Especially severe is her condemnation of the tendency to introduce only fashionable or learned people into novels. She says the silly novelists rarely make us acquainted with "any other than very lofty and fashionable society," and very often the authors know nothing of such society except from the reading of other such novels.
It is true that we are constantly struck with the want of verisimilitude in their representations of the high society in which they seem to live; but then they betray no closer acquaintance with any other form of life. If their peers and peeresses are improbable, their literary men, tradespeople and cottagers are impossible; and their intellect seems to have the peculiar impartiality of reproducing both what they have seen and heard, and what they have not seen and heard, with equal faithfulness.
What is simple, natural, unaffected, she pleads for as the true material of fiction. How she would apply this idea may be seen in her condemnation of a novelist who devoted her pages to a defence of Evangelicalism. This writer is "tame and feeble" because she attempts to depict a form of society with which she is not familiar. That the common phases of religious life are capable of affording the richest material for the novelist, George Eliot has abundantly shown, and what she says of their value in this discussion of "Silly Novelists" is of great interest in view of her own success in this kind of portraiture. What she suggested as a fine field for the novelist was to be the one she herself was so well to occupy. Her success proved how clearly she comprehended the nature of novel-writing, and how well she understood the character of the material with which the best results can be attained.
It is less excusable in an Evangelical novelist than any other, gratuitously to seek her subjects among titles and carriages. The real drama of Evangelicalism—and it has abundance of fine drama for any one who has genius enough to discern and reproduce it—lies among the middle and lower classes; and are not Evangelical opinions understood to give an especial interest in the weak things of the earth, rather than in the mighty? Why, then, cannot our Evangelical novelists show us the operation of their religious views among people (there really are many such in the world) who keep no carriage, "not so much as a brass-bound gig," who even manage to eat their dinner without a silver fork, and in whose mouths the authoress's questionable English would be strictly consistent? Why can we not have pictures of religious life among the industrial classes in England as interesting as Mrs. Stowe's pictures of religious life among the negroes?
Was this question a prophecy? It indicates that the writer's attention had already been directed to the richness of this material for the purposes of the novelist. After reading these words we see why she took up the common life of the English village as she had herself been familiar with it from childhood. In order to be true to her own conception of the novel, there was no other field she could occupy. That she understood the picturesqueness of this form of life no reader of her novels will doubt, or that she saw and understood its capacities for artistic delineation. The opening paragraphs of her Westminster Review article on the "Natural History of German Life" afford further evidence of her insight and wisdom on this subject. They also afford evidence of her hatred of the conventional and the artificial in art, literature and life. The spirit of imitation and mannerism common to the eighteenth century was in every way repugnant to her. She could have had only contempt for the literary art of a Pope or a Boileau. The nature of her realism, and the conception she had of its importance, may be understood from these paragraphs, for in them she has unfolded her theory more clearly than in anything else she has written, and with that genius for sympathetic description which is so marked in her novels.
How little the real characteristics of the working-classes are known to those who are outside them, how little their natural history has been studied, is sufficiently disclosed by our art as well as by our political and social theories. Where, in our picture exhibitions, shall we find a group of true peasantry? What English artist even attempts to rival in truthfulness such studies of popular life as the pictures of Teniers or the ragged boys of Murillo? Even one of the greatest painters of the pre-eminently realistic school, while in his picture of "The Hireling Shepherd" he gave us a landscape of marvellous truthfulness, placed a pair of peasants in the foreground who were not much more real than the idyllic swains and damsels of our chimney ornaments. Only a total absence of acquaintance and sympathy with our peasantry could give a moment's popularity to such a picture as "Cross Purposes," where we have a peasant girl who looks as if she knew L.E.L.'s poems by heart, and English rustics whose costumes seem to indicate that they are meant for ploughmen with exotic features that remind us of a handsome primo tenore. Rather than such cockney sentimentality as this as an education for the taste and sympathies, we prefer the most crapulous group of boors that Teniers ever painted. But even those among our painters who aim at giving the rustic type of features, who are far above the effeminate feebleness of the "Keepsake" style, treat their subjects under the influence of traditions and prepossessions rather than of direct observation. The notion that peasants are joyous, that the typical moment to represent a man in a smock-frock is when he is cracking a joke and showing a row of sound teeth, that cottage matrons are usually buxom, and village children necessarily rosy and merry, are prejudices difficult to dislodge from the artistic mind, which looks for its subjects into literature instead of life. The painter is still under the influence of idyllic literature, which has always expressed the imagination of the cultivated and town-bred, rather than the truth of rustic life. Idyllic ploughmen are jocund when they drive their team afield; idyllic shepherds make bashful love under hawthorn bushes; idyllic villagers dance in the chequered shade, and refresh themselves, not immoderately, with spicy nut-brown ale. But no one who has seen much of actual ploughmen thinks them jocund; no one who is well acquainted with the English peasantry can pronounce them merry. The slow gaze, in which no sense of beauty beams, no humor twinkles,-the slow utterance and the heavy slouching walk, remind one rather of that melancholy animal, the camel, than of the sturdy countryman with striped stockings, red waist coat and hat aside, who represents the traditional English peasant. Observe a company of haymakers, when you see them at a distance, tossing up the forkfuls of hay in the golden light, while the wagon creeps—slowly with its increasing burthen over the meadow, and the bright green space which tells of work done gets larger and larger, you pronounce the scene "smiling," and you think that these companions in labor must be as bright and cheerful as the picture to which they give animation. Approach nearer, and you will certainly find that haymaking time is a time of joking, especially it there are women among the laborers; but the coarse laugh that bursts out every now and then, and expresses the triumphant taunt, is as far as possible from your idyllic conception of idyllic merriment. That delicious effervescence of the mind which we call fun has no equivalent for the northern peasant, except tipsy revelry; the only realm of fancy and imagination for the English clown exists at the bottom of the third quart-pot.
The conventional countryman of the stage, who picks up pocket books and never looks into them, and who is too simple even to know that honesty has its opposite, represents the still lingering mistake that an unintelligible dialect is a guarantee for ingenuousness, and that slouching shoulders indicate an upright disposition. It is quite true that a thresher is likely to be innocent of any adroit arithmetical cheating, but he is not the less likely to carry home his master's corn in his shoes and pocket; a reaper is not given to writing begging letters, but he is quite capable of cajoling the dairy-maid into filling his small-beer bottle with ale. The selfish instincts are not subdued by the sight of buttercups, nor is integrity in the least established by that classic rural occupation, sheep-washing. To make men moral, something more is requisite than to turn them out to grass.
Opera peasants, whose unreality excites Mr. Ruskin's indignation, are surely too frank an idealization to be misleading; and since popular chorus is one of the most effective elements of the opera, we can hardly object to lyric rustics in elegant laced bodices and picturesque motley, unless we are prepared to advocate a chorus of colliers in their pit costume, or a ballet of charwomen and stocking-weavers. But our social novels profess to represent the people as they are, and the unreality of their representations is a grave evil. The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies. Appeals founded on generalizations and statistics require a sympathy ready-made, a moral sentiment already in activity; but a picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment. When Scott takes us into Luckie Mucklebackit's cottage, or tells the story of The Two Drovers,—when Wordsworth sings to us the reverie of Poor Susan,—when Kingsley shows us Alton Locke gazing yearningly over the gate which leads from the highway into the first wood he ever saw,—when Harnung paints a group of chimney-sweepers,—more is done towards linking the higher classes with the lower, towards obliterating the vulgarity of exclusiveness, than by hundreds of sermons and philosophical dissertations. Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot. All the more sacred is the task of the artist when he undertakes to paint the life of the people. Falsification here is far more pernicious than in the more artificial aspects of life. It is not so very serious that we should have false ideas about evanescent fashions—about the manners and conversation of beaux and duchesses; but it is serious that our sympathy with the perennial joys and struggles, the toil, the tragedy and the humor in the life of our more heavily laden fellow-men,—should be perverted, and turned towards a false object instead of the true one.
This perversion is not the less fatal because the misrepresentation which gives rise to it has what the artist considers a moral end. The thing for mankind to know is, not what are the motives and influences which the moralist thinks ought to act on the laborer or the artisan, but what are the motives and influences which do act on him. We want to be taught to feel, not for the heroic artisan or the sentimental peasant, but for the peasant in all his coarse apathy, and the artisan in all his suspicious selfishness.
We have one great novelist who is gifted with the utmost power of rendering the external traits of our town population; and if he could give us their psychological character—their conceptions of life, and their emotions—with the same truth as their idiom and manners, his books would be the greatest contribution art has ever made to the awakening of social sympathies. But while he can copy Mrs. Plornish's colloquial style with the delicate accuracy of a sun-picture, while there is the same startling inspiration in his description of the gestures and phrases of "Boots," as in the speeches of Shakspere's mobs or numskulls, he scarcely ever passes from the humorous and external to the emotional and tragic, without becoming as transcendent in his unreality as he was a moment before in his artistic truthfulness. But for the precious salt of his humor, which compels him to reproduce external traits that serve, in some degree, as a corrective to his frequently false psychology, his preternaturally virtuous poor children and artisans, his melodramatic bootmen and courtesans, would be as noxious as Eugene Sue's idealized proletaires in encouraging the miserable fallacy that high morality and refined sentiment can grow out of harsh social relations, ignorance and want; or that the working-classes are in a condition to enter at once into a millennial state of altruism, wherein every one is caring for every one else, and no one for himself.
If we need a true conception of the popular character to guide our sympathies rightly, we need it equally to check our theories, and direct us in their application. The tendency created by the splendid conquests of modern generalization, to believe that all social questions are merged in economical science, and that the relations of men to their neighbors may be settled by algebraic equations,—the dream that the uncultured classes are prepared for a condition which appeals principally to their moral sensibilities,—the aristocratic dilettantism which attempts to restore the "good old times" by a sort of idyllic masquerading, and to grow feudal fidelity and veneration as we grow prize turnips, by an artificial system of culture,—none of these diverging mistakes can co-exist with a real knowledge of the people, with a thorough study of their habits, their ideas, their motives. The landholder, the clergyman, the mill-owner, the mining agent, have each an opportunity for making precious observations on different sections of the working-class, but unfortunately their experience is too often not registered at all, or its results are too scattered to be available as a source of information and stimulus to the public mind generally. If any man of sufficient moral and intellectual breadth, whose observations would not be vitiated by a foregone conclusion, or by a professional point of view, would devote himself to studying the natural history of our social classes, especially of the small shop-keepers, artisans and peasantry,—the degree in which they are influenced by local conditions, their maxims and habits, the points of view from which they regard their religious teachers, and the degree in which they are influenced by religious doctrines, the interaction of the various classes on each other, and what are the tendencies in their position towards disintegration or towards development,—and if, after all this study, he would give us the result of his observations in a book well nourished with specific facts, his work would be a valuable aid to the social and political reformer.
The estimates given in these essays of the writings of Jane Austen, George Sand, Charlotte Brontë and Thackeray, show the soundness of George Eliot's critical judgment. She fully appreciated Jane Austen's artistic skill, as she did George Sand's impassioned love of liberty and naturalness. She also saw how tame are Miss Austen's scenes, how humanly imperfect are Thackeray's characters. Her own work is wanting in Jane Austen's artistic skill and finish, but there is far more of originality and character in her books, more of thought and purpose. Miss Austen tells her story wonderfully well, but her books are all on the same level of social mediocrity and flatness. No fresh, strong, natural, aspiring life is to be found in one of them. George Eliot has not Jane Austen's artistic skill, but she has thought, depth of purpose, originality of expression and conception, and a marvellous creative insight into character. She is less passionate and bold than George Sand, not the same daring innovator, more rational and sensible. She is not so much a poet, has little of George Sand's power of improvisation, much less of eloquence and abandon. She has more literary skill than Charlotte Brontë, less originality, but none of her crudeness. She has not so much of the subtle element of genius, but more of solidity and thought.
Her theories concerning the novel place George Eliot fully in sympathy with what may very properly be called the British school of fiction. The natural history of man is the subject matter used by this school; and to describe accurately, minutely, some portion of the human race, some social community, is its main object. Richardson, Fielding, Miss Austen and Thackeray are the masters in this school, who have given direction to its aims and methods. They have sought to accomplish in novel-writing somewhat the same results as those aimed at by Wordsworth and Browning in poetry, to follow the natural, to make much of the common, to describe things as they are. They are realists both in method and philosophy, though differing widely from the minuteness and coarseness of Tourguénief and Zola, in that they show a large element of the ideal interfused with the real. This school is seldom coarse, vulgar or sensuous, does not mistake the depraved and beastly for the natural. Its members delight in simple scenes, plain life, common joys; the scenes, life and joys which are open to every Englishman. They have made use of the facts lying immediately about them, those with which they were the most familiar. They have broken away from the traditional theories of life, the manners of books of etiquette and the rules of fashionable society, for the life which is natural and instinct with impulses of its own. The life of the professions is described, local dialects and provincialisms appear, places and scenery are carefully painted, and the disagreeable and painful become elements in these novels, because common to humanity.
To this special theory of the novel, as it had been worked out by the English masters of prose-poetry, George Eliot added nothing essential. Thackeray, Mrs. Gaskell, Miss Austen, Miss Mitford, Fielding and Richardson had preceded her along the way she was to follow. Their methods became hers, she accepted their influence, and her work was done in the spirit they had so ably illustrated. In one direction, however, she far surpassed any one of her masters, and gave to the novel a richness of power and fulness of aim it had not attained to with any of her predecessors. George Eliot combined other methods with that of naturalism, not adhering rigidly to the purpose of painting life as it appears on the surface. Not only from the pre-Raphaelites, but from such romanticists as Scott, did she learn much. Past scenes became natural, and history was discovered to be a vast element in the thought of the present. Scott's power of reviving the past in all its romantic and picturesque features, which gave him such capacity for re-creating the life that had once passed away, was not possessed by George Eliot. Still, if not a romancist, she realized how mighty is the shaping power of the past over the present. For this reason, she endeavored to recast old scenes, to revive in living shapes the times that had gone by. The living movements of the present, its efforts at reform, its cries for liberty, its searchings after a freer and purer life, also became a prominent element in her novels. If in this tendency she somewhat enlarged upon the methods of her masters, yet she was quite in sympathy with many who came just before her, and with many more who were her contemporaries. In another direction she kept along the way followed by many of her co-workers, and brought philosophy and socialistic speculation to the aid of the naturalistic method. Indeed, she so far departed from that method, and from the soundest theories of art, as to become to some extent a doctrinaire.
Her novels, like much of the poetry of the same period, are eclectic in spirit, combining with the naturalistic methods those of the historic, socialistic, culture and speculative schools. Art and culture for their own sake combined in her novels with the purpose to use history and social life obedient to a distinct conception of their meanings. To describe life accurately there must be a clear conception of what life means. Genius never works aimlessly; and in seeing life as it is, always sees that it has a tendency and direction. A mind so thoughtful as George Eliot's, with so strong a love of speculative interest in it, was likely to give to novel-writing done by her a large philosophic element. Yet her philosophy is nearly always subject to her imagination and to her naturalism. Her love of nature, her intimate interest in life and its elemental problems, her passionate sympathy with all human passions and experiences, saves her from becoming a mere doctrinaire, and gives to her speculations a pathetic, living interest. The poetic elements of her novels are so many as to subordinate the philosophic to the true purposes of art.
In one direction George Eliot departed from the methods of her predecessors, and to so great an extent as to be herself the originator of a new school of fiction. She followed the bent of her time for analysis and psychologic interpretation. It is here more than anywhere else she differs from Charlotte Brontë and George Sand. These two great novelists create character by direct representation, by making their persons live and act. George Eliot shows her characters to the reader by analyzing their motives and by giving the history of their development. The disadvantages of the analytic method are apparent when George Eliot is compared with Scott. Unique, personal and human are his creations, instinct with all human emotions, and profoundly real. It is only the poetic side of life which he sees, not its philosophic. George Eliot wanted to know the meanings of things, and this very desire brings a largeness into her books which is not found in Scott's. She was much the more thoughtful of the two, the one who tried to realize to the intellect what life means. Yet her method of doing this is not always the best one for the poet or the novelist. Scott was no realist, and yet George Eliot has not been more accurate than he. Indeed, he is far more truly accurate in so far as he paints the soul as well as the body of life. The sad endings of her novels grew out of a false theory, and from her inability to see anything of spiritual reality beyond the little round of man's earthly destiny. She did not accept the doctrine that art is to be cultivated only for art's sake, for art was always to her the vehicle of moral or philosophic teaching. The limitations of her art largely lay in the direction of her agnosticism. Scott and George Sand gain for their work a great power and effect by their acceptance of the spiritual as real. There is a light, a subtle aroma, a width of vision, a sense of reality, in their work from this source, which is wanting in George Eliot's. The illimitable mystery beyond the region of the real is the greatest fact man has presented to him, and that region is a reality in all the effects it works on humanity. No poet can ignore it or try to limit it to humanity without a loss to his work. It is this subtle, penetrative, aromatic and mystic power of the ideal which is most to be felt as lacking in the works of George Eliot. Much as we may praise her, we can but feel this limitation. Great as is our admiration, we can but feel that there is a higher range of poetic and artistic creation than any she reached.
The quotations presented from her early writings prove that George Eliot began her career as a novelist with a fully elaborated conception of the purposes of the novel and of the methods to be followed in its production. She had thoroughly studied the subject, had read many of the best works of the best writers, and had formed a carefully digested theory of the novel. That she could do this is rather an indication of critical than of creative power. Her novels everywhere betray the greatness of her reasoning powers, that she was a thinker, that she had strong powers of intellectual analysis, and that she had a logical, accurate mind. Had her mind taken no other direction than this, however, she never could have become a great novelist. These essays indicated something beside powers of reasoning and psychological analysis. They also indicated her capacity for imaginative insight into the motives and impulses of human nature, and an intuitive comprehension of what is most natural to human thought and action. They showed appreciation of sympathy and feeling, and delicate perception of the finer cravings and tendencies of even the commonest souls. They gave promise of so much creative power, her friends saw that in novel-writing she was to find the true expression of her large qualities of mind and heart. The person who could so skilfully point out the faults in the poor novels rapidly issuing from the press, and realize the true indications of a master's power in the creations of the literary artists, might herself possess the genius necessary to original work of her own. Her early essays are now chiefly of value for this promise they give of larger powers than those which could be fully expressed in such work. They prophesied the future, and made her friends zealous to overcome her own reluctance to enter upon a larger work. She doubted her own genius, but it was not destined to remain unfruitful.
VIII.
POETIC METHODS.
Had George Eliot written nothing else than the poems which bear her name, she would have been assigned a permanent place among the poets. Having first attained her rank in the highest order of novelists, however, her poetry suffers in comparison with her prose. The critics tell us that no person gifted with supreme excellence in one form of creative expression has ever been able to attain high rank in another. They forget that Goethe was great both in prose and poetry; that his Wilhelm Meister is of scarcely inferior genius to his Faust. They also forget that Victor Hugo holds the first place among the French poets of the present century, at the same time that he is the greatest of all French novelists. It would be well for them also to remember that Scott held high rank as a poet before he began his wonderful career as a novelist. A contemporary of George Eliot's, to name a single instance of another kind, was equally excellent as poet and painter. Dante Rossetti made for himself a lasting place in both directions, and in both he did work of a high order.
In reality, the novel much resembles the narrative or epic poem; and if a work of true genius, it is difficult to distinguish it from the poem except as they differ in external form. The novel has for its main elements those qualities of imagination, description, high-wrought purpose, which are also constituents of much of the best poetry. The novel is more expansive than the poem, one of the chief characteristics of which is condensation; its theme may take a wider range, and it may embrace those cruder and more common features of life which are inappropriate to the poem. The novelist can make a greater use of humor, he can give more detail to description, and portrayal of character can be carried to a much greater extent, than is usual with the poet. The poet requires a subject more sublime, inspiring and naturally beautiful than the novelist, who seeks what is the more human, nearer the level of daily social existence, and full of the affecting even if ruder interests and passions of life. The novel is so similar to the poem, and in so many ways requires such similar qualities of mind for its production, that there is no inherent reason why the same person cannot do equally good work in both. The supposition is that the poet may become a novelist, or the novelist a poet, in all cases except where there is some outward disqualification. The novelist may not have the sense of rhythmical form and of metrical expression; and the poet may not possess that constructive faculty which builds up plots, incidents and characters. In nearly all respects but these the two forms of creative genius so nearly assimilate each other, it is to be expected a novelist may turn poet if he have a large imagination and a stimulating capacity for metrical expression.
Novelists of strong imagination and a ready command of expressive words, barely escape writing poetry when they only purpose to write prose. This is true of Hugo, Auerbach, Dickens and George Eliot, again and again. The glow of creation, the high-wrought impulse of imagination, the ideal conception of life, all move the novelist in the direction of poetry. With much effort he keeps meter and rhyme out of his prose, but simile and metaphor, condensed expression, unusual words, poetic compounds, alliteration, sublime and picturesque expression, will intrude themselves. Dickens even permits meter and rhyme to conquer him, and weakens his style in consequence. He grows sentimental, and the real strength of pure prose is lost. George Eliot is often poetical in expression, touches the very borders of poetry continually, but she seldom permits herself to lapse from the strong, energetic and impressive prose which she almost uniformly writes. Specimens of this noble poetic-prose may be found very often in her pages. While it would be difficult by any transposition of words to turn it into poetry, as may often be done in the case of Dickens's prose, yet it contains most of the elements of a high order of poetry. In the account of the death of Maggie and Tom is to be found a fine specimen of her style, the last words being good iambics.
The boat reappeared, but brother and sister had gone down in an embrace never to be parted; living through again, in one supreme moment, the days when they had clasped their little hands in love, and roamed the daisied fields together.
In the first paragraph of the thirty-third chapter of Adam Bede is a sentence which makes a successful stanza in iambics by the addition of a single word.
The woods behind the chase,
And all the hedgerow trees,
Took on a solemn splendor then
Under the dark low-hanging skies.
It is very seldom, however, that George Eliot permits anything like meter in her prose, and she is usually very reticent of rhythm. There is fervor and enthusiasm, imagination and poetic insight, but all kept within the limits of robust and manly prose. This capacity of prose to serve most of the purposes of poetry may be seen in a marked degree in all of George Eliot's novels. In the account of Adam Bede's love for Hetty this subtle power of words and ideas to give the charm and impression of poetry without rhythm or rhyme is exhibited in a characteristic manner.
I think the deep love he had for that sweet, rounded, blossom-like, dark-eyed Hetty, of whose inward self he was really very ignorant, came out of the very strength of his nature, and not out of any inconsistent weakness. Is it any weakness, pray, to be wrought on by exquisite music? to feel its wondrous harmonies searching the subtlest windings of your soul, the delicate fibres of life where no memory can penetrate, and binding together your whole being, past and present, in one unspeakable vibration; melting you in one moment with all the tenderness, all the love that has been scattered through the toilsome years, concentrating in one emotion of heroic courage or resignation all the hard-learned lessons of self-renouncing sympathy, blending your present joy with past sorrow, and your present sorrow with all your past joy? If not, then neither is it a weakness to be so wrought upon by the exquisite curves of a woman's cheek and neck and arms, by the liquid depths of her beseeching eyes, or the sweet childish pout of her lips. For the beauty of a lovely woman is like music; what can one say more? Beauty has an expression beyond and far above the one woman's soul that it clothes, as the words of genius have a wider meaning than the thought that prompted them; it is more than a woman's love that moves us in a woman's eyes—it seems to be a far-off, mighty love that has come near to us, and made speech for itself there; the rounded neck, the dimpled arm, move us by something more than their prettiness—by their close kinship with all we have known of tenderness and peace. [Footnote: Adam Bede, chapter XXXIII.]
Love, music and beautiful landscapes continually inspire the poetic side of her nature; and these themes, which are constantly recurring in her chapters, draw forth her imagination and give fervor and enthusiasm to her expression. Her love of nature is deep and most appreciative of all its transformations and beauties. This sensitiveness to the changes of the outward world is a large element in her mind, and indicates the reality of her poetic gifts. This may be seen in a passage such as the following:—
The ride to Stone Court, which Fred and Rosamond took the next morning, lay through a pretty bit of midland landscape, almost all meadows and pastures, with hedgerows still allowed to grow in bushy beauty, and to spread out coral fruit for the birds. Little details gave each field a particular physiognomy, dear to the eyes that have looked on them from childhood; the pool in the corner where the grasses were dank and trees leaned whisperingly; the great oak shadowing a bare place in mid-pasture; the high bank where the ash-trees grew; the sudden slope of the old marl-pit making a red background for the burdock; the huddled roofs and ricks of the homestead without a traceable way of approach; the gray gate and fences against the depths of the bordering wood; and the stray hovel, its old, old thatch full of mossy hills and valleys, with wondrous modulations of light and shadow, such as we travel far to see in later life, and see larger, but not more beautiful. These are the things that made the gamut of joy in landscape to midland-bred souls—the things they toddled among, or perhaps learned by heart, standing between their father's knees while he drove leisurely. [Footnote: Middlemarch, chapter XII.]
It is nature as affecting man, and man as transformed into a creature of feeling and passion by the mysterious conditions of his existence, which oftenest arouses the poetic fervor in her. The enthusiasm of high resolves, yearnings after the pure and beautiful, and love's regenerating power, give to her themes which kindle poetic expression to a glow. The vision of Mordecai on Blackfriars' bridge affords a fine example of her love of the ideal in moral purpose, and shows how stimulating it is to her imagination. It is a poetic picture of the finest quality she has given in this chapter, one that could easily have been made to find expression in verse of great beauty; but it is poetry in thought and spirit alone, not in form or structure. It is true prose in form, strong in its fulness of detail, knit together with words of the right texture, built up into a true prose image of beauty in thought.
Mordecai's mind wrought so constantly in images that his coherent trains of thought often resembled the significant dreams attributed to sleepers by waking persons in their most inventive moments; nay, they often resembled genuine dreams in their way of breaking off the passage from the known to the unknown. Thus, for a long while, he habitually thought of the Being answering to his need as one distinctly approaching or turning his back toward him, darkly painted against a golden sky. The reason of the golden sky lay in one of Mordecai's habits. He was keenly alive to some poetic aspects of London; and a favorite resort of his, when strength and leisure allowed, was to some one of the bridges, especially about sunrise or sunset. Even when he was bending over watch-wheels and trinkets, or seated in a small upper room looking out on dingy bricks and dingy cracked windows, his imagination spontaneously planted him on some spot where he had a far-stretching scene; his thought went on in wide spaces, and whenever he could, he tried to have in reality the influences of a large sky. Leaning on the parapet of Blackfriars' bridge, and gazing meditatively, the breadth and calm of the river, with its long vista half hazy, half luminous, the grand dim masses or tall forms of buildings which were the signs of world-commerce, the on-coming of boats and barges from the still distance into sound and color, entered into his mood and blent themselves indistinguishably with his thinking, as a fine symphony to which we can hardly be said to listen, makes a medium that bears up our spiritual wings. Thus it happened that the figure representative of Mordecai's longing was mentally seen darkened by the excess of light in the aerial background. But in the inevitable progress of his imagination toward fuller detail he ceased to see the figure with its back toward him. It began to advance, and a face became discernible; the words youth, beauty, refinement, Jewish birth, noble gravity, turned into hardly individual but typical form and color: gathered from his memory of faces seen among the Jews of Holland and Bohemia, and from the paintings which revived that memory. Reverently let it be said of this mature spiritual need that it was akin to the boy's and girl's picturing of the future beloved; but the stirrings of such young desire are feeble compared with the passionate current of an ideal life straining to embody itself, made intense by resistance to imminent dissolution. The visionary form became a companion and auditor, keeping a place not only in the waking imagination, but in those dreams of lighter slumber of which it is truest to say, "I sleep, but my heart is awake"—when the disturbing trivial story of yesterday is charged with the impassioned purpose of years. [Footnote: Daniel Deronda, chapter XXXVIII.]
Many times in her prose George Eliot has recognized the true character of poetry, and she has even given definitions of it which show how well she knew its real nature. She makes Will Ladislaw say that—
To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion—a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. [Footnote: Middlemarch, chapter XXII.]
She thinks poetry and romance are as plentiful in the world as ever they were, that they exist even amidst the conditions created by invention and science; and if we do not find them there it is only because poetry and romance are absent from our own minds. If we have not awe and tenderness, wonder and enthusiasm, poetry cannot come near us, and we shall not be thrilled and exalted by it. [Footnote: Daniel Deronda, chanter XIX.] Yet it is not difficult to see that George Eliot is not a poet in the fullest sense, because hers is not thoroughly and always a poetic mind, because she reasons about things too much. The poet is impressed, moved, thrilled and exalted, and pours out his song from his feelings and transfused with emotion. George Eliot was given to speculation, loved exactness of expression, and kept too close to the real. She had not that lightness of touch, that deftness and flexibility of expression, and that versatility of imaging forth her ideas, which the real poet possesses. Her mind moved with a ponderous tread, which needed a prose style large and stately as its true medium of expression. While she had poetic ideas in abundance, and an imaginative discernment of nature and life, she had not the full gift of poetic speech. She lacked inspiration as well as flexibility of thought, her imagination was not sufficiently rich, and she had not the full sense of rhythmic harmony.
George Eliot first began to write in verse, as was to be expected of one gifted with an imagination vigorous as hers. Her love of music, her keen perception of the beauties of nature, her love of form and color, gave added attraction and impetus in the same direction. That she did not continue through many years to write poetry seems to have been partly the result of her intense interest in severer studies. The speculative cast of her mind predominated the poetical so nearly as to turn her away from the poetic side of life to find a solution for its graver and more intricate problems. Her return to the poetic form of expression may be accounted for partly as the result of a greater confidence in her own powers which came from success, and partly from a desire for a new and richer medium of utterance.
So far as can be judged from the dates of her poems, as appended to many of them, "How Lisa Loved the King" was the earliest written. This was written in the year of the publication of Romola, and was followed the next year by the first draft of The Spanish Gypsy. The poetical mottoes of Felix Holt, however, were the first to be published; and not until these appeared did the public know of her poetic gifts. The Spanish Gypsy was not published until 1868, and "How Lisa Loved the King" appeared the following year.
The original mottoes in Felix Holt gave good hint of George Eliot's poetic gifts. They are solid with thought, pregnant with the ripe wisdom of daily experience, significant for dramatic expression, or notable for their humor. They are rather heavy and ponderous in style, though sonorous in expression. A stately tread, a largeness of expression, an air of weighty meaning, appear in nearly all these mottoes. As a specimen of the more philosophic, the following will indicate the truthfulness of this description:—
Truth is the precious harvest of the earth,
But once, when harvest waved upon a land,
The noisome cankerworm and caterpillar,
Locusts, and all the swarming, foul-born broods,
Fastened upon it with swift, greedy jaws,
And turned the harvest into pestilence,
Until men said, What profits it to sow?
Her capacity for dramatic expression, in which a rich comprehension of life is included, may be seen in these lines:
1ST CITIZEN. Sir, there's a hurry in the veins of youth
That makes a vice of virtue by excess.
2D CITIZEN. What if the coolness of our tardier veins
Be loss of virtue?
1ST CITIZEN. All things cool with time—
The sun itself, they say, till heat shall find
A general level, nowhere in excess.
2D CITIZEN. 'Tis a poor climax, to my weaker thought,
That future middlingness.
Wisdom alloyed with humor appears in another motto:
"It is a good and soothfast saw;
Half-roasted never will be raw;
No dough is dried once more to meal.
No crock new-shapen by the wheel;
You can't turn curds to milk again
Nor Now, by wishing, back to Then;
And having tasted stolen honey,
You can't buy innocence for money."
Mr. Buxton Forman says, that "in the charming headings to the chapters of Felix Holt it seemed as though the strong hand which had, up to that point, exercised masterly control over the restive tendency of high prose to rear up into verse, had relaxed itself just for the sake of a holiday, and no more. These headings did not bear the stamp of original poetry upon them. Forcible as were some, admirable in thought and applicability to the respective chapters as were all, none bore traces of that clearly defined individuality of style betrayed by all great and accomplished practitioners of verse, in even so small a compass as these headings. Some of them possess the great distinctive technical mark of poetry,—condensation; but this very condensation is compassed not in an original and individual method, but in the method of some pre-existent model; and it is hardly necessary to enforce that power of assimilation or reproduction, however large, is no infallible index of self-existent poetical faculty." This critic finds traces of Shakspere, Wordsworth and Mrs. Browning in these mottoes, and thinks they are all imitative, even when they are best. It is too easy, however, to dispose of a piece of literary work in this manner, and such criticism is very apt to have little meaning in it. George Eliot has proven herself far too original, both in prose and poetry, to make such a criticism of much value. Even if the charge of imitation is a valid one, it is far more probable that it was conscious and purposed, than that George Eliot's poetic gifts could only be exercised when impelled by the genius of some other. To give the impression of quotation may have been a part of George Eliot's purpose in writing these mottoes, which are original enough, and thoughtful enough, to have been attributed to any of the great poets. The real defects of her poetry lie in quite another direction than that of a lack of originality. She has enough to say that is fresh and interesting, she has no need to consult others for what she is to utter; but she has not the fervor of expression, the impressive touch, which separates poetry from prose. There is intellectual power enough, thought even in excess, but she does not soar and sing. She walks steadily, majestically along on the ground, she has no wings for the clear ether. Indeed, she is too much a realist to breathe in that upper air of pure song; it is too fine and delicate for one who loves the solid facts of earth so well as she.
If George Eliot often wrote prose which is almost poetry, she also wrote poetry which is almost prose. The concentrated, image-bearing phrases of poetry are wanting oftentimes in her verse. There is meter but no other quality of poetry, and not a few passages could be printed as prose with scarce a suspicion to the reader that they were intended for poetry. Mr. Buxton Forman has given a passage from The Spanish Gypsy in this way, adding only six insignificant words, and restoring i to is in two instances. He rightly says that the passage printed in prose "would surely be read by any one who saw it for the first time, without any suspicion that it merely required the excision of six little words and two letters to transform it to verse; no single expression betraying the secret that the passage is from a poem."
Do you hear the trumpet! There is old Eamon's blast. No bray but his can shake the air so well. He takes his trumpeting as solemnly as an angel charged to wake the dead; thinks war was made for trumpeters, and that their great art was made solely for themselves who understand it. His features have all shaped themselves to blowing, and when his trumpet is either bagged or left at home he seems like a chattel in a broker's booth, a spoutless watering-can, a promise to pay no sum particular!
George Eliot had not full command of poetic expression. This frequently appears, not only in the fact that many lines are simply prose in thought, but in the defects of the poetic form. Some lines are too short and others too long, some having four and some six feet. An instance of the former is to be found in these words between Don Silva and the Prior, forming one line:
Strong reasons, father.
Ay, but good?
Of the latter:
And starry flashing steel and pale vermilion.
Still more suggestive are the expedients she resorts to in order to complete the line. Lopez is made to say,—
Santiago! Juan, thou art hard to please.
I speak not for my own delighting, I.
I can be silent, I.
Very near this, Lopez is spoken of in this line:
That was not what he drew his sword at—he!
Such defects as these are not, certainly, of vital importance, and may doubtless be found in even the greatest poets; but they are noticeable here because of one texture with that which limits the quality of her poetic art. The principal criticism to be made on her poetry is that it was composed and did not create itself out of a full poetic mind. It was wrought out, was the result of study and composition, is wanting in spontaneity and enthusiasm. The most serious defect of her poetry is also the most marked defect of her prose, and this is a want of the ideal element. She was a realist by nature, and could not free herself from the tendency to look at the world on its surface only.
In her poetry George Eliot is much more a doctrinaire than in her novels. All her poems, except a few of the shorter ones, are devoted to the inculcation of some moral or philosophic teaching. The very effort she was obliged to make to give herself utterance in poetry predisposed her to intellectual subjects and those of a controversial nature. For this reason her verse has a special interest for those who are attracted to her teachings. Her pen was freer, more creative, in her great novels than in her poems. In fact, her novels, especially Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss, are much more poetical than much she did in verse. In her verse she tried to present the more spiritual side of life, to make living and effective her own conceptions of the unseen and eternal. Yet she was burdened constantly in this effort by the fact that she had a new theory of the spiritual and ideal side of life to interpret. The poets who win the homage of mankind, and conquer all hearts to themselves, take the accepted interpretations of the great spiritual problems of life as the basis of their work and give those a larger, loftier meaning through their poetic and ideal insight and capacity of interpretation. They shun theories which must be expounded and interpretations for which no one is prepared. It is here George Eliot is seriously at fault as a poet, however much she may be commended as a teacher and reformer. Perhaps the truest piece of poetic work she did was Agatha, in which, however, there is a greater reliance than in most of her poems, on the accepted interpretations of spiritual beliefs. In portraying the trust, childlike and simple, of an old woman, and in endeavoring to realize the poetic elements of that trust and simplicity, she was very effective. In such work as this she would have been much more successful, from the strictly poetic point of view, than she has been, if she had not attempted to give her theories a clothing in verse. In her "Brother and Sister" she was also very successful, but especially so in the "Two Lovers." There is an exquisite charm and power in some of these minor poems. Where the heart was free, and the intellect was not dominant and insistent on the importance of its theories, there was secured a genuine poetic beauty. There is true poetry in these lines:
Two lovers by a moss-grown spring:
They lean soft cheeks together there,
Mingled the dark and sunny hair,
And heard the wooing thrushes sing.
Oh budding time!
Oh love's blest prime!
Two wedded from the portal stept:
The bells made happy carrollings,
The air was soft as passing wings,
White petals on the pathway slept.
Oh pure-eyed bride!
Oh tender pride!
There is a beauty and majesty in the poem on subjective immortality which is likely to make it, as it has already become, the one popular poem among all she wrote. There is a stimulus, enthusiasm and abandon about it which is attained but seldom in her other verses. The love of humanity, its passionate longing to sacrifice self for the good of all, is acceptable to much of the thought and purpose of the present time; and its spirit of sacrifice is one which may commend it to all earnest souls. In the more extended poems there is genuine accomplishment just in proportion as the leading purpose was artistic rather than philosophic or moral.
Difficult as it was for a successful novelist to secure applause as a poet, George Eliot overcame the distrust of her admirers and gained also a not unmerited place as a poet. Her verse has been a real addition to her work, and is likely to command an increasing interest in the future. That it is not always successful from the merely artistic point of view, that it is not to be placed by the side of the best poetry of the time, is no reason why it will not appeal to many minds and enlist its own company of admirers. Next after the universal poets are those who appeal to a select circle and charm a particular class of minds. Among these George Eliot will stand as one of the foremost and one of those most worthy of homage. As the poet of positivism, she will long delight those in sympathy with her teachings. It would be extravagant praise to call her a second Lucretius, and yet that which has given the Roman author his place among poets will also give George Eliot rank in the same company. With all his merits as a poet, it has not been his poetic power, or his love of nature, or his worth as an interpreter of human nature, which has given Lucretius his reputation as a poet. With real poetic power,—for he would have been a much smaller man without this,—he combined a philosophic mind and a daring genius for speculation. The poetry gave charm and ideal grandeur to the speculations, and the philosophy made the poetry full of meaning and earnest intellectual purpose. He read life and nature with a keener eye and a more profound penetration than others of his time; he tried to grasp the secret of the universe, and because of it he left behind the touch of a strong mind. In some such way as this, George Eliot's poetry is likely to be read in the future. As poetry merely, it cannot take high rank; but for the sake of its philosophy, which is conceived as a poet would conceive it, there is promise that its future is to be one that is lasting. Even for poetry there must be thought, and the larger, profounder it is the better for the poetry, if it is imaginatively conceived and expressed. It is not thought, or even philosophy, which annuls poetry, but want of ideal and creative insight. To Goethe, Wordsworth or Browning there was a gain by enlargement of intellectual materials, but these were suffused in true poetic fire, and came forth a new creation. In so far as George Eliot has attained this result is she a poet, and is she sure of the future suffrages of those who accept her philosophy. At the least, her admirers must rejoice at the enlarged range of expression she secured by the use of the poetic form.
IX.
PHILOSOPHIC ATTITUDE.
George Eliot was pre-eminently a novelist and a poet; but she is also the truest literary representative the nineteenth century has yet afforded of its positivist and scientific tendencies. What Comte and Spencer have taught in the name of philosophy, Tyndall and Haeckel in the name of science, she has applied to life and its problems. Their aims, spirit and tendencies have found in her a living embodiment, and re-appear in her pages as forms of genius, as artistic creations. They have experimented, speculated, elaborated theories of the universe, drawn out systems of philosophy; but she has reconstructed the social life of man through her creative insight. What they mean, whither they lead, is not to be discovered nearly so plainly in their books as in hers. She is their interpreter through that wonderful insight, genius and creative power which enabled her to see what they could not themselves discover,—the effect of their teachings on man as an individual and as a social being.
Whoever would know what the agnostic and evolution philosophy of the time has to teach about man, his social life, his moral responsibilities, his religious aspirations, should go to the pages of George Eliot in preference to those of any other. The scientific spirit, the evolution philosophy, live in her pages, reveal themselves there in all their strength and in all their weakness. She was a thinker equal to any of those whose names stand forth as the representatives of the philosophy she accepted, she was as competent, as they to think out the problems of life and to interpret social existence in accordance with their theories of man and nature. Competent to grasp and to interpret the positive philosophy in all its details and in all its applications, she also had that artistic spirit of reconstruction which enabled her to apply to life what she held in theory. Along with the calm philosophic spirit which thinks out "the painful riddle of the earth," she had the creative spirit of the artist which delights in portraying life in all its endeavors, complexities and consequences. She not only accepted the theory of hereditary transmission as science has recently developed it, and as it has been enlarged by positivism into a shaping influence of the past upon the present, but she made this law vital with meaning as she developed its consequences in the lives of her characters. To her it was not merely a theory, but a principle so pregnant with meaning as to have its applications in every phase of human experience. Life could not be explained without it; the thoughts, deeds and aspirations of men could be understood only with reference to it; much that enters into human life of weal and woe is to be comprehended only with reference to this law. In regard to all the other evolution problems and principles her knowledge was as great, her insight as clear, and her constructive use of them as original.
A new theory of life and the universe may be intellectually accepted as soon as its teachings are comprehended; but the absorption of that theory into the moral tissues, so that it becomes an active and constant impulse and motive in feeling and conduct, is a long and difficult process. It takes generations before it can associate itself with the instinctive impulses of the mind. It is one thing to accept the theory of universal law as an intellectual explanation of the sequences of phenomena, but it is quite another to be guided by that theory in all the most spontaneous movements of feeling, conscience and thought. A few minds are able to make such a theory at once their own by virtue of genius of a very instinctive and subtle order; but for the great majority of mankind this result can only be reached after generations of instruction. The use made of such theories by the poets and novelists is a sure test of their popular acceptance. When the poets accept such a theory, and naturally express themselves in accordance with its spirit, the people may soon feel and think according to its meaning.
The theory of evolution will not easily adjust the human mind to its conclusions and methods. It is therefore very remarkable that George Eliot, the contemporary of Comte, Spencer, Darwin, Lewes and Tyndall, should be able to give a true literary expression to their speculations. She has not only been able to follow these men, to accept their theories and to understand them in all their implications and tendencies, but she has so absorbed these theories into her mind, and so made them a part of all its processes, that she has painted life thoroughly in accordance with their spirit. Should the teachings of the evolutionists of to-day be finally accepted, and after a few generations become the universally received explanations of life and the universe, it is not likely any poet or novelist will more genuinely and entirely express their spirit than George Eliot has done. The evolutionary spirit and ways of looking at life became instinctive to her; she saw life and read its deepest experiences wholly in the light shed by this philosophy. For this reason her writings are of great value to those who would understand the evolution philosophy in its higher phases.
George Eliot accepted the intellectual conclusions of evolution, and the outline thus afforded she filled in with feeling and poetry. She interpreted the pathos, the tragedy, the aspirations of life in the light of this philosophy. Accepting with a bold and undismayed intellect the implications and consequences of evolution, rejecting or abating no least portion of it, she found in it a place for art, poetry and religion; and she tried to show how it touches and moulds and uplifts man. She shrank from nothing which would enable her to reveal how man is to live in such a universe as she believed in; she saw all its hardness, cruelty, anguish and mystery, and resolutely endeavored to show how these enter into and help to form his destiny. In doing this she followed the lead of the positivists in the acceptance of feeling as the basis and the true expression of man's inner life. The emotional life is made the essential life; and all its phases of manifestation in art, poetry and religion are regarded as of great importance. George Eliot viewed the higher problems of life from this point of view, giving to the forms in which the emotional side of man's nature is expressed a supreme importance. Religion, as the response of feeling to the mystery of existence, occupied a most important place in her philosophy. That her interpretation of the emotional elements of life is the true one, that she has discovered their source or their real ideal significance, may well be doubted; but there is every reason for believing that she realized their great value, and she certainly tried in an earnest spirit to make them helpful in the life of ideal beauty and truthfulness.
All that agnostic science and the evolution philosophy had to teach, George Eliot accepted, its doctrine of descent, its new psychology, and its theories of society and human destiny. Its doctrine of experience, its ethical theories, were equally hers. Yet into her interpretation of existence went a woman's heart, the widest and tenderest sympathy, and a quick yearning purpose to do what good she could in the world. She saw with the lover's eyes, motherhood revealed itself in her soul, the child's trust was in her heart. The new philosophy she applied to life, revealed its relations to duty, love, sorrow, trial and death. To her it had a deep social meaning, a vital connection with the heart, its hopes and its burdens, and for her it touched the spiritual content of life with reality. It was in this way she became the truest interpreter of the evolution philosophy, the best apostle of the ethics taught by agnostic science. She not only speculated, she also felt and lived. Philosophy was to her more than an abstract theory of the universe; into it entered a tender sympathy for all human weakness, a profound sense of the mystery of existence, and a holy purpose to make life pure and true to all she could reach. This larger comprehension gives a new significance to her interpretation of evolution. It makes it impossible that this philosophy should be fully understood without a study of her books.
It is because George Eliot was not a mere speculative thinker that her teachings become so important. The true novelist, who is gifted with genius, who creates character and situation with a master's hand, must have some theory of life. He must have some notion of what life means, what the significance of the pathos and tragedy of human experience, and why it is that good and evil in conduct do not produce the same results. Such a theory of life, if firmly grasped and worked out strongly, becomes a philosophy. Much depends with the novelist on that philosophy, what it places foremost, what it sees destiny to mean. It will affect his insight, give shape to his plots, decide his characters, guide his ethical interpretations, fix his spiritual apprehension. It was because George Eliot adopted a new and remarkable philosophy, one that teaches much which the instincts of the race have rejected, and repudiates much which the race has accepted as necessary to its welfare, that her teachings become so noteworthy. Genius first of all she had, and the artist's creative power; but the way she used these, and the limitations she put upon them by her philosophy, give her books an interest which not even her wonderful genius could alone produce. That philosophy is in debate; and it is not yet decided whether it is mainly false because growing out of wrong methods, or if it be in reality a true explanation of existence. Its revolutionary character, its negative spirit, its relations to ethics and religion, make it remarkable, and even startling. Profound thinkers, men of commanding philosophic apprehension and power of generalization, have accepted it; physical science has largely lent its aid to the support of its conclusions. Yet on its side genius, imagination, creative instinct, artistic apprehension, have not given their aid. Without them it is defective, and cannot command the ideal sentiments and hopes of the race. First to fill this gap came George Eliot, and she yet remains its only great literary ally and coadjutor. Tyndall, Haeckel and DuBois Raymond can give us science; but this is not enough. Comte, Mill and Spencer can give us philosophy; but that is inadequate. They have also essayed, one and all, to say some true word about morals, religion and the social ideals; but they have one and all failed. They are too speculative, too far away from the vital movements of life, know too little of human experience as it throbs out of the heart and sentiments. They can explain their theories in terms of science, ethics and philosophy; but George Eliot explains them in terms of life. They have speculated, she has felt; they have made philosophies, she has created ideal characters and given us poetry; they have studied nature, she has studied experience and life; they have tried to resolve the mind into its constituent elements; she has entered into the heart and read its secrets; they have looked on to see what history meant, she has lived all heart tragedies and known all spiritual aspirations.
George Eliot was not a mere disciple of any of the great teachers of evolution. Though of their school, and largely in accord and sympathy with them, yet she often departed from the way they went, and took a position quite in opposition to theirs. Her standpoint in philosophy was arrived at quite independently of their influence, and in many of its main features her philosophy was developed before she had any acquaintance either with them or their books. She wrote concerning John Stuart Mill, [Footnote: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps' "Last words from George Eliot," is Harper Magazine for March 1882. The names of Mill and Spencer are not given in this article, but the words from her letters so plainly refer to them that they have been quoted here as illustrating her relations to these men.]—
I never had any personal acquaintance with him, never saw him to my knowledge except in the House of Commons; and though I have studied his books, especially his Logic and Political Economy with much benefit, I have no consciousness of their having made any marked epoch in my life.
Concerning another leading positivist she has said,—
Of [Herbert Spencer's] friendship I have had the honor and advantage for twenty years, but I believe that every main bias of my mind had been taken before I knew him. Like the rest of his readers, I am, of course, indebted to him for much enlargement and clarifying of thought.
Not long previous to her death, in reading Bridges' version of The General View of Positivism, she expressed her dissent more often than her assent, and once she said,—
I cannot submit my intellect or my soul to the guidance of Comte.
George Eliot did not take up her residence in London until her thirty-second year, and previous to that time her acquaintance with the positivist leaders must have been slight. Before that age the opinions of most persons are formed, and such was the case with George Eliot. It is likely her opinions underwent many changes after this date, but only in the direction of those already established and in modification of the philosophy already accepted. She became an evolutionist without the aid of those men who are supposed to be the originators of this theory. Every new idea or new way of interpreting nature and life grows into form gradually, and under the influence of many different minds. The evolution philosophy was long accepted before it became a doctrine or was formulated into a philosophy. The same influences worked in many quarters to produce the same conclusions. It was given to George Eliot to come under a set of influences which led her to accept all the leading ideas of evolution before she had any opportunity to know that philosophy as it has been elaborated by the men whose names are most often connected with it. A brief account of the successive philosophic influences which most directly and personally touched her mind will largely help towards the comprehension of her teachings.
The most intimate friend of her youth, who gave her a home when trouble came with her family, and stimulated her mind to active inquiry after truth, was a philosopher of no mean ability. Charles Bray not only was the first philosopher she knew, but her opinions of after years were mainly in the direction he marked out for her. In his Philosophy of Necessity, published in 1841, he maintained that the only reality is the Great Unknown which we name God, that all natural laws are actions of the first cause. He taught that the world is created in our own minds, the result of some unknown cause without us, which we call matter; but it is thus God mirrors himself to us. "All we see is but the vesture of God, and what we call laws of nature are but attributes of Deity." Matter is known to us only as the cause of sensations, while the soul is the principle of sensation, dependent upon the nervous system; the nervous system depending upon life, and life upon organization. All knowledge comes to man through the action of the external world upon the senses; all truth, all progress, come to us out of experience. "Reason is dependent for its exercise upon experience, and experience is nothing more than the knowledge of the invariable order of nature, of the relations of cause and effect." All acts of men are ruled by necessity. Pain produces our ideas of right and wrong, and happiness is the test of all moral action. There are no such things as sin and evil, only pains and pleasures. Evil is the natural and necessary limitation of our faculties, and our consequent liability to error; and pain, which we call evil, is its corrective. Nothing, under the circumstances, could have happened but that which did happen; and the actions of men, under precisely the same circumstances, must always issue in precisely the same results. Death, treated of in a separate chapter, is shown to be good, and a necessary aid to progress. Society is regarded as an organism, and man is to find his highest life in the life of others. "The great body of humanity (considered as an individual), with its soul, the principle of sensation, is ever fresh and vigorous and increasing in enjoyment. Death and birth, the means of renewal and succession, bear the same relation to this body of society as the system of waste and reproduction do to the human body; the old and useless and decayed material is carried out, and fresh substituted, and thus the frame is renovated and rendered capable of ever-increasing happiness…. The minds, that is to say, the ideas and feelings of which they were composed, of Socrates, Plato, Epicurus, Galileo, Bacon, Locke, Newton, are thus forever in existence, and the immortality of the soul is preserved, not in individuals, but in the great body of humanity…. To the race, though not to individuals, all beautiful things are preserved forever; all that is really good and profitable is immortal."
Nearly every idea here presented was accepted by George Eliot and re-appears in her writings. In Bray's later books much also is to be found which she embraced. He therein says that all outside of us is a delusion of the senses. [Footnote: This summary of Bray's philosophy is condensed from an article in the Westminster Review for April, 1879.] The senses conspire with the intellect to impose upon us. The constitution of our faculties forces us to believe in an external world, but it has no more reality than our dreams. Each creature is the creator of its own separate, different world. The unity of outward things is imposed on them by the faculty of individuality, and is a mere fiction of the mind. Matter is a creature of the imagination, and is a pure assumption. It is the centre of force, as immaterial as spirit, as ethereal and unsubstantial. As centres of force imply locality, and locality space, so space must have an extension of its own. Not so; it is a pure creation of the mind. The same holds true of time. The world of mind, the moral world as well, are our own creations. Man has no power over himself; nothing could have been otherwise than as it is. Repentance and remorse are foolish regrets over what could not have been otherwise. All actions and motives are indifferent; only in their consequences can any distinction be observed between them. Such as minister to man's pleasure he calls good; such as produce pain he calls evil. Thereis no good but pleasure, and no evil but pain. Hence there is no distinction between moral and physical evil. Morality is the chemistry of the mind, its attractions and repulsions, likes and dislikes. God is an illusion, as are all moral conclusions based on his existence, Nor has man any reality; he is the greatest illusion and delusion of all. The faculty of individuality gives us all our ideas and feelings, and creates for us what we call our minds. A mind is an aggregate of a stream of consciousness. Ideas, feelings, states of consciousness, do not inhere in anything; each is a distinct entity. "Thinking is," is what we should say, not "I think." Here we are at the ground fact of what constitutes being, on solid footing; consciousness cannot deceive us. Thinking is, even if mind and matter, self and not-self, are illusory. It is, even if we deny both the external and internal causes of consciousness. We know our own consciousness, that alone. All is inference beside. When we consider what inferences are most probable, we are led to build up a constructive philosophy. Consciousness says we have a body, body a brain, and pressure on the brain stops consciousness; hence a close connection between the brain and consciousness. The two go together, and in the brain we must lay the foundation of our philosophy. The mental faculties create the world of individual consciousness, it the outside world. We know only what is revealed in consciousness. Matter and mind are one. Life and mind are correlates of physical force; they are the forms assumed by physical force when subjected to organic conditions. Yet there is no such thing as mere physical force. Every atom of matter acts intelligently; it has so acted always. The conscious intelligence of the universe has subsided into natural law, and acts automatically. This universal agent of life in all things is God. All consciousness and physical force are but "the varied God." There is in reality no agent but mind, conscious or unconscious. God is nature; matter is mind solidified. Matter is force as revealed by the senses. It is the body, force is the soul. In nature, as in man, body and soul are one and indivisible. Mind builds up organisms. There is a living will, conscious or unconscious, in all things. The One and All requires the resignation of the individual and personal, of all that is selfish, to the Infinite whole.