No More Learning



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>
It cannot be said that her hand as an essayist was heavy-even
against Theophrastus Such this charge cannot fairly lie ; but, the
slighter the texture of her work, the more arduous she seemed to
find the process of unloading her learning within its limits. When,
in her novels, she essayed short introductory or discursive passages
after the example of Fielding or Thackeray, ease was the one quality
which she could not command. 'n the other hand, whatever she
in
wrote, even, as it were, in passing, was invariably lucid ; and no
pen has ever better than hers illustrated the truth of her own
assertion: ‘the last degree of clearness can only come by writing? '
At last—when 'we were very poor? ? —her companion discovered
the hidden treasure, or insisted on its being brought to light.
Like a born novelist, she thought of the title The Sad Fortunes
of the Rev. Amos Barton, almost before she had shaped the
subject of the story in her mind ; but she was speedily in the
midst of it and had resolved on its forming the first of a series to
be called Tales from Clerical Life. Amos Barton, the first part
of which appeared in the January 1857 number of Blackwood's
Magazine, was followed, in the course of the same year, by the
two other tales of the series, Mr Gilfil's Love Story and Janet's
Repentance. All three bore the signature George Eliot-a name
chosen, almost, at random and thus admirably adapted for giving
rise to the widest variety of wild conjecture. Even Thackeray
thought the author a man; but Dickens was sure of the woman.
Both great novelists were warm in their admiration, as, also, were
Bulwer Lytton, Anthony Trollope and Mrs Gaskell-a pleasant
testimony to the generous temper of literary genius in the
Victorian age. We pass by the more doubtful tribute of admira-
tion offered by an impostor whose impudent pretensions to the
authorship of Scenes, and, afterwards, of Adam Bede, were not
quashed until nearly two years had passed.
Notwithstanding the just and discerning applause with which
the first appearance of George Eliot as a writer of fiction was
greeted, it would not be difficult to show that, in Scenes of
Clerical Life, her style and manner as a novelist were still in the
making ; but what she still had to learn was so speedily learnt
that not much needs to be said on this head. In after days, she
laughed at herself for being—or at her critics for thinking her-
‘sesquipedalian and scientific' at all costs; and, on the very first
1 Life, etc. , vol. 1, p. 334.
2 See Letters of C. Eliot Norton (1913), vol. 1, p. 307. Cf. ibid. p. 316, as to her
social isolation at this time.


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]
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387
page of the first of these tales, the walls of Shepperton church are
described as 'innutrient,' like the bald head of the Rev. Amos
Barton. As this example indicates, the taste of the phraseology is
not always perfect; and the artifices of style are not always
original'. The humour, at times, is inadequate, and, at other
times, forced : the group of clergy over whom Mr Ely affably
presides at the book-club dinner in Amos Barton includes one or
two very unfinished sketches, while the talk at the symposium in
the Red Lion, in Janet's Repentance, is too cleverly stupid? . .
Moreover, in this last and, by far, most powerful of the three stories,
the construction is seriously at fault; for Dempster does not, as
had obviously been intended, die a ruined man, and (which is of
(
more importance) Janet's recovery from her craving for drink is
not harmonised with her deeper spiritual repentance. What, then,
accounts for the effect produced by these Scenes when they first
appeared, and still exercised by them on the admirers of George
Eliot's later and maturer works? In the first place, no doubt, the
gnomic wisdom, which generally takes the form of wit, is as striking
as it is pregnant}; but, again, occasionally it has the lucid direct-
ness which, rather than mere pointedness, is characteristic of the
Greek epigram*, and, yet again, at times, it lurks in the lambency
of unsuspected humour”, while it may rise to the height of a
prophetic saying or a maxim for all time", or pierce with poetic
power into the depths of tragic emotion”. The examples of these
varieties of expression given below have been taken almost at hap-
hazard from Scenes of Clerical Life, and no attempt will be made,
easy though it would be, to multiply them from this or later works.
But they may be regarded as sufficiently illustrating a feature in
the imaginative writings of George Eliot which must be acknow-
ledged to be one of their most distinctive characteristics. Yet,
a
1 An ill-placed Sam-Wellerism in Janet's Repentance (p. 581) exhibits both faults.
2 Surely Mr Dempster, even in a simulated access of rage, would hardly have talked
of the asinine virus of dissent. '
3 • Though Amos thought himself strong, he never felt himself strong' (Amos
Barton). The Countess intended (ultimately) to be quite pious' (ibid. ).
4 •Animals are most agreeable friends. They ask no questions; the
pass no
criticisms' (Mr Gilfil's Love Story).
5 • The boys thought the rite of confirmation should be confined to the girls'
(Janet's Repentance). “A friendly dinner was held by the Association for the Prose-
cution of Felons' (Mr Gilfil's Love Story).
6 • Trust and resignation fill up the margin of ignorance' (Janet's Repentance).
7 Tina is compared to a poor wounded leveret, painfully dragging its body through
the sweet clover-tufts—for it, sweet in vain' (Mr Gilfil's Love Story).
8 The reader desirous of an anthology of Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings of
25-2


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a
even the brilliancy of the writing and no other epithet would
suit it-allows itself to be overlooked, as the sympathetic power
of the writer, and the catholic breadth of her principles of moral
judgment, impress themselves upon the reader. The Sad Fortunes
of the Rev. Amos Barton, though hardly more than a sketch,
teaches a lesson, devoid of any subtlety or novelty, that it is
neither the cloth nor the respectability of the man himself (and
Amos was “superlatively middling') that entitles him to goodwill,
but the human anguish of his experiences—the pathos of an
ordinary soul-as he is left with his children by the deathbed of
his poor, beautiful, patient Milly? Mr Gilfil's Love Story is of
hardly more solid structure-a vision of the past, illustrating the
beautiful simile of the lopped tree which has lost its best branches
—but a true reflection of the tragedy of life with its unspeakably
cruel disenchantments, softened only by fate's kindness in the
midst of unkindness. And Janet's Repentance deals, as George
Eliot herself put it? , with a collision, not between 'bigoted church-
manship’and evangelicalism, but between irreligion and religion.
It is not perfection that makes Tryan a true hero any more than,
as we are reminded in a fine passage, it made Luther or Bunyan;
nor is it in what he achieved, but in the spirit in which he
sought to achieve, that lies the value of his endeavour. The
atonement of Janet, an erring woman as he had been an erring
man, but whom his influence saves from herself, is told with the
same power of sympathy; and, while Tryan dies with her love in
sight, there remains for her a life which has become a solemn
service. The humanity of both these stories, and of the last in
particular, as exhibiting the blessed influence of one human soul
(not one set of ideas, for ideas are poor ghosts') upon another-
this is what came home to the readers of George Eliot's first book
as already something more than promise.
Before Scenes of Clerical Life had reached a speedier close
than the authoress had, at first, intended, and before the book, as
a whole, had come into the hands of the great novelists by whose
side she was soon to take her place, George Eliot had begun her
new story, Adam Bede. A considerable part of it was written at
Dresden, and it was finished by November 1858. The germ of
this novel, the reading of which, Dickens said, 'made an epoch in
George Eliot is referred to the collection under that title by Alexander Main (1872),
for whom she bad much personal regard.
? She is surely not called Amelia without intention. George Eliot, as has been
pointed out, was a reader of both Fielding and Thackeray.
· Life, etc. , vol. 1, p. 370.


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>
his life,' and which, like the firstfruits of some other authors of
genius, is, by many of the lovers of George Eliot, held unsurpassed
in original power by any of its successors, was a story of terrible
simplicity. Her aunt Elizabeth Evans, methodist preacher at
Wirksworth, had told her of a confession made to her by a girl in
prison, who had been convicted of the murder of her child, but had
previously refused to confess the crime. On the foundation of
this far from uncommon anecdote of woe, the authoress of Adam
Bede raised a structure of singular beauty and deep moral signifi-
cance. The keynote of the story--the belief that the divine spirit
which works in man works through man's own response to its
call—dominates the narrative from first to last. It is sounded by
Adam Bede in an opening scene of singular originality and force,
in which he is introduced with his brother Seth in the midst of
their fellow-workmen ; and it is the text of a full exposition of his
views on religion in the middle of the story, where it' pauses a
little,' and Adam is represented as “looking back' upon the ex-
periences of his life and their illustration of the truth : 'it isn't
notions sets people doing the right thing-it's feeling. And it
connects itself with the altruism which, though Adam does not
attain to it at once or till after sore trial, since nothing great or
good drops into our laps like ripe fruit, George Eliot exemplified
in this, as in other of the most grandly conceived characters in
her stories, and, thus, as it were, superinduced in her readers
by making them
better able to imagine and feel the pains and the joys of those who differ from
themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling, erring,
human creatures1.
While the ethical spirit of the narrative thus, throughout, maintains
the same high level, and while, with true moral strength, is contrasted
the weakness which neither beauty can excuse nor kindliness of
disposition cover, the awful gulf that separates act from thought,
and passionate longing or yielding languor from guilt and its
inevitable consequences, opens itself before our eyes, and we
recognise, in the results of human deeds, an aváyan far stronger
and more resistless than what men call fate.
Viewed from another point of view, it is little short of wonder-
ful that so new a writer should have satisfied so many demands of
the novelist's art. The descriptive power which George Eliot here
exhibits, though the scenery and surroundings depicted by her are
associated with ancestral rather than personal reminiscences, is very
1 Life, etc. , vol. I, pp. 487—8.


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6
fresh and vivid : the Staffordshire village and the Derbyshire
neighbourhood have an element of northern roughness effectively
mixed with their midland charm. And the signature of the times
in which the story plays is alike unmistakable--more especially in
its treatment of the religious life of an age which was but faintly
lit up with the 'afterglow of methodism,' and in which the new
revival of church feeling had not yet made old-fashioned parsons
like Mr Irvine feel uncomfortable. But it is in the characters of
the novel themselves that the author's creative power already
appears at its height in Adam Beile, and that she gives proof of
that penetrating perception of the inner springs of human action
which, without exaggeration, has been called Shakespearean.
Adam Bede himself is no Sir Charles Grandison of the class to
which he belongs, but an example of a high-souled working man
who has taught himself the duty of self-sacrifice, till, like the
ploughman of old, Adam Bede brings us nearer to a conception of
the divine mission which a fellow-creature may help to carry out.
He is throughout contrasted, in no harsh spirit, with his younger
brother, who is cast in a slighter mould, but whose humility has a
beauty of its own. The kindly rector, whose shrinking gentleness
is defended almost without a touch of irony, and his godson, whose
good resolutions are almost an element of his instability, the coldly
selfish squire, the savagely sympathetic schoolmaster-all are more
or less novel, and all are true, varieties of human nature. . Among
the women, Dinah and Hetty sleep, separated only by a thin wall,
in the Poysers' house-but, on the one side of it, there abides an
innate selfishness which thinks itself born for the sunshine, on the
other, the loving minister of comfort which will not be rejected at
the last. With Mrs Poyser herself and the family over which she
holds sway, we enter into another sphere of George Eliot's creative
genius.
Among all the groupings invented by her, the Poyser
family has remained unsurpassed as a popular favourite, and such
scenes as the walk of the family to church, or their appearance at
the young squire's birthday feast, are pure gems. Mrs Poyser
herself, though universally admired, has, perhaps, not always been
quite justly appreciated. She is, above all things, a great talker,
the value of whose talk should by no means be estimated only by
that of the 'proverbs' by which it is adorned. Indeed, since we
have it on George Eliot's own authority, that there is not one thing
put into Mrs Poyser's mouth that is not fresh from my own mind'
-in other words, that Mrs Poyser's sayings are not, properly
speaking, proverbs at all—they should be regarded merely as the


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.
XI]
Adam Bede
391
spontaneous decorations of an eloquence which can rely on powers
of exposition superior to all resistance, and merely on occasion,
when moved by didactic purpose, is fain to heighten the effect of
its colouring by means of these gnomic jewels? .
The construction of the story is skilful and close, and, with
logical firmness, bears out the principle laid down by Adam Bede,
that you can never do what's wrong without breeding sin and
trouble, as well as his later reflection : 'that's what makes the
blackness of it. . . it can never be undone? ' The only exception
that can be justly taken to the self-developing course of the narra-
tive is concerned with its concluding portion. As was frequently
the case with the Victorian novel, the conclusion of Adam Bede
is long drawn-out-in this instance, probably, with the design of
reconciling the reader to Adam's second love, for Dinah, and to his
marriage with her. It is not so much as affecting any previous
notion of Dinah that this ending is unfortunate, or because we are
sorry for Seth, or even because the whole episode, intrinsically, is
not very probable. But could a deep and noble nature such as
Adam Bede's have forgotten his love for Hetty, while she was still
suffering for guilt which, as he well knew, was only half her own?
And if (as is not very clear from the closing pages) she had already
passed away, could she have been dead to Adam ? Our dead,' as
*
we read in a passage of the novel which seems to breathe, as it
were, the remorse of humanity, are never dead to us till we have
forgotten them? '
Adam Bede had been finished little more than three months
when a new story, 'a sort of comparison picture of provincial life'
was already in George Eliot's mind; and, within a year from that
date, the story in question was already completed (March 1860).
The Mill on the Floss may not be the greatest of its author's
novels ; but it was that into which she poured most abundantly
the experiences of her own life when it had still been one of youth
and hope ; so that none of her books appeal with the same direct-
ness to the personal sympathies of her readers, at least in its earlier
and more simply developed parts: it is the David Copperfield or
the Pendennis among the products of her literary genius
p. 119.
1 Cf. Life, etc. , vol. I, p. 463, and Adam Bede,
? Ibid. pp. 150, 641.
3 Adam Bede, p. 152. Strangely enough, the relation between Adam and Dinah,
which, according to the ordinary laws of fiction could only end in their ultimate union,
was not suggested to George Eliot by Lewes till she had made some progress with the
story. His argument (for which see Life, vol. I, p. 447) does not remove the blot (if it
be one), which was pointed out by Bulwer Lytton as the single thing, besides the dialect,
to be found fault with in Adam Bede (ibid. p. 526).


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Although she was fain to acknowledge the truth of Bulwer
Lytton's criticism', that the epic breadth into which she was
beguiled by love of her subject in the first two volumes' caused a
want of fulness in the preparation of the tragedy reached in the
third, yet, the nobility and beauty of Maggie's personality has to
be made fully manifest before we can absolve her for giving way,
even momentarily, to her passion for Stephen ; and a long ending,
such as goes far to mar the effect of certain other of George Eliot's
works, would hardly have enhanced the expiatory solemnity of its
perfect close. Maggie's is the earliest in the sequence of George
Eliot's heroines par excellence—Romola, Dorothea, Gwendolen
being the others. None of them brings home to us with more
intense force than Maggie Tulliver the conflict waged by the
great imaginative aspirations of the soul, which never abandons
them though it cannot command their fulfilment, and the puri-
fying influence of these aspirations. For, with her, as with the
rest, of whom, though with features wholly her own, she is a sort
of prototype, the escape from hopeless battling or prostrating
collapse lies one way only—that to which she is, as it were, acci-
dentally led—the way of self-sacrifice. If she stumbles on the
threshold of her better life, it is that she may fully learn the truth
of Philip's saying that there can be no renunciation without pain,
and she has to pass through a struggle far harder than her early
yearnings and strivings before she conquers. After this, she can
await the end, whatever judgment may be passed upon her by her
brother, who cannot go beyond knowing that he is in the right, or
by all the gossips of St Ogg's, who cannot rise above the certainty
that she is in the wrong. When the end comes, it finds her in the
midst of tempest and destruction as a bringer of reconciliation and
peace, and the novel closes, in perfect harmony with its opening,
as a story of trusting love.
In The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot had already displayed
an amplitude of exposition—both in the delineation of manners
and in the analysis of their significance—which could not but, from
time to time, seem exacting even to the warmest admirers of her
genius. Mr and Mrs Tulliver, in some ways, are a kind of inversion
of the Poysers, and, though of a feebler personal texture, not less
true to nature and nature's humorousness. But Mrs Tulliver's
sisters must be pronounced frequently tedious, and the enquiry
into the motives of ordinary doings by ordinary people is, at times,
trying. Still, in The Mill on the Floss, the background remains a
1 Life, etc. , vol. II, p. 17.
es


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393
background only, and there is no dissipation of the interest which
never ceases to centre in ‘sister Maggie'-as the whole story was
intended to have been called, till its present name, breathing the
very spirit of English romance, and hinting vaguely at the tragic
course of the homely story, was, in a happy moment, substituted.
After the completion of this novel, which was dedicated to
Lewes, the authoress left England in his company for a few months'
holiday, which she spent mainly in Italy. In Florence, which
aroused in her a stronger interest than even Rome itself, she began
to think of Romola ; nor is it possible that this theme could have
grown in her mind without the aid of the genius loci. But, after
her return, although she continued to carry on an extensive course
of reading for the sake of this book, she did not actually set to
work upon it for nearly a twelvemonth further. Wholly absorbed
as she was, at this time, by her literary work, and holding aloof
from any wider social intercourse, she was able, by 1861, to com-
plete for publication another story, totally different in its associations
from that upon which her mind had already become primarily
intent. Silas Marner, though it can hardly be said to fall under
the category of short stories, extends to no great length, and, in
construction and treatment, shows a perfect sense of proportion on
the part of the writer. Indeed, competent judges have pronounced
it, in form, George Eliot's most finished work, while none of her
larger novels surpasses it in delicacy of pathos. The life of the
solitary linen-weaver, driven out long ago, by a grievous wrong,
from the little religious community to which he belonged, and
doomed, as it seemed, to a remote quietude rendered bearable
only by his satisfaction in his growing pile of gold, is suddenly
changed by the theft of his treasure. The young spendthrift who
has done the deed vanishes ; and the mystery remains unsolved
till it is cleared up with the unravelling of the whole plot of the
story. Nothing could be more powerfully drawn than the blank
despondency of the unhappy man, and nothing more beautifully
imagined than the change wrought by the golden-haired child who
takes the place of the gold by his hearth and in his heart. The
tenderness of fancy which pervades this simple tale, and the bright-
ness of humour which, not so much in the symposiasts of the
Rainbow as in the motherly Dolly Winthrop, relieves the con-
strained simplicity of its course, certainly assure to Silas Marner
a place of its own among George Eliot's works.
'I began Romola,' she writes', 'a young woman—I finished it an
1 Life, etc. , vol. II, p. 88.
>


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old woman' In whatever sense this saying is to be accepted, it
shows how she had consciously and consistently contemplated this
work as a labour of years, and how she had been led to the writing
of it by something besides a vast variety of study in political
and ecclesiastical history, in theology, in political philosophy, in
humanistic and artistic lore and in illustrative literature of all
kinds. Yet, it is a supreme prerogative of genius to be able to
master its material by becoming part of what it has transformed ;
and George Eliot was never more herself, and never displayed her
most distinctive intellectual qualities and moral purposes with
more powerful directness than in this, the most elaborate, as well
as erudite, of all her literary productions. Romola is one of the
most real and lifelike of her prose fictions, and, from this point of
view, too, shows itself altogether superior to a novel which it is
difficult not to bring into comparison with it, Charles Kingsley's
Hypatia, published about ten years earlier. Both works exhibit
the movement of actual life, as well as of deep feeling ; but
Romola is not less distinguished from the older work by its
greater variety and vividness of illustrative detail, than it is by
the profounder depth of the human emotions, belonging to no
age or scene in particular, which it calls up. For, although
Romola may fairly be called a historical novel, it is something
at once different from, and more than, this. The book has a
right to be so described by virtue of the exhaustive view which
it offers of the Florence of its period, of the men who helped to
make or mar the fortunes of the republic, of the traditions, usages
and notions of the city, of the humours of its festivals and the
charms of its gardens, of the types of signoria, mercato, the world
of learning and letters and the cloisters of San Marco. The actual
historical personages introduced-Machiavelli, king Charles VIII
and the rest-are not mere lay figures, but careful studies; and
Savonarola himself towers before us, with the wellknown facial
features in which a likeness, not without reason, has been dis-
covered to George Eliot's own, while his eloquence is reproduced
from his own written discourses. The lesser figures with which
the canvas is crowded—the talkers in the barber's shop and the
rest-are, to say the least, as concrete and as lifelike as are any of
George Eliot's English townsfolk or villagers ; indeed, she says
herself that her desire to give as full a view of the medium in
which a character moves as of the character itself actuated her in
Romola just as strongly as it did in The Mill on the Floss and
i See her letter in reply to R. H. Hutton's criticism, Life, etc. , vol. 11, pp. 96—7.
9


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in her other books ; but that the excess of this was, naturally,
more perceptible in the former instance. The wonderfully fine
proem almost leads us to suppose that it is the opening to a his-
torical novel, of which Florence itself will prove to be the main
theme. Yet, the whole of these surroundings, to use George
Eliot's word, form only the 'medium,' or milieu, of the action-
of Savonarola himself as well as of his beloved Florence; and the
action itself is, once more, the struggle through which fate, cir-
cumstance, place, time and the individualities—her father, her
husband and the rest—brought into contact with her own in-
dividuality compel a noble-natured woman to pass before she can
reconcile herself to her lot in the consciousness of having striven
for what is great and good. The evolution thus accomplished is a
process of which the human interest pervades, but at the same time
transcends, all its rich political, religious and literary envelopment.
The piety of Romola, her maiden devotion to the service of her
father and the studies which he loves, cannot, we know, circum-
scribe the life of one created, like herself, for the performance of
the highest duties of womanhood. And so she falls in love with
Tito—beautiful and clever and gifted with the adaptability which
belongs to the lower scholarship, as it does to the lower statesman-
ship, of life, and which, if combined with an unflinching and
unyielding 'improbity' of purpose, often comes near to brilliant
There may be points and passages—beginning with his
mock marriage to Tessa-in which the cruelty of Tito's selfishness
is beyond bearing ; but the hardening of his heart is told with
fidelity to nature. It may be added that, although the construc-
tion of the story is not open to the charge of artificiality (and the
Baldassare by-plot is quite in accordance with historical proba-
bility), fateful meetings and lucky escapes from meetings are too
liberally distributed over the surface of the action. But, as the
novel runs along what, apart from mere details, may be truly
described as its majestic course, Romola herself rises to the height
of the problems which she is called upon to confront-problems of
public and private duty, which her spiritual guide, Savonarola,
refused to allow her to treat as distinct from one another. The
hopes and fears of her fellow-citizens may shrink from the friar,
when his position, gradually undermined, begins to give way; when
the plague takes the heart out of the people; and when the church
drives him out of her communion; but neither plague nor papal
thunder has terrors for her free and exalted soul, and she has not
ceased to trust in the prophet because he has become rebel. In her
success.


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6
personal experiences, she passes through a not dissimilar evolution.
The tragic sorrow of her utter isolation seems, at last, to have de-
scended upon her hopelessly, and, through the blue waters, she drifts
away from all that was near and dear to her. But, like her boat,
her lofty soul finds its way into harbour. To the villagers among
whom she landed she left behind her the legend of the beneficent
Madonna's visit ; to herself, there remained the resolve to hold
herself on the highest level of self-sacrifice possible to her, tending
the children of her twice faithless husband, and leaving all else in
the hands of God. Thus, while Tito had fallen, because, of the
earth earthy, he could not, with all his beauty and learning and
wit, rise above himself, Romola stands erect, though with bowed
head. The variegated brilliancy of the setting which dazzles us in
this wonderful novel thus melts, at its close, into a soft diffusion
of the purest light.
Not long after the completion of Romola, George Eliot and
George Henry Lewes had established themselves at The Priory,
Regent's park.
But, though the effort had been extraordinary-
she had, as she wrote some ten years later, written the book
with her best blood, such as it is, and with the most ardent
care for veracity of which her nature was capable? '—she had
no intention of resting on her laurels. 'The last quarter,' she
writes in January 1865, ‘has made an epoch for me, by the
fact that, for the first time in my serious authorship, I have
written verse. ' The earliest mention in her correspondence of
The Spanish Gypsy, early in September 1864, characteristically
records that, while already engaged upon the play, she was
' reading about Spain’; but, before, in the beginning of 1867,
she took a journey to that country, she had been persuaded to
give herself a respite, producing, in the interval, the one volume
novel Felix Holt, the Radical (1866). In some respects, this
book holds an isolated position among her works, and, practically,
alone warrants her being placed among eminent English writers
of fiction who, in their novels, have treated political, as well as
social, topics. Her consciousness of this direct purpose is shown
by her having, after some hesitation, consented to follow up the
publication of the novel by that of an Address to Working-
Men issued in the name of its hero? As was her wont, she
Life, etc. , vol. II, pp. 438—9.
2 This address, printed in Blackwood's Magazine for 1866, able as it undoubtedly is,
must, from the point of view of its probable effect on the audience or public con-
templated, be confessed to be, in the first instance, too long; in the second, too full of
figures and illustrations borrowed from popular science, general history and other, in
6
1


## p. 397 (#413) ############################################

XI]
Felix Holt
397
had prepared herself for her political novel by a solid course of
reading, which included, besides the worthy Samuel Bamford's
Passages from the Life of a Radical, such guidance as Mill's
Political Economy and Harriet Martineau's version of Comte's
Système de Politique Positive. On an examination, however, of
her story itself, it will not be found to convey any political teaching
of further purport than that which, a decade and a half earlier,
Charles Kingsley and his friends had sought to bring home to
the British working man. The secret of true reform is not to be
found in any particular measure or programme of measures,
whether it call itself Reform bill", people's charter or any other
name of high sound; but it lies in the resolve of the mass of the
people—in other words, of the working classes—to learn to think
and act for themselves. This kind of radicalism, though far from
being either vague or visionary, is that of an idealist; and, as
such, the principles of Felix Holt are presented in this story,
in contrast with the toryism of the Debarrys and the colonially
clearsighted opportunism of Harold Transome. For the rest, the
political philosophy of Felix Holt has not very much to do with
the story, except as part and parcel of the manliness of character
by which he secures his place in the heart of the heroine. The
plot by which the contrasts in her fortunes and in those of the
other personages of the story are developed is more melodramatic
in its course than is usual with George Eliot; and, whether its
legal machinery be perfect or otherwise, the general impression
left on the reader is not one in which excellences of detail
combine into a satisfactory total effect. Thus, and because of
the lack of a female character comparable in interest to those
standing forth in her other books, Felix Holt cannot be held
entitled to rank with the finest of them.
The Spanish Gypsy, not completed and published till 1868,
fills no such place in the sum of George Eliot's literary work as
it does in her literary life as regarded by herself. The poem, of
which the subject was first, more or less vaguely, suggested by an
Annunciation of Tintoretto at Venice, is, in form, a combination
of narrative and drama, with a considerable admixture of lyric;
but, though thus suggesting a certain spontaneity of composition,
it is artificial in the result, and, to put it bluntly, 'smells of the
lamp. The reader becomes oppressed, not only by the lore
themselves, suitable sources; and, finally, too obviously wanting in the balance of
earnest encouragement which no popular oratory of the kind can afford to spare.
1 Cf. the passage on the Reform bill, Life, vol. II, p. 152.


## p. 398 (#414) ############################################

398
[ch.
The Political and Social Novel
poured into the dramatic mould, but by the great amount of
guidance bestowed upon him--the characterisation of characters,
and the like-and is left cold by the solution of the problem
whether racial duty has claims to high allegiance, higher than
our love ? ' Some of the descriptive passages, above all the popular
festival in which the acrobat-conjuror figures with his monkey
Annibal, before the lady Fedalma is herself moved to join in the
dance, have the brilliant picturesqueness of scenes in Romola ;
nor, of course, are we left without the sententious comments of
a highly intelligent chorus.
George Eliot, now at the height of her literary reputation,
was still to produce two of her most important prose fictions,
and was able to suit her methods and forms of composition to
her own preferences. The great length, and the production, in
large instalments, of Middlemarch, a Study of Provincial Life
(1871—2), and of its successor Daniel Deronda, were not unaccept-
able to a generation which, compared with its successors, 'lived
when the days were longer (for time, like money, is measured by
our needs). . . . We later historians,' she adds, speaking of Fielding,
'must not linger after his example, and if we did so, it is probable
that our chat would be thin and eager, as if delivered from a
camp-stool in a parrot-house. ' This she says by way of humorously
excusing herself for abstaining from those digressions which were
not really very congenial to her; but, at the same time, she was
conscious that the fullness with which she treated her proper themes
might, at times, seem exacting. Yet, whatever may be thought
of this increasing amplitude of treatment in her latest novels,
accompanied, as it was, by a certain falling-off in the freshness and
variety of accumulated detail, her incomparable power of exhibiting
the development of character is here found at its height. This
development, in which time, contact and purpose alike have their
share, may show itself, as she writes in the preface to Middle-
march, in the epic life of a St Teresa ; but it also shows itself
in many a latterday life ; and, if it is worth studying, analysing,
following on to its results at all, must be best worth the effort
if this is made with relative completeness. At the same time,
Middlemarch—the same cannot, with equal confidence, be asserted
of Daniel Deronda—is an admirable example of constructive art,
and, in this respect, may challenge comparison with the consummate
workmanship of Romola. The story flows on without constraint;
but Dorothea never sinks out of her primary place in our interest;
as her ideals never abandon her, so, her consistent shaping of her
>


## p. 399 (#415) ############################################

xi] Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda
399
conduct in accordance with them never ceases to command our
sympathy. Her great original blunder in allowing herself to be
wooed and won by Mr Casaubon, whose ultra-academical pedantry
and ‘archangelical method of exposition’ she mistakes for marks
of real superiority, was all but unavoidable by one to whom, as
to herself, an ordinary marriage was impossible (ordinary men
may be consoled by the fact that Sir James Chettam is one of
the best drawn gentlemen in George Eliot's gallery of characters).
But, although her mistake is cruelly revenged upon her, after her
very submissiveness to duty has deepened her husband's delusion
as to his own value, it fails to debase her. As she gradually
comes to love Ladislaw, she is protected by the lofty purity of
her mind from acknowledging her feeling to herself too soon or
from giving way to it after she has confessed to herself both her
passion and its hopelessness. She is made happy in the end; but
;
she has been true to herself from first to last. Side by side with
Dorothea's experiences of life and its trials we have those of
Lydgate, who has matched himself unequally with smiling common-
place and has to descend from his own level? . The whole story,
with its double plot, is an admirable social picture as well as a pro-
found study of human character; the episode of the political reform
struggle, with the inconsequent Mr Brooke as its central figure,
is more satirical in treatment than is that of Lydgate's efforts for
medical reform; and, though ample in its framework and even
finding room for a purely humorous character in the person of
Mrs Cadwallader, the novel is far less diffuse than some of its
predecessors.
Daniel Deronda (1876), the last of George Eliot's works of
prose fiction, though, as is not to be denied, it brought some dis-
appointment to the ever-widening congregation of her admirers,
both in matter and style, maintains the high standard of Middle-
march; and, in the character of Gwendolen, offers one more
variety of the high-spirited and high-souled woman whom the
experience of life trains to resignation—a resignation of little
worth if it comes without pain. She passes, imperiously self-
centred, through childhood and girlhood; nor is it till after she
has quickly shaken off the honest proffer of a boyish heart that
she steadies herself to meet the first real trial-the imminent
marriage proposal of Grandcourt, great by his calm acceptance
1 The experiences of Lydgate were, probably, in part, suggested by those of the young
doctor in Harriet Martineau's Deerbrook, to which Kingsley's Two Years Ago may, also,
have been indebted.


## p. 400 (#416) ############################################

400
[ch.
The Political and Social Novel
of his great position in the world. His character, however, is
better conceived than executed; for, while we have to take his
high-breeding on assurance, his brutality thrusts itself pitilessly
upon us.
A secret which makes Gwendolen pause on the brink
of acceptance causes her to go abroad to escape Grandcourt
(who follows her very slowly) and to be brought face to face
with Daniel Deronda. Gradually, he becomes a kind of higher
admonition-for he is too detached to fill the office of good angel
-in her life. His own, from his early days onwards, has been
enveloped in a mystery to the solution of which the reader looks
forward with tempered interest. It proves, in the end, to be a
racial problem—though a less violent one than that of The
Spanish Gypsy-with which we are invited to deal; and the haze
of Disraelian dreams hangs round this part of the story, till, at
the close, it leaves us face to face with the familiar project of
the restoration of a national centre to the Jewish race. The
attempt to constitute this Semitic mystery an organic part of
the story of Gwendolen and her experiences, which culminate
in her unhappy marriage with Grandcourt and his tragic death,
cannot be deemed successful. After she has grown accustomed
to rely absolutely on nothing but Deronda and his 'Bouddha-like'
altruism, she finds herself, at last, as her woman's nature cries out
in a moment of despair, ‘forsaken’ by him, so that he may fulfil
his destiny, which includes his marriage with Mirah. But the
candid though severe critic', who goes rather far in his suggestion
that this ending may “raise a smile which the author did not
intend to excite,' is within the mark when he adds that 'no words
of praise can be too warm for the insight displayed by the book
into the complex feelings of modern character' or 'for its delicacy
and depth of delineation of sentiment. ' Among the subsidiary
personages of the story, one is wholly new and original-the
musician of genius, whose single-minded devotion to an art which,
for George Eliot, always had a unique fascination, rises superior
to his personal grotesqueness. Thus, almost in spite of itself,
Daniel Deronda remains one of the great achievements of its
author's genius.
Between the inception of Middlemarch and the completion,
some seven years later, of Daniel Deronda, George Eliot wrote
some pieces of verse which must not be passed by without
mention. How Lisa loved the King (1869) is a very charming
treatment of a subject taken from Boccaccio, and previously-
i See Letters of C. Eliot Norton (1913), vol. 11, p. 64.
6


## p. 401 (#417) ############################################

xi]
George Eliot's Poems
401
so susceptible is a truly pathetic theme of repeated successful
adaptation dealt with very happily in at least two plays of
note? George Eliot's poem is specially interesting by virtue
.
of its graceful form-rimed couplets which suit themselves to the
delicately fanciful argument as if they had come from the pen
of Leigh Hunt. If this delightful little effort has in it just a
trace of artificiality, it is not on that account the less suited to
the conscious refinement of the renascence age.
Of about the same date, and conceived in no very different
mood, is Agatha (1869), a pretty picture of still-life and genial
old age, further softened by religious influence. Slightly later
(1870) is Armgart, which consists of three dramatic scenes, telling
story of artistic triumph, followed by bitter disappointment and
renunciation. Here, may possibly be found the germ of some of
the Klesmer speeches in Daniel Deronda. To the same year, also,
belongs The Legend of Jubal, a more considerable poetical effort,
which treats with great breadth what are really two distinct motifs.
One of these is a tribute to the power of music in the form of
an account of its origin and first spread; the other is the old story
of the return of the inventor of the art after a long absence to the
scenes of its beginnings, where he has been forgotten and is treated
with ignominy, but consoled by the honour in which his art is
held. The theme, no doubt, in more respects than one, suited
George Eliot, and inspired her to one of her finest poems.
She afterwards wrote certain other pieces in verse—some of
them lyrics not devoid of charm, and one of them, more especially
The Minor Prophet, in a vein which might be thought not wholly
unlike that of some of the characters in verse by Robert Browning,
but that his power of dramatic condensation is wanting. They
are full of brilliant turns of thought, and the poet had acquired
a mastery of metre which made her delight in putting her ideas
into a form well suited to gnomic utterances. In prose, she
produced nothing further of importance? The Impressions of
Theophrastus Such, of which the publication was postponed to
1879, on account of George Henry Lewes's death, was much read
1 Decameron, x, 7. The plays are Shirley's The Royall Master and Alfred de
Musset's Carmosine.
% They are collected, with those mentioned above, in the volume of Poems forming
vol. XI of the Warwick edition.
3 The Lifted Veil and Brother Jacob (both printed with Silas Marner in vol. vi of
the Warwick edition) go back to the years 1859 and 1860 respectively. The former
is a study of clairvoyance as, at once, a gift and a curse, hardly less improbable than
it is painful. Brother Jacob is a rather sordid tale of nemesis.
E. L. XIII. OH. XI.
26


## p. 402 (#418) ############################################

402
The Political and Social Novel [CH. XI
when it came out, and the success of the book, which, in a more
than ordinary sense, was one of esteem, sent a ray of consola-
tion into her retirement. The satire of the modern Theophrastus
directs itself chiefly to the foibles and vanities of the literary
class-a class to which no authors ever more thoroughly belonged,
and took pride in belonging, than George Eliot and the lost guide
and companion of her labours, but as to whose weaknesses her
own single-mindedness of purpose and freedom from all pretence
or affectation supplied her with a safe standard of judgment.
But this series of essays falls short of the collections offered by
the Greek moralist, and by the most successful of his modern
imitators, whether French or English, not only in variety, but,
also, by the absence of what might have been expected from
George Eliot herself, had she still been at the height of her
power-namely, evidence of the plastic or formative gift which
tradition asserted Theophrastus to have carried even to the
extent of mimicry. The work is, explicably enough, devoid of
gaiety-an element which, though not indispensable, can ill be
spared altogether in a book of this sort.
Quite late in her life, a personal happiness for which it is not
presumptuous to say that her heart had yearned, came to the
gifted woman of whose writings we have briefly spoken, in the
form of marriage. In May 1880, she gave her hand to John
Walter Cross, in recognition of a chivalrous devotion measurable
only by those who knew him well. But the dream was a short
one. On their return from a continental tour on which Cross
had fallen ill at Venice, she, in her turn, was prostrated by
sickness, and, before the year was out, on 22 December, she
passed away. Of no greater woman of letters is the name re-
corded in English annals, and of none who had made the form
of composition finally chosen by her as her own so complete a
vehicle of all with which she had charged it. George Eliot's
novels speak to us of her comprehensive wisdom, nurtured by
assiduously acquired learning, of her penetrating and luminous
wit, furnished with its material by a power of observation to
which all the pathetic and all the humorous aspects of human
character lay open and of her profound religious conviction of
the significance of life and its changes as helping to better the
human soul brave and unselfish enough not to sink before them.


## p. 403 (#419) ############################################

CHAPTER XII
THE BRONTËS
WHEN Mrs Gaskell published The Life of Charlotte Brontë,
she was forty-seven, and had already written Mary Barton,
Cranford and Ruth. In six years, there were to follow Sylvia's
Lovers and that story in which is embalmed the charm of all
things fading—Cousin Phillis. The biography was worthy of its
author. Here was presented, not less truthfully than exquisitely,
all that it was essential to know of the sad story of Charlotte
Brontë's life, and, interwoven in its texture, and consummately
in place, the beautiful piece of prose in which Ellen Nussey told
of Anne Brontë's death. It was surprising that this masterpiece,
at its first appearance, should have been marred by indiscretions
of revelation, relating, in part, to the father of the sisters, to
whose paternal care the book paid tribute, and who was still
alive, an octogenarian. The explanation was, partly, that Mrs
Gaskell was a novelist whose first obligation was truth to character,
and who was interested in the subordinate personages of her
narrative mainly in so far as they illustrated the figure of its
heroine; and, also, partly, that the task she had set herself—to
tell soon and fully Charlotte Brontë's life-story-was not one that
could possibly have been executed without giving some temporary
offence. Yet, the main lines of the story were seized and held
with the unerring hand of genius, and, in the amended version, we
now possess a book that, both in its candour and in its restraint,
remains the true record for posterity.
Of the substantial accuracy of its picture of the Brontë
household, there is no longer any question. Some of the original
domestic details now banished from the volume may not have been
correct; but such stories as attached themselves to Patrick Brontë
do not gather round a man of unexacting character. His custom of
dining alone in a house with two sitting-rooms is sufficiently
26-2


## p. 404 (#420) ############################################

404
[ch.
The Brontës
significant. No one,' writes Mary Taylor to Ellen Nussey, a year
after Charlotte's death, 'ever gave up more than she did and
with full consciousness of what she sacrificed. ' Family affection
for his offspring, on the one side, of course, there was, and, on the
other, deep filial piety and that cherishing fondness which springs
from piety; but it is a main element in Charlotte Brontë's later
history that talk in the lonely house must often have been 'but
a tinkling cymbal. '
Patrick Brunty or Brontë, as, at Haworth, he came finally to
write the name, was, so far as we know, a pure Irishman. He
was born in Emdale, county Down, in 1777, and, in 1802, presumably
with the aid of some slender savings, he entered St John's
college, Cambridge. After taking his degree, he held various
curacies, settling down finally, in 1820, in the incumbency of
Haworth. But the troubles of life were not over; for, in less
than two years, his always delicate wife, Maria Branwell, whom he
had married in 1812, had died, leaving him the care of six children,
Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, Patrick Branwell, Emily Jane and
Anne, of whom the eldest was eight and the youngest not yet
two years of age. In this difficulty, his wife's sister Elizabeth
.
Branwell took up her residence with him at Haworth, remaining
there as mistress of his house till her death. Thus was the house-
hold constituted till Charlotte Brontë was twenty-six.
For so large a family, the house in the graveyard was a
confined habitation : it stood at the top of the steep and drab
village, its front windows looking on the church and the
graves,
and its back on the wide-stretching moors over which the tiny
girls loved constantly to ramble. Their father was not a learned
man; but he knew enough to teach infants, and it was a mistake
that, in order to provide them with more systematic instruc-
tion, he should have sent four of them to a clergy daughters'
boarding school. This was an absurdly cheap subsidised insti-
tution, for no other was within his means; and the disastrous
experiment, afterwards forming the basis of the account of Lowood
in Jane Eyre, came to an end within a year. Charlotte Brontë
believed that the precarious health of her two elder sisters had
suffered from the experience. In any case, the first tragedies
of her home were the early deaths of the much-loved Maria and
Elizabeth.
The household, thus reduced in numbers, remained at Haworth
for the next six years, occupied with reading, rambling, household
management and, above all, with literary invention ; and it was


## p. 405 (#421) ############################################

XII]
Brussels
405
not till 1831, when Charlotte was nearly fifteen, that she was again
sent to a boarding school, this time to Miss Wooler's at Roe Head,
where she made the acquaintance of Ellen Nussey and Mary
Taylor, who became her lifelong friends. Miss Wooler was nd
and competent, and eighteen fairly happy months of pupilage
resulted, three years later, in Charlotte's returning as an in-
structress, while Emily and Anne also became pupils in the same
school. But Charlotte was not born to be a teacher of young
girls, and, after another interval of three years, she returned to
Haworth, fretted in mind and spirit. Yet, something had to be
done to replenish the family exchequer on which the one, and
thoroughly unsatisfactory, brother was beginning to make a series
of claims. Emily had attempted and failed to live the life of an
assistant schoolmistress under peculiarly exacting conditions, and
there was nothing left for Charlotte and Anne except to become
governesses in private families. But, though the gentle Anne
.
was, apparently, a good governess, retaining one post for four
years, the experiences of neither of the pair met their wishes,
and it occurred to Charlotte and Emily that they should
qualify for the three setting up school by themselves. For this,
,
some knowledge of foreign languages was indispensable, and, in
February 1842, the two sisters, aged, respectively, twenty-five and
twenty-three, had found their way as pupils into a foreign school,
the pensionnat Héger, rue d'Isabelle, Brussels. The short year
spent there was made especially interesting on account of the
lectures of the professor of literature, Constantin Heger, a man
of thirty-three who, obviously, added to some of the usual
Napoleonisms of the professeur des jeunes filles (Napoleonisms to
which Charlotte Brontë was not blind) a genuine force of character,
something of the genius of exposition and a touch of that ironic
or semi-humorous malice which is the salt of personality. But
this brightening episode was not to last, and, in eight months, the
sisters were hurrying home too late to attend the deathbed of
their aunt Branwell.
The home was reorganised, Emily being left to keep house.
Branwell, who had failed in several occupations, found a post as
tutor in the same family where Anne was governess, and Charlotte
Brontë allowed herself to be tempted to return to Brussels, in
January 1843, as instructress in English. She was now verging
on twenty-seven, and at Brussels were the surroundings that had
broken the dull monotony of her life. Hitherto, this monotony
had been endurable; henceforth, it was no longer so. As she taught


## p. 406 (#422) ############################################

406
[CH.
The Brontës
in the school of the Hegers, at times instructing Constantin Héger
and his brother-in-law in English, and hearing from him constantly
of the high things in literature and life, there was set up that
rapport of intelligence, and, more than this, that interplay where
soul responds to soul, of which, hitherto, she had known nothing.
In a year, she was back in the lonely house, herself now twice
lonely ‘for remembering happier things. All had not gone well
in her absence: the brother was hastening down a career that
ended in an early grave; the plan of a school had come to
nothing; the tone of the communications she sent to her adored
professor, too exalté, led to the ending of all communication; and
in the letters she wrote to Brussels in these barren years we can
hear the cry of a stifled heart. In March 1845, she writes to Ellen
Nussey :
I can hardly tell you how time gets on at Haworth. There is no event
whatever to mark its progress. One day resembles another: and all have
heavy lifeless physiognomies. . . . There was a time when Haworth was a very
pleasant place to me: it is not so now. I feel as if we were all buried here.
. . . Write very soon dear Ellen.
There was one way of escape and one only-for 'the imagination
is not a state,' as Blake tells us, 'it is the human existence itself. '
Yet, this relief was not found at once, nor was the unconscious
attempt to supply it at first successful. In the poems which, with
others by her sisters, were published in 1846 and in her first serious
attempt at a novel, The Professor, traces of a recent loss are too
evident, the transcription of emotional experience is too literal. The
substance of the art-work is not yet just a number of things that had
happened, ready for the free handling of the artist. The authoress
is, obviously, trying to solve a riddle in her past, and it was not till
1847, when Jane Eyre was published, that, though still carrying
her burden of experience, she found relief in imagination. The
love-story which Charlotte Brontë tells in Jane Eyre is a more
beautiful one than that which Mrs Gaskell has pictured in Cousin
Phillis. It is finer because it is as innocent and yet it is not
withered. In Jane Eyre, it dances before us dignified with the
joy of living. Here, at last, the artistic problem solved itself,
freely, without effort almost, the tangle of the real and the
ideal, as it were, merely unrolling. In the midst of her care for
her ageing father, now threatened with blindness, with the Poems
fallen dead from the press and the little light she had known a
memory only, the vision came to her, as it came to Thackeray, for
'behold, love is the crown and completion of all earthly good. '


## p. 407 (#423) ############################################

XII)
The Plot of Jane Eyre
407
6
Some concession, doubtless, had to be made to the requirements
of the prevailing art of fiction. As novels were understood in the
middle of the nineteenth century, they were always love-stories
in the common or vulgar sense. You did really fall in love with
someone and want to marry. The love in question was by no
means simply a great and noble affection, an overflow of being,
rather the contrary. There had to be a basis which people could
understand. Esmond had really to marry lady Castlewood, though,
of course, in that instance, the love of which Thackeray wrote was
not a love that dreams of marriage. These things happen in fable-
land, or, at least, they thus happened in the fableland of the mid-
century.
What Charlotte Brontë had to tell was a tale of the heart's
realisation through another, and of the loss of what seemed to
be realised. Because it was a novel she was writing, the loss
had not to be final, but, because it was a story of loss, there
had to be a bar. "The plot of Jane Eyre,' writes Charlotte to
Mr Williams in the autumn of 1847, 'may be a hackneyed one.
Mr Thackeray remarks that it is familiar to him, but having read
comparatively few novels, I never chanced to meet with it, and
I thought it original. Charlotte Brontë's possible forgetfulness,
if she had seen the story, and Thackeray's dim memory are equally
explicable. The tale of actual and intended bigamy which Sheridan
Le Fanu contributed to The Dublin University Magazine in 1839
was just one of those stories eminently adapted for floating in the
back of the mind. In the strange fictions of Le Fanu, the reader's
feelings are sympathetically and deeply moved without his either
seeing the actual occurrences face to face or believing them to be
real. The atmosphere, which is, generally, charged with suggestions
from the supernatural, has something of smoke in it and our memory
of the stories is often but the memory of a dream. But that Le
Fanu's tale suggested the plot of Jane Eyre is decidedly possible? .
If so, Sir Leslie Stephen’s query why the pleasing Rochester
should have embarked on an intended bigamy is sufficiently
answered. The original hint was a story of bigamy, and
Charlotte Brontë altered and softened it to meet her purpose,
like Shakespeare, moulding (but not entirely reversing) her plot,
to make it correspond more nearly with her characters. If, on
the contrary, she had not read Le Fanu's tale, one must admit
that, with no hint to constrain her, she was guilty of one incon-
sistency of invention. There was, perhaps, another reason. Odd
i See appendix to this chapter.
>


## p. 408 (#424) ############################################

408
[CH.