George Eliot
To read George Eliot attentively is to become aware how little one knows
about her. It is also to become aware of the credulity, not very
creditable to one’s insight, with which, half consciously and partly
maliciously, one had accepted the late Victorian version of a deluded
woman who held phantom sway over subjects even more deluded than
herself. At what moment, and by what means her spell was broken it is
difficult to ascertain. Some people attribute it to the publication of
her Life. Perhaps George Meredith, with his phrase about the
“mercurial little showman” and the “errant woman” on the daïs, gave
point and poison to the arrows of thousands incapable of aiming them so
accurately, but delighted to let fly. She became one of the butts for
youth to laugh at, the convenient symbol of a group of serious people
who were all guilty of the same idolatry and could be dismissed with the
same scorn. Lord Acton had said that she was greater than Dante; Herbert
Spencer exempted her novels, as if they were not novels, when he banned
all fiction from the London Library. She was the pride and paragon of
her sex. Moreover, her private record was not more alluring than her
public. Asked to describe an afternoon at the Priory, the story-teller
always intimated that the memory of those serious Sunday afternoons had
come to tickle his sense of humour. He had been so much alarmed by the
grave lady in her low chair; he had been so anxious to say the
intelligent thing. Certainly, the talk had been very serious, as a note
in the fine clear hand of the great novelist bore witness. It was dated
on the Monday morning, and she accused herself of having spoken without
due forethought of Marivaux when she meant another; but no doubt, she
said, her listener had already supplied the correction. Still, the
memory of talking about Marivaux to George Eliot on a Sunday afternoon
was not a romantic memory. It had faded with the passage of the years.
It had not become picturesque.
Indeed, one cannot escape the conviction that the long, heavy face with
its expression of serious and sullen and almost equine power has stamped
itself depressingly upon the minds of people who remember George Eliot,
so that it looks out upon them from her pages. Mr. Gosse has lately
described her as he saw her driving through London in a victoria—
a large, thick-set sybil, dreamy and immobile, whose massive features,
somewhat grim when seen in profile, were incongruously bordered by a
hat, always in the height of Paris fashion, which in those days commonly
included an immense ostrich feather.
Lady Ritchie, with equal skill, has left a more intimate indoor
portrait:
She sat by the fire in a beautiful black satin gown, with a green shaded
lamp on the table beside her, where I saw German books lying and
pamphlets and ivory paper-cutters. She was very quiet and noble, with
two steady little eyes and a sweet voice. As I looked I felt her to be a
friend, not exactly a personal friend, but a good and benevolent
impulse.
A scrap of her talk is preserved. “We ought to respect our influence,”
she said. “We know by our own experience how very much others affect our
lives, and we must remember that we in turn must have the same effect
upon others.” Jealously treasured, committed to memory, one can imagine
recalling the scene, repeating the words, thirty years later and
suddenly, for the first time, bursting into laughter.
In all these records one feels that the recorder, even when he was in
the actual presence, kept his distance and kept his head, and never read
the novels in later years with the light of a vivid, or puzzling, or
beautiful personality dazzling in his eyes. In fiction, where so much of
personality is revealed, the absence of charm is a great lack; and her
critics, who have been, of course, mostly of the opposite sex, have
resented, half consciously perhaps, her deficiency in a quality which is
held to be supremely desirable in women. George Eliot was not charming;
she was not strongly feminine; she had none of those eccentricities and
inequalities of temper which give to so many artists the endearing
simplicity of children. One feels that to most people, as to Lady
Ritchie, she was “not exactly a personal friend, but a good and
benevolent impulse”. But if we consider these portraits more closely we
shall find that they are all the portraits of an elderly celebrated
woman, dressed in black satin, driving in her victoria, a woman who has
been through her struggle and issued from it with a profound desire to
be of use to others, but with no wish for intimacy, save with the little
circle who had known her in the days of her youth. We know very little
about the days of her youth; but we do know that the culture, the
philosophy, the fame, and the influence were all built upon a very
humble foundation—she was the grand-daughter of a carpenter.
The first volume of her life is a singularly depressing record. In it we
see her raising herself with groans and struggles from the intolerable
boredom of petty provincial society (her father had risen in the world
and become more middle class, but less picturesque) to be the assistant
editor of a highly intellectual London review, and the esteemed
companion of Herbert Spencer. The stages are painful as she reveals them
in the sad soliloquy in which Mr. Cross condemned her to tell the story
of her life. Marked in early youth as one “sure to get something up very
soon in the way of a clothing club”, she proceeded to raise funds for
restoring a church by making a chart of ecclesiastical history; and that
was followed by a loss of faith which so disturbed her father that he
refused to live with her. Next came the struggle with the translation of
Strauss, which, dismal and “soul-stupefying” in itself, can scarcely
have been made less so by the usual feminine tasks of ordering a
household and nursing a dying father, and the distressing conviction, to
one so dependent upon affection, that by becoming a blue-stocking she
was forfeiting her brother’s respect. “I used to go about like an owl,”
she said, “to the great disgust of my brother.” “Poor thing,” wrote a
friend who saw her toiling through Strauss with a statue of the risen
Christ in front of her, “I do pity her sometimes, with her pale sickly
face and dreadful headaches, and anxiety, too, about her father.” Yet,
though we cannot read the story without a strong desire that the stages
of her pilgrimage might have been made, if not more easy, at least more
beautiful, there is a dogged determination in her advance upon the
citadel of culture which raises it above our pity. Her development was
very slow and very awkward, but it had the irresistible impetus behind
it of a deep-seated and noble ambition. Every obstacle at length was
thrust from her path. She knew every one. She read everything. Her
astonishing intellectual vitality had triumphed. Youth was over, but
youth had been full of suffering. Then, at the age of thirty-five, at
the height of her powers, and in the fullness of her freedom, she made
the decision which was of such profound moment to her and still matters
even to us, and went to Weimar, alone with George Henry Lewes.
The books which followed so soon after her union testify in the fullest
manner to the great liberation which had come to her with personal
happiness. In themselves they provide us with a plentiful feast. Yet at
the threshold of her literary career one may find in some of the
circumstances of her life influences that turned her mind to the past,
to the country village, to the quiet and beauty and simplicity of
childish memories and away from herself and the present. We understand
how it was that her first book was _Scenes of Clerical Life_, and not
_Middlemarch_. Her union with Lewes had surrounded her with affection,
but in view of the circumstances and of the conventions it had also
isolated her. “I wish it to be understood,” she wrote in 1857, “that I
should never invite any one to come and see me who did not ask for the
invitation.” She had been “cut off from what is called the world”, she
said later, but she did not regret it. By becoming thus marked, first by
circumstances and later, inevitably, by her fame, she lost the power to
move on equal terms unnoted among her kind; and the loss for a novelist
was serious. Still, basking in the light and sunshine of _Scenes of
Clerical Life_, feeling the large mature mind spreading itself with a
luxurious sense of freedom in the world of her “remotest past”, to speak
of loss seems inappropriate. Everything to such a mind was gain. All
experience filtered down through layer after layer of perception and
reflection, enriching and nourishing. The utmost we can say, in
qualifying her attitude towards fiction by what little we know of her
life, is that she had taken to heart certain lessons not usually learnt
early, if learnt at all, among which, perhaps, the most branded upon her
was the melancholy virtue of tolerance; her sympathies are with the
everyday lot, and play most happily in dwelling upon the homespun of
ordinary joys and sorrows. She has none of that romantic intensity which
is connected with a sense of one’s own individuality, unsated and
unsubdued, cutting its shape sharply upon the background of the world.
What were the loves and sorrows of a snuffy old clergyman, dreaming over
his whisky, to the fiery egotism of Jane Eyre? The beauty of those first
books, _Scenes of Clerical Life_, _Adam Bede_, _The Mill on the Floss_, is
very great. It is impossible to estimate the merit of the Poysers, the
Dodsons, the Gilfils, the Bartons, and the rest with all their
surroundings and dependencies, because they have put on flesh and blood
and we move among them, now bored, now sympathetic, but always with that
unquestioning acceptance of all that they say and do, which we accord to
the great originals only. The flood of memory and humour which she pours
so spontaneously into one figure, one scene after another, until the
whole fabric of ancient rural England is revived, has so much in common
with a natural process that it leaves us with little consciousness that
there is anything to criticise. We accept; we feel the delicious warmth
and release of spirit which the great creative writers alone procure for
us. As one comes back to the books after years of absence they pour out,
even against our expectation, the same store of energy and heat, so that
we want more than anything to idle in the warmth as in the sun beating
down from the red orchard wall. If there is an element of unthinking
abandonment in thus submitting to the humours of Midland farmers and
their wives, that, too, is right in the circumstances. We scarcely wish
to analyse what we feel to be so large and deeply human. And when we
consider how distant in time the world of Shepperton and Hayslope is,
and how remote the minds of farmer and agricultural labourers from those
of most of George Eliot’s readers, we can only attribute the ease and
pleasure with which we ramble from house to smithy, from cottage parlour
to rectory garden, to the fact that George Eliot makes us share their
lives, not in a spirit of condescension or of curiosity, but in a spirit
of sympathy. She is no satirist. The movement of her mind was too slow
and cumbersome to lend itself to comedy. But she gathers in her large
grasp a great bunch of the main elements of human nature and groups them
loosely together with a tolerant and wholesome understanding which, as
one finds upon re-reading, has not only kept her figures fresh and free,
but has given them an unexpected hold upon our laughter and tears. There
is the famous Mrs. Poyser. It would have been easy to work her
idiosyncrasies to death, and, as it is, perhaps, George Eliot gets her
laugh in the same place a little too often. But memory, after the book
is shut, brings out, as sometimes in real life, the details and
subtleties which some more salient characteristic has prevented us from
noticing at the time. We recollect that her health was not good. There
were occasions upon which she said nothing at all. She was patience
itself with a sick child. She doted upon Totty. Thus one can muse and
speculate about the greater number of George Eliot’s characters and
find, even in the least important, a roominess and margin where those
qualities lurk which she has no call to bring from their obscurity.
But in the midst of all this tolerance and sympathy there are, even in
the early books, moments of greater stress. Her humour has shown itself
broad enough to cover a wide range of fools and failures, mothers and
children, dogs and flourishing midland fields, farmers, sagacious or
fuddled over their ale, horse-dealers, inn-keepers, curates, and
carpenters. Over them all broods a certain romance, the only romance
that George Eliot allowed herself—the romance of the past. The books
are astonishingly readable and have no trace of pomposity or pretence.
But to the reader who holds a large stretch of her early work in view it
will become obvious that the mist of recollection gradually withdraws.
It is not that her power diminishes, for, to our thinking, it is at its
highest in the mature _Middlemarch_, the magnificent book which with all
its imperfections is one of the few English novels written for grown-up
people. But the world of fields and farms no longer contents her. In
real life she had sought her fortunes elsewhere; and though to look back
into the past was calming and consoling, there are, even in the early
works, traces of that troubled spirit, that exacting and questioning and
baffled presence who was George Eliot herself. In _Adam Bede_ there is a
hint of her in Dinah. She shows herself far more openly and completely
in Maggie in _The Mill on the Floss_. She is Janet in _Janet’s
Repentance_, and Romola, and Dorothea seeking wisdom and finding one
scarcely knows what in marriage with Ladislaw. Those who fall foul of
George Eliot do so, we incline to think, on account of her heroines; and
with good reason; for there is no doubt that they bring out the worst of
her, lead her into difficult places, make her self-conscious, didactic,
and occasionally vulgar. Yet if you could delete the whole sisterhood
you would leave a much smaller and a much inferior world, albeit a world
of greater artistic perfection and far superior jollity and comfort. In
accounting for her failure, in so far as it was a failure, one
recollects that she never wrote a story until she was thirty-seven, and
that by the time she was thirty-seven she had come to think of herself
with a mixture of pain and something like resentment. For long she
preferred not to think of herself at all. Then, when the first flush of
creative energy was exhausted and self-confidence had come to her, she
wrote more and more from the personal standpoint, but she did so without
the unhesitating abandonment of the young. Her self-consciousness is
always marked when her heroines say what she herself would have said.
She disguised them in every possible way. She granted them beauty and
wealth into the bargain; she invented, more improbably, a taste for
brandy. But the disconcerting and stimulating fact remained that she was
compelled by the very power of her genius to step forth in person upon
the quiet bucolic scene.
The noble and beautiful girl who insisted upon being born into the Mill
on the Floss is the most obvious example of the ruin which a heroine can
strew about her. Humour controls her and keeps her lovable so long as
she is small and can be satisfied by eloping with the gipsies or
hammering nails into her doll; but she develops; and before George Eliot
knows what has happened she has a full-grown woman on her hands
demanding what neither gipsies nor dolls, nor St. Ogg’s itself is
capable of giving her. First Philip Wakem is produced, and later Stephen
Guest. The weakness of the one and the coarseness of the other have
often been pointed out; but both, in their weakness and coarseness,
illustrate not so much George Eliot’s inability to draw the portrait of
a man, as the uncertainty, the infirmity, and the fumbling which shook
her hand when she had to conceive a fit mate for a heroine. She is in
the first place driven beyond the home world she knew and loved, and
forced to set foot in middle-class drawing-rooms where young men sing
all the summer morning and young women sit embroidering smoking-caps for
bazaars. She feels herself out of her element, as her clumsy satire of
what she calls “good society” proves.
Good society has its claret and its velvet carpets, its dinner
engagements six weeks deep, its opera, and its faery ball rooms . . .
gets its science done by Faraday and its religion by the superior clergy
who are to be met in the best houses; how should it have need of belief
and emphasis?
There is no trace of humour or insight there, but only the
vindictiveness of a grudge which we feel to be personal in its origin.
But terrible as the complexity of our social system is in its demands
upon the sympathy and discernment of a novelist straying across the
boundaries, Maggie Tulliver did worse than drag George Eliot from her
natural surroundings. She insisted upon the introduction of the great
emotional scene. She must love; she must despair; she must be drowned
clasping her brother in her arms. The more one examines the great
emotional scenes the more nervously one anticipates the brewing and
gathering and thickening of the cloud which will burst upon our heads at
the moment of crisis in a shower of disillusionment and verbosity. It is
partly that her hold upon dialogue, when it is not dialect, is slack;
and partly that she seems to shrink with an elderly dread of fatigue
from the effort of emotional concentration. She allows her heroines to
talk too much. She has little verbal felicity. She lacks the unerring
taste which chooses one sentence and compresses the heart of the scene
within that. “Whom are you going to dance with?” asked Mr. Knightley, at
the Westons’ ball. “With you, if you will ask me,” said Emma; and she
has said enough. Mrs. Casaubon would have talked for an hour and we
should have looked out of the window.
Yet, dismiss the heroines without sympathy, confine George Eliot to the
agricultural world of her “remotest past”, and you not only diminish her
greatness but lose her true flavour. That greatness is here we can have
no doubt. The width of the prospect, the large strong outlines of the
principal features, the ruddy light of the early books, the searching
power and reflective richness of the later tempt us to linger and
expatiate beyond our limits. But it is upon the heroines that we would
cast a final glance. “I have always been finding out my religion since I
was a little girl,” says Dorothea Casaubon. “I used to pray so much—now
I hardly ever pray. I try not to have desires merely for myself. . . .”
She is speaking for them all. That is their problem. They cannot live
without religion, and they start out on the search for one when they are
little girls. Each has the deep feminine passion for goodness, which
makes the place where she stands in aspiration and agony the heart of
the book—still and cloistered like a place of worship, but that she no
longer knows to whom to pray. In learning they seek their goal; in the
ordinary tasks of womanhood; in the wider service of their kind. They do
not find what they seek, and we cannot wonder. The ancient consciousness
of woman, charged with suffering and sensibility, and for so many ages
dumb, seems in them to have brimmed and overflowed and uttered a demand
for something—they scarcely know what—for something that is perhaps
incompatible with the facts of human existence. George Eliot had far too
strong an intelligence to tamper with those facts, and too broad a
humour to mitigate the truth because it was a stern one. Save for the
supreme courage of their endeavour, the struggle ends, for her heroines,
in tragedy, or in a compromise that is even more melancholy. But their
story is the incomplete version of the story of George Eliot herself.
For her, too, the burden and the complexity of womanhood were not
enough; she must reach beyond the sanctuary and pluck for herself the
strange bright fruits of art and knowledge. Clasping them as few women
have ever clasped them, she would not renounce her own inheritance—the
difference of view, the difference of standard—nor accept an
inappropriate reward. Thus we behold her, a memorable figure,
inordinately praised and shrinking from her fame, despondent, reserved,
shuddering back into the arms of love as if there alone were
satisfaction and, it might be, justification, at the same time reaching
out with “a fastidious yet hungry ambition” for all that life could
offer the free and inquiring mind and confronting her feminine
aspirations with the real world of men. Triumphant was the issue for
her, whatever it may have been for her creations, and as we recollect
all that she dared and achieved, how with every obstacle against
her—sex and health and convention—she sought more knowledge and more
freedom till the body, weighted with its double burden, sank worn out,
we must lay upon her grave whatever we have it in our power to bestow of
laurel and rose.