BOOKS.
GEORGE ELIOT.* MR. CROSS has accomplished his difficult task with tact and modesty. He has evidently thought of nothing but the main object,—to let George Eliot tell, as far as possible, her own tale ; and we should say that the only way in which he could materially have improved his work would have been by greatly curtailing, and in some instances entirely omitting, the very long Art-impressions recorded in the second volume, which have certainly failed to interest the present writer, and will probably be thought the least effective portion of the Life by most of its readers. For the rest, the letters tell their own tale ; and the few connecting links of narrative with which Mr. Cross supplies his readers, certainly do not err in the direction of excess.
It is not easy to predict how these volumes will affect the public judgment of the great author whose private life they help to record. We may say at once that that life is what every one would be inclined to expect from the translator of Strauss and Feuerbach, or even from the author of The Spanish Gypsy and the poems, but that it gives hardly the least glimpse of the genius which produced some of the greatest and most dramatic stories in the English language. We have seldom felt more surprise than in remembering that these mellifluous, grave, rather high-flown, very low-spirited letters, in which there is hardly a keen thrust or a touch of homely humour, and certainly not a single buoyant laugh from beginning to end, proceed from the same mind which conceived Mrs. Poyser, and Bob Jakin, and Mr. Brooke, and a dozen other delightful characters, in the delineations of which the fresh surprises are at least as remarkable as the solidity of the painting. There was a sense of astonishment of the same kind, though to a much less extent, in the far lees complete autobiography of Mr. Trollope. There, too, we caught not a glimpse of the sources of the dramatic gifts of the man, no explanation at all of the wealth of lifelike imaginations in the mind of one all whose personal judgments and tastes were of a single type, and that a somewhat narrow, commonplace, and practical type. It is impossible to read the life of Sir Walter Scott, it is impossible to read the life of Miss Brontë, it is impossible to read the life even of Harriet Martineau, without to some extent at least understanding how they came to be the authors of their chief writings. There is a certain affinity between the authors as represented in those biographies and their own finest creations. But there is no such affinity recognisable between Mr. Trollope, as painted by himself in his autobiography, and his delightful picture of Mr. Harding, or between Mr. Trollope and his exquisite picture of the second Duke of Omnium's difficulties and perplexities. And there is no such affinity between George Eliot, as painted by herself in this long string of letters, and her picture of Mrs. Poyser, or of Nancy Lam meter, or of Mrs. Cadwallader, or of Mr. Trumbull, or of Mr. Brooke, or of Grandcourt. These letters indicate a reflective character of long-drawn amiability and considerateness, utterly destitute of anything like sharp resentments, almost "ostentatiously sweet," remarkably deficient in keen and healthy instincts, but forgiving, and incapable of even temporary vindictiveness to a point beyond even the achievement of many of the saints. She describes admirably the mixture of satire and kindliness in her own composition when she says in a letter to her sister, Mrs. Houghton, —"I need the Jesuits' discipline of silence ; and though my evil-speaking issues from the intellectual point of view rather than the moral, though there may be gall in the thought while there is honey in the feeling, yet the evil-speaking is wrong." We were not aware, by the way, that Jesuits, as such, have any discipline of silence. Probably George Eliot was thinking of the Trappists. But we are much more inclined to find fault with "the honey in the feeling" than we are with the gall in the thought, not because we like gall, but because the honey is a little too abundant, and gives the impression of undiscriminating sweetness. In George Eliot it was not affected sweetness; but it does appear to a certain extent to have been regulated and artificial sweetuess,—sweetness on principle rather than sweetness on impulse. It is the sweetness of deliberately sugared thoughts rather than the sweetness of happy feelings. We wait from the beginning of the first volume to the end of the third to find a single letter which seems to bubble-over like
a fresh spring from the eagerness and intensity of the thought ; but we do not find it. George Eliot's benignity is genuine, constant, inexhaustible ; but it is benignity, not warmth. You seem to see it fertilising rather than refreshing, and undulating elaborately through her life like Addison's equivalent for the Psalmist's still waters,"— Perhaps, however, this impression of too-carefully regulated a sweetness is quite as much due to the predominance of self-conscions thought as to the predominance of too elaborate a suavity.
George Eliot, when she writes in the character of one of her simplest characters, can write English as good and as nervous as was ever written by Englishman or Englishwoman ; but when she writes in her own perscn,—whether in the reflective parts of her novels, or in her poems, or in her letters,—she is anything but a nervous writer. Her style is elaborate, self-conscious, and artificial. She writes like a modern edition of her own "demigod, Milton,"—not, indeed, in ornateness, for in her prose there is no ornateness, but in long-drawn elaborateness and sententiousness, flavoured with a languor all her own. In her poetry she is a second-rate Milton ; though she misses, of course, the inspiration and mdgnificent touches of Milton. Oddly enough, if you want to see George Eliot's English at its best, you must go to her genuinely dramatic writing, not the drama of The Spanish Gypsy, but the drama of Adam, Bede, or Silas Matner, or Middlentarch. Before one has finished the three volumes of letters, one is asking oneself, almost with bewilderment, where the terse, frank, and idiomatic English of Caleb Garth or Felix Holt has vanished to. It is certainly not in her correspondence, nor in the personal reflections of her journals. Indeed, what one most misses in these letters is instinct, intensity, vividness. They are letters of slow and somewhat too sweet reflectiveness, out of which the vivacity of strong personal impression seems to have vanished altogether.
As regards the subjects of her correspondence, there is the same want of vivid first-hand feeling,—of strong instinct as distinguished from careful judgment. It can hardly be that one who had so rich a store of dramatic conceptions in her mind, can have been destitute of such feelings and instincts ; but it is certain that no correspondence of equal length and importance was ever more destitute of them. From the era of her soonresigned evangelical creed to the era of her agnosticism and deep sympathy with Positivism, there is not a sign in her letters that it cost her even a slight struggle to discard any one of her beliefs. She shed her belief in the historical character of Christianity as a rose-tree sheds its flowers. She shed her . belief in the personality of God as the same tree sheds its leaves. There is not the faintest sign of a moral pang in parting with either one or the other. Of course, we do not for a moment mean to say that there was none, but that there was none of which any trace remains in any of the letters of a singularly full correspondence. Indeed, if her mental sufferings in any stage of her life were considerable, every one of those spasms of pain, —excepting those involved in the throes of composition,—has left not a wrack behind. It is true that when she is translating Strauss's mythical explanation of The Life of Jesus, Mrs. Bray, one of her intimate friends, writes that :—" Miss Evans says she is Strauss-sick,—it makes her ill dissecting the beautiful story of the crucifixion, and only the sight of the Christ image" [an ivory crucifix] "and picture make her endure it." It seems an odd form of panacea against the pangs of the Rationalism she was engaged in spreading, • this to which George Eliot resorted,—namely, to keep before her the most vivid reminder she could have of the meaning attached by believers to the reality which the Rationalists engaged to explain away. But it is well worth noting that George Eliot, in spite of the realism of her pictures of human life, regarded abstract ideas as the only true objects of religious faith. She says, in one letter to Miss Hennell," Paint soap-bubbles, and never fear but I will find a meaning, though very likely not your meaning. Paint the crucifixion in a bubble, —after Turner,—and then the resurrection. I see them now and we gather her drift to be that the meaning which her mind would gather from these ideal symbols would be at least as good as the meaning which those who regard both crucifixion and resurrection as real events attach to those real events. "It seems to me," she writes to Mrs. Peter Taylor, "the soul of Christianity lies not at all in the facts of an individual life, but in the ideas of which that life was the meeting-point and the new starting-point. We can never have a satisfactory basis for the history of the man Jesus, but that negation does not affect the Idea of the Christ, either in its historical influence or its great symbolic meanings." (Vol. II., pp. 359-360.) That seems to us precisely the opposite of the truth. It is not the idea of Christ's life, but the conviction that that idea was really and perfectly incarnated in an actual career, that has made Christ the great religions power of Christendom. The ideas which have been suggested by that life, to those who hold that life to have been shrouded in a mist of myth and pretence, have been, more or less, inoperative ideas, or if not quite inoperative, yet ideas of no very high order and significance. But George Eliot always apparently held to this belief, that the worship of ideas is the only true worship ; and it led her to depreciate the vast difference between embodying ideas in life, and only holding them up to the reverence of the world. No one can deny that she herself held up the sanctity of marriage to the respect of the world,—indeed, she depicts it in her really pure and noble • fictions as one of almost, if not altogether, sacramental signifi cance. Yet she could speak of the very great and cruel blow which she gave by her own example to the reverence of mankind for that faith, in what seems to us words, coming from such a pen, of singular feebleness and shallowness :—" If I
live five years longer," she writes to Miss Hennell, in 1857, " the positive result of my existence on the side
of truth and goodness will outweigh the small negative good that would have consisted in my not doing anything to shock others ; and I can conceive no consequences that will make me repent the past. Do not misunderstand me, and suppose that I think myself heroic or great in any way. Far enough from that ! Faulty, miserably faulty, I am,—but least of all faulty when others most blame." (Vol. I., p. 461.) As if any one could weigh for himself the effect of his example against the effect of his precepts or even of his delineations, and be sure that what be had achieved that was good in the latter direction would "far outweigh" what he had done to weaken others' faith in the former way. One of George Eliot's own weighty remarks—made during the unpleasant discussion raised some years ago as to Lord Byron's offences—might have been quoted with good effect by way of reply to what she has here said :— "One trembles to think how easily that moral wealth may be lost which it has been the work of ages to produce, in the refinement and differenciug of the affectionate relations." No one has given us more cause to tremble than George Eliot herself in spite of the great beauty and noble ethical spirit of her imaginative works. Her belief in :esthetic representations of moral good—as distinguished from moral ideas embodied in life and so transformed into realities—was far too confident. It was the weak thread in an intellect in many respects singularly strong.
Perhaps the most remarkable among these too monotonous letters are those written within the last six years of George Eliot's life to Mrs. (now Lady) Ponsonby, in which she enters with perfect frankness into her innermost faith, and avows that, in her opinion, the belief in God has had no important idfluence, except so far as it has represented a human ideal which would be just as potent if it were confessedly a human ideal and nothing more. It is clear that her correspondent had represented herself as having lost all moral motive-power in losing the belief in God's reality; and that the idea of absolute necessity on which the non-Theistic view of the Universe rested, had still further paralysed her will and rendered her indifferent as to what she might do, because she was persuaded that no blame could attach to her for doing what was simply inevitable. To this George Eliot replies :—
"My books have for their main bearing a conclusion the opposite of that in which your studies seem to have painfully imprisoned you —a conclusion without which I could not have cared to write any reprcsentatien of human life—namely, that the fellowship between man and man which has been the principle of development, social and moral, is not dependent on conceptions of what is not man : and that the idea of God, so far as it. has been a high spiritual influence, is the ideal of a goodness entirely human (i.e., an exaltation of the human). Have you quite fairly represented yourself in saying that you have ceased to pity your suffering fellow-men, because you can no longer think of them as individualities of immortal duration in some other state of existence than this of which you know the pains and the pleasures F—that you feel less for them now you regard them as more miserable F And, on a closer examination of your feelings, should you find that you bad lost all sense of quality in actions—all possibility of admiration that yearns to imitate—all keen sense of what is cruel and injurious—all belief that your conduct (and therefore the conduct of others) can have any difference of effect on the well-being of those immediately about you (and therefore on those afar off), whether you carelessly follow your selfish moods or en. courage that vision of others' needs, which is the source of justice, tenderness, sympathy in the fullest sense ? I cannot believe that your strong intellect will continue to see, in the oouditions of man's appearance on this planet, a destructive relation to your sympathy this seems to me equivalent to saying that you care no longer for colour, now you know the laws of the spectrum. As to the necessary combinations through which life is manifested, and which seem to present themselves to you as a hideous fatalism, which ought logically to petrify your volition—have they, in fact, any such influence on your ordinary course of action in the primary affairs of your existence as a human, social, domestic creature ? And if they don't hinder you from taking measures for a bath, without which you know that you cannot secure the delicate cleanliness which is your second.nature, why should they binder you from a line of resolve in a higher strain of duty to your ideal, both for yourself and others ? But the consideration of molecular physics is not the direct ground of human love and moral action, any more than it is the direct means of composing a noble picture or of enjoying-great music. One might as well hope to dissect one's own body and be merry in doing it, as take molecular physics (in which you must banish from your field of view what is specifically human) to be your dominant guide, your determiner of motives, in what is solely human. That every study has its bearing on every other is true ; but pain and relief, love and sorrow, have their peculiar history which make an experience and knowledge over and above the . swing of atoms. The teaching you quote as George Sand's would, I think, deserve to be called nonsensical if it did not deserve to be called wicked. What sort of culture of the intellect' is that which, instead of widening the mind to a fuller and fuller response to all the elements of our existence, isolates it in a moral stupidity ?—which flatters egoism with the possibility that a complex and refined human society can continue, wherein relations have no sacredness beyond the inclination of changing moods ?—or figures to itself an aesthetic human life that one may compare to that of the fabled grasshoppers who were once men, but having heard the song of the Muses could do nothing but sing, and starved themselves so till they died and had a fit resurrection as grasshoppers; 'and this,' says Socrates, was the.
return the Muses made them.' The progress of the world— which you say can only come at the right time—can certainly never come at all save by the modified action of the individual beings who compose the world ; and that we can say to ourselves with effect, 'There is an order of considerations which I will keep myself continually in mind of, so that they may continually be the prompters of certain feelings and actions,' seems to me as undeniable as that we can resolve to study the Semitic languages and apply to an Oriental scholar to give us daily lessons. What would your keen wit say to a young man who alleged the physical basis of nervous action as a reason why he could not possibly take that course ?"
George Eliot's correspondent might have rejoined that no one in his senses would propose not to do what he wished to do on the ground that he had no power to do it, unless he was really convinced that the power was wanting, but that the difficulty lies in the case where you do not wish to do what is right, and would much rather believe yourself impotent to do it,—in which case the disbelief in an independent will which can conquer wishes, and can row hard ago brat the stream of desire and opportunity, is an essential condition of right action. George Eliot's argument, which is complete in regard to actions in conformity with the spontaneous bent of nature, is wholly futile in regard to actions which can only be achieved by the subjugation of nature.
George Eliot's desire to elevate human idealism into a religion, results in her using language quite as unreal as that of the Positivists themselves. Indeed, to the Positivists she certainly strongly inclined, though she never actually joined them. She did not, of course, believe in any individual life after death; but she did not scruple to say -*blessed are the dead," though she certainly meant nothing by it but that they had ceased to be goaded on by pain. She writes to a widow that "every day will be sacred with the memory" of her husband ; and then goes on, "nay, his presence. There is no pretence or visionariness in saying that he is still part of you." We should have thought that nothing could have been more pretentious or visionary ; for all she meant was that the wife's life and nature would have been quite other than it was, had she never married as she did; a very just though not a very consolatory remark, and Certainly no more equivalent to saying that her husband was present with her than the assertion that the earth at midnight woUld not be what it is, had the sun never shone, is equivalent to saying that the sun is shining still. Again, George Eliot repeatedly expresses her " thankfulness " for what has happened, and even quotes what sounds to us pure irreverence, " Magnificat anima mea," where there is no human agency to thank, and, in her belief, no personal agency at all to whom thanks are due. More than this, in one letter, she writes, "God bless you ; that is not a false word, however many false ideas may have been hidden under it. No,—not false ideas, but temporary ones,—caterpillars and chrysaiids of future ideas." Now, whatever these "caterpillars and ehrysalids " might have been, no one was more strenuous than George Eliot in maintaining that God is only an ideal
reflex of man ; and that, therefore, no prayer could be rationally addressed to him in any sense in which we address prayers or petitions to personal beings. Nevertheless, so little was George Eliot able to do without the phraseology of a religion in which she did not believe,—so deeply did she feel the void,—that she adopted the dreamy unrealities of the religion-man u lecturers, and invoked blessings in words expressing only the" caterpillars and chrysalids of future ideas,"—whatever that may mean,— in order to hide from herself the awful blank.
Taken as a whole, this Life leaves us with the impression of a lofty mind of singularly feeble instincts and singularly amiable sentiments,—sornewhat slow and elaborate in its movements, and almost artificially judicial in its attitude towards every new intellectual claim. A sceptical Milton, without his epic genius, though with a very real dramatio gift of her own, we yet never see that gift in anything which she writes in her own name. And we lay down the book with the melancholy feeling that a very little more trust in moral instinct would have kept George Eliot from the transgression of her life, and been worth to her more than all the range of that wide reading, that accurate learning, and that earnest though pallid enthusiasm, with which she entered on the Vocatiou she had laid down for herself,—" to live and teach."
We may say of the engravings that the likeness of Robert Evans, the father of the novelist, is full of interest, and adequately suggests the intellectual thoroughness, the force of character, and the absolute integrity which we had been accustomed to expect from one who suggested the main characteristics of Caleb Garth. The earlier likeness of George Eliot is decidedly pleasing, but hardly expressive of originality. The late one is, to our thinking, the more impressive ; very massive in its reflectiveness, and massive also in its burdeh of ponderous and almost overpowering suavity.
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