GEORGE ELIOT'S "BREAKFAST PARTY."

MHE July number of Macmillan's Magazine contains a striking picture of the profound intellectual chaos of the time, in George Eliot's blank-verse debate,—which rises at times into true poetry,-.— among a set of University young men, as to the ultimate source of obligation, or in default of obligation, of whatever mithetic prin. ciple may best take its place, in the human soul. The picture is specially striking, because in every line it assumes, though it nowhere positively asserts, that there is no real spiritual authority in existence which is guiding us forward and filling us with the highest of our aims. The breakfast party is all at sea on all points. It contains, first., a priest who argues as if the submission to authority were nothing but a leap in the dark, though what he regards as a noble leap in the dark, and one to which the highest need of our nature leads us ; but against him we are sufficiently warned by the author at the very opening, where he is described as,—

" A tolerant listener, Disposed to give a hearing to the lost,

And breakfast with them ore they went below," All the others are University students, to whotqvGeorge Eliot has given the names of Hamlet's set at Wittenberg. First there is Hamlet, the youngest of the set,— " Questioning all things, and yet half-convinced Credulity were better ; held inert 'Twist fascinations of all opposites,

And half-suspecting that the mightiest soul (Perhaps his own!) was union of extremes,

Having no choice but choice of everything :

As, drinking deep to-day for love of wine,

To-morrow half a Brahmin, scorning life

As mere illusion, yearning for that True Which has no qualities ; another day Finding the fount of grace in sacraments, And purest reflex of the light divine In gem-bossed pyx and broidered Resolved to wear no stockings, and to fast With arms extended waiting extasy ;

But getting cramps inst..ad, and needing change,

A would-be pagan next."

In fact, Hamlet is a feeble waverer, without much heart even in his wavering. lloratio, the host, is hardly mentioned, except in relation to his faculty for silence, and for "all service save rebuke." Osric is a devotee of the msthetic principle, a follower of Mr. Pater's, and is skilfully described in George Eliot's most scornful manner, as a

"Spinner of fine sentences, A delicate insect, creeping over life, Feeding on molecules of floral breath, And weaving gossamer to trap the sun."

Laertes is a species of Frederic Harrison, "ardent, rash, and radical," who believes in human good and in the life of humanity. Rosencranz is a discursive Fitzjarnes Stephen, gigantesque, forci- ble, and a lover of force, disposed to ridicule the dogmas of all others, and to sigh for some-

" Sword, nay, chance of sword Hanging conspicuous to their inward eyes, With edge so constant-threatening as to sway All greed and lust by terror,—and a law Clear-writ and proven as the law supreme Which that dread sword enforces ;" but to admit that he sighs for this in vain, and in the meantime laughs at the empty humanitarian aspirations of Laertes. "Grave G-uildenstern,"on the other hand, is the nearest representative, we suppose, of George Eliot's own convictions. He believes in a great ideal to which, even if, in defiance of retrogressive tenden- cies in the universe, we cannot approach more and more closely, we may yet properly address a worship of sorrow, and "so mourn for the world's dying good" as to "keep our spiritual life intact,"—

"Beneath the murderous clutches of disproof, And find a martyr-strength."

&eh are the group who discuss the first principles of conduct. The priest is present only at the earlier part of the discussion, which begins by Osric's explaining his abhorrence of the "tasteless squabbling called philosophy," since human nature is but an ephemeral butterfly, which has not time both to enjoy and to dispute, and must sacrifice the highest enjoyment for which it is made, if it devote life to barren speculation on the whence and why. To this, Laertes replies by repudiating all arguments "that start with calling me a butterfly," and which end, of course, in conclusions worthy of a butterfly. To this the priest assents, adding that he himself finds no fault with the scepticism which, in- tellectually, discerns "a final equivalence of all good and ill," and which makes the difference between them some absolute bias of the will or the soul, voluntarily making choice for itself of faith or unbelief. Hereupon, of course, Hamlet asks for the sign of the right as distinguished from the wrong choice, and the priest answers that what the nature of man craves is rule, and that it can be ruled by nothing but that which is above itself ; that it cannot obey a taste, for taste is but a part of self ; that it cannot obey science or reasoning, since neither is a directing, but solely an inquiring power ; that it finds only one body claiming its obedience, and that is the authoritative Church—" whose argument is found,"— " In lasting failure of the search elsewhere,

For what it holds to satisfy man's need."

Here the priest leaves, and Guildenstern immediately attacks his position, which is at first defended by lIamlet, who praises the Church, because it gives no explanations, but,—

" Governs,—feeds resolve,

By vision fraught with heart-experience And human yearning."

Guildenstern remarks on this that the priest has caught Hamlet up in his "air-chariot," has persuaded him that the reality in the Church is that of which no evidence can be given, and that what the Church really requires of you is insinuated in safe parenthetical hints that you should pay no attention to "what stares you in the face and bruises you." You are to assume that the Church is the one thing which human nature needs, emit() ignore the fact that the Church does not satisfy those needs when it damns heresy or

not, according as gold is to be gained or lost by doing so, or when it holds before the mind,— " A Calvary where reason mocks at Love, And Love forsaken sends out orphan cries, Hopeless of answer."

In a word, according to Guildenstern,—

" The soul remains Larger, diviner, than your half-way Church, Which racks your reason into false consent, And soothes your love with sops of selfishness."

In other words, the ideal in your soul is infinitely above any discernible power or organisation outside it. In all this the radical humanitarian Laertes heartily concurs, asserting, in words not unlike Mr. John Stuart Mill's, that if the hidden power strong enough to inflict suffering, turned out bad, resistance to it would be the true obedience, and not submission. Hereupon the devotee of taste, °aria, makes his point,—that to a question of mere taste it has come after all, though the moral taste which prefers that "which grates upon the sense" differs from the true msthetic taste simply "in being bad." Then Rosencranz, the vivid sceptic, who would like to find a sword hanging over him and compelling him to obey the supreme, clear-written law, if he only could, but who discerns no such sword, breaks out into scorn of the utter rela- tivity of all human good, and the deficiency of any absoluteness of criterion :— " The ago of healthy Saurians well supplied With heat and prey, will balance well enough A human age where maladies are strong And pleasures feeble; wealth a monster gorged 'Mid hungry populations ; intellect

Aproned in laboratories, bent on proof

That this is that, and both are good for naught, Save feeding error through a weary life."

Thereupon the humanitarian radical declares that if life is worth- less, it should be thrown off ; but if not, if all its advantages and enjoyments are eagerly coveted, then gratitude and loyalty are owed to the power which made them real and possible,—a human power, however, not a divine :- "I am no optimist, whose faith must hang

On hard pretence that pain is beautiful, And agony explained for men at ease By virtue's exercise in pitying it.

But this I hold : that he who takes one gift Made for him by the hopeful work of man, Who tastes sweet bread, walks where he will unarmed, His shield and warrant the invisible law, Who owns a hearth and household charities, Who clothes his body and his sentient soul With skill and thoughts of men, and yet denies A human good worth toiling for, is cursed

With worse negation than the poet feigned

In Mephistopheles."

Thereupon Guildenstern takes up the conversation, and explains where, in his opinion, the origin of obligation is to be found. But as this is a critical point in the dialogue, and we are ourselves of opinion that Guildenstern gets completely out of his and every- body else's depth, in explaining how "the Outward" comes to be better and nobler than "the Inward," we must give textually the most significant passage of his discourse :— "I meet your deadliest challenge, Rosencranz :-

Where get, you say, a binding law, a rule Enforced by sanction, an Ideal throned With thunder in its hand? I answer, there Whence every faith and rule has drawn its force Since human consciousness awaking owned An Outward, whose unconquerable sway Resisted first and then subdued desire, By pressure of the dire Impossible Urging to possible ends the active soul, And shaping so its terror and its love. Why, you have said it—threats and promises Depend on each man's sentience for their force : All sacred rules, imagined or revealed, Can have no form or potency apart From the percipient and emotive mind. God, duty, love, submission, fellowship, Must first be framed in man, as music is, Before they live outside him as a law.

And still they grow and shape themselves anew,

With fuller concentration in their life Of inward and of outward energies

Blending to make the last result called Man,

Which means, not this or that philosopher Looking through beauty into blankne.s, not The swindler who has sent his fruitful lie By the last telegram: it means the tide

Of needs reciprocal. toil, trust, and love—

The surging multitude of human claims Which make 'a presence not to be put by' Above the horizon of the general soul.

Is inward Reason shrunk to subtleties, And inward wisdom pining passion-starved 7— The outward Reason has the world in store, Regenerates past.ion with the stress of want, Regenerates knowledge with discovery, Shows sly rapacious SPlf a blunderer, Widens dependence. knits the social whole In sensible relation more defined."

And then, with a little secondary duel between Guildenstern and Osric as to the origin of the sense of the beautiful, the discussion really ends,—Guildenstern maintaining that the sense of the beautiful is nothing but the perfect flower of the moral conduct of previous generations:—

"Taste, beauty, what are they But the soul's choice towards perfect bias wrought By finer balance of a fuller growth,—

Sense brought to subtlest metamorphosis Through love, thought, joy,—the general human store

Which grows through all life's functions ?—as the plant

Holds its corolla, purple, delicate, Solely as outflush of that energy Which moves transformingly in root and branch."

The end is that Hamlet, quivering "in transit imminent from catholic striving into laxity," accepts Guildenstern's account of the growth of the beautiful out of the general progress of the world, as its most perfect flower ; but holds that this height once reached, the consciousness of the beautiful may be a law to itself, and abide by the final test of delight, as the rule of its highest conduct. And for our own parts, we believe that Hamlet has logically the best of it, that is, on Guildeustern's own premisses. If taste and beauty not only depend on moral life for their existence, but come forth as the perfect expression and flower of such life, we think Hamlet might be justified in supposing that they should be held to be a law unto themselves. The flower cannot turn against the root and the branch. The final outcome of great laws of evolution cannot rebel against those laws and defy them. If Guildenstern is right in his delineation of the gradual growth of truth and right, as an outward body of urgent acts and conditions, which gradually press upon and mould the inward desires of men to reason- able and decent forms, then what could we trust, what ought we trust, more completely, than the desires which show proof of their origin by "the outflush of that energy which moves transformingly

in root and branch ?" In a word, if the Power of right be not a personal and conscious Being whom we can consult, and who can

and will let us know when we sin against him, by penalty and pang, —but is rather a mere dumb sum-total of human tendencies and energies in their maturest forms,—then why either condemn or dis- trust that instinct of delight which is said to be the consummate outgrowth of all these inarticulate throes ? The service of the ideal is no service at all, for the ideal cannot pull you up when you go wrong, and tell you that you are pursuing a false ideal. If you miss your spring at it, it will never set you right. Hamlet had more to say for himself in maintaining that he might abide by the oracle of personal taste, than Guildenstern could have had, in subjecting personal taste to the recti- fication of a wide survey of the tendencies inherent in human civilisation. If the former oracle is apt to get out of order from personal causes, the latter is apt to be so wide and vague as to defy interpretation. Only if there be a perfect being who speaks perpetually in men as be spoke through his own chOsen human embodiment, only then are loyalty and fidelity, in the highest sense of the words, anything but chance shots at a pos- sible good? And as none of the Breakfast Party in the "modern Wittenberg" had even a dream of any faith of this kind, it is not to be wondered at that they chased each other round a labyrinth of endless ambiguities and fruitless mystification& Energy was never more wasted on shadows than in this contest among Nihilists,—some noble and some ignoble,—but all helpless, and all astray.