BOOKS.

GEORGE ELIOT.*

SIR LESLIE STEPHEN has produced an almost perfect study of the great writer whom Professor Saintsbury is content to place in " a high position among the second class of English novelists." For our own part, we deprecate the method of criticism that has recourse to class-lists. It is impossible to classify authors on the merit system as we classify under- graduates or sheep. The end of letters is neither a tripos nor an agricultural show. The function of literature is the illumi- nation and setting forth of life and Nature. The function of literary criticism is the proclaiming of such work as fulfils this function and the condemning of such as does not. In so far as a man or woman fulfils the function of literature, be it only in one short poem, he or she is in the first and only class of literature. The other work may be left to the destructive- ness of time, which cannot touch—

"The rondure brave, the liked loveliness Gold as it was, is, shall be evermore."

Sir Leslie Stephen does not tread in this book the devious paths of comparative criticism. He shows us clearly that it is no part of his business to compare George Eliot with Jane Austen, with Charlotte Brontë, with Mrs. Gaskell, for the purposes of a class-list. His business is with the work that George Eliot produced, the causes that gave her work its par- ticular characteristics, the tests that must be applied in order to ascertain the extent to which that work may be regarded as mortal, the extent to which it may be regarded as immortal. We have no doubt that Sir Leslie Stephen would readily acknowledge that his tests are not infallible, and that it is possible that time, the only final critic, may condemn aspects of work that he approves and approve work that he condemns. But it is beyond all doubt that George Eliot produced work that the final critic will approve, and that to relegate such work to a second class is to create a " second-class immor- tality," a sort of suburb of Parnassus.

Si Leslie Stephen seems to us to have used admirable judg- ment in the way that he has dealt with the life of the novelist. In so far as the details of that life are necessary to the under- standing of the work produced, in so far as they are necessary to explain the methods and the form of production, they are fully set out. But when such details would merely satisfy the idle curiosity of the reader, would merely pander to the degraded taste that is infinitely more interested in the quality of an author's linen than in the quality of his prose, the details are suppressed. Full knowledge of the early life of George Eliot is absolutely essential to a comprehension of her life's work, and such knowledge is given; but the later life is presented in broad outline only, illuminated by phrases and passages that show clearly enough the effect that her seclusion from the world had upon her later work. Miss Evans's extraordinary union with Mr. G. H. Lewes in so far as it affected her work is, of course, a legitimate subject of comment. Circumstances rendered a marriage impossible, and there can be no manner of doubt that the novelist regarded the union as absolutely moral and

• George .F:liot. Ity toseUe Stephen. Emit& Men ot .Letters."...Lorteas : 11.-113mqs sad Co. Rs. is1it>1

willingly faced the social difficulties that the position inevitably created. While admitting that this quasi-marriage possessed features of morality that are absent in marriages that are dictated by low motives, there is an aspect of the question that could not have escaped George Eliot's philosophic mind, and did, we believe, as a matter of fact, deeply affect the whole tone and character of her work. " It may be a pretty problem," says Sir Leslie Stephen, "for casuists whether the breach of an as- sumed moral law is aggravated or extenuated by the offender's honest conviction that the law is not moral at all. George Eliot at any rate emphatically took that position." That is so. But George Eliot the philosopher, the novel-writer, took up also another position. The unending consequences of our selfish acts upon the lives of others was a string in her harp that she never wearied of striking. " If we only look far enough off for the consequences of our actions," she says in the third chapter of the fifth book of The Mill on the Floss, with bitter irony, "we can always find some point in the combination of results by which those actions can be justified." George Eliot knew well enough that her action (however " moral " as far as she herself was concerned) was not merely a protest against the indissolu- bility of marriage, but went to the very bases of organised social life. " At present," says Dr. Kenn to Maggie, in the chapter where " St. Ogg's passes judgment,"—" at present every- thing seems tending towards the relaxation of ties—towards the substitution of wayward choice for the adherence to obligation, which has its roots in the past." Adherence to obligation—the obligations of humanity, the obligations of nationality or race, the obligations of family life, the sense of duty in the least as in the greatest—is George Eliot's philosophy of life. Yet her " choice of life" (to use Johnson's phrase in Basselas), full of blessedness as it was to her, ran contrary to the whole trend of her philosophy, and therefore she, who " came to fiction from philosophy," was, as we insisted many years ago, "the most melancholy of authors."

George Eliot's first work in fiction was, of course, Scenes of Clerical Life. The first part appeared in Blackwood's Magazine in January, 1857. Dickens, and Dickens alone, at once detected that the author was a woman, and asserted that "the exquisite truth and delicacy both of the humour and pathos of these stories " were unequalled. Sir Leslie Stephen points out with truth that "Dickens's appreciation is the more creditable to him because the work is conspicuous by its freedom from his besetting faults " ; and it might be thought that the value of the criticism is greatly heightened by this fact. Sir Leslie adds that "it is the constant, though not obtrusive, suggestion of the depths below the surface of trivial life which gives an impressive dignity to the work; and, in any case, marks one most distinctive characteristic of George Eliot's genius." This fact seems to us an additional evidence of the futility of hard-and-fast comparative criticism. Miss Austen suggested no such depths, and yet her dialogue is very comparable with that of George Eliot at her best. Nevertheless, to compare the two is to miss the art of each. It is as fruitless as to compare the landscapes of Claude and Turner.

Adam Bede, the second novel, was published in the beginning of 1858. It " whatever else may be said of it, placed the author in the first rank of the Victorian' novelists." Sir Leslie Stephen refuses to accept the author's view and intention that the novel should derive its main interest from Dinah Morris, intelligible though it was "that she should take a Methodist preacher for her centre of interest." But Dinah is not only too "good, for human nature's daily food " ; she has not "the defects incident to her position," and is, therefore, not wholly true to life. Moreover, the critic, feels that "the development of the story does not quite follow the lines required by the reader's sympathy"; the interest is " with the pathetic criminals and not with the, admirable female confessor," and "the last book, therefore,' comes upon us, if we take this view, as superfluous and rather unpleasant." The novel, in fact, is not really centred upon the religious motive. There Sir Leslie Stephen's hostile criticism ends. The work he considers to be a.masterpieee. He even admits that Adam's "later discovery of Dinah's merits* was possible. "Men do become commonplace and reasonable as they grow older," says the critic profoundly and with a sorrowful sense of reasittion.- Mrs: koricer iP .vtriattotati isitsgisiereir bashes

favourite among George Eliot's creations. He writes of her with a warmth that is an obvious thawing from the usual judicial characteristics of his criticism and his prose. "Mrs. Poyser may take rank with Sam Weller as one of the irresistible humonrists. She has a special gift for attracting us by the

most unscrupulous feats of sophistry." We should prefer to rank Mrs. Poyser's feats with those of the king of sophists, Sir John Falstaff. Sir Leslie Stephen's enthusiasm is not, however, limited to Mrs. Poyser. The first part of The Mill on the Floss—though the whole story suffers from its length—meets with the most ungrudging approval. It "represents to my

mind the culmination of George Eliot's power No book, I imagine, ever set forth so clearly and touchingly the glamour with which the childish imagination invests the trivial and commonplace." But the "comparative weakness" of the masculine portraits is a fault here as elsewhere, and there is a " jar" in finding that Maggie, the "beautiful soul," should not have realised what " a very poor animal " Stephen Guest is. Stephen is another instance of George Eliot's "incapacity for pourtraying the opposite sex." "I am inclined to sympa-

thise with the readers of Clarissa Harlowe when they entreated Richardson to save Lovelace's soul. Do, I mentally exclaim,

save this charming Maggie from damning herself by this

irrelevant and discordant degradation." Nevertheless, we take it that Sir Leslie Stephen holds that The Mill on the Floss, taken even as a whole, is a great work, and the greatest that George Eliot produced. Any other opinion appears almost impossible despite the obiter dictum, attributed to Mr. Oscar Browning, that Daniel Deronda is the greatest novel in the English language.

George Eliot's later novels, produced with infinite effort and charged with tremendous mental energy, do not, Sir Leslie Stephen seems to think, possess all the vital force of the earlier

work. " However, it would be absurd to speak without pro- found respect" of Itomola. "I am alternately seduced into

admiration and repelled by what seems to me a most lament- able misapplication of first-rate powers." It is the historical setting that hopelessly fails. Put aside "the historical parapher- nalia" and "there remains a singularly powerful representation of an interesting spiritual history There is hardly any

novel, except The Mill on the Floss, in which the stages in the

inner life of a thoughtful and tender nature are set forth with so much tenderness and sympathy." Sir Leslie doubts if she ever again reached a mark as high as that reached in the

five novels that concluded with Romola in 1863. Her life,

from which all criticism, all true freedom of social intercourse, was excluded, certainly was against the production of work based on observation and experience. Psychological construc- tion was compelled to take the place of analysis from experience and observation. Moreover, " so sensitive a woman, working so conscientiously and with so many misgivings, could hardly

make her imaginary world a cheerful place of residence." Micldlemarch " shows George Eliot's reflective powers fully

ripened and manifesting singular insight into certain intricacies of motive and character" ; but " she seems to be a little out of touch with the actual world, and to speak from a position of philosophic detachment which somehow exhibits her characters in a rather distorting light Yet it is clearly a work of extraordinary power, full of subtle and

accurate observation." In the last novel, Daniel Deroncla," the

story of Gwendolen's marriage shows undiminished power " ; but, as in the case of Hetty Sorrel, Gwendolen " is so charming in her way that we feel more interest in the criminal than in the confessor," Deronda. We agree that the perfection of Daniel Deronda is almost as irritating as the perfection of Sir Charles Grandison, but we kcannot at all agree with Sir Leslie Stephen that to take sympathy for the Jews as the motive of a hero showed in the novelist "a defective sense of humour." Such a motive has fine dramatic possibilities,

though we doubt if George Eliot realised them; but we must confess that Daniel's unconscious sense of race is philosophy gone mad, and agree that the hero " is an amiable mono- maniac and occasionally a very prosy moralist."

Great novelist as George Eliot was, we cannot help believing that she would have been still greater had hers been a life

into which neither philosophy nor Mr. G. H. Lewes had entered. Her novels would then have beenl to use Sir Leslie Stephen's illuminating definition of a novel, " transfigured ex. paddies" throughout% 4s...itut ion'the other •Iumd*,:ve should have lost that note of the inevitable guidance of fate which makes The Mill on the Floss, and in a lesser degree the other novels, read like a Greek tragedy, and the novelist would not have had the early invaluable aid of one whose loyal service to her is his chief title to fame. But her heroines would have been created, we believe, without the aid of philosophy, and they, from Milly Barton to Gwendolen Harleth, "have an interest unsurpassed by any other writer."

Sir Leslie Stephen's study of the work of George Eliot seems to us as judicial as it is illuminating, and re- lieved, as it is, by keen though kindly critical irony and by something approaching enthusiasm, it is certain of a cordial welcome from the very large public who delight in the novels of the true genius and tender-hearted woman of whom he treats. •