No More Learning

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).


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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.


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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.


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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.


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[CH.
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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.


## 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


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[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.


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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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[CH.
The Political and Social Novel
>
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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xi]
Silas Marner
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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394
[CH.
The Political and Social Novel
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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XI]
Romola
395
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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396
The Political and Social Novel [CH.
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


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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.


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[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.