FOOTNOTES:

[13] As Lockhart expresses it in the Quarterly, “There is a decided family likeness between Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, yet the aspect of the Jane and Rochester animals in their native state, as Catherine and Heathcliff, is too odiously and abominably pagan to be palatable even to the most vitiated class of novel readers. With all the unscrupulousness of the French school of novels it combines that repulsive vulgarity in the choice of its vice which supplies its own antidote.”

[14] “She did not approve of twilight walks. Why should they want to go out just then like the tradespeople, a thing which ladies never did.”

A PROFESSIONAL WOMAN
(George Eliot, 1819-1880)

George Eliot once declared that “if art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally.... The only effect I long to produce by my writings is that those who read them shall be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and joys of those who differ from themselves.”

It is written in Adam Bede:

“My strongest effort is to avoid any arbitrary picture, and to give a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind. The mirror is doubtless defective; the outlines will sometimes be disturbed, the reflection faint or confused; but I feel as much bound to tell you as precisely as I can what that reflection is, as if I were in a witness box narrating my experience on oath....

“I would not, even if I had the choice, be the clever novelist who could create a world so much better than this, in which we get up in the morning to do our daily work, that you would be likely to turn a harder, colder eye on the dusty streets and the common green fields—on the real breathing men and women who can be chilled by your indifference or injured by your prejudice, who can be cheered and helped onward by your fellow-feeling, your forbearance, your outspoken, brave justice.

“So I am content to tell my simple story, without trying to make things seem better than they were; dreading nothing, indeed, but falsity, which, in spite of one’s efforts, there is reason to dread. Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult....

“It is for this rare, precious quality of truthfulness that I delight in many Dutch paintings; which lofty-minded people despise. I find a source of delicious sympathy in these faithful pictures of a monotonous, homely existence, which has been the fate of so many more among my fellow-mortals than a life of pomp or of absolute indigence, of tragic suffering or of world-stirring actions. I turn, without shrinking, from cloud-borne angels, from prophets, sibyls, and heroic warriors, to an old woman bending over her flower-pot, or eating her solitary dinner, while the noonday light, softened perhaps by a screen of leaves, falls on her mob-cap, and just touches the rim of her spinning wheel, and her stone jug, and all those cheap common things which are the precious necessaries of life to her; or I turn to that village wedding, kept between four brown walls, where an awkward bridegroom opens the dance with a high-shouldered, broad-faced bride, while elderly and middle-aged friends look on, with very irregular noses and lips, and probably with quart-pots in their hands, but with an expression of unmistakable contentment and good-will....

“All honour and reverence to the divine beauty of form! Let us cultivate it to the utmost in men, women, and children—in our gardens and in our houses.... Paint us an angel if you can, with a floating violet robe, and a face paled by the celestial light; paint us yet oftener a Madonna, turning her mild face upward and opening her arms to welcome the divine glory; but do not impose on us any æsthetic rules which shall banish from the region of art those old women scraping carrots with their work-worn hands, those heavy clowns taking holiday in a dingy pothouse, those rounded backs and stupid, weather-worn faces that have bent over the spade and done the rough work of the world—those homes with their tin pans, their brown pitchers, their rough curs, and their clusters of onions....

“There are few prophets in the world, few sublimely beautiful women, few heroes. I can’t afford to give all my love and reverence to such rarities: I want a great deal of those feelings for my everyday fellow-men, especially for the few in the foreground of the great multitude whose faces I know, whose hands I touch, for whom I have to make way with kindly courtesy. Neither are picturesque lazzaroni or romantic criminals half so frequent as your common labourer, who gets his own bread, and eats it vulgarly but creditably with his own pocket-knife. It is more needful that I should have a fibre of sympathy connecting me with that vulgar citizen who weighs out my sugar in a vilely-assorted cravat and waistcoat, than with the handsomest rascal in red scarf and green feathers; more needful that my heart should swell with loving admiration at some trait of gentle goodness in the faulty people who sit at the same hearth with me, or in the clergyman of my own parish, who is perhaps rather too corpulent, and in other respects is not an Oberlin or a Tillotson, than at the deeds of heroes whom I shall never know except by hearsay, or at the sublimest abstract of all clerical graces that was ever conceived by an able novelist.”

Woman has found, and proclaimed, her mission. She is a moral realist, and her realism is not inspired by any idle ideal of art, but by sympathy with life. Jane Austen and Mary Mitford were compared, condescendingly, with Dutch painters. George Eliot claims the parallel with pride. It may be questioned if realism was ever defended with so much eloquence, from such high motives. Finally, if the romance of high life has no place in these pictures, neither has the romance of crime, adventure, or squalid destitution. They hold up the mirror to mediocrity. They present the parish.

And for many years George Eliot influenced thought and culture among the middle-classes more widely, and perhaps more profoundly, than any other writer. We can remember a generation for whom the moral problems involved in the relations between Dorothea and Will Ladislaw were a favourite topic for tea-table conversation in serious families; and when the novelist herself married a second time, it seemed to many that an ideal had been desecrated. Her intensity of religious feeling, combined with independence towards theological authority, expressed with truly artistic effect the whole temperament of an age whose spiritual cravings were almost exclusively ethical. Her contribution to literature, placing her in the highest rank, was the creation of many characters, instinct with humanity, struggling with fine moral earnestness towards the attainment of an ideal, halting long and stumbling often by the way. Their appeal to young readers of each generation is irresistible; while the crowded backgrounds, so truthfully and dramatically portrayed, of a day when the English middle-classes were ever eager in extending their moral and mental horizon, can never lose value as an important chapter in social history.

If we have read them rightly, it is this for which women’s work had been all along preparing the way. George Eliot certainly had not so great a genius as Jane Austen or Charlotte Brontë; she was not a pioneer like Fanny Burney. But she had greater breadth, more firm solidity; and she was conscious of her aim, with the professional training, the culture, and the genius to achieve.

Women, we see, have been always realistic and parochial. They have avoided the glitter of wealth and the grime of sin. Tender to prodigals, they have loved the home. If the “intense and continuous note of personal conviction,” so conspicuous in George Eliot, began with Charlotte Brontë, women have always felt and thought morally.

She has been summarily dismissed as an “example of the way in which the novel—once a light and frivolous thing—had come to be taken with the utmost seriousness—had in fact ceased to be light literature at all, and began to require rigorous and elaborate training and preparation in the writer, perhaps even something of the athlete’s processes in the reader.”

But such seriousness was characteristic of her age, and everyone had then learnt to demand professionalism in art; while, on the other hand, readers of 1821 were assured that “Miss Austen had the merit of being evidently a Christian writer,” who conveyed “that unpretending kind of instruction which is furnished by real life,” and whose works may “on the whole be recommended, not only as among the most unexceptionable of their kind, but as combining, in an eminent degree, instruction with amusement.”

Charlotte Brontë, we may remember, was declared, by her contemporaries, “one who has, for some sufficient reason, long forfeited the society of her sex”; and George Eliot herself was accused of “coarseness and immorality,” in her attempt “to familiarise the minds of our young women in the middle and higher ranks with matters on which their fathers and brothers would never venture to speak in their presence ... and to intrude on minds which ought to be guarded from impurity the unnecessary knowledge of evil.” To such critics her claim to kinship with the “honest old Dutchman” is set aside for a parallel to “the perverseness of our modern ‘pre-Raphaelites,’ with their choice of disagreeable subjects, uncomely models, and uncouth attitudes.”

Such is the natural result of women daring to think for themselves. To-day we are content rather to notice that Miss Burney first cleansed the circulating library, and Miss Austen most unobtrusively extolled the domestic virtues; while their sisters in art all contributed to the prevalence of wholesome fiction; until Miss Brontë and George Eliot stirred up the conscience of man towards woman. In reality women are born preachers, and always work for an ideal.

The period, indeed, is already approaching in which women’s work can no longer be treated en masse and by itself, apart from men’s. It is no longer essentially spontaneous or unconscious, as in Miss Burney and Jane Austen. We have described the writers immediately preceding George Eliot as professional experts, careful of art; and once the world had learnt to expect good work from woman and grown accustomed to her as an artist, there remained no further occasion for her to speak as a woman among aliens. George Eliot, indeed, like Charlotte Brontë, had been, by some of her contemporaries, taken for a man; but the youngest and most inexperienced reader to-day could scarcely have been momentarily deceived. There are, indeed, certain tricks, or mannerisms, of masculinity; but they are superficial, and not actually worn with much grace or skill.

No earlier woman-writer, indeed, had assumed so comprehensive a philosophy, or scarcely any attempt at ordered opinion on life in general, on character, or on faith. But, despite the enthusiasm of certain biographers, despite the influence—unquestioned—of Herbert Spencer, Strauss, George Henry Lewes, and others, we are not personally disposed to grant much weight to our author’s generalisations; while certainly the obtrusiveness of her moralising is an artistic blemish.

The fact is that George Eliot’s outlook remains thoroughly emotional and feminine. In herself, we know, she always saw life through a man-interpreter; and the didactics of her novels are derived from the study of books, not from the exercise of independent reason or thought. If she talked ethics, she felt faith.

But, on the other hand, her work has little external affinity with that of the women of genius preceding her (though it may be a natural development from theirs), because it is obviously the result of training and study, that is professional. It is, moreover, the first important contribution by women to the problem novel with a purpose. Both points can be easily illustrated by the most elementary comparison.

We have tacitly assumed, and with obvious justification in fact, that Fanny Burney and Jane Austen, for example, wrote entirely out of their own personal experience. We picture their own surroundings from the society in their novels, noting the power acquired by the limitation. Charlotte Brontë did not go beyond her own circle, save in imagination. But George Eliot, no less certainly, studied mankind for copy. It is true that she made more direct use of her own family and friends than they. Maggie Tulliver is no less autobiographical than Lucy Snowe. True also that for description and atmosphere she depended largely on memory. But even here the treatment is that of a self-conscious artist, composing and presenting from outside, studying effects, grouping types; always alive to a comparison between life and literature. And as she uses the human material which has come to her in the natural order of things, she increases it by the journalist’s eye for new copy, piquant contrast, and unexpected revelation. She invokes, moreover, the assistance of every literary device—prepared humour, scholarly style, cultured allusion, local colour, analytical characterisation, and dramatic construction. We have here no longer a spontaneous revelation of woman; rather her captain in full array, armed for fight.

Nor is the message, or open discussion of problems, less novel or less deliberate. It was possible, indeed inevitable, to notice in the earlier examples of woman’s work that she held theories on life not quite in accord with what man had always expected from her. Part of her inspiration, no doubt, was the desire to express these. On certain points, recognised womanly,—such as education and the ordering of a home,—she soon learnt to speak openly; but, in the main, we studied the woman’s ideal of character and conduct from her portrait-painting; we deduced her approval from her sympathy, her budding criticism from her scorn. If she attempted direct teaching, it was mostly in support of mere conventional duty; the reward of virtue and the punishment of vice, tentatively measured perhaps by a standard, not quite blindly copied from men. The greatest artists among women before Charlotte Brontë never obtruded the moral, discussed the problem.

But what was fearlessly urged on a few chosen topics from the Haworth parsonage became the foreground and main subject with the assistant editor of the Westminster Review. We are, to-day, somewhat overweighted with problem novels; but George Eliot was the first among us to realise the full power of fiction as a vehicle more persuasive, if not more powerful, than the pulpit; for the fearless and intimate discussion of all the questions and difficulties which must confront a man, or a woman, who is not content to accept things as they are, or to believe all he is told. To-day we may detect

“a curious naïveté in the whole impression George Eliot’s novels convey.... The ethical law is, in her universe, as all powerful as the law of gravitation, and as unavoidable. Remorse, degeneration of character, and even material loss, are meted out for transmission with the rigid and childlike sense of justice which animated the writers of the Old Testament. Her temper was Hebraistic, and goodness was more to her than beauty. It may be doubted whether in the world, as we see it, justice works as impartially and with such unmistakable exactitude, whether the righteous is never forsaken, and evil always hunts the wicked person to overthrow him.”

But we must remember that George Eliot’s conception of wickedness, if limited, was well in advance of her age; that she understood temptation, and could draw a most dramatically “mixed” character. Her people are not all black or all white. She knew how slight an error or slip, how amiable a weakness, could lead to actions which the Pharisee called sin, and the Puritan would punish with hell-fire. She entirely forgave Maggie Tulliver, she held out the hand of fellowship to Godfrey Cass, and even to Arthur Donnithorne. If “we are almost afraid of” Dinah Morris, she, too, certainly loved sinners. George Eliot, in fact, will not accept any opinion on authority, or follow the world in judgment; and if “the world has never produced a woman philosopher,” her work remains pre-eminent as the first complete and outspoken record of woman’s “scientific speculation to discover an interpretation of the universe,” her first conscious message to mankind; destined to “raise the standard of prose-fiction to a higher power; to give it a new impulse and motive.” She has now spoken for herself on conduct and on faith.

Nevertheless George Eliot remains a woman. We still look to her primarily for the revelation of woman, and woman’s vision of man. We have taken another step, onward and inward, towards the mystery of the feminine ideal, the meaning of the Home and the Family to those who make it. All this is far more complex, indeed, than anything we have studied in earlier chapters. It embraces, in Romola, some reconstruction of past times; in Daniel Deronda, some study of an alien race. It includes sympathy for a woman wandering so far from the natural feminine instincts as to abandon, and half murder, her own child; for a girl who, given to dreamy ideals and passionate self-sacrifice, will yet suffer attentions from the acknowledged lover of her cousin, simply because he is handsome. It reveals the genuine repentance and uplifting of a drunken wife; it permits “friendship” between a married woman and a young artist whose very vices are more attractive than the heartless tyrannical egoism of her husband. We have travelled a long way, certainly, from Catherine Morland and Fanny Price. We can imagine a new Lydia Bennet under George Eliot.

Still the problems are women’s problems: the solutions are feminine, as we may see from the eagerness with which they were condemned by man, the conservative and the conventional. “I’m no denyin’,” said Mrs. Poyser, “the women are foolish. God almighty made ’em to match the men.” It was George Eliot’s ambition, towards which she accomplished much, that “the women” should be less intent upon that matching, more willing, and able, to mould themselves after their own pattern: in their turn to form a creed, to establish a standard—wherein she was following, but more consciously, those who had gone before. As Huxley remarked, in answer to Princess Louise, she did not “go in for” the superiority of women. She rather “teaches the inferiority of men.”

For, verily, there is no more in it. Her women are lost outside the home; they are not financially, or intellectually, “independent.” They have no professions, no clubs, no sports. Their interests are confined to religion, domesticity, and love. Nor does George Eliot attempt to follow “the men” into politics[15] or business, on to the cricket field or the parade ground. A soldier is distinguished by his regimentals, a scholar by his library, a doctor by his gig. She has a strong partiality, tempered by criticism, for the clergy; she can distinguish, intelligently, between Church and Dissent; she knows a good deal about squires and farmers; she loves the labourer. We may safely regard her work as the continuation, and the completion, of our subject.

The completion, indeed, is rather intellectual than artistic. She covers the whole ground, as none of her predecessors had attempted; she makes the last final addition of subject by discovering, and facing, social problems; she applies the last word in literary professionalism; but inasmuch as her characters are more typical and more studied than Jane Austen’s, they are, in a sense, less modern and less universal. We may learn more from her about women, and women’s opinions; but these are the women of one age only—fast awakening, indeed, and conscious of many troubling possibilities, but not free.

Their chief aim is, while widening their knowledge and sympathy, to speak with imperious accents of duty, that “stern Daughter of the Voice of God.” Despite her assumption of masculine logic and reasoning, itself an artistic blemish, she offers no explanation of her categorical and materialistic, ethical dogma. The distinction between good and evil with her is in the last resort a question of emotional instinct, haunted by “the faltering hope that a spiritual interpretation of the universe may be true.” It is impossible to avoid feeling that she accords the greatest strength of character to serene piety like that of Dinah Morris, or to Adam Bede’s conception of the “deep, spiritual things in religion ... when feelings come into you like a rushing, mighty wind.... His work, as you know, had always been part of his religion, and from very early days he saw clearly that good carpentry was God’s will.” In her heart of hearts, George Eliot, we are certain, would have echoed Mrs. Poyser’s preference for character over doctrine: “Mr. Irvine was like a good meal o’ victual, you were the better for him without thinking on it; and Mr. Ryde was like a dose o’ physic, he gripped you and worrited you, and, after all, he left you much the same.”

It was Mr. Irvine, you will remember, who put on his slippers before going upstairs to his plain, invalid sister; and “whoever remembers how many things he has declined to do even for himself, rather than have the trouble of putting on or taking off his boots, will not think this last detail insignificant.” It needs a woman, however, to appreciate such a service of love.

George Eliot, indeed, could be humorous, somewhat pedantically, and even genial about little things, and she recognised most fully their importance in life. But her more calculated and accumulative effects were all tragic or subdued melancholy; partly, no doubt, from this uncertainty of hers about faith and her passionate sense of justice, so relentless in its demand for the punishment of sin; partly also from that tinge of sadness which overshadows the narrow, old-fashioned dogma by which her own childhood was moulded. Hard as she strove for intellectual freedom, and eagerly as she proclaimed independence of judgment, the halter of early impressions was round her neck; and it is only by dwelling upon incidents or individuals, and ignoring the studied main motive, that we can gain from her work any of the joy in physical or natural beauty which should be an artist’s first care to impart.

Yet, after all, nature has triumphed over temperament. In reality, for example, Dinah Morris lives for us in her tactful tenderness for the querulous old Lisbeth, and in her yearning towards Hetty; not in the “call,” the “leading,” and the “voices” by which her ministry was inspired. On the other hand, we admire her dignified superiority to masculine criticism of women’s preaching: “It isn’t for men to make channels for God’s Spirit, as they make channels for the water-courses, and say, ‘Flow here, but flow not there.’”

Hetty Sorrel, again, was only adventurous through misfortune; she belongs to the fireside. Dorothea was a hero-worshipper; Maggie Tulliver is the ideal sister; Mary Garth the ideal helpmate. The crimes of Rosamond Vincy, if there be no mercy in their exposure, are wholly domestic; the sins of Janet are committed for her husband.

It is the same with the men. Amos Barton is only a poor country clergyman, and grey-haired Mr. Gilfil “filled his pocket with sugar-plums for the little children.” Adam Bede “had no theories about setting the world to rights,” and “couldn’t abide a fellow who thought he made himself fine by being coxy to’s betters.” The Tullivers, father and son, were, in their different ways, as fine specimens of honest tradesmen as Bulstrode was a consummate hypocrite of the provinces. Lydgate was no more than an exceptionally clever and cultured general practitioner, and we fancy that Will Ladislaw was a better lover than artist. George Eliot’s squires are typical ornaments of the countryside; her farmers belong as permanently to one side of the hearth as their wives to the other. Silas Marner, practising a trade that could not “be carried on entirely without the help of the Evil One,” since “all cleverness was in itself suspicious,” had no power of filling his life with “movement, mental activity, and close fellowship” outside the “narrow religious sect” in which his youth was passed.

Nancy Osgood “actually said ‘mate’ for ‘meat,’ ‘’appen’ for ‘perhaps,’ and ‘’oss’ for ‘horse,’ which, to young ladies living in good Lytherly society, who habitually said ’orse, even in domestic privacy, and only said ’appen on the right occasions, was necessarily shocking.” She supported “a cheerful face under rough answers and unfeeling words by the belief that ‘a man must have so much on his mind’”; and “had her unalterable code” ready for all occasions.

They are not an heroic company, you perceive, these sons and daughters of a highly intellectual woman-novelist. In its more primitive exponents their “kindness” is “of a beery and bungling sort,” their anger is brutal and bigoted; they are not really interested in general principles, in psychological analysis, in refined passion, or in the future of mankind. Yet they are very serious about life, a good deal puzzled by the apparent injustice of God, and filled with love or hatred towards all their neighbours. In this parish, as in most, everyone knows all about everyone else’s affairs, and finds them of supreme interest.

Thus George Eliot maintains the feminine attention to minutiæ; the woman’s centralisation of Life round the family. She has acquired knowledge, “read up” literature, and to some extent digested philosophy; but she applies her powers, her culture, and her training—from practice and association with professional writers—to the amplification and rounding off of woman’s art. She established domestic realism by the expression of feminine insight. She is content to leave other things to other pens. The appearance of generalisations not influenced by her sex is misleading. It is only a modern form of the old story. Her heart, and her genius, are those of a woman, womanly.

Scenes of Clerical Life, 1858.
Adam Bede, 1859.
The Mill on the Floss, 1860.
Silas Marner, 1861.
Romola, 1863.
Felix Holt, 1866.
Middlemarch, 1872.
Daniel Deronda, 1876.