No More Learning

At Knutsford (which thus
became part of herself), most of Elizabeth Stevenson's girlhood
was spent; the rest was divided between London, Newcastle-on-
Tyne (where she resided in the house of a unitarian minister,
William Turner, who is said to have suggested some features in
the beautiful character of Thurston Benson in Ruth) and at
Edinburgh, (as humorously recorded in the introduction to Round
the Sofa). In 1832, she married William Gaskell, then and to the
end of his life, minister of the Cross street unitarian chapel in
Manchester and an accomplished scholar, with whom all the rest
of her life flowed on in perfect unison. The circle of friends of
which she now became part and of which, in time, her house,
84 Plymouth grove, was to be looked upon as a chosen centre,
was one of social as well as intellectual distinction; yet it was as
a 'greater Manchester,' in more than the local sense of the phrase,
that she learnt to love the place, till, even on her holidays in Wales,
and, afterwards, on the Neckar, in Italy and in her favourite France,
she could look back, like Mary Barton on the railway to Liverpool,
'towards the factory-chimneys, and the cloud of smoke which
hovers over the place, with a feeling akin to Heimweh. ' And it is
not too much to say that what, from the first, helped to bind her
to the city which, for more than fourscore years, was to be her
home and that of her daughters, was the care for the poor of
which she and they never lost sight. Several years before she
began Mary Barton, she and her husband printed the first (and,
as it proved, the only) one of a projected series of versified Sketches
1 His mother, Mrs Gaskell's paternal grandmother, was cousin, once removed, of
the author of The Seasons.
2 In Blackwood's Magazine for January 1837 (vol. XLI, no. 255).


## p. 373 (#389) ############################################

>
XI]
Mary Barton
373
among the Poor, 'rather' as she confidentially put it to her friend
Mrs Howitt, in the manner of Crabbe, but in a more seeing-beauty
spirit. ' The influence of Crabbe, tempered in the fashion which
this passage indicates, is, as will be seen, traceable in some of her
published writings.
Mary Barton, a Tale of Manchester Life, was written in
1845–71, when there was still great distress in the manufacturing
districts, and when the abolition of the corn laws was only be-
ginning to exercise its remedial effects; and it was published in
1848, when the political and social fabric of this country stood
unshaken, though not unmoved, by the convulsions of the continent.
When, or just before, Mrs Gaskell was beginning her story,
Disraeli had published Coningsby and was preparing to follow
it by Sybil; but Mrs Gaskell was unacquainted with either of
these works, though she might have given them at least as
friendly a reception as was accorded to the later of them by her
contemporary George Eliot? . It is, however, clear that Mrs
Gaskell's story was concerned with a rather earlier period of
British social history—the years 1842—3; and this was recog-
nised by the most powerful, though not by the most violent,
among its critics: The troubles of these years really dated from
the series of bad harvests which had begun so far back as 1837,
and which had led, in 1838, to the great chartist meeting on Kersal
moor, Manchester, and, in the following year, amidst continued
distress, to the rejection, by a large parliamentary majority, of
a monster chartist petition, agreed upon by a national convention
of working men’s delegates. It cannot be said that (though, as
John Barton and other less prejudiced observers noted, royal
drawing-rooms and other social functions were not suspended)
these occurrences made no impression even in London ; but, at
Manchester and elsewhere in the manufacturing districts, there
ensued much agitation and violence, and, when, in 1840 and 1841, the
distress among the working classes continued and, in the following
year, reached its height, a great part of Lancashire fell into a
condition approaching to riot, though the queen's speech stated
1 The conjecture that the short and powerful story Lizzie Leigh, of which the
first portion appeared on 30 March 1850, in the first number of Household Words, was
written, in part at least, before Mary Barton, is plausible, but unproved. Probably,
the reproduction in it, with a different relation, of the Esther episode was unconscious.
George Eliot's Life, by Cross, J. W. , vol. I, p. 104.
3 Greg, W. R. , speaks of such periods as 1842'; The Manchester Guardian of
28 February 1849 refers to this morbid sensibility to the condition of factory
operatives, which has become so fashionable of late among the gentry and landed
aristocracy. '
.
6


## p. 374 (#390) ############################################

374
[CH.
The Political and Social Novel
that the sufferings and privations of the manufacturing districts
had been borne 'with exemplary patience and fortitude. ' After
another petition—this time bearing more than three million sig-
natures—had been rejected by a sweeping majority of the house
of commons, a wild riot broke out at Manchester, and a general
strike was for a few days enforced.
It was the impression of these events, and of the efforts which
followed to allay the almost unprecedented sufferings, as well as
the perilous excitement, of the working classes, especially in the
manufacturing districts, which was upon Mrs Gaskell when she
wrote her tale of Manchester life. For it should not be over-
looked that, if the preceding years had brought with them sore
suffering and savage wrath, 1842 and the years immediately
following, at all events, were full, not only of charitable effort, but
of legislative endeavour to find remedies for the existing condition
of things; that, in a word, the conscience of the country was
awake, and the system by which things (including wages) were left
to right themselves had been definitely put on its defence. This
is the point of view from which the authoress of Mary Barton
addressed herself to the problem of the early forties, which she
did not so much as profess to understand in all its economical
bearings; and this is what the eminent political and economical
thinker who was the sternest critic of the book failed to see when
he tried to shift the chief blame for the patent evils of the situation
from the masters to the workmen, and, more especially, to the
ex-workmen who form the acting staff of trades' unions and
delegations! ' Mrs Gaskell's panacea—the bringing-about of a
good understanding (in every sense of the term) between masters
and men-had only begun to be put into operation in the period
with which Mary Barton deals; and even to these beginnings she
pays a tribute, though not in a particularly decisive form? .
Still, it is obvious enough that, in Mary Barton, there is no
very manifest intention of holding a careful balance between the
two sides, and that, as was inevitable, the sympathies of the
2
6
i Greg, W. R. , Mistaken Aims and Attainable Ideals of the Working Classes (1876),
reprinted from The Edinburgh Review, April 1849. See, also, Essays in Political
and Social Science, vol. I, 1853.
? 1. e. in that of improvements effected by, or due to the mind of, the elder Carson
which submitted to be taught by suffering. '
8 Against the quite improbably cruel behaviour of the younger Carson in caricaturing
the unhappy workmen delegates might be set the much less improbable but infinitely
more heinous fact of his murder—especially when it is borne in mind that the actual
murder which probably suggested this incident was occasioned, not by private
vengeance, but by a wish to intimidate the masters of a district near Manchester.


## p. 375 (#391) ############################################

6
XI]
North and South
375
reader are engaged on the side of those who have 'to stint in
things for life. The writer did not plead their cause as deserving,
or deprived of, particular rights; chartist, or even democratic,
dreams were far away from her mind; she and many of the
working men and women would probably even have disagreed
as to the protection which the law should give to wives and
children? But she thought that the men should be treated as
brethren and friends' by their employers, and that, so long as this
remained untried, there could be no desire for peace and, conse-
quently, no hope of better things.
It is impossible to go back here upon the controversy to which
the publication of Mary Barton gave rise ; it did not weaken the
force of her appeal for sympathy with those who needed it; but,
if unjust to the main motive, it was almost inevitably provoked by
the actual effect, of her book. That her own sense of justice and
the magnanimity inspired by it became aware of this is shown by
the novel which, six years later, she published under the title North
and South, and apart from which, in justice to the writer, Mary
Barton ought never to be judged. In 1854, the great remedial
legislation of the abolition of the corn laws had borne its full
fruits; the agitation for the charter, though not extinct, had
cooled down, and working men in the manufacturing districts
had begun to appreciate the value of association and the uses
of combination. On the other hand, the more intelligent of the
masters, too, could not but better discern the necessity, and the
more conscientious of them the duty, of establishing with their
men relations which no longer ignored their necessary dependence
upon one another. This, so far as the question of factory labour
came to be treated in it, was the general conception of North and
South, the story which, curiously enough, appeared in Household
Words immediately after Dickens's Hard Times, though written
in absolute independence of it. The critic who had condemned,
while admiring, Mary Barton blessed North and South altogether.
But Mrs Gaskell had neither wished to receive, nor intended to
make, an amende honorable. The social teaching of the two
novels is perfectly self-consistent; and, though it did not solve the
difficulties of the problem to which it addressed itself, in no later
phase of that problem has the spirit of Mrs Gaskell's message been
left aside with impunity.
Mary Barton, which, besides, as was inevitable, surpassing
i Old Alice is against the employment of married women in factories; but poor
Mrs Davenport denounces the law keeping children from factory work.


## p. 376 (#392) ############################################

376
[CH.
The Political and Social Novel
all later works of its author in the spread of its popularity at
home, has been translated into many foreign tongues, reveals
more of her distinctive literary qualities than is common with
first works. But it was written in conditions and with thoughts
of its own. The working men and women who appear in it (in-
cluding both hero and heroine) are not only true Lancashire, but
living human beings. The plot is admirably clear, and rises to
a climax of dramatic power rare, but not unparalleled, in Mrs
Gaskell's later stories. Curiously enough, it is here that her
humour, more or less repressed in the earlier part of the novel,
for the first time comes freely to the front, in the old boatman and
the gamin Charley. But the story was not conceived in cheerful-
ness, and, as its scene lies in humble homes, repeated appeal to
the impressiveness of deathbeds (on which Maria Edgeworth re-
marked) seems not unfitting. On the other hand, it is full of
strong passion, and of the tenderest of pathos, and is steeped in
that feeling of neighbourly love which we are almost induced to
deem the best privilege of the poor.
The success of Mary Barton speedily brought Mrs Gaskell
into near relations with the grand masters of the branch of
literature in which she had herself taken a leading place, and
more especially with Dickens, who showed her, as a writer in
Household Words and all the Year Round, and in many other
ways, the highest consideration and regard. She wrote much for
him during the greater part of her literary life, but hardly ever,
either in her contributions to his Christmas numbers or in her
occasional papers, anything unworthy of preservation, as illustrating
her freshness of thought, power of observation and delicacy of
sympathy. Unlike many of her fellow-contributors, she cannot be
said to have fallen, except quite occasionally', under the spell of
his manner or mannerism. Her own English style was always of
singular purity; neither north nor south had marred it by 'pro-
vincialisms 2'; and it is not by chance that one of her favourite
writers: was Mme de Sévigné, whose style was wholly natural and
perfectly pure. Whatever Mrs Gaskell’s theme—a page of homely
life, a tale of adventure or even of crime, or one of those mysterious
Perhaps the most striking instance of an unconscious imitation of Dickens is to
be found in both some of the pathos and some of the fun of the delightful Mr Harrison's
Confessions. And see, post, as to Cranford.
? The best writers must have some little habitual flaw of diction; Mrs Gaskell's use
of the verb 'name' is the only one that is recurrent in hers.
8 The design of writing Mme de Sévigné's life occupied Mrs Gaskell in her last
years.


## p. 377 (#393) ############################################

.
XI]
Cranford
377
supernatural experiences which had an irresistible fascination for
her—the lucidity and delicacy of the style never fail the teller of
the story.
>
After, in The Moorland Cottage (1850), which is full of simple
charm, and has additional interest as containing the germ of not
a few characters and situations in her later works, she had
produced her second separately published story, Mrs Gaskell
contributed to Household Words (1851–3), in a series of papers
republished (1853) under the collective title Cranford, what (all
questions of preference or predilection apart) must be described
as the most original of all her works. The literary derivation of
this inimitable prose idyll, that grew out of itself into a whole
from which nothing is to be taken away and to which (as it
proved) nothing could safely be added”, is a question admitting
of discussion : but this discussion may easily be carried too far.
Crabbe and Mary Russell Mitford, Galt and Maria Edgeworth, and
even Jane Austen, influenced the choice and limitation of theme
to some extent, and Dickens was not wholly a stranger to the
method of treatments. But the interweaving of truth and fiction,
and the proportioning of the elements of pathos and tenderness
to those of humour and even of fun, were wholly the author's own.
‘Cranford,' says lady Ritchie", ‘proves the value of little things,
of the grain of mustard-seed,' and 'reveals the mighty secret of
kindness allied to gentle force. ' Thus, the intimate record of the
human lives and souls sheltered by a sequestered little Cheshire
home became a favourite of the English-speaking world ; and the
gentle and shrinking Miss Matty takes her place among the true
heroines of our domestic fiction.
In the same year as the collected Cranford, appeared a novel
of a very different type-Ruth. This book caused a controversy
in its way almost as violent as that excited by Mary Barton,
W. R. Greg, more in sorrow than in anger, censuring its 'false
a
a
1 Maggie, above all, is Molly in germ, even in her attachment to her chosen
solitary seat.
2 One attempt was, not very successfully, made; another, on a larger scale, one
may think fortunately, remained a passing fancy. Mr Harrison's Confessions and
Wives and Daughters use the same background, but each in its own fashion. One or
two passages in the latter story come rather close to Cranford, but are not, perhaps,
so good as the rest of the book.
: The reference to Pickwick was removed from one passage of the text, but left
standing in another.
• A Discourse on Modern Sibyls (read to the English Association, 1913), p. 8.
5 The name of this novel was probably (though, of course, not certainly) suggested
by one of Crabbe's Tales of the Hall.


## p. 378 (#394) ############################################

378
[CH.
The Political and Social Novel
morality,' and F. D. Maurice, Charles Kingsley (after a more or
less a priori fashion), Florence Nightingale and others ranging
themselves on the side of the defence. Ruth treats a wholly ethical
problem, or, rather, two problems which the course of the story
almost tempts the reader to confound. The plea for Christian
forgiveness of sin following on repentance is unanswerable; but
the incident on which everything is made to turn in the progress
of the plot cannot be pronounced a happy conception. The value
of the virtue of truthfulness was always present to Mrs Gaskell's
mind, and there are few of her stories but, in one way or another,
help to illustrate it? But, in Ruth, though the lie is told for the
wronged woman rather than by her, the trouble which it brings
forth fails to strike the reader as inevitable, and the compassion
evoked by a story of the deepest pathos is, therefore, not without
reservation. Other exceptions might be taken to the working-out
of the plot (especially as to the part played in it by a very un-
attractive Lothario); but the beauty of the central figure remains,
and the pity of her fate, tenderly softened by the ministering love
of those around her.
Of North and South (first published as a complete work in
1855) we have already spoken, and can only note further that, to its
picture of the differences between masters and men, it adds, with
great constructive skill, the contrast indicated in its title, and
another contrast of wider sway and deeper import. If Margaret's
prejudice against manufacturers is, perhaps, a little stubborn for
her time of day, her virgin pride is not less true to nature than
Thornton's tenacity; and the true crisis of the story—Margaret's
farewell to her brother2_is not less dramatic than the earlier
scene of her defence of Thornton against the mob. After the
crisis, the story begins to drag—it was, like Hard Times, the
first brought out by its writer in weekly instalments. That it
should remain one of the finest, if not the finest, of her achieve-
ments, must, therefore, be allowed to show an extraordinary
mastery of the art in which she had rapidly come to excel.
Yet, at this very time, she turned aside from this to another
1 Thus, in tragic fashion, Sylvia's Lovers, and, in a more genial vein, Wives and
Daughters, where Molly's truthfulness lies at the very core of her nature, in contrast
with her stepmother's equally characteristic 'falsity in very little things. ' The rather
casuistical problem of the white lie recurs in North and South.
2 The story of Frederick is a variation of that of Peter in Cranford; Mrs Gaskell's
interest in the subject of reappearances, as well as in that of disappearances (on which
she wrote a separate paper), was, no doubt, due to the disappearance in his youth of her
brother John, a lieutenant in the merchant service.


## p. 379 (#395) ############################################

xi] Mrs Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë 379
field of composition in which she was a novice. Mrs Gaskell's
Life of Charlotte Brontë, to which she devoted the whole of
the year 1856 and which was published, in two volumes, in
the following year, is a possession for ever, and while, in the
words of Charlotte Brontë's father, the work had been done
'in such a way as no person but the writer could have done
it,' no later treatment of the same theme, critical, contro-
versial, supplementary, or retouching, will ever in any sense
supersede it. Even were the present the most appropriate place,
it would be impossible to notice here-quite apart from all
discussion of details, whether of statement or of omission-cavils
concerning the entire method and spirit of treatment adopted by
the biographer, more especially in the earlier portions of the
book? No more spontaneous honour, it has been said? , was ever
offered by one woman of genius to another than when Mrs Gaskell
wrote the life of her friend; and the time cannot be distant when
those who care most both for the fame of Charlotte Brontë and
her sisters will be the readiest to acknowledge what it owes to the
generous and truthful record that made them enduring memories.
But the strictures passed upon passages of this biography
gave much pain to its author, and for some years she published
little of importance. My Lady Ludlow, which was reprinted
with several other tales in the pleasantly introduced collection
Round the Sofa, in 1859, after appearing in Household Words
during the summer months of the previous year, cannot be
reckoned among her best stories; though some of the characters,
from the highbred châtelaine to the acute little poacher's son,
are admirably drawn, the machinery, for once, does not move
easily. Mrs Gaskell found herself and her wonderful power of
narrative again in Sylvia's Lovers (1863), a perfect story but
for a certain lengthiness and excess of ảvayvápious towards the
closeThe terrors of the press-gang, a remarkably lucid account
of which, after the time-honoured manner of Scott, introduces
the story, serves as a background to a domestic drama of extra-
ordinary power, strengthened in its hold upon the mind by the
1 Cf. Reid, Sir T. Wemyss, Charlotte Brontë (1877), and the observations on it,
of Stephen, Sir L. , Charlotte Brontë,' in Hours in a Library, 3rd series (1879),
pp. 338 ff.
2
By lady Ritchie, op. cit. A generous welcome was given to this biography at the
time of its appearance by George Eliot, who had admired Ruth, but thought it strained.
3 The motif of Philip's return to his wife reappears in Mrs Gaskell’s short tale
The Manchester Marriage (1859). Both this and Sylvia's Lovers were earlier in date
of publication than Enoch Arden (1864).


## p. 380 (#396) ############################################

380
(ch.
The Political and Social Novel
graphic art that brings the grand ‘Monkshaven' seascape and
the rough times of the great naval wars vividly before us? .
Sylvia's Lovers can certainly not be called a political novel; but
it is a historical novel in the broader sense in which The Heart of
Midlothian may be thus described, and worthy to be named with
that masterpiece as a tale of passion and anguish that goes straight
to every human heart. 'It was,' Mrs Gaskell said, 'the saddest story
I ever wrote'; and she poured into it all the infinite pity of which
her loving nature was capable. The canvas of the story is full of
figures, instinct with life and truth, including Kester, her single
male example of a class always a favourite in British fiction, but
never drawn with more affectionate humour than by Mrs Gaskell,
whom her own domestic servants adored.
It would not be easy to point to a more signal instance of the
power of genius to vary both the forms in which it presents its
creations, and the effects which these presentments produce, than
is furnished by a comparison between Sylvia's Lovers and its
successor Cousin Phillis. This short story first appeared in The
Cornhill Magazine, in 1863—4, and was printed, as a whole, in the
following year. In it, Mrs Gaskell once more tells the tale of a
broken heart-broken by abandonment. But, this time, it is no
seeming tragic destiny which has swept down upon the course of
love-only an everyday cruelty of fate which, in this instance, was
not even intended by its agent. Cousin Phillis is an idyll only, but
one of the loveliest, and, in plan and in setting, one of the most
finished, of its kind. If minister Holman, who quotes Vergil on
his way home from farm-work and evening hymn, stands forth
like one of the patriarchal figures in Hermann und Dorothea,
the sweetness and the sadness of Phillis herself remain with us
as an incomparable memory of love and loss—undisturbed by any
happy ending
One of Mrs Gaskell's novels has still to be noted here, which,
though nominally unfinished, has, by many judges, been held to be
in execution the most perfect of them all. Wives and Daughters,
an Every-day Story, was, like its predecessor, first printed in
The Cornhill Magazine, where it appeared from August 1864 to
January 1866. Most of the story had been written during a
happy holiday at Pontresina, on a visit to Mrs Gaskell's intimate
1 Crabbe's story of Ruth in Tales of the Hall, already mentioned, may have
suggested the first idea of a tale of impressment to Mrs Gaskell; but this part of the
plot of Sylvia's Lovers is based on a historical episode of Whitby life of which she had
carefully studied the facts.


## p. 381 (#397) ############################################

xi]
Wives and Daughters
381
friend Mme Mohl at Paris and at Dieppe. Before the publication
of its last, but uncompleted, portion, Mrs Gaskell died, quite
suddenly, but surrounded by many of those she loved best, at
Holybourne near Alton in Hampshire, in a country-house which
she had intended to present to her husband on the completion of
her novel. This had been all but reached when death overtook
her, while in full enjoyment of her powers, which had never been
exerted with more delightful mastery and assured effect than in
her last work. To describe Wives and Daughters as in its
author's later manner is, however, a criticism of doubtful import.
It was, rather, that some of her literary gifts-especially the
humour which she had richly displayed in so early a work as
Cranford—had now mellowed into a delicious softness, and that,
even in depicting the serious conflicts through which the souls
of men and women have to pass in this troubled existence, she
had learnt the value of the subdued . colouring—the half-tints
of real life,' which George Eliot had desiderated in Ruth? Wives
and Daughters, thus, instead of being called in Mrs Gaskell's
later manner, should be described as Mrs Gaskell’s manner itself
in perfection. Above all, its irony is inimitable. This enables
the writer to furnish in Mr Gibson a fresh type of simple manliness
—the type which women most rarely succeed in realising-quite
different from that of Thornton in North and South, yet deserving
a place by its side, and, among the female figures, to contrast with
the true-hearted Molly and the irresistible Cynthia, the wholly
original personality of Clare-second wife, stepmother, ci-devant
governess and the embodiment of unconscious shallowness. She
is certainly not a 'woman of feeling’; neither, however, is she a
woman without feelings; for 'if Mrs Gibson had ever felt anything
acutely, it was the death of Mr Kirkpatrick,' her first husband.
In Mrs Gaskell's hands, the social novel, which, in Mary Barton,
she had essayed with extraordinary success, had thus developed
into a form of fiction which she had made entirely her own. The
power of finding full expression for the human sympathy within
her, which had given force to her earliest work, had grown and
been refined as it grew, till, in her latest, she had produced one
of the most exquisite examples in English fiction of the pure
novel of character.
In far different fashion from the reflection, in the writings of
Mrs Gaskell, of her calm life, happy in itself and in the home
· Life, by Cross, J. W. (edition 1902), vol. I, p. 247.


## p. 382 (#398) ############################################

382
[CH.
The Political and Social Novel
where it was led, the experiences of the woman of genius who
consistently signed her writings with the pseudonym George Eliot
send their often refracted rays across the pages of her chief prose
fictions. She was too thorough an artist to copy out into them
either her own personality or that of any of her kinsfolk, friends
or acquaintances; there is,' she wrote about Adam Bede, 'not
a single portrait in the book, nor will there be in any future book
of mine? ' Moreover, her spirit, like that of her favourite heroines,
was too lofty to allow her to complain of troubles or exult in
happiness which she was conscious of owing, in part at least, to
herself. And it was with her life's work, rather than with its
outward events, that her mind was occupied, as she looked back-
ward or forward during its course ; 'the only thing,' she told her
husband when urged by him to write her autobiography, 'I should
care much to dwell on would be the absolute despair I suffered
from of ever being able to achieve anything? '
The first twenty-one years of Mary Ann Evans's life—she was
born 22 November 1819—were spent in the commonplace sur-
roundings (on the border, though, of Shakespeare's forest of Arden)
of a rather remote half manor, half farmhouse, on a great Warwick-
shire estate of which her father was agent. He must have been
a notable man, and of his strong character some features are held
to have passed into both Adam Bede and the high-minded and
humorous Caleb Garth in Middlemarch. At Griff house, the
companion of Mary Ann's childhood, before 'school parted them? ,'
was her brother Isaac, just as Tom was Maggie's in the golden
hours which never came back till the very last. To the associations
of her early youth she steadfastly clung, true to her belief in the
formative influence of such remembrances upon the active, as well
as the contemplative, passages of life. By her elder sister's
marriage, she became, at an early age, the head of her widowed
father's house, and thus soon acquired a self-reliance which had
been fostered by her acknowledged superiority over her school-
fellows and companions. Though her reading seemed to her
4
1 See George Eliot's Life, as related in her Letters and Journals, arranged and edited
by her husband, Cross, J. W. , vol. I, p. 486. This book, though its editor disclaims the
functions of a biographer, is executed with great tact and ability. The references to it
as Life, etc. , in the present chapter, are to the reprint uniform with the Warwick
edition of George Eliot's Works.
? Life, etc. , vol. 1, p. 29.
8 See the charming Brother and Sister' in Poems (Warwick edition, vol. ix,
pp. 578589).
4 See . Looking Backward' in The Impressions of Theophrastus Such (vol. XII,
pp. 23—43)


## p. 383 (#399) ############################################

XI]
ΧΙ George Eliot's Early Years 383
fragmentary, it was already assuming proportions which, in the
end, were to make her a kind of Acton among English women of
letters. In the meantime, she passed, alone, through the phase of
absorption in religious and even ascetic ideas—which was intensified
by the example of an aunt whose self-sacrificing devotion afterwards
suggested that of Dinah Morris in Adam Bede-and then reached
a recognition of the claims of the individual intellect to freedom
of enquiry. The liberating influence, in her case, had been that of
Charles Bray, a manufacturer at Coventry, into the immediate
neighbourhood of which she had now removed with her father,
and of his wife. Bray had recently (1841) published The Philosophy
of Necessity, and his brother-in-law, Charles Hennell, was author
of An Inquiry concerning the Origin of Christianity (1838), to
the German translation of which a preface had been contributed
by Strauss'.
It was thus that Mary Ann Evans was led to take
over from Mrs Hennell the laborious undertaking of an English
translation of the celebrated Leben Jesu, which ultimately appeared,
early in 1846, with a preface by the author.
The ethics of her inner life, as disclosed by her correspondence
about this date, are those to which she afterwards gave repeated
expression in her maturest works. There is nothing paradoxical
in her description of herself, working at her desk till she felt
'Strauss-sick,' with a crucifix placed before her eyes, more familiar
to them than it was to Romola's in her younger days. Her
purpose was not to spread doubts and difficulties—she detested
what she called the quackery of infidelity,' and even in Buckle
she found only a mixture of irreligion and conceit. The ground
was to be 'good,' i. e. well-prepared, into which she desired to sow
good seed, instead of rooting up tares where we must inevitably
gather up the wheat with them. Yet, for freedom of enquiry, no
effort, no struggle seemed sufficient to her. Such she was when,
shortly after she had passed her thirtieth year, she may be said to
have begun her literary life. After death had ended her father's
long illness, during which she had been his devoted nurse, finding
time, however, occasionally to work at her translation of Spinoza's
Tractatus Theologico-Politicus', she rested, for a time, at Geneva,
and, in 1850, took up her abode in London. Few men or women
1 In 1852, Mary Ann Evans contributed an analysis of Charles Hennell's book to
John Chapman's Catalogue of his publications (see Life, etc. , vol. I, pp. 76—82).
Hennell's unmarried sister Sara, author of Thoughts in Aid of Faith, was long one
of her favourite correspondents.
? Neither this, nor a translation by her of Spinoza's Ethics, seems ever to have
been published.
>


## p. 384 (#400) ############################################

384
[CH.
The Political and Social Novel
have ever entered upon a life of letters better fitted for it than she
was. Enthusiastic-enthusiasm, she said, is necessary 'even for
pouring out breakfast'; sympathetic—it was in her wonderful
sympathy,' the two men to whom she was in succession most closely
united agreed that her power lay? '; sincerely religious, though
she had left both the creeds and practices of religion behind her? ;
equipped like very few writers laden with learning either of the
schools or self-acquired; and possessed of a power of work such as
only belongs to a lifelong student: so she set herself to her task.
Though she was to become one of the foremost of Victorian
novelists, it was still some years before she essayed, or probably
thought of essaying, a work of fiction. The political or politico-
social novel was then, as has been seen, in the ascendant, and, in
problems directly affecting the political life of the nation, her own
experience and training had not hitherto been such as to awaken
in her a special interest. The Reform bill agitation and its
consequences were only impressions of her girlhood; in the party
contentions which followed on the close of the whig régime she
had no concern, and, on this aspect of politics, as even her latest
novels show, she always looked coldly and quite from the outside.
She had no sympathy with 'young Englandism' except in so far
as she loved and respected the movement as an effort on behalf
of the people, and, curiously enough, the future authoress of
Daniel Deronda sternly averted her eyes from everything speci-
fically Jewish3. ' But Carlyle’s French Revolution had not failed
to appeal to her very strongly, and when, in London, the horizon
of her intellectual interests widened and her powers of sympathy,
which knew no distinction of class but were most at home with
her
own, had full play. She was much attracted by the novels of
Kingsley, between whose genius and his faults she drew a drastic
contrastº.
At first, however, the influences under which she fell were not
those of writers anxious to guide public feeling in political and
social questions. Before settling in London she had been a
temporary member of the Bray household at Coventry, and
had there come to know some notable thinkers; it was thus
natural enough that, in 1850, she became a contributor to The
Westminster Review, which was then being taken over (from
· Life, etc. , vol. I, p. 326.
? Her religious position is well characterised in Storr, V. F. , Development of English
Theology (1913), pp. 361–2.
3 Life, etc. , vol. I, pp. 138—9.
• Ibid. p. 246.


## p. 385 (#401) ############################################

XI]
ΧΙ
George Henry Lewes
385
John Stuart Mill) by John Chapman, as an organ of advanced
theological and philosophical thought, and, to a considerable
extent, of the teaching of Comte and his followers. In the
following year, she became associated with Chapman in the conduct
of the Review, and, although she shrank from being put forward
as editress, it is clear that, before long, she bore the chief burden
of the office. Herbert Spencer, one of the leading lights of the
circle to which she now belonged, among other friendly offices,
introduced her to George Henry Lewes, who, at that time, was
editor of The Leader. Attracted by the extraordinary intellectual
vivacity and quickness of sympathy which, together with brilliant
scientific and literary gifts, distinguished Lewes, she formed a
union with him. His own home had, for some time, been broken
up; on his three sons, she bestowed the kindliest maternal
affection. He showed to her, as well he might, unsurpassable
devotion, and watched over her literary labours, and the fame
they brought her, with unremitting care. But, even after she had
become famous, her life with him long remained isolated, except
for the admirers of her genius whom he brought to their house.
It would be surprising if, especially in her earlier works, a tinge of
melancholy, which generally tended to take the nobler form of
renunciation, were not perceptible ; but the personal trials of her
life never, as the whole series of those works shows, even momen-
tarily overthrew the balance of her moral judgment. And this is
of the greater importance as applied to her writing, inasmuch as
she never ceased to regard it as the most responsible among the
activities of her existence. Writing,' she declares, soon after she
had first attempted fiction, “is part of my religion, and I can write
no word that is not prompted from within? . '
Besides a translation of Ludwig Feuerbach's Essence of Christi-
anity (1854)? , she was now at work on a variety of subjects brought
into her hands in the way of journalistic duty; and it is curious
that it should have been an article (of the superior smashing
kind) on The Evangelical Teaching of Dr Cummings which first
convinced Lewes of the true genius in her writing. It was about
this time that they spent three weeks at Weimar (his Life of
Goethe was then on the eve of publication), going on thence to
Berlin-an experience of great value as well as interest to her.
>
a
1 Life, etc. , vol. 1, p. 375.
? This is the only publication of Mary Ann Evans published under her own name.
3 Reprinted from The Westminster Review in vol. XII, pp. 419 ff.
4 Life, etc. , vol. I, p. 311.
25
E. L. XIII.
CH. XI.


## p. 386 (#402) ############################################

386
[CH.
The Political and Social Novel
>
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.


## p. 387 (#403) ############################################

XI
]
Scenes of Clerical Life
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


## p. 388 (#404) ############################################

388
[CH.
The Political and Social Novel
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.


## p. 389 (#405) ############################################

XI]
Adam Bede
389
>
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.


## p. 390 (#406) ############################################

390
[CH.
The Political and Social Novel
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


## p. 391 (#407) ############################################

.
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,
?