Studies in Early Victorian Literature Part 8

There can be no doubt that this const.i.tutional vehemence of his, this hypertrophy of blood and muscle, injured his work and dimmed his reputation. Much of his work he ought to have burnt. His cla.s.sical studies are worthless, his _Life of Thackeray_ and his _Travels_ are mere book-making. His novels, even the best, are revised and printed with scandalous haste. He speaks of a "_toga virile_" and of "_the husband of his bosom_," for wife; and there are misprints in every paragraph. When, in his _Autobiography_, he let the public into the story of his method, of his mechanical writing so many words per hour, of his beginning a new tale the day after he finished the last, of his having no particular plot, and hardly thinking about a plot, and all the little trade secrets of his factory, the public felt some disgust and was almost inclined to think it had been cheated out of its 70,000 pounds.

Anthony Trollope was not a fraud, nor even a mere tradesman. His reputation may perhaps partially revive, and some of his best work may be read in the next century. His best work will of course be a mere residuum of his sixty books, as is the best of nearly all prolific writers. I am inclined to think the permanent survival may be limited to the _Barchester_ cycle, with _Orley Farm_ and the two _Phineas Finns_. In any case, his books will hereafter bear a certain historical interest, as the best record of actual manners in the higher English society between 1855 and 1875. That value nothing can take away, however dull, _connu_, and out of date the books may now seem to our new youth. It is a curious problem why our new youth persists in filling its stomach with the poorest trash that is "new"--_i.e._ published in 1895, whilst it will not look at a book that is "old "--_i.e._ published in 1865, though both are equally unknown to the young reader. If our new youth ever could bring itself to take up a book having 1865 on its t.i.tle-page, it might find in the best of Anthony Trollope much subtle observation, many manly and womanly natures, unfailing purity of tone, and wholesome enjoyment.

[1] This anecdote has been doubted, on the ground that such rapid composition is impossible. But Trollope in his _Autobiography_ a.s.serts this fact, exactly as he told George Eliot, except that the first half hour was occupied by re-reading the work of the previous day. The average morning's work was thus 2500 words, written in two and a half hours.

X

GEORGE ELIOT

It will be the duty of the more serious criticism of another generation in some degree to revive the reputation of George Eliot as an abiding literary force--a reputation which the taste of the hour is rather disposed to reduce. Five-and-twenty years ago the tendency was towards excessive praise: many judges, of trained literary insight, proclaimed her as the greatest genius of the age, one of the brightest stars of English literature, nay, said some of them, quite losing control of their speech--a modern Shakespeare, and so forth. Some cooler heads looked grave, but none save the inveterate cynics ventured to mock; and the great public, as usual, thought it best to follow the lead of so many men and so many women of the higher culture. The inevitable reaction ensued: when, not only were the grave shortcomings of George Eliot ruthlessly condemned, but her n.o.ble aim and superb qualities were blindly ignored.

The taste in popular romance sways. .h.i.ther and thither in sudden revulsion, like the taste in hats or in frocks, or the verdict of manhood suffrage. This or that type becomes suddenly the rage, this or that mannerism is voted an offence, as quickly as fashion runs after a new tint, or boycotts an obsolete sleeve. Journalism and all the other forces of the hour stimulate these caprices and carry away the ma.s.ses by their volubility and noise. It is the business of serious criticism, keeping a cooler head, to correct these fervid impulses of the day--whilst excited audiences in the amphitheatre raise or depress the fatal thumb, awarding life or death to the combatants in the great arena.

The business of criticism is to _judge_--to judge upon the whole evidence, after hearing counsel on both sides with equal attention, after weighing every shred of argument and every word that any witness has to offer, and after patient study of every aspect of the case, to deliver a complete and reasoned estimate of the whole matter at issue.

The true critic is not a mere juryman, who has nothing to do but to p.r.o.nounce a bare verdict of "guilty" or "not guilty." He is a judge of the supreme court of equity, who may find, in some intricate story unravelled at his bar, a dozen errors in law and as many mistakes of fact, and yet may give substantial relief or may decree onerous penalties. It is easy enough to detect faulty, easy enough to insist on merits: the thing wanted to guide the public is the cool, compensated, equitable judgment that is not seduced by any conspicuous charm, and is not irritated by any incorrigible defect, but which, missing no point of merit and none of failure, finally and resolutely strikes the just balance.

This just balance, with all its intricate adjustments of compensation and equivalence, is peculiarly needed in the case of George Eliot, and at the same time is unusually difficult. George Eliot was most conspicuous as an artist, as a worker in the sphere of imagination and creation. At the same time, she had very rare powers and a really unusual learning quite outside of imaginative art. And these reflective powers and such stores of knowledge are often antagonistic to creative art, and undoubtedly were so not seldom with her. If Aristotle himself had written a dull psychological tragedy, we might read it for his sake, but we should not forgive him, and we ought not to forgive him. And if Shakespeare himself had written the _Novum Organum_ or the _Principia_, we should not have had _Hamlet_ and _Lear_ as we now know them. There is no compensation between philosophy and poetry. No profundity, no learning, can give beauty to verses which lack the divine fire. If George Eliot's fame has to be based solely on her great powers and endowments, her art would not be worth much.

However, it is not so: she was an artist, with true artistic gifts.

Her philosophic power and her scientific attainments often enn.o.ble these gifts: yet it is too often evident that they seriously mar and embarra.s.s them.

Turn it the other way. Until nearly the age of forty, George Eliot was known only as a critical and philosophical writer. And in reading, in logical ac.u.men, and in breadth of view, she was the equal of the first minds of her time. But no one of her contemporaries, eminent in philosophy and science, approached her, however remotely, in artistic gifts; and no one of them even attempted to invest ethical and social ideas with high imagination and beautiful ideals. Thus, George Eliot was of a far higher mental plane than any contemporary who has used imaginative prose as an art, and she was also a far greater artist than any contemporary philosopher. It is quite certain that learning and wisdom may be lodged in the same brain with the highest poetry, as Lucretius, Virgil, Dante, Milton, and Goethe may prove. And men of original power have not seldom used imaginative art with signal success to convey the ideas with which they were charged; for this has been done by Cervantes, Rabelais, Swift, Rousseau, Byron, Sh.e.l.ley, and Goethe.

It is therefore legitimate and natural that a powerful and teeming mind should resort to art as its medium, and also that an artist of high aims should be a systematic thinker and an omnivorous student. The combination is very rare and success is singularly difficult. To fail in art is to lose all and to end in utter failure. And to carry ethical purpose and erudition into art is indeed a perilous undertaking, wherein but one or two of the greatest have wholly succeeded. The problem with George Eliot is to judge how far she has succeeded in the all but impossible task. That her success is far from complete is but too obvious. That she has had many incidental successes is also obvious. Her work is not sufficiently spontaneous, not easy or simple, not buoyant enough. But it has great n.o.bility, rare distinction. It may not live as perfect art; but it should not perish as ambitious failures perish.

If George Eliot were not a writer of romance, she was nothing at all in the front ranks of Victorian literature. With all her powers of mind, her mastery of language, her immense stores of knowledge and supreme culture, she gave to the world nothing of great mark, acknowledged and known as hers, except her famous romances; for, as we shall presently see, we cannot count any of the poems as of great mark. But, as a writer of romance, George Eliot differs essentially and for the worse from all the other great writers of romance in her own or preceding generations. Most certainly she was not a born romancer; she had no spontaneous gift of telling stories, no irrepressible genius that way.

Now all the great romancers have been born to it, as Robinson Crusoe was born to the sea, or as Turner was born to paint. Though Scott published novels late, he had begun _Waverley_ at thirty-four; his earlier works are romantic ballads and metrical romances; and from boyhood, at home and abroad, he was ever filled with some tale of adventure and character. Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth "lisped" in novelettes, as Pope said he "lisped in numbers." Though Charlotte Bronte published so little, she wrote stories incessantly from childhood. Lytton, d.i.c.kens, Thackeray, Trollope, invented tales as part of their daily lives, and from the earliest age. But George Eliot was thirty-nine when her first tales were published, and she was forty before she was known to the public as a novelist at all. And so little was novel-writing her natural gift, that her most intimate friends never suspected her power, nor did she herself altogether enjoy the exercise of her art. To the last her periods of mental gestation were long, painful, and unhopeful. Parturition was a dangerous crisis, and the long-expected infant was reared with misgivings and a superfluity of coddling. The romances of George Eliot came like some _enfant de miracle_, born late in the mother's life, at the cost of infinite pain, much anxiety, and amidst the wondering trepidation of expectant circles of friends.

Even in her best books we never quite get over the sense of almost painful elaboration, of a powerful mind having rich gifts striving to produce some rare music with an unfamiliar and uncongenial instrument.

It reminds us of Beethoven evolving his majestic sonatas on an untuned and dilapidated old piano, the defects of which he could not himself hear. The conventional critic in _The Vicar of Wakefield_ is told to say that "the picture would have been better if the artist had taken more pains." With George Eliot too often we are made to feel that the picture would have been, at any rate, more enjoyable if the artist had taken less pains. To study her more ambitious tales is like an attempt to master some new system of psychology. The metaphysical power, the originality of conception, the long brooding over anomalies and objections--these are all there: but the rapid improvisation and easy invention are not there. Such qualities would indeed be wholly out of place in philosophy, but they are the essence of romance. In romance we want to feel that the piece is only brought to an end by time and our human powers of listening; that there is "plenty more where these come from"; that the story-teller enjoys telling stories for their own sake, and would go on with the tales, though the audience were reduced to a child, an idiot, and a deaf man.

This explains the paradox that the most popular, and most certainly the most praised of George Eliot's works, are the simpler and the shorter.

Every one enjoys the _Scenes of Clerical Life_, short stories of a hundred pages each, with simple plots and a few characters in everyday life. I have no doubt myself that _Silas Marner_ comes nearer to being a great success than any of the more elaborate books. Yet _Silas Marner_ is about one-fifth part of the length of _Middlemarch_; and its plot, _mise-en-scene_, and incidents are simplicity itself. There is no science, no book-learning, and but few ethical problems in it from beginning to end; and it all goes in one small volume, for the tale concerns but the neighbours of one quiet village. Yet the quaint and idyllic charm of the piece, the perfection of tone and keeping, the harmony of the landscape, the pure, deep humanity of it, all make it a true and exquisite work of high art.

Modern English (and I am one of those who hold that the best modern English is as good as any in our literature) has few pieces of description more gem-like in its crystalline facets than the opening chapter that tells of the pale, uncanny weaver of Raveloe in his stone cottage by the deserted pit. Some of us can remember such house weavers in such lonesome cottages on the Northern moors, and have heard the unfamiliar rattle of the loom in a half-ruinous homestead. How perfect is that vignette of Raveloe--"a village where many of the old echoes lingered, undrowned by new voices"--with its "strange lingering echoes of the old demon-worship among the grey-haired peasantry"! The entire picture of the village and its village life a hundred years ago, is finished with the musical and reserved note of poetry, such as we are taught to love in Wordsworth and Tennyson. And for quiet humour modern literature has few happier scenes than the fireside at the "Rainbow," with Macey and Winthrop, the butcher and the farrier, over their pipes and their hot potations, and the quarrel about "seeing ghos'es," about smelling them!

Within this most graceful and refined picture of rural life there is a dominant ethical motive which she herself describes as its aim, "to set in a strong light the remedial influences of pure, natural, human relations." This aim is perfectly worked out: it is a right and healthy conception, not too subtle, not too common:--to put it in simpler words than hers, it is how a lonely, crabbed, ill-used old man is humanised by the love of a faithful and affectionate child. The form is poetic: the moral is both just and n.o.ble: the characters are living, and the story is original, natural, and dramatic. The only thing, indeed, which _Silas Marner_ wants to make it a really great romance is more ease, more rapidity, more "go." The melody runs so uniformly in minor keys, the sense of care, meditation, and introspection is so apparent in every line, the amount of serious thought lavished by the writer and required of the reader is so continuous, that we are not carried away, we are not excited, inspired, and thrilled as we are by _Jane Eyre_ or _Esmond_. We enjoy a beautiful book with a fine moral, set in exquisite prose, with consummate literary resources, full of fine thoughts, true, enn.o.bling thoughts, and with no weak side at all, unless it be the sense of being over-wrought, like a picture which has been stippled over in every surface.

A clever French woman said of George Eliot's conversation--_elle s'ecoute quand elle parle_! Just so, as we read on we seem to see how she held up each sentence into the light as it fell from her pen, scrutinised it to see if some rarer phrase might not be compacted, some subtler thought excogitated. Of all the more important tales, _Silas Marner_ is that wherein we least feel this excessive thoughtfulness.

And thus it is the best. Perhaps other born romancers would have thrown into it more life, energy, jollity, or pa.s.sion. Thackeray would have made the weaver a serio-comic hermit: d.i.c.kens would have made Eppie a sentimental angel; Charlotte Bronte would have curdled our blood; Trollope might have made more of Nancy's courting. But no one of them could have given us a more lofty lesson "of the remedial influences of pure, natural, human relations." The only doubt is, whether a novel is the medium for such lessons. On this, opinions are, and will remain, divided. The lesson and the art ought both to be faultless.

When we ask for a romance fully developed and more than a graceful vignette, _Adam Bede_ must be regarded as the princ.i.p.al, and with the wider public it is always the typical, work of George Eliot. She said herself that it seemed to her "impossible that she should ever write anything so good and true again":--and herein she was no doubt right.

It is the only one of her works in prose or verse which we feel to be inevitable, spontaneous, written out of the abundance of enjoyment and experience. It is of all her books the heartiest, the wittiest, the most cheerful, or rather the least desponding. In that book it may be that she exhausted herself and her own resources of observation as an eye-witness. She wrote fine things in other veins, in different scenes, and she conceived other characters and new situations. But for all practical purposes _Adam Bede_ was the typical romance, which everything she had thought or known impelled her to write, in which she told the best of what she had seen and the most important of what she had to say. Had she never written anything but _Adam Bede_, she would have had a special place of her own in English romance:--and I am not sure that anything else which she produced very materially raised, enlarged, or qualified that place.

_The Mill on the Floss_ must always be very interesting to all who knew George Eliot and loved her work, if for no other reason, for its autobiographic and personal touches and its revelation of yearnings and misgivings hardly suspected in life. There are scenes and minor characters in it which hold their own against _Adam Bede_, but as a whole it is not so strong or so rich in colour, and it can hardly be said to occupy new ground. It has not the pathos of _Amos Barton_, nor the exquisite style of _Silas Marner_, nor the breadth and constructive merit of _Adam Bede_. And except to the chosen band of Eliotists, it is not likely to retain any permanent popularity. It is a book to study for those who have special interest in George Eliot as woman, as teacher, and as artist--but for my own part I find it rather a book to reflect upon than a book to read and to re-read.

With respect to _Romola_, though we must all agree with Mr. Oscar Browning that it is "replete with learning," "weighed with knowledge in every page," exquisite in art, and so forth, it is really impossible to call it with him "the best historical novel ever written." Even in exact reproduction of another age, it cannot compare with _Esmond_, and how immeasurably as romance is it beneath the fire and movement of a dozen historical romances that one could name! The beauty of the Florentine pictures, the enormous care, thought, and reading, lavished on the story, the variety of literary resource--all make it a most memorable work, a work almost _sui generis_, a book which every student of Italy, every lover of Florence must mark, learn, and inwardly digest. But to call it a complete success is to go too far. The task was too great. To frame in a complex background of historical erudition an ethical problem of even greater complexity and subtlety--this was a task which might have sorely tried even greater powers than hers--a task in which Goethe and Scott might have succeeded, but which Goethe and Scott were too truly the born artists to attempt without ample care, and too busy with many things to devote to it the required labour.

_Romola_ is certainly a wonderful monument of literary accomplishments; but it remains a _tour de force_, too elaborate, too laboured, too intricate, too erudite. As the French say, it has _trop de choses_, it is too long, too full, over-costumed, too studiously mounted on the stage. We sometimes see nowadays "a Shakespearean revival," with scenery studied by eminent artists on the spot, costumes archaeologically accurate, real armour, "properties" from famous collections, a _mise-en-scene_ of lavish splendour and indefatigable research--and then we ask, how can "Hamlet" or "Lear" live up to such learning, and why is "Romeo" such a melancholy devil? Few men enjoyed the earlier portions of _Romola_ more than I did. _Italianissimo_ and _Florentissimo_ as I was, it was an intense treat. But, though I have read and re-read _Romola_ from time to time, it has always been in sections. I have never read it straight through at one time; and to this hour, I am not quite clear about all the ramifications of the plot and the various cross-purposes of the persons. Could any one say this about _Quentin Durward_ or _Ivanhoe_, or of the _Last Days of Pompeii_, or of _Esmond_ or even of _Hypatia_ or _Westward Ho!_

_Romola_, we know, tried its author most cruelly in composition, nor need we wonder at this. "I began it,", she said, "a young woman--I finished it an old woman." "It ploughed into her," said her husband, "more than any of her other books." And, in my opinion, it marks the decline of her genius. I cannot count any of the later books as equal to her earlier works. Her great period of production reaches at most over the six years 1858-1863 (aetat. 39-45), in which she produced _Scenes of Clerical Life_ (1858), _Adam Bede_ (1859), _The Mill on the Floss_ (1860), _Silas Marner_ (1861), and _Romola_ (1863). If we measure by strict success in the highest art, this period should not be extended beyond the four years which closed with _Silas Marner_.

_Romola_ is an ambitious, beautiful, altogether n.o.ble essay to fly skyward like Icarus, whose ingenious mechanism was melted by the sunlight in mid-career. And I cannot count any of the later pieces, prose or verse, as anything but inferior to _Romola_. They have great beauties, fine pa.s.sages, subtle characters, and high conceptions--but they are the artificial products of a brain that showed symptoms of exhaustion, of a great writer who was striving after impossible tasks without freedom and without enjoyment.

I cannot at all agree with those admirers of George Eliot's genius who believe that it grew continuously in power, who even a.s.sure us that it reached its zenith in _Daniel Deronda_. What can they mean? _Daniel Deronda_, as usual, shows brilliant literary skill in many pa.s.sages, and its insight into modern Hebraism is a psychological problem. But with all its merits and even beauties, _Daniel Deronda_ has the fatal defect of unpleasant characters who are neither beautiful nor interesting, terrible situations which bore rather than terrify us, a plot which is at once preposterous and wearisome. As to _Middlemarch_--George Eliot's longest, most crowded, and ethically most elaborated romance--with all its subtlety, its humour, its variety, and its sardonic insight into provincial Philistinism, it becomes at last tedious and disagreeable by reason of the interminable maunderings of tedious men and women, and the slow and reiterated dissection of disagreeable anatomies. At this moment I cannot, after twenty years, recall the indefinite, lingering plot, or the precise relations to each other of the curiously uninteresting families, who talk scandal and fuss about in Middlemarch town.

In _Felix Holt_ I was naturally much interested, having read it in ma.n.u.script, and advised upon the point of law, as appears from her published letters in the _Life_ by J. Cross. There are two or three lines--the lawyers' "opinion on the case"--which she asked me to sketch; and I remember telling her when she inserted these lines in the book, that I should always be able to say that I had written at least a sentence which was embodied in English literature. _Felix Holt_ contains some fine characters and scenes, but it cannot be regarded as equal to _Adam Bede_ and _Silas Marner_. We will not speak of _Theophrastus Such_, 1879, written just before her death. It was the work of a woman physically and intellectually exhausted. I feel a certain guilty sense of disappointment when I think of the book, for I possibly had some hand in causing it to be written. I had sent her a long letter pointing out that our literature, with all its wealth of achievement in every known sphere, was still deficient in one form of composition in which the French stood paramount and alone. That was what they called _Pensees_--moral and philosophical reflections in the form of epigrams or rather aphorisms. I thought, and I still think, that this form of composition was peculiarly suited to her genius, at least in her prime. It was not in her prime when she painfully evolved the sour affectations set forth in _Theophrastus_.

A word or two must be said about the _Poems_. They have poetic subjects, ideas, similes: they are full of poetic yearning, crowded with poetic imagery; they have everything poetry needs, except poetry.

They have not the poet's hall-mark. They are imitation poems, like the forged "ancient masters" they concoct at Florence, or the Tanagra statuettes they make in Germany. With all her consummate literary gifts and tastes, George Eliot never managed to write a poem, and never could be brought to see that the verses she wrote were not poems. It was an exaggeration of the defect that mars her prose; and her verses throw great light on her prose. They are over-laboured; the conception overpowers the form; they are too intensely anxious to be recognised as poems. We see not so much poetic pa.s.sion, as a pa.s.sionate yearning after poetic pa.s.sion. We have--not the inevitable, incalculable, inimitable phrase of real poetry--but the slowly distilled, calculated, and imitated effort to reach the spontaneous.

It is melancholy indeed to have to admit this, after such labour, such n.o.ble conceptions, such mastery over language: but it is the truth.

And it explains much of kindred failure in her prose work. Great imagination, n.o.ble conceptions, mastery over language can do much, but they cannot make a poet. Nothing can, but being a poet. Nor can these gifts make a great romancer or poet in prose. Nothing can, but being born to romance, being a prose poet. As the Gospel has it--"Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?" George Eliot had not sufficiently meditated on this scripture. She too often supposed that by taking thought--by enormous pains, profound thought, by putting this thought in exquisite and n.o.ble words--she might produce an immortal romance, an immortal poem.

And yet let us never forget that the _Spanish Gypsy_ is a very grand conception, that it has some n.o.ble scenes, and here and there some stately lines--even some beautiful pa.s.sages, could we forget the artificial alliteration and the tuneless discords to which the poet's ear seems utterly insensible. The opening lines seem to promise well and have much of mellow thought, in spite of five hissing sibilants in the very first verse--

[Transcriber's note: In the original book, the letters in the poem fragments under discussion were bolded. Here, they are delineated with slashes (/).]

'Ti/s/ the warm /S/outh, where Europe /s/pread/s/ her land/s/.

Like fretted leaflets, breathing on the deep:

And then comes in the fourth line an awful cacophony of alliteration--and an alliteration in "c."

A /C/alm earth-G.o.ddess /c/rowned with /c/orn and vines.

Then we have a really pretty but artificial line--an alliteration in "m."

On the /M/id Sea that /m/oans with /m/e/m/ories.

The seventh line again is an alliteration of alternate "p" and "d."

/P/ant /d/umbly /p/a.s.sionate with /d/reams of youth.

The tenth line is an excruciating alliteration in sibilants.

/F/eed/s/ the /f/amed /s/tream that water/s/ Andalu/s/.

But it must be admitted that the next line is graceful--

And loiters, amorous of the fragrant air.

The whole introduction of some 400 lines is full of beautiful images, fine thoughts, and striking phrases, but it is crowded, artificial, brocaded to excess with _trop de choses_; and it suddenly breaks into drama, with dialogue in person. This alternation of dramatic form and dialogue with epical narrative, interlarding the tragedy in parts with portentously long explanatory comment, is perhaps the most unlucky novelty which was ever attempted in verse. What would one say if even fine pa.s.sages out of Wordsworth's _Excursion_ had been accidentally bound up between the pages of Shakespeare's _Hamlet_?

But it is needless to enlarge on all the metrical and poetic defects of this medley of nearly 10,000 lines, with its lip-twisting, ear-torturing lyrics--(was there ever such a cacophony as--