GEORGE ELIOT AND HER LOVER [To the Editor of the
SPECTATOR.] SIR,—I have read with much interest Mr. Richard Church's review of George Eliot's Family Life and Letters, by Arthur Paterson. Evidently he does not share in the " modern aversion from her work and character " which he so justly says is merely " a sign of our debility." But what is the 7round for this aversion ? Virginia -Woolf, in her brilliant centenary article on George Eliot in the Times Literary Supplement, remarked how little we know of George Eliot herself. That is the truth. The British literary public knows next to nothing about the real George Eliot, for the simple reason that her husband and biographer, Mr. Cross, with conventional notions of what was fit and unfit for the public ear, pruned her letters of all that was self-revealing, and carefully closed and sealed every door that future biographers might try to open. The public fell back on the stuffed figure of a Sibyl seated on her tripod receiving com- plaisantly the fatuous worship of her devotees, and it has proceeded to prejudge her books and condemn them without, in many cases, taking the trouble to read them. The stuffed figure does not even remotely resemble the real woman. George Eliot was painfully. diffident and humble, and with her
" fierce logical mind " judged herself and her work with a disinterested severity that no amount of adoration was able to soften. She had a constitutional reserve which she could rarely break through in her letters. Those who pierced the veil loved her devotedly, and found her as adorable as her own Maggie Tulliver..
The real woman is being given to the public only in bits.
Miss Haldane has in part revealed the vivid life of the passionate young woman when she was sub-editor of the Westminster Review. Mr. Arthur Paterson, by a touch here and there, has added to the likeness. But the full real life is yet to be written, and whenit is, it will show us George Eliot, not so much as " a symbol of Victorian intensity of purpose and intellectual seriousness," but as a great spirit of the new age in which we are now living. " Shall we say, Let'the ages try the spirits ? . . . Nay, we are the beginning of the ages," she wrote of here Mordecai, forgetting herself. The words are-true of herself. The Victorians loved her books in spite of their disapproval of herself. The next generation treated her as parents are always treated by their children when they are beginning to grow up. We wait to see her step forth clothed in warm flesh and blood, and then her books will be acknowledged once for all as masterpieces of English literature.
Meanwhile, her name is being kept alive by simple people
who care nothing for literary fashions, who make no claims to possess a correct literary taste. A crowd of unlearned old women in any English village will listen breathlessly while Adam Bede is read aloud to them ; those who .depend on the public libraries continue to demand The Mill on the Floss ; and those who have read hardly anything but the English Bible and The Pilgrim's Progress keep a warm place for Silas Marner. And lest it be said that the common folk are no judges, I may remind the_ British critic that George Eliot is appreciated in Germany, Italy, Russia, and Japan ;_ and that in France a succession of critics, Emile Montegut, Edmund Scherer, Count de Vogue, Proust, have given her -a supreme place, Vogue placing her even above Tolstoi and
Tourgenieff, whom he greatly admired. . . .
There is one matter that will always divide opinion, and that is her relation to George Henry Lewes, Mr. Richard Church says that is " a spectacle to move us to reverence." Do those who do easily to-day what George Eliot did in the strictest period of Victorianism realize .what it cost, the most tender and sensitive of women ? If human souls. are made by suffering accepted. and offered, then surely George Eliot found herself in an anonymoga relation which enabled. her .to.put forth the best that was in her. Those who wanted to defend the woman always blamed the man. . George Henry Lewes had no justice done to him at all by the solid Victorians.. His versatility and lightness of touch showed nothing but a frivolous nature. When George Eliot comes
into her own her lover also will win a tribute that would have been given to him spontaneously had he lived to-day instead " Dorlcote," Millfield Lane, N.O.
Previous page
