BOOKS.
'SILAS ALA.RNER, THE WEAVER OF RAVELOE.•
" Suss MAnwEn" bears to George Eliot's former works much the re- lation Thackeray's "Esmond" bears to his more popular novels, or
Currer " Villette" to " Shirley" and " Jane Eyre." It will delight the critics, but perhaps disappoint the ruck of habitual novel- readers. The story as such is slight, the plot patent before it is half developed, and some of the characters rather sketches than carefully executed portraits. Wonderful sketches some of them are, suggest- ing a wealth of knowledge and insight behind such as is given to few, but sketches only, nevertheless. Part of this short-coming may be due to the size within which the narrative has been compressed. George Eliot's thoughts and plots are usually alive, and compression injures them as it injures all other living things. But with that pro- test on behalf of the novel-reader the attempt at criticism must end. Written in English, which in these days of effeminate style it is a luxury to read, the book is perfectly studded with brilliancies of thought and humour. There is scarcely a page from which we cannot extract a gem. The old qualities of the writer, that marvellous insight into the motives and ideas which move inferior minds, the subtle analysis of apparently ordinary character, the keen perception of the influenceV habitual restraint and freedom, shine out in more than their accustomed power. The hero is a psychological study, and his gradual development through an original but uneventful career is traced with a pen which never misses its stroke, and only leaves him when lie stands before the reader a being he personally knows. Silas Marner, the hero of the story, is a weaver in a large town, and connected with a religious society " known to itself as the church which assembled in Lantern Yard." Highly regarded by his church, Silas Marner, a weak, short-sighted, upright, and narrow-minded man, contracted a friendship for another member, who accused him of theft. The evidence against him was strong, and the church resolved, after a fashion which was once common in the smaller religious commu- nities, and which Wesley is said habitually to have practised, to test his guilt by drawing lots before the Lord. The lots declared Silas guilty ; and, with his faith overthrown, and his heart broken, Silas fled to Raveloe, a village full of "homesteads, where men supped heavily and slept in the light of the evening hearth, and where women seemed to be laying up a stock of linen for the life to come." There he pursued his trade, a lonely man; he could not go to church, for the church in the village was too unlike the only discipline he knew. He missed
" The white-washed walls; the little pews where well-known figures entered with a subdued rustling, and where first one well-known voice and then another,
lipitched in a peculiar key of petition, uttered phrases at once occult and familiar, ke the amulet worn on the heart ; the pulpit where the minister delivered un questioned doctrine, and swayed to and fro, and handled the book in a long- accustomed manner ; the very pauses between the couplets of the hymn, as it was given out, and the recurrent swell of voices in soug: these things had been the channel of divine influences to Marner—they were the fostering home of his religious emotions—they were Christianity and God's kingdom upon earth. A weaver who finds hard words in his hymn-book knows nothing of abstractions- as the little child knows nothing of parental love, but only knows one face and one lap towards which it stretches its arms for refuge and nurture.
He could not go to the alehouse, and the neighbours missing him from these two retorts began to look evilly upon the stranger. Be- sides, was he not a weaver ? and weavers were generally wanderers.
" No one knew where wandering men had their homes or their origin ' • and how was a man to be explained unless you at least knew somebody who knew his father and mother? ro the peasants of old times, the world outside their own direct experience was a region of vagueness and mystery: to their untravelled thought a state of wandering was a conception as dun as the winter life of the swallows that came back with the spring; and even a settler, if he came from distant parts, hardly ever ceased to be viewed with a remnant of distrust, which would have prevented any surprise if a long course of inoffensive conduct on his part had ended in the commission of a crime; especially if he had any reputation for knowledge, or showed any skill in handicraft.'
It was a village, the author says in another place, where a miser was safe from robbery, for "how could thieves have spent the money in their own village without betraying themselves. They would be obliged to ' run away'—a course as dark and dubious as a balloon bourney." Thus isolated, Silas Marner turned to his trade, and ecame by imperceptible degrees a miser—a miser, however, not led by the ordinary thirst for gold. The motives which impelled him to an objectless saving are described with power, rarely equalled in the literature of fiction, and a subtlety of analysis George Sand would with difficulty emulate. We must extract one sentence : " Gradually the guineas, the crowns, and the half-crowns, grew to a heap, and Marner drew less and less for his own wants, trying to solve the problem of keeping himself strong enough to work sixteen hours a day on as small an outlay as possible. Have not men, shut up in solitary imprisonment, found an interest in marking the moments by straight strokes of a certain length on the wall, until the growth of the sum of straight strokes, arranged in triangles, has become a mastering purpose? Do we not while away moments of inanity or fatigued wait- ing by repeating some trivial movement or sound, until the repetition has bred a want, which is incipient habit? That will help us to understand how the love of accumulating money grows an absorbing passion in men whose imaginations, even in the very beginning of their hoard, showed them no purpose beyond it. Marner wanted the heaps of ten to grow into a square, and then into a larger square ; and every added guinea, while it was itself a satisfaction, bred a new desire. In this strange world, made a hopeless riddle to him, he might, if he had had a less intense nature, have sat weaving, weaving—looking towards the end of his pattern, or towards the end of his web, till he forgot the riddle, and everything else but his immediate sensations ; but the money had come to mark • Silas Horner, the Weaver of Raveloe. By George Eliot, Author of "Adam Bedo." Blackwood and Co.
off his weaving into periods, andthe money not only grew, but it remained with him. He began to think it watreonseioua of him, as his loom was, and he would on no account have exchanged those coins, which had become his familiars, for other coins with unknown faces. He handled them, he counted them, till their form and colour were like the satisfaction of a thirst to him: but it was only in the night, when his work was done, that he drew them out-to enjoy their com- panionship."
And so he laboured on till the leap had grown large, and the thread of his life crossed with that of a family which brought him at once punishment and consolation. This family consists of a father, Squire Cass, an old farmer of the weakly tyrannical sort, "whose memory kept certain strong impressions -unmodified by detail," the eldest son, Godfrey, a weak man,,sketched in with a pencil so light that the character is hardly legible, and a brother Dunstan, a very ordinary blackguard. Godfrey, years before, has married and 'de- serted a lowborn wife, and his knowledge of this fact :gives Dunstan power over him, which he uses to extort money paid to Godfrey by the tenants. Dunstan, trusted with a horse whose sale will replace the money thus given him, stakes the animal, and stumbling, half- mad with annoyance, into Silas's cottage, finds the hidden treasure, and with it • " steps forward into the darkness," and is -drowned. Godfrey,ignorant of his fate, confesses his:bestowal of the money to his father, in a scene as lifelike as Thackeray ever described, and is told as an atonement to make love to Miss Nancy Lammeter. This young lady is.Godfrey's aecretidol; but the knowledge of his bondage fetters him, and afraid either to confess or commit a crime, he hangs back from the temptation he cannot shake off. At a great party given by the squire, at which Nancy Lammeter is present, intelli-
ce is brought in of a poor• woman found dead in the snow. It is Godfiey's deserted wife, and who, a victim to opium, has been frozen to death in sleep, while on her way to expose him. Her child is found and retained by Silas Marner. Godfrey conceals the whole affair, marries Nancy Lammeter, and the story takes a leap of fifteen Tears.
The second part opens with the deserted child, now grown into a fair girl of sixteen, whose undeveloped character is described with a sort of loving accuracy, which succeeds in leaving that most difficult impression for an artist to produce, the bright promise of the future perfectness. Silas Marner has relinked himself to life, and the steps of the process are described with humour of a kind which is wanting evenin Adam Bede. The 'neighbours have become neigh- bourly, for his goodness to the child has removed the local supersti- tion, and he finds in the love of his foundling a charm which restores the unity of his two existences. We cannot extract from the ex- quisite descriptions of his new life, for we shall not have room for the portrait of Nancy Lammeter, now Mrs. Godfrey Cass. She and her husband are childless, and Godfrey urges her to adopt Eppie, though without explaining his own relationship. But
" Adoption was more remote from the ideas and habits of that time than of our own ; still Nancy had her opinion on it. It was as necessary to her mind to have an opinion on all topics, not exclusively masculine, that had come under her notice, as for her to have a precisely marked place for every article of her per- sonal property: and her opinions were always principles, to be unwaveringly acted on. They were firm, not because of their basis, but because she held them with a tenacity inseparable from her mental action. On.all the duties and pro- prieties of life, from filial behaviour to the arrangement of the evening toilette, pretty Nancy Lammeter, by the time she was three-and-twenty, had her un- alterable little code, and had formed every one of her habits in strict accordance with that code. She carried these decided judgments within her in the most unobtrusive way: they rooted themselves in her mind, and grew there as quietly as grass. Years ago, we 'know, she insisted on dressing like Priscilla, because 4 it was right for sisters to dress alike,' and because 'the would do what was right if she wore a gown dyed with cheese-colouring.' That was a trivial but typical instance of the mode in which Nancy's life was regulated."
'Who, after that, does not know Nancy Lammeter? A scheme of drainage, however, lays bare a pit outside Silas Marner's cottage, and the skeleton of Dunstan is found clutching the lost treasure. -Godfrey, frightened at this proof of unsleeping retribution, tells his story to his wife, and together they proceed to reclaim Eppie. Eppie refuses to leave her adopted father, and Silas lives on happily with his daughter, 'married to &gardener, to.the last, regretting only that his innocence was never cleared to Lantern Yard. We have given but a poor sketch of the story, but, as we have said, the charm of the book is in the writing, in the subtle working out of Silas Marner's internal history, in the perpetual touches of a wise humour which, so to speak, ripple smilingly over the stream of the 'narration; in the minor characters, the description of whose ways and little sayings creates an impression like one of Wilkie's paintings. There is. a scene of gossip, for instance, in the village inn just as Marner rushes in to complain of his loss, -almost Shakspearian in its quiet fun, Dogberry is scarcely better than Macey, the village clerk, who tells his " deppity" " you're right there, Tookey, there's always two 'pinions -; there's the 'pinion a man has of himsen, and there's the 'pinion other folks have on him. There'd be two 'pinions about a , -cracked bell if the bell could hear itself," and cheeks a farrier of irre- verent ideas who wants tome a ghost before he believes in them, " as if ghoses 'ud want to be believed in by anybody so ignirant." Nor must we forget Miss Priscilla, proud of her own ugliness and keen sense, or Dolly Winthorp, a Mrs. Poyser and honey, a woman "so -eager for duties that life seemed to offer them too scantily unless she rose at half-past four, though this threw a scarcity of work over the more advanced hours of the morning, which it was a constant problem with her to remove," and who was " only grave and inclined to shake her head and sigh like a funereal mourner who is not a re- lation," and " confessed that things came into her head when she was leeching or poultiei a such as she could never think on when she was sitting still." But To quote all the good sentences would be to re- publish the book, and we can but advise all men whose palates can relish literary ratafia to purchase Silas Marner.
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