GEORGE ELIOT.

ENGLAND has suddenly lost the greatest writer among Englishwomen of this or any other age. There can be no doubt that George Eliot touched the highest point which, in a woman, has been reached in our Literature,—that the genius of Mrs. Browning, for instance, though it certainly surpasses George Eliot's in lyrical sweetness, cannot even be compared with hers in general strength and force. The remarkable thing about George Eliot's genius is, that though there is nothing at all unfeminine in it,—if we except a certain touch of

scientific pedantry which is not pedantry in motive, but due only to a rather awkward manipulation of somewhat unfemi- nine learning,—its greatest qualities are not in the least the qualities in which women have usually surpassed men, but rather the qualities in which, till George Eliot's time, women had always been notably deficient. Largeness of mind, largeness of conception was her first characteristic, as regards both matters of reason and matters of imagina- tion. She had far more than many great men's power of conceiving the case of an opponent, and something approach- ing to Shakespeare's power of imagining the scenery of minds quite opposite in type to her own. There was nothing swift, lively, shallow, or flippant about her ; and yet she could draw Swift, lively, shallow, and flippant people with admirable skill and vivacity, as, for example,VIrs. Poyser, Mrs. Cadwallader, and many more, Her own nature was evidently sedate and rather slow-moving, with a touch of Miltonie stateliness in it, and a, love of elaboration at times even injurious to her genius. Yet no characters she ever drew were more powerfully drawn than those at the very opposite pole to her own, for example, Hetty's childish, empty self-indulgence, Tito's smooth and gliding volup- tuousness passing into treachery, Rosamond's tender suscepti- bility and heartlesa vanity. She herself was painstaking, even beyond the point up to which genius is truly defined as the power of taking pains, She often took too much pains, Her greatest stories lose in force by their too wide reflectiveness, and especially by an engrafted mood of artificial reflectiveness not suitable to her genius. She grew up under Thackeray's spell, and it is clear that Thackeray'e satirical vein had too much influence over her from first to last, but especially in some of those earlier tales into which she threw a greater power of passion, than any which she had to spare for the two great efforts of the last ten years. "Adam Bede," which might otherwise be the greatest of all English novels,—many, no doubt, really think it so,—is gravely injured . by those heavy satirical asides to the reader, in which you recognise the influence exerted over her mind by the genius of Thackeray,—asides, however, which are by no means in keeping with the large, placid, and careful drawing of her own magnificent, and on the whole tranquil, rural car- toons. The present writer, at least., never takes up these earlier stories--" Silas Morner " excepted—without a certain sense of irritation at the discrepancy between the strong, rich, and free drawing of the life they contain, and the somewhat falsetto tone of many of the light reflections interspersed. George Eliot had no command of Thackeray'a literary stiletto, and her substi- tute for it is unwieldy. Even in the " Scenes from Clerical Life" this jars upon us. For example, this sentence in "Janet's Repentance" :—" When a man is happy enough to win the affec- tions of a sweet girl, who can soothe his cares with crochet, and. respond. to all his most cherished ideas with braided urn-rugs and chair-covers in German wool, he has at least a gintrantee of domestic comfort, whatever trials may await him out of doors," does not please an ear accustomed to the happy bitterness of Thackerity's caustic irony. It is heavy, not to say elephantine ; and this heavy raillery rather increased upon George Eliot in " Adam Bede " and the " Mill on the Floss." One is annoyed to have .so great a painter of the largest human life turning aside to warn us that " when Tityrus and Meliboeus happen to be on the same farm, they are not sentimentally polite to each other ;" or that a High-Church curate, considered abstractedly, "is nothing more than a sleek, binutnous animal, in a white neckcloth, with views more or less Anglican, and furtively addicted to the flute." These sarcasms are not good in them- selves, and still less are they good in their connection, where they spoil a most catholic-miuded and marvellous picture. George Eliot's literary judgment was not equal to her reason and her imagination, and he took a great deal too much pains with the discursive parts of her books.

Imaginatively, we hardly recognise any defect in this great painter, except that there is too little movement in her stories ; —they wholly want dash, and sometimes want even a steady current. No novelist, however, in the whole series of English novelists, has combined so much power of painting external life on a broad canvas with so wonderful an insight into the life of the soul. Her English butchers, ftuyiers, auctioneers, and parish clerks, are at least as vigorously drawn as Sir Walter Scott's bailies, peasants, serving-men, and beggars ; while her pictures of the inward conflicts, whether of strong or of feeble natures, are far more powerful than any which Sir Walter Scott ever attempted. Such a contrast as that between Hetty and Dinah, such a picture as that of Mr. Casimbon's mental and moral limitation and confusion, such a study as that of Gweudolen's moral suffering under the torture administered by CA randcourt, was as much beyond the sphere of Sir Walter Scott, as his historical pictures of Louis XI., Mary Stuart, Balfour of Burley, Claverhouae, or James I. are beyond the sphere of George Eliot. On the only occasion on which George Eliot attempted anything of the nature of historical portraiture, --in " Romola,"—the purely imaginative part of the story is far more powerful than the historical. The ideas of the time when the revival of learning took place had quite possessed themselves of George Eliot's mind, and. had stirred her into a wonderful imaginative effort. But her conceptions of the purely imagined figures,--of Bardo, of Baldasaarre, and of Tito,—are far greater than her study of Savonarola, The genius for his- torical portraiture, for gathering up into a single focus the hints of chroniclers and historians, is something distinct from that of more creation, and demands apparently a subtler mixture of interpreting with creating power, than most great creators possess. Even Sir Walter Ssott failed with Napoleon, where he had not free movement enough, and the wealth of historical material shackled and overpowered the life of his imagination.

It would not be true to say that George Eliot failed in like fashion, with Savonarola. No doubt her picture of the great Italian reformer is fine, and up to a certain point effective. But in looking back on the story, Savonarola fades away from the scene. It is Bardo, the old, enthusiast for the Greek learning,

or the fitfully vindictive gleam of Baldassarre's ebbing intellect as flashes of his old power return to him, or the supple Greek's crafty ambition, which stands out in one's memory, while the devout and passionate Donithicam is all but forgotten.

No one can deny that the moral tone of George Eliot's books —" Felix Holt " being, perhaps, a doubtful exception,—is of the noblest and purest kind, nor that the tone of feeling which pre-

vails in them goes far in advance even of their direct moral teaching. We should say, for instance, that in regard to marriage/

the spirit of George Eliot's books conveys an almost sacra- mental conception of its binding, sacredness, though, unfortun- ately, of course, her career did much to weaken the authority of the teaching implied in her books. But the total effect of her books is altogether ennobling, though the profoundly sceptical reflections with which they are penetrated may counter- act, to some extent, the tonic effect of the high moral feeling with which they are coloured. Before or after most of the noblest scenes, we come to thoughts in which it is almost as

impossible for the feelings delineated to live any intense or hope- ful life, as it is for human lungs to breathe in the vacuum of an au-pump, After she, has breathed a noble spicit into a great scene, she too often proceeds to exhaust the air which is the very life-breath of great actions, so that the reflective element in her books undermines the ground beneath the feet of her noblest characters. In " Adam Bede," she eventually jusi ifies her hero's secularistic coldness of nature, and makes you feel that Dinah was ass enthusiast, who could not justify what she taught. in "Janet's Repentance," again, she ex- presses in a few sentences the relief with which the mind turns away from the search for convictions calculated to urge the mind to a life of beneficent self-sacrifice, to those acts of self- sacrifice themselves No wonder the sick-room and the lazaretto have so often been a refuge from the tosing of intellect:nal doubt,—a place of repose for the worn and wounded spirit. hero is a duty about which all creeds and all philosophies are at One : here, at least, the conscience will not be dogged by doubt, the benign impulse will not be checked by adverse theory ; here you may begin to act, without settling one preliminary question. To moisten the sufferer's parched lips through the long night-watches, to bear up the drooping head, to lift the helpless limbs, to divine the want that can find no utterance beyond the feeble motion of the hand, or beseeching glance of the oye,—these are offices that demand no self.questionings, DO casuistry, no assent to proposi- tions, no weighing of consequences. Within the four walls where the stir and glare of the 'world are shut out, and every voice is sub- dued, where a human being lies prostrate, thrown on the tender mercies of his fellow, the moral relation of man to man is reduced to its utmost clearness and simplicity ; bigotry cannot confuse it, theory cannot pervert it, passion, awed into quiescence, can neither pollute nor perturb it. As we bend over the sick-bed, all the forces of our nature rush towards the channels of pity, of patience, and of love, and sweep down the miserable, choking drift of our qaarrels, our debates, our would.be wisdom, and our clamorous, Selfish desires. This blessing of serene freedom from the importunities of opinion lies in all simple direct nets of mercy, and is one source of that sweet calm which is often felt, by the watcher in the sick-room, oven when the duties there are of a hard and terrible kind."

There speaks the true George Eliot, and we may clearly say of her that in fiction it is her great aim, while illustrating what she believes to be the true facts and laws of human life, to find a fit stage for ideal feelings nobler than any which seem to her to be legitimately bred by those facts and laws. But she too often finds herself compelled to injure her own finest moral effects by the sceptical atmosphere with which she permeates them. She makes the high-hearted heroine of her "Mill on the Floss" all but yield to the physiological attraction of a poor sort of man of science. She makes the enthusiastic Dorothea, in " Middlemarch," decline upon a poor creature like Ladishaw, who has earned her regard chiefly by being the object of Mr. Casaubon's jealousy. She takes religious patriotism for the subject of her last great novel, but is at some pains to show that her hero may be religions without any belief in God, and patriotic without any but an ideal country. This reflective vacuum which she pumps out behind all noble action, gives to the workings of her great itnagivation a general effect of supreme melancholy.

We should rank George Eliot second only in her own proper field—which is not the field of satire, Thackeray's field—to Sir Walter Scott, and. second to him only because her imagina- tion, though it penetrates far deeper, had neither the same splendid vigour of movement, nor the same bright serenity of tone. Her stories are, on the whole, richer than Fielding's, as well as far nobler, and vastly less artificial than Richardson's.

They cover so much larger a breadth and deeper a depth of life than Miss Austen's, that though they are not perhaps so

exquisitely finished, they belong to an altogether higher kind of

worlil. They arc stronger, freer, and less Rembrandt-like than Miss Bronto's ; and are not mere photographs of social man, like Trollope's. They are patient and powerful studies of

individual human beings, in an appropriate setting of social manners, from that of the dumbest provincial life, to that of

life of the highest self-knowledge. And yet the reflections by

which they are pervaded, subtle and often wise as they are, to some extent iujure the art of the pictures by their satiric tone, or if they do not do that, take superfluous pains to warn you how very doubtful and insecure is the spiritual footing on which the highest excellence plants its tread.

And this, too, is still more the fault of her poems, which, in spite of an almost Miltonie stateliness, reflect too much the monotonous cadences of her own musical but over-regulated voice, The poems want inspiration. And the speculative melancholy, which only slightly injured her prose, pre-

dominates fatally in her verse. Throughout her poems she is always plumbing the deep waters for an anchorage, and report- ing "no soundings." The finest of her poems, "The Legend of jubal," tries to affirm, indeed, that death, the -loss of all conscious existence, is a sort of moral gain,—as though the loss of self were the loss of selfishness, which it not only is not, but never could be, since selfishness can (slily be morally ex- tinguished iu it living self,—but the legson is so obviously a moral gloss put on the face of a bad business, that there, at least, no anchorage is found. And in " The Spanish Gypsy " the speculative despair is even worse, while the failure of the imaginative portraiture is more conspicuous, because the por- traiture itself is more ambitious. It will be by her seven or eight groat fictions that George Eliot will live, not by her poems, and still less by her essays. But all these, one perhaps excepted, will long continue to be counted the greatest achieve- ments of an Englishwoman's, and perhaps even of any woman's brain.