Life of George Eliot
. George Eliot and Her Times. By Elizabeth S. Haldane. (Hodder and Stoughton. 12s. Od.) One finds one's self watching with the keenest interest the resurrection one by one of the great Victorians, who were confidently announced to be dead and buried. Anthony Trollope is receiving a recognition which was never .given to him in his lifetime. George Eliot is on the way. The reaction against her was curiously unjust. Her critics seemed angry with her for her immense fame, and while they gazed at her obvious faults they refused to notice her superb gifts.
Miss Ilaldane comes to her pleasant task of love and justice with a large understanding that has been disciplined by her profound studies in Hegel and Descartes, and humanized by like studies in English literature. She knows thoroughly lhe Victorian period, and she sees clearly what were the adven- titious elements in George Eliot's fame. Like Carlyle and Browning and Ruskin, George Eliot was an impassioned moralist, and we have ceased to respond to her moralizing. We need to remember that Hogarth in his lifetime was valued for his " pictured Moralities." It is only recently that we have forgotten his moralities and see in him an artist of exuberant vitality incessantly revealed by his line of beauty. Miss Haldane draws George Eliot out of the artificial atmo- sphere that her adorers created, and a very real person emerges ; we see her in relation to our time, and are left assured of her immortality.
Mr. Cross tried to present George Eliot through her letters. But her letters hide her, and she is only revealed truly in her books. Again, Mr. Cross could not write frankly of episodes in the early life of his wife. Miss Blind did not know of them. Oscar Browning may have suspected. But Miss Haldane shows us the passionate Miss Evans coming to London from a liar away province, lodged in John Chapman's Bohemian 1 se in the Strand, quivering into love with him and with 1 lerbert Spencer and George Henry Lewes in quick succession, till her self-conscious deliberation is swept away as she flies with Lewes to the Continent. All this is a welcome correction of Mr. Cross's suave portrait. Miss Haldane is equally corrective when she shows, with great skill, the unusually long. painful, weary years during which Miss Evans served her apprenticeship before she leapt into fame with Adam Bede. Lewes is admirably drawn, and the author shows how even his constant sympathetic vivacity could not ward off the weary demon that took possession of George Eliot as she travelled towards her everlasting winter.
The novels are considered in turn and Swinburne's sweeping condemnation of the close of the Mill on the Floss is quoted. George Eliot thought that a widening psychology would justify Maggie's episode with Stephen Guest, and we suspect the rising generation will agree with her. Adam Bede and Silas Marner need no defence. Miss Haldane feels the great- ness of Romola, and probably agrees with the splendid tribute that a former editor of the Spectator, R. II. Hutton, paid to it in 1863. She obviously enjoys Felix Holt as Henry James and all real lovers of George Eliot do. But we are not so sure of her estimates of Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. There are many signs that Middlemarch has regained . its position. Miss Clemente Dane recently acknowledged it as a masterpiece ; doubtless she acclaims it on other grounds than those given by the Victorians. The same may be said of Daniel Deronda. The Jews are studying it and staging it. It may be that a young critic will discover heights and depths in it that were never suspected by those who hastily skimmed the Jewish parts of the book and only talked of Gwendolen.
Anyway, Miss Haldane has paved the way to the young critic, and has herself given a wonderful portrait of a great Englishwoman.
CHARLES GARDNER.
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