George Eliot; a Critical Study of Her Life, Writings and Philosophy Part 24

After she began her career as a novelist George Eliot wrote about twenty essays, nearly all of which are included in her last book, _Impressions of Theophrastus Such_. Previous to this, however, she had published in the first number of the _Fortnightly Review_, issued May 15, 1865, and edited by Lewes, an article on "The Influence of Rationalism," in review of Mr.

W.H. Lecky's book on that subject. A year after the appearance of _Felix Holt_ she wrote out her views on the subject of political reform, in the shape of an "Address to Workingmen by Felix Holt," which appeared in _Blackwood's Magazine_ for January, 1868. These essays are significant, because of the light they afford concerning the author's views on religious and political subjects. The first is a piece of thorough reviewing, and shows what George Eliot might have done in that direction. She is a merciless critic, and yet one inclined to appreciate all that is best in an author. Her sympathies with positivism and with the "scientific method" in philosophy find expression in the pages of this essay. In it she gives a most expressive utterance to her ideas about the universality of law and the influence of tradition. Her point of view is so antagonistic to Mr, Lecky's that she does not do full justice to his work. His idealism is repugnant to her, and he does not give prominence enough to please her to those positivist influences in which she so strongly believed. Her dissatisfaction with his idealism appears in her very first words.

There is a valuable cla.s.s of books on great subjects which have something of the character and functions of good popular lecturing.

They are not original, not subtle, not of close logical texture, not exquisite either in thought or style; but by virtue of these negatives they are all the more fit to act on the average intelligence. They have enough of organizing purpose in them to make their facts ill.u.s.trative, and to leave a distinct result in the mind even when most of the facts are forgotten; and they have enough of vagueness and vacillation in their theory to win them ready acceptance from a mixed audience. The vagueness and vacillation are not devices of timidity; they are the honest result of the writer's own mental character, which adapts him to be the instructor and the favorite of "the general reader." For the most part, the general reader of the present day does not exactly know what distance he goes; he only knows that he does not go "too far." Of any remarkable thinker, whose writings have excited controversy, he likes to have it said "that his errors are to be deplored." leaving it not too certain what those errors are; he is fond of what may be called disembodied opinions, that float in vapory phrases above all systems of thought or action; he likes an undefined Christianity which opposes itself to nothing in particular, an undefined education of the people, an undefined amelioration of all things: in fact, he likes sound views--nothing extreme, but something between the excesses of the past and the excesses of the present. This modern type of the general reader may be known in conversation by the cordiality with which he a.s.sents to indistinct, blurred statements. Say that black is black, he will shake his head and hardly think it; say that black is not so very black, he will reply, "Exactly." He has no hesitation, if you wish it, even to get up at a public meeting and express his conviction that at times, and within certain limits, the radii of a circle have a tendency to be equal; but, on the other hand, he would urge that the spirit of geometry may be carried a little too far. His only bigotry is a bigotry against any clearly defined opinion; not in the least based on a scientific scepticism, but belonging to a lack of coherent thought--a spongy texture of mind, that gravitates strongly to nothing. The one thing he is staunch for is the utmost liberty of private haziness.

But precisely these characteristics of the general reader, rendering him incapable of a.s.similating ideas unless they are administered in a highly diluted form, make it a matter of rejoicing that there are clever, fair-minded men who will write books for him--men very much above him in knowledge and ability, but not too remote from him in their habits of thinking, and who can thus prepare for him infusions of history and science that will leave some solidifying deposit, and save him from a fatal softening of the intellectual skeleton. Among such serviceable writers, Mr. Lecky's _History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe_ ent.i.tles him to a high place. He has prepared himself for its production by an unusual amount of well-directed reading; he has chosen his facts and quotations with much judgment; and he gives proof of those important moral qualifications, impartiality, seriousness and modesty. This praise is chiefly applicable to the long chapter on the history of Magic and Witchcraft, and to the two chapters on the antecedents and history of Persecution.

A further evidence of her wide culture and reading, and of her large critical ability, may also be found in the first number of the _Fortnightly Review_, for which she wrote the first of the "notices of new books" which it published. This was a review of Mr. Owen Jones's _Grammar of Ornament_.

The author was one of her friends, and the decorator of the rooms in which her Sunday receptions were held. She praised the book very highly. The first paragraph of this notice betrays her appreciation of the aesthetic movement in England, and her sympathy with its objects and spirit. The moral value of aesthetic influences is characteristically expressed. The influence of the environment, as she understood it, is here seen. The largeness of her faith in the moral efficiency of material causes is nowhere so strongly expressed by her as in the words which follow.

The inventor of movable types, says the venerable Teufelsdrockh, was disbanding hired armies, cashiering most kings and senates, and creating a whole new democratic world. Has any one yet said what great things are being done by the men who are trying to banish ugliness from our streets and our homes, and to make both the outside and the inside of our dwellings worthy of a world where there are forests, and flower-tressed meadows, and the plumage of birds; where the insects carry lessons of color on their wings, and even the surface of a stagnant pool will show us the wonders of iridescence and the most delicate forms of leaf.a.ge? They, too, are modifying opinions, for they are modifying men's moods and habits, which are the mothers of opinions, having quite as much to do with their formation as the responsible father--Reason. Think of certain hideous manufacturing towns where the piety is chiefly a belief in copious perdition, and the pleasure is chiefly gin. The dingy surface of wall pierced by the ugliest windows, the staring shop-fronts, paper-hangings, carpets, bra.s.s and gilt mouldings, and advertising placards, have an effect akin to that of malaria; it is easy to understand that with such surroundings there is more belief in cruelty than in beneficence, and that the best earthly bliss attainable is the dulling of the external senses. For it is a fatal mistake to suppose that ugliness which is taken for beauty will answer all the purposes of beauty; the subtle relation between all kinds of truth and fitness in our life forbids that bad taste should ever be harmless to our moral sensibility or our intellectual discernment; and--more than that--as it is probable that fine musical harmonies have a sanative influence over our bodily organization, it is also probable that just coloring and lovely combinations of lines may be necessary to the complete well-being of our systems, apart from any conscious delight in them. A savage may indulge in discordant chuckles and shrieks and gutturals, and think that they please the G.o.ds, but it does not follow that his frame would not be favorably wrought upon by the vibrations of a grand church organ. One sees a person capable of choosing the worst style of wall-paper become suddenly afflicted by its ugliness under an attack of illness. And if an evil state of blood and lymph usually goes along with an evil state of mind, who shall say that the ugliness of our streets, the falsity of our ornamentation, the vulgarity of our upholstery, have not something to do with those bad tempers which breed false conclusions?

The address to workingmen which George Eliot put into the mouth of Felix Holt is a suggestive and valuable piece of political writing. Tradition is therein presented as a moral and political influence. The spiritual treasures mankind possesses she says are the products of tradition, and these must be preserved. This can be done only by keeping the old inst.i.tutions and forms until they can be organically supplanted by others.

All the various portions of society are mutually dependent, and the destruction of any one of them will be to the injury of all. This she says to workingmen as a reason why they should not antagonize the social orders above them, whose work is as important as their own. The organs of society are the various social cla.s.ses of which it is composed, and society is to be improved by turning cla.s.s interests into the functions by which Humanity is to be developed. The spiritual treasures of the past are only to be preserved by order and good government; hence all revolutionary methods are suicidal. Life is to be advanced by giving social influence into the hands of the wisest. True principles must regulate society, and these George Eliot would have rest on science and altruism.

Such are some of the ideas of this remarkable essay, one of the most suggestive and instructive of all she wrote. The emphasis she laid on retribution, tradition, heredity and duties appears here in all its force.

Perhaps nothing else she wrote so clearly brings out some of the characteristics of her mind. Her intense distrust of individualism does not permit her to say a single word of the _rights_ of the laboring cla.s.ses.

The right of rebellion and revolution is totally disregarded, rather it is not recognized that any rights whatever exist. The workingman is not to think of himself or his cla.s.s, but of society and humanity; he is to become an altruistic worker for the common good. While this is fine in theory, yet history indicates that the aristocratic cla.s.ses have yielded to the broader social spirit only when they have been compelled to do so. The concessions must come from above, not from beneath. George Eliot's political philosophy, if carried into actual life, would keep the proletariate where they are, and strengthen the social power of the aristocratic cla.s.ses.

These words may indicate the drift of the essay:

But I come back to this: that, in our old society there are old inst.i.tutions, and among them the various distinctions and inherited advantages of cla.s.ses, which have shaped themselves along with all the wonderful slow-growing system of things made up of our laws, our commerce and our stores of all sorts, whether in material objects, such as buildings and machinery, or in knowledge, such as scientific thought and professional skill. Just as in that case I spoke of before, the irrigation of a country, which must absolutely have its water distributed or it will bear no crop; these are the old channels, the old banks and the old pumps, which must be used as they are until new and better have been prepared, or the structure of the old has been gradually altered. But it would be fool's work to batter down a pump only because a better might be made, when you have no machinery ready for a new one: it would be wicked work, if villages lost their crops by it. Now the only safe way by which society can be steadily improved and our worst evils reduced, is not by any attempt to do away directly with the actually existing cla.s.s distinctions and advantages, as if everybody could have the same sort of work or lead the same sort of life (which none of my hearers are stupid enough to suppose), but by turning of Cla.s.s Interests into Cla.s.s Functions or duties. What I mean is, that each cla.s.s should be urged by the surrounding conditions to perform its particular work under the strong pressure of responsibility to the nation at large; that our public affairs should be got into a state in which there should be no impunity for foolish or faithless conduct. In this way, the public judgment would sift out incapability and dishonesty from posts of high charge, and even personal ambition would necessarily become of a worthier sort, since the desires of the most selfish men must be a good deal shaped by the opinions of those around them: and for one person to put on a cap and bells, or to go about dishonest or paltry ways of getting rich that he may spend a vast sum of money in having more finery than his neighbors, he must be pretty sure of a crowd who will applaud him. Now changes can only be good in proportion as they help to bring about this sort of result: in proportion as they put knowledge in the place of ignorance, and fellow-feeling in the place of selfishness. In the course of subst.i.tution cla.s.s distinctions must inevitably change their character, and represent the varying Duties of men, not their varying Interests.

But this end will not come by impatience. "Day will not break the sooner because we get up before the twilight." Still less will it come by mere undoing, or change merely as change. And moreover, if we believed that it would be unconditionally hastened by our getting the franchise, we should be what I call superst.i.tious men, believing in magic, or the production of a result by hocus-pocus. Our getting the franchise will greatly hasten that good end in proportion only as every one of us has the knowledge, the foresight, the conscience, that will make him well-judging and scrupulous in the use of it. The nature of things in this world has been determined for us beforehand, and in such a way that no ship can be expected to sail well on a difficult voyage, and reach the right port, unless it is well-manned: the nature of the winds and the waves, of the timbers, the sails and the cordage, will not accommodate itself to drunken, mutinous sailors.

You will not suspect me of wanting to preach any cant to you, or of joining in the pretence that everything is in a fine way and need not be made better. What I am striving to keep in our minds is the care, the precaution, with which we should go about making things better, so that the public order may not be destroyed, so that no fatal shock may be given to this society of ours, this living body in which our lives are bound up. After the Reform Bill of 1832, I was in an election riot, which showed me clearly, on a small scale, what public disorder must always be; and I have never forgotten that the riot was brought about chiefly by the agency of dishonest men who professed to be on the people's side. Now the danger hanging over change is great, just in proportion as it tends to produce such disorder by giving any large number of ignorant men, whose notions of what is good are of a low and brutal sort, the belief that they have got power into their hands and may do pretty much as they like. If any one can look round us and say that he sees no signs of any such danger now, and that our national condition is running along like a clear broadening stream, safe not to get choked with mud, I call him a cheerful man; perhaps he does his own gardening, and seldom takes exercise far away from home. To us who have no gardens, and often walk abroad, it is plain that we can never get into a bit of a crowd but we must rub clothes with a set of roughs, who have the worst vices of the worst rich--who are gamblers, sots, libertines, knaves, or else mere sensual simpletons and victims. They are the ugly crop that has sprung up while the stewards have been sleeping; they are the multiplying brood begotten by parents who have been left without all teaching save that of a too-craving body, without all well-being save the fading delusions of drugged beer and gin. They are the hideous margin of society, at one edge drawing towards it the undesigning ignorant poor, at the other darkening imperceptibly into the lowest criminal cla.s.s. Here is one of the evils which cannot be got rid of quickly, and against which any of us who have got sense, decency and instruction have need to watch. That these degraded fellow-men could really get the mastery in a persistent disobedience to the laws and in a struggle to subvert order, I do not believe; but wretched calamities would come from the very beginning of such a struggle, and the continuance of it would be a civil war, in which the inspiration on both sides might soon cease to be even a false notion of good, and might become the direct savage impulse of ferocity. We have all to see to it that we do not help to rouse what I may call the savage beast in the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of our generation--that we do not help to poison the nation's blood, and make richer provision for b.e.s.t.i.a.lity to come. We know well enough that oppressors have sinned in this way--that oppression has notoriously made men mad; and we are determined to resist oppression. But let us, if possible, show that we can keep sane in our resistance, and shape our means more and more reasonably towards the least harmful, and therefore the speediest, attainment of our end.

Let us, I say, show that our spirits are too strong to be driven mad, but can keep that sober determination which alone gives mastery over the adaptation of means. And a first guarantee of this sanity will be to act as if we understood that the fundamental duty of a government is to preserve order, to enforce obedience of the laws. It has been held hitherto that a man can be depended on as a guardian of order only when he has much money and comfort to lose. But a better state of things would be, that men who had little money and not much comfort should still be guardians of order, because they had sense to see that disorder would do no good, and had a heart of justice, pity and fort.i.tude to keep them from making more misery only because they felt some misery themselves. There are thousands of artisans who have already shown this fine spirit, and have endured much with patient heroism. If such a spirit spread and penetrated us all, we should soon become the masters of the country in the best sense and to the best ends. For, the public order being preserved, there can be no government in future that will not be determined by our insistence on our fair and practicable demands. It is only by disorder that our demands will be choked, that we shall find ourselves lost amongst a brutal rabble, with all the intelligence of the country opposed to us, and see government in the shape of guns that will sweep us down in the ign.o.ble martyrdom of fools.

The eighteen essays published as the _Impressions of Theophrastus Such_ purport to have been the work of a bachelor of singular habits and tastes, who had written a book which proved a failure, and who left this volume to appear posthumously. He had been in the habit of giving an account to himself of the characters he met with, and he begins his book by describing his own weaknesses. He cla.s.ses himself as one of the blunderers he would portray, as having the faults and foibles he finds in others. Expressively the author says, "If the human race has a bad reputation, I perceive that I cannot escape being compromised." This may be taken as the sentiment of George Eliot herself; and it is she who really speaks in these words concerning the satirical criticisms of those she describes:

If I laugh at you, O fellow-men! if I trace with curious interest your labyrinthine self-delusions, note the inconsistencies in your zealous adhesions, and smile at your helpless endeavors in a rashly chosen part, it is not that I feel myself aloof from you: the more intimately I seem to discern your weaknesses, the stronger to me is the proof that I share them. How otherwise could I get the discernment?--for even what we are averse to, what we vow not to entertain, must have shaped or shadowed itself within us as a possibility before we can think of exorcising it. No man can know his brother simply as a spectator.

After the second essay Theophrastus disappears, and no further hint is given that it is he who is the reputed author. This slight fict.i.tious machinery is too weak to carry the load put upon it. The reader soon feels that it is George Eliot who is talking, and the opinions put forth, the sentiments expressed, are recognized as her own. Indeed, it would have been better, so the reader may probably come to say to himself, if this attempted disguise had been entirely dispensed with. By the time he has reached the sixth essay, "Only Temper," the discerning reader, familiar with George Eliot's books, will be ready to affirm that this is no other than the author herself speaking very frankly and finely her own sentiments. In this essay the moral temper of her mind appears, and her strong inclination to subordinate the individual to the social requirements of life.

These papers are modelled on those of the great essay-making period in English literature. Old-fashioned names are adopted, which have a greater or less significance in connection with the purpose of the essay. The man with the excitable temper is called Touchwood, while the man who slides into a deferential acceptance of opinions made for him is Mixtus. This method of the old essayists seems antiquated, c.u.mbersome and unsuitable to the subjects discussed. The persons described lose their individuality by its use, and the reader forgets that they were meant to be creatures of flesh and blood. For the most part, they are mere abstractions, mere figures of straw, to be knocked over by the ingenious pen of the author.

Some special fault or sin is given the name of a personality, but it is too much isolated from actual existence to produce the impression of a living thing.

These essays much resemble occasional chapters in her novels, and might have been studies for a new work. They are studies simply, done with a fine skill and polish, but fragmentary. The large setting of her novels is needed to give them relief and proportion. They disappoint as they are, for the satire is too apparent, and we do not see these characters in action, where their follies would obtain for them a more living interest. They are studies of individual character, portraying types of social and literary weakness, such as may have come under George Eliot's observation. They are careful dissections of motives and conduct, and full of a minute a.n.a.lysis of the moral and intellectual nature of her characters. There is abundance of candid criticism, shrewd observation and compressed wisdom of statement.

Occasionally she is at her very best; but she uses many long, c.u.mbersome sentences, the satire is too harsh and the wisdom too unwieldy. Her sympathy, love, pathos and pity are not so apparent as in her novels; she takes less delight in these creations, and evidently created them for purposes of dissection. She is never so weak in her other writings as in these essays, so wanting in genius and large-heartedness. She scourges many of the intellectual follies of the time, the conceit of culture, the pride of literature, and the narrowness of politics; but in most of the essays this is all.

The artistic conception of the book is too slight and fragmentary, and it gives the impression of being unfinished in execution and desultory in purpose. Yet there is in it much of fine feeling, pure sentiment, lively satire and apt wisdom. Sometimes the thought is labored; but there is a wealth of clear-cut conviction, strong thoughts and rich experience. There is force in the arguments, richness of ideas throughout, and a wonderful aptness of allusion and ill.u.s.tration. Her culture and learning are everywhere apparent in the fine perception of the most exact a.n.a.logies and in the ease with which she brings science to the support of morals. Those of her admirers who come closest to her spirit, thoroughly appreciate her ideas, and delight in them, will read this book with satisfaction, and feel thankful that she wrote it. No one who would know the mind of George Eliot can afford to overlook it.

When George Eliot writes on subjects involving a moral purpose or ideal, she is always wise and interesting. When, however, she attempts to satirize some weakness or laugh at some folly, she is not always successful. Rich as may be the satire and the wit of her novels, both are often heavy and dull in her essays.

The greater number of essays in this volume are devoted to the a.n.a.lysis of special types of character, but a few are given to moral problems. These latter are of the more interest and value, and they present some new discussions of those problems with which George Eliot was so much fascinated. Her earnest faith in altruism, realism, tradition, natural retribution and the social value of morality, is as distinct here as in her novels or poems. In the essay on "False Testimonials" she gives a good realistic definition of imagination, which she says is "always based on a keen vision, a keen consciousness of what is, and carries the store of definite knowledge as material for the construction of its inward visions."

She is no realist, however, in the sense of confining poetry merely to a photographic picture of outward nature. She accepts Dante as a genuine realist, for "he is at once the most precise and homely in his reproduction of actual objects, and the most soaringly at large in his imaginative combinations." She would have faithfulness to facts, but no limitation of vision; she would have the imagings exact and legitimate, but she would give our moral and intellectual insights no narrow bounds. Her realism is well defined when she criticises one of those persons who take mere fancy for imagination, to whom all facts are unworthy of recognition.

In at least two of these essays, those on "Debasing the Moral Currency" and "The Modern Hep, Hep, Hep!" she has newly expressed herself concerning tradition. In the first she protests against the too-common custom of satirizing what is n.o.ble and venerable. Our need of faith in the higher things of life is very great, and that faith is to be established only through our regard for what has been given us by those who have gone before us. Whatever lowers our trust in the results of human efforts is corrupting, for it breaks down our faith in the true sources of human authority. "This is what I call debasing the moral currency," she says; "lowering the value of every inspiring fact and tradition so that it will command less and less of the spiritual products, the generous motives which sustain the charm and elevation of our social existence--the something besides bread by which man saves his soul alive." With her conception of tradition, as the legitimate source of the moral and spiritual life in man, and as the influence which builds up all which is truest and purest in our civilization, she can endure to see no contempt put upon its products. This essay, more perhaps than anything else she wrote, gives an insight into her conception of the higher life and her total lack of faith in any idealistic sources of human motive or inspiration. Contempt for the traditional, with her, implies contempt for the spiritual and moral. To destroy the traditional is revolutionary, dangerous and immoral. She cannot reject tradition in the name of higher wisdom, in the name of higher truth and authority. It gone, and all is gone; hence her fear of all iconoclastic and revolutionary methods. So she would keep whole and pure the national memories of every people. In the last essay of the book she says, "The preservation of national memories is an element and a means of national greatness, and their revival a sign of reviving nationality." It is "the divine gift of memory" as it expresses itself in the life and purposes of a people, "which inspires the moments with a past, a present and a future, and gives the sense of corporate existence that raises man above the brutes." All which lowers the influence or the sacredness of this memory is debasing. The corrupting of this memory "is the impoverishment that threatens our posterity;" and this "new famine, a meagre fiend, with lewd grin and clumsy hoof, is breathing a moral mildew over the harvest of our human sentiments." That eager yearning of the nineteenth century for truth and reality, for something more than traditions and national memories, which displays itself in reforms and revolutions of every kind, had little of George Eliot's sympathy. Yet this spirit is stronger even than tradition, and creates for us a new world and a higher life.

Throughout these essays it is the social side of morality which is praised and commended. What will increase the altruistic spirit, what will widen sympathy and helpfulness, is regarded as truly ethical in its import. Ideal aims are brought to the level of present needs and the possibilities of human nature as it now exists.

Wide-reaching motives, blessed and glorious as they are, and of the highest sacramental virtue, have their dangers, like all else that touches the mixed life of the earth. They are archangels with awful brow and flaming sword, summoning and encouraging us to do the right and the divinely heroic, and we feel a beneficent tremor in their presence; but to learn what it is they summon us to do, we have to consider the mortals we are elbowing, who are of our own stature and our own appet.i.tes.... On the whole, and in the vast majority of instances, the action by which we can do the best for future ages is of the sort which has a certain beneficence and grace for contemporaries.

A sour father may reform prisons, but considered in his sourness he does harm.

In another essay, that ent.i.tled "Only Temper," the social side of morality is again presented. Especially does it appear in that on "Moral Swindlers."

"Let us refuse to accept as moral," says George Eliot, "any political leader who should allow his conduct in relation to great issues to be determined by egoistic pa.s.sion, and boldly say that he would be less immoral even though he were as lax in his personal habits as Sir Robert Walpole, if at the same time his sense of the public welfare were supreme in his mind, quelling all pettier impulses beneath a magnanimous impartiality." George Eliot is almost without exception sound and just in her moral judgments, but here her theories have made her overlook the true conditions of a moral life.

Seeing that Morality and Morals under their _alias_ of Ethics are the subject of voluminous discussion, and their true basis a pressing matter of dispute--seeing that the most famous book ever written on Ethics, and forming a chief study in our colleges, allies ethical with political science, or that which treats of the const.i.tution and prosperity of States, one might expect that educated men would find reason to avoid a perversion of language which lends itself' to no wider view of life than that of village gossips. Yet I find even respectable historians of our own and of foreign countries, after showing that a king was treacherous, rapacious, and ready to sanction gross breaches in the administration of justice, end by praising him for his pure moral character, by which one must suppose them to mean that he was not lewd nor debauched, not the European twin of the typical Indian potentate whom Macaulay describes as pa.s.sing his life in chewing bang and fondling dancing-girls. And since we are sometimes told of such maleficent kings that they were religious, we arrive at the curious result that the most serious wide-reaching duties of man lie quite outside both Morality and Religion--the one of these consisting in not keeping mistresses (and perhaps not drinking too much), and the other in certain ritual and spiritual transactions with G.o.d which can be carried on equally well side by side with the basest conduct toward men. With such a cla.s.sification as this, it is no wonder, considering the strong re-action of language on thought, that many minds, dizzy with indigestion of recent science and philosophy, are fain to seek for the grounds of social duty; and without entertaining any private intention of committing a perjury which would ruin an innocent man, or seeking gain by supplying bad preserved meats to our navy, feel themselves speculatively obliged to inquire why they should not do so, and are inclined to measure their intellectual subtlety by their dissatisfaction with all answers to this "Why?"

It would be quite impossible for George Eliot to write an essay without some fresh thought or some new suggestion. To those who admire her genius and are in sympathy with her teachings this volume will have a special interest. Its few essays which touch upon moral or speculative subjects are of the utmost value as interpretations of her life and thought.

All her essays, the later as the earlier, are mainly of interest as aids to an understanding of her philosophy. Nothing is worthless which helps us clearly to comprehend an original mind.

XIX.

THE a.n.a.lYTIC METHOD.

George Eliot's literary method was that of Fielding and Thackeray, both of whom evidently influenced her manner. Their realism, and especially their method of comment and moral observation, she made her own. She had little sympathy with the romanticism of Scott or the idealism of d.i.c.kens. Her moral aims, her intense faith in altruism, kept her from making her art a mere process of photographing nature. Nature always had a moral meaning to her, a meaning in reference to man's happiness and health of soul; and that moral bearing of all human experiences gave dignity and purpose to her art.

It was the method of Scott to present the romantic, picturesque and poetic side of life. He was not untrue to nature, but he cared more for beauty and sentiment than for fact. He sometimes perverted the historic incidents he made use of, but he caught the spirit of the time with which he was dealing with absolute fidelity. In this capacity for historic interpretation he surpa.s.sed George Eliot, who had not his instinctive insight into the past.

Scott had no theory about the past, no philosophy of history was known to him; but above all novelists he had the power to see by the light of other days, and to make the dead times live again. Not George Eliot and not Thackeray was his rival in this historic insight and poetic power of interpretation; and his superior success was due not only to his peculiar genius but also to his romanticism. Scott failed where George Eliot succeeded, in giving an intellectual interpretation of life. With certain social and moral tendencies he was clearly at home. On its side of adventure and social impulse and craving for a wider life, as a single instance of his power, he was a true interpreter of the age of Elizabeth.

Its deeper spirit, its intellectual movements, he did not, and could not, bring within the range of his story. It was here George Eliot was superior, as is abundantly shown in _Romola_. The thoughtful aspects of Florentine life she truthfully presented; but its more romantic elements it needed a Scott to make living and real. In _The Spanish Gypsy_ there is very little of genuine interpretation. Certain local features may be accurate, but the spirit of the time is not there; the characters are not such as that age and country developed. Scott, with all his romanticism, would have introduced _reality_ into such an historic picture.

Within her own lines of power George Eliot is much greater than Scott, who could not have written _Adam Bede_ or _Middlemarch_, or brought out what is best in those works. Adventure was necessary to Scott; he could not have transfigured the plain and homely with beauty as George Eliot has done.

Where she is at her best, as in the simple scenes of _Silas Marner_, there is a charm, pathos and sympathy in her work which must endear it to all hearts. That peculiar power Scott did not have; yet it would be most difficult to decide which is the truer to nature. Genuine art, it is true, has its foundation in the realities of human experience: but those realities are not always best interpreted by the methods of realism. In his own province Scott was truer to nature than George Eliot was in the same field, as may be seen at once by comparing _The Spanish Gypsy_ with _Ivanhoe_, or any of Scott's novels dealing with the mediaeval and feudal ages, he took the past into himself, caught its spirit, reflected it in its wholeness. In this he was a genuine realist, and all the more faithful to reality because he did not accept realism as a theory.

In comparing George Eliot with d.i.c.kens, it must first of all be noted that each is the superior of the other in his own special province. d.i.c.kens has more imagination; he appeals to more universal sentiments, touches a wider circle of experiences, captivates his readers with a resistless interest and tenderness of spirit. His characters are unreal, mere caricatures often, mere puppets. Yet he had an imagination of marvellous power, so that his characters appeared to his own mind as if real, and he describes them as if they actually stood before him, making them intensely real to his readers. Many of his persons never lived, never could have lived; yet they are types or certain traits of character made living and brought out into a distinctive existence. What those traits of character are he makes all the more apparent by this method.

d.i.c.kens had not a fine literary taste, he had no clear insight into some of the purer human sentiments, he was grossly untrue and false in many of his pictures. Yet all in all, with his many faults, it is to be said that his idealism, which was not of a high type, made him a true interpreter of life. If his characters are less faithfully drawn than George Eliot's, his insight into some of the sentiments and emotions was truer. His pictures may be false in some particulars, but he has given them the true spirit with which they should be animated.

In thoughtful fidelity to the facts of life, George Eliot surpa.s.ses Scott or d.i.c.kens. Scott by his insight, d.i.c.kens by his imagination, were able to do what she could not; but they put little thought into their work. They did not think about what life meant; she did. They worked instinctively, she thoughtfully. Her characters are more often to be met with than theirs; and there is a freshness, a wholesomeness, about them theirs do not have.

She is more simple and refined than Fielding, more elevated in tone of thought, there is a deeper and a richer purpose in her work. None of the cynicism and hardness of Thackeray appear in her pages. She is fresher, more genuine, more poetic than he, with more of humanity.

In her essay on "The Natural History of German Life" she said of d.i.c.kens that he was "gifted with the utmost power of rendering the external traits of our town population." City life d.i.c.kens and Thackeray most truly photographed in all its features of sn.o.bbishness and selfishness. Its better side, its n.o.bler sentiments, its humanity, they did not succeed in so well; not so well as George Eliot did, and simply because they did not so much sympathize with it. Country life they did not understand, and could not have sketched. Where George Eliot best succeeded they would have failed. Her real advance upon d.i.c.kens and Thackeray, however, lay in another direction. She says in the essay just quoted, speaking of Diekens's portraitures of town populations, that "if he could give us their psychological character--their conception of life and their emotions--with the same truth as their idiom and manners, his books would be the greatest contribution art has ever made to the awakening of social sympathies."

In the two directions here indicated lay her superiority over other novelists,--her humanitarian sympathies and her psychologic insight. In reality, she did not contribute anything new to the realism of literary art. All which can be said for faithfulness to nature in art and poetry has been said by Ruskin, and George Eliot was early a reader of his books. Her predecessors, especially Thackeray, opened the way in the application of the realistic principles in its newer spirit. The enlargement of realism, however, was carried on to a much greater extent by the pre-Raphaelites in painting and poetry, and George Eliot was influenced by them as well. Their principle of loyal fidelity to the time and circ.u.mstances depicted was her own, at least in theory.

It was in another direction her chief characteristic lay, that of describing "psychologic character." Here she was no imitator, but she made a way of her own, and developed a new method. The method of science she applied to literature. Science has adopted the method of a.n.a.lysis, of inductive inquiry, of search in all the facts of nature for the laws which underlie them. So magnificent have been the results obtained by this process in the study of the material world, that it has been applied with the hope of securing the same thorough investigation of the phenomena presented by history, ethics and religion. Even here the method has justified itself, and has in recent years opened up new and valuable results, giving to the world an enriched conception of the life of man.

The speculative mind has been stimulated to fresh activity, and new philosophies, of vast and imposing proportions, have been the result. The studies of Charles Darwin, and the elaboration of the theory of evolution, have given a marvellous incentive to the new method, resulting in its wide-spread application to all the questions of nature and life.

A method so productive in all directions must have its effect on literature. What claims the attention of all thinking men cannot long be kept out of poetry and art. In painting and in music it has been largely developed in the direction of a more intimate and sympathetic interpretation of nature and man. In literature the new method has been mainly brought into application hitherto in the form of photographic studies of human life. To describe what is, to make a true word-picture, has been the chief aim. With George Eliot began a wider use of the new method and its application in a more sympathetic spirit to the deeper problems of the mind and heart. She was not content to paint the surface of nature, to give photographic sketches of the outside of human life, but she wished to realize every subtle fact and every most secret impulse. An admirer of the Dutch school in painting, and of Jane Austen as a novelist, she was not content with their results and methods, wishing to interpret the spirit as well as the letter of nature and life.

In literature, the new method as developed in recent years consists in an application of psychology to all the problems of man's nature. George Eliot's intimate a.s.sociation with the leaders of the scientific movement in England, naturally turned her mind into sympathy with their work, and made her desirous of doing in literature what they were doing in science. In the special department of physiological psychology, no one did more than George Henry Lewes, and her whole heart went out in genuine appreciation of his work. He studied the mind as a function of the brain, as being developed with the body, as the result of inherited conditions, as intimately dependent on its environment. Here was a new conception of man, which regarded him as the last product of nature, considered as an organic whole.

This conception George Eliot everywhere applied in her studies of life and character. She studied man as the product of his environment, not as a being who exists above circ.u.mstances and material conditions. "In the eyes of the psychologist," says Mr. James Sully, "the works of George Eliot must always possess a high value by reason of their large scientific insight into character and life." This value consists, as he indicates, in the fact that she interprets the inner personality as it is understood by the scientific student of human nature. She describes those obscure moral tendencies, nascent forces, and undertones of feeling and thought, which enter so much into life. She lays much stress on the subconscious mental life, the domain of vague emotion and rapidly fugitive thought.

The aim of the psychologic method is to interpret man from within, in his motives and impulses. It endeavors to show why he acts, and it unfolds the subtler elements of his character. This method George Eliot uses in connection with her evolutionary philosophy, and uses it for the purpose of showing that man is a product of hereditary conditions, that he has been shaped into his life of the emotions and sentiments by the influence of tradition. The psychologic method may be applied, however, without connection with the positive or evolutionary philosophy. The mind may be regarded as a distinct force and power, exercised within social and material limits, and capable of being studied in all its inner motives and impulses. Yet in her mental inquiries George Eliot did not regard man as an eternal soul in the process of development by divine methods, but as the inheritor of the past, moulded by every surrounding circ.u.mstance, and as the creature of the present. Instead of regarding man as _sub specie eternitatis_, she regarded him as an animal who has through feeling and social development come to know that he cannot exist beyond the present.

This limitation of his nature affected her work throughout.