orderly presentation” (ii. 43-48). Then she says that “the development theory, and all other explanation of processes by which things came to be produce a feeble impression compared with the mystery that lies under processes.” This position it does not now concern us to discuss, but at least it is in singular discrepancy with her strong habitual preference for accurate and quantitative knowledge, over vague and 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. Cross tells us, she could read with thorough delight to herself; though after the appalling specimen of Mill’s juvenile Latinity that Mr. Bain has disinterred, the fastidious collegian may be sceptical of the scholarship of prodigies. Hebrew was her favorite study to the end of her days. People commonly supposed that she had been inoculated with an artificial taste for science by her companion. We now learn that she took a decided interest in natural science long before she made Mr. Lewes’s acquaintance, and many of the roundabout pedantries that displeased people in her latest writings, and were set down to his account, appeared in her composition before she had ever exchanged a word with him.
All who knew her well enough were aware that she had what Mr. Cross describes as “limitless persistency in application.” This is an old account of genius, but nobody illustrates more effectively the infinite capacity of taking pains. In reading, in looking at pictures, in playing difficult music, in talking, she was equally importunate in the search, and equally insistent on mastery. Her faculty of sustained concentration was part of her immense intellectual power. “Continuous thought did not fatigue her. She could keep her mind on the stretch hour after hour; the body might give way, but the brain remained unwearied” (iii. 422). It is only a trifling illustration of the infection of her indefatigable quality of taking pains, that Lewes should have formed the important habit of re-writing every page of his work, even of short articles for Reviews, before letting it go to the press. The journal shows what sore pain and travail composition was to her. She wrote the last volume of Adam Bede in six weeks; she “could not help writing it fast, because it was written under the stress of emotion.” But what a prodigious contrast between her pace, and Walter Scott’s twelve volumes a year! Like many other people of powerful brains, she united strong and clear general retentiveness, with a weak and untrustworthy verbal memory. “She never could trust herself to write a quotation without verifying it.” “What courage and patience,” she says of some one else, “are wanted for every life that aims to produce anything,” and her own existence was one long and painful sermon on that text.
Over few lives have the clouds of mental dejection hung in such heavy unmoving banks. Nearly every chapter is strewn with melancholy words. “I cannot help thinking more of your illness than of the pleasure in prospect – according to my foolish nature, which is always prone to live in past pain.” The same sentiment is the mournful refrain that runs through all. Her first resounding triumph, the success of Adam Bede, instead of buoyancy and exultation, only adds a fresh sense of the weight upon her future life. “The self-questioning whether my nature will be able to meet the heavy demands upon it, both of personal duty and intellectual production – presses upon me almost continually in a way that 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 no pleasure; but it is a grief to me that I do not constantly feel strong in thankfulness that my past life has vindicated its uses.”
Romola seems to have been composed in constant gloom. “I remember my wife telling me, at Witley,” says Mr. Cross, “how cruelly she had suffered at Dorking from working under a leaden weight at this time. The writing 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-defined transition in her life. In her own words, ‘I began it a young woman – I finished it an old woman.’” She calls upon herself to make “greater efforts against indolence and the despondency that comes from too egoistic a dread of failure.” “This is the last entry I mean to make in my old book in which I wrote for the first time at Geneva in 1849. What moments of despair I passed through after that – despair that life would ever be made precious to me by the consciousness that I lived to some good purpose! It was that sort of despair that sucked away the sap of half the hours which might have been filled by energetic youthful activity; and the same demon tries to get hold of me again whenever an old work is dismissed, and a new one is being meditated” (ii. 307). One day the entry is: “Horrible scepticism about all things paralysing my mind. Shall I ever be good for anything again? Ever do anything again?” On another, she describes herself to a trusted friend as “a mind morbidly desponding, and a consciousness tending more and more to consist in memories of error and imperfection rather than in a strengthening sense of achievement.” We have to turn to such books as Bunyan’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, as she says, she felt that Dante was right in condemning to the Stygian marsh those who had been sad under the blessed sunlight. “Sad were we in the sweet air that is gladdened by the sun, bearing sluggish smoke in our hearts; now lie we sadly here in the black ooze.” But still for the most part sad she remained in the sweet air, and the look of pain that haunted 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 was unavoidable. It would be rash to compare George Eliot with Tacitus, with Dante, with Pascal. A novelist – for as a poet, after trying hard to think otherwise, most of us find her magnificent but unreadable – as a novelist bound by the conditions of her art to deal in a thousand trivialities of human character and situation, she has none of their severity of form. But she alone of moderns has their note of sharp-cut melancholy, of sombre rumination, of brief disdain. Living in a time when humanity has been raised, whether formally or informally, into a religion, she draws a painted curtain of pity before the tragic scene. Still the attentive ear catches from time to time the accents of an unrelenting voice, that proves her kindred with those three mighty spirits and stern monitors of men. In George Eliot, a reader with a conscience may be reminded of the saying that when a man opens Tacitus he puts himself in the confessional. She was no vague dreamer over the folly 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 tired child, And weep away this life of care,” as Shelley at Naples; nor is it the despairing misery that moved Cowper in the awful verses of the Castaway. It was not such self-pity as wrung from Burns the cry to life, “Thou art a galling load, Along, a rough, a weary road, To wretches such as I;” nor such general sense of the woes of the race as made Keats think 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 the savage truculence of Swift. Intellectual training had given her the spirit of order and proportion, of definiteness and measure, and this marks her alike from the great sentimentalists and the sweeping satirists. “Pity and fairness,” as she beautifully says (iii. 317), “are two little words which, carried out, would embrace the utmost delicacies of the moral life.” But hers is not seldom the severe fairness of the judge, and the pity that may go with putting on the black cap after a conviction for high treason. In the midst of many an easy flowing page, the reader is surprised by some bitter aside, some judgment of intense and concentrated irony with the flash of a blade in it, some biting sentence where lurks the stern disdain and the anger of Tacitus, and Dante, and Pascal. Souls like these are not born for happiness.
This is not the occasion for an elaborate discussion of George Eliot’s place in the mental history of her time, but her biography shows that she 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 of many a powerful character in this century, from Cardinal Newman downwards. Then with curious rapidity she threw it all off, and embraced with equal zeal the rather harsh and crude negations which were then associated with the Westminster Review. The second stage did not last much longer than the first. “Religious and moral sympathy with the historical life of man,” she said (ii. 363), “is the larger half of culture;” and this sympathy, which was the fruit of her culture, had by the time she was thirty become the new seed of a positive faith and a semi-conservative creed. Here is a passage from a letter of 1862 (she had translated Strauss, we may remind ourselves, in 1845, and Feuerbach in 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 further: —
“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 pre-eminently 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 God (which is understood to be expressed by God) carries me along in its main current; and if there were not reasons against by 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 recognized 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, and the Imitatio was never far from her hand. “She particularly enjoyed reading aloud some of the finest chapters of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and St. Paul’s Epistles. The Bible and our elder English poets best suited the organ-like tones of her voice, which required for their full effect a certain solemnity and majesty of rhythm.” She once expressed to a younger friend, who shared her opinions, her sense of the loss which they had in being unable to practise the old ordinances of family prayer. “I hope,” she says, “we are well out of that phase in which the most philosophic view of the past was held to be a smiling survey of human folly, and when the wisest man was supposed to be one who could sympathise with no age but the age to come” (ii. 308).
For this wise reaction she was no doubt partially indebted, as so many others have been, to the teaching of Comte. Unquestionably the fundamental ideas had come into her mind at a much earlier period, when, for example, she was reading Mr. R. W. Mackay’s Progress of the Intellect (1850, i. 253). But it was Comte who enabled her to systematise these ideas, and to give them that “definiteness,” which, as these pages show in a hundred places, was the quality that she sought before all others alike in men and their thoughts. She always remained at a respectful distance from complete adherence to Comte’s scheme, but she 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 had thankfully learned much from it. Wordsworth, again, was dear to her in no 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 last novel: —
“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’s oneness of character, just, for that matter, as we see it in Mill’s long and grave march from the uncompromising denials instilled into him by his father, then through Wordsworthian mysticism and Coleridgean conservatism, down to the pale belief and dim starlight faith of his posthumous volume. George Eliot was more austere, more unflinching, and of ruder intellectual constancy than Mill. She never withdrew from the position that she had taken up, of denying and rejecting; she stood to that to the end: what she did was to advance to the far higher perception that denial and rejection are not the aspects best worth attending to or dwelling upon. She had little patience with those who fear that the doctrine of protoplasm must dry up the springs of human effort. Any one who trembles at that catastrophe may profit by a powerful remonstrance of hers in the pages before us (iii. 245-250, also 228).
“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 her letters in 1860 (ii. 283): – “I have faith in the working out of higher possibilities than the Catholic or any other Church has presented; and those who have strength to wait and endure are bound to accept no formula which their whole souls – their intellect, as well as their emotions – do not embrace with entire reverence. The highest calling and election is to do without opium, and live through all our pain with conscious, clear-eyed endurance.” She would never accept the common optimism. 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 thought it is a source of constant mental distortion to make the denial of this a part of religion – to go on pretending things are better than they are.”
Of the afflicting dealings with the world of spirits, which in those days were comparatively limited to the untutored minds of America, but which since have come to exert so singular a fascination for some of the most brilliant of George Eliot’s younger friends (see iii. 204), she thought as any sensible Philistine among us persists in thinking to this day: —
“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 her first stories, down to 1876, when she wrote, not under her brightest star, her last novel of Daniel Deronda. During this time the great literary influences of the epoch immediately preceding had not indeed fallen silent, but the most fruitful seed had been sown. Carlyle’s Sartor (1833-4), and his Miscellaneous Essays (collected, 1839), were in all hands; but he had fallen into the terrible slough of his Prussian history (1858-65), and the last word of his evangel had gone forth to all whom it concerned. In Memoriam, whose noble music and deep-browed thought awoke such new and wide response in men’s hearts, was published in 1850. The second volume of Modern Painters, of which I have heard George Eliot say, as of In Memoriam too, that she owed much and very much to it, belongs to an earlier date still (1846), and when it appeared, though George Eliot was born in the same year as its author, she was still translating Strauss at Coventry. Mr. Browning, for whose genius she had such admiration, and who was always so good a friend, did indeed produce during this period some work which the adepts find as full of power and beauty as any that ever came from his pen. But Mr. Browning’s genius has moved rather apart from the general currents of his time, creating character and working out motives from within, undisturbed by transient shadows from the passing questions and answers of the day.