On George Eliot
All knowledge, all thought, all achievement, seems more precious and enjoyable to me than it ever was before in life. But as soon as one has found the key of life 'it opes the gates of death.' Youth has not learned the art of living, and we go on bungling till our experience can only serve us for a very brief space. That is the external order we must submit to.
JANE AUSTEN Would have recognised the force of this, though she would probably have disagreed with it, and would certainly have thought it a very ungenteel sentiment for a familiar letter. For
her, living was an art to be got on with, not pontificated about. But it was an art about which both she and George Eliot held strong views, and those views were essentially the same. Divided as they were by all the turbulence of the romantic movement, both ladies none the less believed that life presents a pattern which can be understood and conformed with by the majority, not a myth to be explored by the individual. Both are remarkable for the perfec- tion of their insight into the commonplace; but where Jane Austen acknowledges its nature with a corresponding lightness of touch, George Eliot treats it with the full, rich, and romantic copiousness which comes from Scott's emphasis on man as an historical animal, and Kant's analysis of his moral being. Emma is moulded and matured like a snowflake, but Lydgate is assembled and destroyed in appalling detail. He has not learnt how to live, and so all the resources of the authoress are combined to break him on the wheel of the external and materialist order.
The bourgeois nature of her achievement accounts for the changes in George Eliot's reputation, which, after a period of inflation, seems to be again on the decline. She takes the common- place too seriously because she saw nothing beyond it. Where Jane Austen's lightly ordered world is solidly sustained by the founda- tion of religious belief, represented by Sherlock's Sermons and the Vicar, George Eliot's has nothing to keep it in place but its own earnestness, the 'absolute and peremptory' nature of Duty. She clings to the eighteenth-century pattern without its underlying belief, and piles on the romantic detail without exploring the romantic ideal of the superhuman. She would have no truck with a Rochester, let alone a Raskolnikov. Instead of endowing her characters with (to quote a recent critic) 'that slight element of the more than human that instantly grips the reader's interest,' she is content with the all-too-human characters of most modern novelists who—according to the same critic—`produce intellectual constipation after fifty pages.' The nemesis of her attitude, then, is contemporary high-class feminine fiction, and this will not do for the stern young men who see the sole justification for the romantic novel in Dostoevsky, Kafka, Sartre, Camus and so forth.
But are they right about this? Perhaps the great point about George Eliot is that she combines, in a unique way, the analytic virtues of eighteenth-century prose with the newly discovered world of romantic poetry. Prose is the instrument of the in- tellectual, poetry of the bourgeois. Prose is the medium of chal- lenge and simplification : poetry of complication and acceptance. In England in the nineteenth century novels tend to become more like poetry and less like prose. And George Eliot, curiously enough, embodies the process. Middlemarch is above all a poetic novel. It is not surprising that Virginia Woolf—in whose work the English novel's progress into poetry finally culminates—should have called it one of the few English novels that can be read with pleasure by an adult. By an adult with a mature poetic taste, she might have added. Middlemarch opens right away with a scene in which the poetry of the dramatic symbolism reminds us of Hardy and D. H. Lawrence. The two sisters, Dorothea and Celia, are examining the jewels left them by their mother. Celia's reaction to the glittering things is instant, uncomplex. It shows us what her fate will be; she will put no stumbling-blocks in her own path. 'But Dorothea's thought was trying to justify her delight in the jewels by merging them in her mystic religious joy.' She, too, has a vital response to the colour and opportunity of life, but her response will take perverse forms and cause her much suffering. The poetry of the scene is new and profound, though the cool irony of its dialogue and its presentation are worthy of Jane Austen.
The letters have no poetry. Occasionally sententious, they are on the whole cosily redolent of an Austen world, a world in which the important business is retailing gossip, comforting a friend, con- fiding feminine ingenuities. 'I have made a new era of comfort for myself by devising the simplest thing possible in the way of braces to hold up my flannel and calico drawers, and I am wondering whether I have the start of you in invention, so that I can actually give you a hint in return for all the thoughts and stitches you have given me.' Like Dr. Johnson, the great lady seems reassuringly to have thought nothing too little for so little a creature as man. She is alarmed by the appearance of a traveller in a French railway carriage, and 'it was some small relief to reflect that he was not an Englishman.' In this admirable edition of the Letters, Professor Haight puts us into her world the more surely by interposing ill her correspondence letters from her friends, publisher, and hus- band—to each other as well as to her. Thus we find her hikband, G. H. Lewes, complaining to Blackwood that he felt so poorly that 'even listening to Mrs. Lewes reading soon wearies me.' She could not bear to read the reviews of her books, and, placid as the surface of her correspondence is, her constant complaints about her health make a neurotic undertone that is strangely touching. The 'Demon Wind' rarely leaves her. How fortunate were the Victorians to be able to enjoy poor health and retail its daily symptoms with the most disarming frankness, instead of boring each other with their emotional states! George Eliot's artless communiques about her digestive tract oddly convince that she had a large heart, and that it was in the right place.
JOHN BAYLEY
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